Chapter 5 SISTER'S WARNING

POV: Jason

He found her at the kitchen sink that night, alone, sleeves pushed up to her elbows, washing dishes nobody had asked her to wash.

That stopped him in the doorway a second.

Anna had never washed a dish in her life that Jason could remember. Not because she was lazy, she wasn't, but because their father never let her be the one who cleaned up after other people in this club. She's not staff, Marcus used to say, loud enough for anyone to hear it. She's family. There's a difference, and you'll all remember it. Jason had grown up watching men scramble to clear their own plates around her, not because anyone forced them to, but because Marcus had made it clear what disrespecting that line would cost.

Now here she was, scrubbing a pan at the sink like it was just one more thing on a list nobody else was going to do.

"You don't have to do that," he said.

"Somebody does."

"That somebody doesn't have to be you."

She didn't turn around. "It's fine, Jason."

He crossed the kitchen, leaned against the counter beside her, close enough to talk quiet. The water ran. She kept scrubbing the same pan longer than it needed.

"Talk to me," he said.

"About what."

"About what this place actually is now. Not the version Victor gave a eulogy about today."

Anna's hands slowed on the pan. She didn't stop completely, just slowed, the rhythm of it going careful, the way a person moves when they're choosing every word before it leaves their mouth and every motion before their body makes it.

"You remember Petey," she said. "Used to run the garage."

"Yeah."

"He doesn't run the garage anymore."

"Where'd he go."

"Nobody knows. Nobody asks." She rinsed the pan, set it in the rack, picked up another. "Victor said he had reservations about some of the new business. Said Petey decided the life wasn't for him anymore. Moved somewhere quieter."

"You believe that."

"I'm telling you what he said." Her voice stayed flat, even, careful in a way that made it sound less like an answer and more like a transcript. "There's an investigation process now, if somebody's suspected of talking out of turn, or skimming, or just thinking too loud about things that aren't their business. It's thorough. Victor takes it seriously. Says he owes everyone in this club a fair process, says that's what Dad would have wanted."

"And what does the process actually look like."

Anna's hands stopped on the pan entirely this time.

"I don't know," she said. "I've never seen it."

Jason watched her say that and understood, somewhere underneath the words, that she was lying, or close enough to lying that the difference didn't matter. Not lying to protect herself from him exactly. Lying the way you'd lie to keep a door shut on a room you didn't want to walk back into, even in conversation, even just in your own head.

"Anna."

"What."

"Look at me."

She kept her eyes on the sink. "I'm doing dishes, Jason."

"Anna."

She turned the water off. The kitchen went quiet except for the drip of the faucet and the low hum of the clubhouse beyond the wall, music and voices from the bar Victor kept running like nothing in this house had changed in three years.

"You want to know what speaking costs around here," she said, still not looking at him, voice dropping lower, careful in a new way now, mapping something out for him in code he was supposed to be smart enough to read between the lines of. "It costs whatever Victor decides it costs. Sometimes that's nothing. Sometimes you say the wrong thing in front of the wrong person and a week later you're the guy who decided the life wasn't for him anymore. There's no rule you can follow to stay safe. That's the part that gets people. You think if you're careful enough, quiet enough, useful enough, you'll be fine. And mostly you are. Until you're not, and you never see the line you crossed to get there."

"That's not protection," Jason said. "That's a cage with nice paint."

"Don't," Anna said.

The word came out fast, sharp, more reflex than thought, like something in her had reached out and slapped his sentence down before her mind had caught up to deciding it should.

She turned back to the sink. Picked up another dish that didn't need washing as badly as her hands seemed to need something to do.

That's when Jason saw it.

Her sleeve had ridden up while she worked, just an inch, just enough. Bruises ringed the inside of her forearm, faint yellow, the kind that take a week or two to fade that far, fingertip shaped, four small marks where someone's hand had gripped hard enough to leave a record of itself on her skin.

Not fresh. Not old either. Recent enough to still mean something.

Jason didn't move. Didn't say a word. He just looked, and looked, and let his face do whatever it was going to do, which from the outside probably looked like nothing at all, the same careful blank he'd worn since the gate, since the ring, since the eulogy. Inside, something had gone very quiet and very still and very far past anger, into a place anger doesn't usually visit.

Anna caught him looking.

She yanked the sleeve down so fast the motion looked almost violent, a single hard pull, fabric snapping back into place over the marks like a door slamming shut on a room.

"Don't," she said again.

It wasn't a request. Jason understood that the second the word left her mouth. It was an order, the kind a person gives when they've already calculated exactly how much worse things could get if the wrong reaction happened in the wrong place, and decided the safest path forward was to make sure that reaction never started in the first place.

Jason said nothing.

He kept his eyes on her face instead of her arm, kept his hands loose at his sides instead of fists, kept every part of him still in a way that should have felt like control and instead felt like something coiling, something with no outlet yet, something that was going to need one eventually and was already starting to look around the room for it.

The silence stretched between them, long enough that the dripping faucet became the loudest thing in the kitchen.

Anna picked the dish back up. Started washing again, hands steady now, too steady, the kind of steady that comes from years of practice making your body do normal things while everything underneath it screams.

Jason didn't move from the counter.

He just watched his sister wash dishes she'd never had to wash before, sleeves pulled down past marks she'd never had to hide before, and understood that whatever this club had become in three years, it had already taken more from her than anyone in that memorial room full of tears had any idea.

And the worst part, the part that sat in his chest like a stone, was the way she'd said don't. Not scared of him. Scared for someone else. Some automatic, bone deep instinct in her had reached out to protect Victor before she'd even finished registering what her brother had seen.

That wasn't loyalty.

Jason had been inside long enough to know the difference between a man who chose his cage and a man who'd simply stopped being able to see the bars.

His sister hadn't chosen anything.

She'd survived. And surviving, it turned out, could look exactly like devotion if you didn't know what you were looking at.

He knew what he was looking at.

He just didn't yet know what he was going to do about it.