The next day, Flynn pulled up to the church and let me out. He didn’t come inside with me; I’d already told him I wanted him to wait outside.

I’d asked the band to come together for an emergency meeting. No film crew. I’d told Dylan, expressly, Just Dirty. And he knew exactly what that meant.

If you care about me, please do this for me, I’d cried to him over the phone, late last night, after Seth left. Because there was a part of me that was afraid they wouldn’t do this for me. Get them to come, I’d pretty much begged him. I need you all to be there.

And Dylan told me, They’ll be there, Elle.

I could tell, by the vehicles in the lot, that they were. When I walked into the church, they were all waiting for me: the innermost inner circle.

Jesse, Dylan and Zane, along with Brody, Maggie and Jude.

Jessa wasn’t here yet, but she’d texted to let me know she was on her way.

Seth wasn’t here yet, either. I’d asked him to come a little later than the others. I’d begged him to come, and after some initial refusal, he’d agreed. But I needed to talk to Dirty first. I needed to get a sense of how they were all going to handle this, without him here to catch the brunt of it if this went very badly.

Maggie herded everyone together into the various old pews and chairs we had strewn around. She passed out coffee. She gave me a hug. Even though she couldn’t know what I was about to say, it felt good.

They all sat, dead quiet, looking at me. I took a deep breath, stuffing down the nausea that kept trying to creep up, then told them what I’d come here to say.

“Seth is in my life—to stay.”

Silence.

Everyone just sat there, looking at me.

Maggie glanced at Brody. No one else moved, let alone spoke.

Finally, Jesse crossed his arms over his chest. “What does that mean?”

“It means she wants him in the band,” Zane translated. And he wasn’t wrong about that.

“I’m more than willing to work with him on the side if that can’t happen,” I told them. “That’s not a threat. I’m not leaving Dirty. I just want you all to know how serious I am about this. About him.” I met Jesse’s eyes, briefly. He looked back at me, his expression dark, unreadable. “I don’t know everything that happened between Seth and Jessa…” I glanced at Brody. “But I know it’s not what you all seem to think. I know that much. And I know him.”

Silence again.

At least everyone seemed to be digesting what I’d said.

I wasn’t sure if any of them, other than Dylan and Jude, had figured out that my feelings for Seth went beyond professionalism and friendship. But I wasn’t exactly ready to say, I’ve fallen in love with him, and he’s knocked me up, so deal with it.

“Well, I do know what happened,” Brody said, finally breaking the silence. “And maybe you don’t know Seth as well as you think you do, Elle.”

I opened my mouth to respond to that, not even sure what I was going to say, when Jude cut in. “You don’t know everything.” He was speaking to Brody, not me, and everyone turned to look at him.

Jude sighed.

Then he took a long look up at the ceiling, like he really didn’t want to say what he was going to say next. Like he couldn’t quite believe he was going to say it.

“Seth owed a lot of money to the MC,” he growled out. “And you do not owe money to the MC.” He looked at each one of us in turn, as he let his words sink in. “In the end, I needed him out of the band because of the heat coming down on him.”

Jesus. Not what I wanted to hear.

“Drug money?” Dylan asked, and he didn’t sound surprised. None of us could be, exactly.

Really, it made sense.

“We’re talking about the Kings,” Zane said. “What other kind is there?”

Jude shot Zane a look. “We are not talking about the Kings. At least, not just the Kings. Seth owed some other guys, some seriously bad guys, some serious money. I don’t have to explain to you all what that means. It’s common fucking knowledge you don’t ever wanna owe shit to men like that. And you all know that’s all I’m gonna say about that.”

“How much money?” Zane pressed.

Jude sighed again. “He was snorting it faster than he could make it. I covered his debts for a while, and he looked out for Jessa for me in return. Because I asked him to. Told him to, actually.”

“You did what?” Clearly, that did surprise Jesse. Actually, he looked totally fucking pissed.

It surprised me, too.

“I warned him,” Jude said. “Threatened to cut him off, did cut him off, and he turned elsewhere for his drugs. Then I found out how much he owed around, and I knew he wouldn’t be paying me back anytime soon. So I went to my brother. Piper took care of it. That’s all you’ve gotta know.” He shook his head, like he was kinda wishing he hadn’t even said that much. “Fucking meanwhile, Seth told me what he saw—Jessa and her girlfriends at parties, with some of these piece-of-shit guys.”

“Sinners,” Brody said, putting two-and-two together, just as I did.

The Sinners were a rival club of the Kings, notoriously dangerous, and if Seth was getting drugs from bikers in Vancouver who weren’t Kings… Jude wouldn’t say so, but that had to be it. Anyone who read the news knew the Sinners were deeply involved in the drug trade on the west coast.

“Fucking Roni,” Brody growled under his breath.

“It’s got nothing to do with Roni,” Jude snapped right back.

Well, shit… Even Jesse appeared taken aback by Jude’s tone.

I had no idea what Roni, a girlfriend of Jessa’s, had to do with any of this, other than the fact that we all knew she had a thing for bikers and had dated Jude’s brother, Piper, a long time ago? But why Jude would bite Brody’s head off for mentioning her, I couldn’t say.

Unless Jude was sweet on her or something?

God, how deep did this rabbit hole go…?

I didn’t even want to know.

“Please just tell me there are no bikers after Seth now,” I said.

“No,” Jude said. “Lucky for him, he’s in Piper’s good books these days.”

Well thank fuck.

“I can’t believe you didn’t fucking tell me about this,” Jesse said. He was shaking his head at Jude, and clearly, he was not happy.

“Jessa was starting to come to our parties,” Jude replied, “and we couldn’t stop her. But she knew when she did, she’d get kicked out. She wasn’t welcome. That meant she was gonna find somewhere else to go, to get what she wanted. And she did. She started going with her friends to other parties, hanging with a different crowd, ones I couldn’t be at to keep an eye on her. I couldn’t babysit your little sister. And where were you?” He looked around at each of us.

No one spoke.

“We all had other shit to do,” Jude said. “But Seth was there. He was there for Jessa in a way none of us could be. So I told him to keep an eye on her. I’m not saying it ended well. I’m not saying it was the best thing. But at the time it was the best I could do. She was going to those parties and getting high whether you or I liked it or not. While she was there with Seth, I knew she was at least safe. I kept him supplied, and she was getting her shit from him, from the Kings, so I knew it was clean. She was safer than any other girl at any of those parties.”

“Yeah,” Brody growled. “Safe from everyone but Seth.”

Brody and Jude looked at each other across the room, and I could feel the tension smashing between them.

“Who the fuck do you think Seth Brothers is?” Jude demanded. “You’ve totally demonized the guy because Jessa came crying to you with some sob story that has less to do with him than it does with her, and you were so blinded by your infatuation with her, you couldn’t even see it.”

Brody rose to his feet. At first, he looked stricken… But then he got pissed, quick. “Is that how you fucking see it?”

Jude took a breath and seemed to bite his tongue. Maybe he knew he’d crossed a line there.

Maybe infatuation was a fair word to describe Brody’s attachment to Jessa back then. But now she was carrying his child. Their relationship went far deeper than infatuation. Jude was taking a real risk challenging Brody on that topic.

And maybe Brody knew that.

Maybe he was putting it together; that if Jude was sticking his neck out for Seth, there was a damn good reason.

“Look,” Jude said, relenting a bit and looking weary of it all, “I knew along the way Seth was crushing on Jessa, and the fact that I didn’t do shit about it was my biggest mistake. I get that. But you need to get over it. She’s over it. She’s got your kid in her belly. It’s time to move on, brother.”

We were all silent. The tension in the room was fucking stifling.

My eyes met Dylan’s, then Zane’s. They said nothing, but I could see what they were thinking. It was right there, on their faces.

They were thinking that Jude was right.