Chapter 7: The Tailor's Shop
The freight lift deposited us on the second-sub-level storage floor, where towering stacks of white linen tablecloths, spare banquet chairs, and crates of imported glassware lined the endless white-tiled hallways. Jax moved with quiet efficiency, navigating the labyrinth of service corridors as if he’d walked them a hundred times before, though I knew he’d spent his life on highways and in dusty garages, far away from crystal chandeliers and velvet-draped ballrooms.
"We need to clean you up a bit before we go any higher," Jax muttered, stopping in front of an unmarked wooden door marked Housekeeping & Linen Supply.
He tried the brass handle, and to my surprise, it turned with a soft click. Inside was a small, quiet room cluttered with sewing machines, extra uniforms, and rolls of spare fabric. It was empty, the night shift workers presumably out on the service floors attending to the gala upstairs.
Jax flicked on the single overhead light, illuminating dust motes dancing in the warm air. He walked over to a rack of spare employee uniforms and white button-down shirts, running his hand along the hangers until he found a small, boys-sized black vest and a crisp white shirt left over from a catering crew.
"Put these on," Jax said, tossing the clothes onto a folding chair. "Take that old jacket off. If we're going to walk past the grand staircase, we need to look like we belong here, not like we just crawled out from under a bridge."
I stripped off my tattered, grease-stained jacket—the one I’d worn through the rain and the cold pavement outside—and slipped into the clean white shirt. It was a little big in the sleeves, but the cotton felt soft against my skin. When I buttoned the small black vest over it, I caught my reflection in the tall leaning mirror by the sewing machine. My messy light brown hair was still unruly, but the pale skin and big hazel eyes looked different against the dark fabric. For the first time in my life, I didn't look like a stray kid from the roadside; I looked like someone who had a place in the world.
Jax watched me from the doorway, leaning his shoulder against the wooden frame. His expression softened just a fraction, the hard lines around his mouth relaxing as he reached into his pocket and pulled out the old faded photograph. He looked down at it for a long moment, his thumb brushing over the image of himself holding a baby under the neon sign of an old desert motel.
"You look just like your mother did when she first walked into my garage fourteen years ago," Jax said softly, his voice barely louder than the hum of the sewing machine motor. "She had that same look in her eyes. Like she was waiting for the floor to drop out from under her, but too proud to ask anyone to catch her."
"Did she leave because of the hotel?" I asked, looking up at him with the photo still resting between us.
Jax let out a slow breath, shaking his head. "She didn't leave because she wanted to, Toby. They bought her out. Her family... the Sterlings. They didn't want a biker hanging around their clean corporate name. They gave her a choice: walk away with a bank account and a plane ticket, or watch them bury me under a pile of trumped-up charges that would have put me away for good. She chose to save me. And she spent the rest of her life paying for it in a gilded cage."
He slipped the photograph back into his vest pocket, his eyes hardening once more as he straightened up.
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"Come on," Jax said, opening the door back out into the bright service corridor. "The gala’s starting in the main ballroom on the third floor. It's time Evelyn Sterling met the ghost she thought she buried a long time ago."
We stepped out together, our footsteps echoing softly against the tile as we turned toward the winding marble stairs that led straight up into the heart of the high-society world.
