Chapter Three
WILL
Millie comes through the door with a large covered tray balanced against her hip, her attention on keeping it level.
Her dark hair is pulled back in a loose tie that never quite manages to contain it, soft strands escaping around her face like they’ve given up on discipline the same way she sometimes does.
There’s a faint smudge of flour along her forearm that she either doesn’t know about or has decided isn’t worth addressing.
Her eyes lift when she adjusts her grip, long lashes catching the light as the warm hazel beneath turns molten for a second, rich and deep, like something drawn straight from the earth her father works.
She’s wearing a soft rust-colored cardigan that makes the warmth in her skin glow richer, deeper, like sun-baked clay.
The color pulls every subtle gold tone forward, turning something already striking into something that feels… deliberate.
Her mouth presses slightly while she concentrates, full lips set in determination rather than frustration.
She doesn’t rush, never does. She moves with that same easy steadiness that comes from growing up around heavy machinery, long days, and hardworking men who taught her strength didn’t need to be loud to matter.
Fuck she is stunning.
An easy beauty that doesn’t even have to try.
Even in jeans, a simple blouse, and a cardigan, she makes me fucking breathless.
She moves through the main room like she belongs here, slipping between brothers and furniture with the kind of natural ease that only comes from years of this place wrapping itself around her without anybody realizing it was happening.
I notice.
I always notice.
She spots Victoria first, and her whole face changes. That polite, put-together expression she wears around most people slips away, replaced by something real, warm, and completely unguarded. The softer side of her, she doesn’t hand out to just anybody.
“Brown butter snickerdoodles and lemon bars,” she announces, setting the tray on the coffee table with careful attention, like this actually matters to her. “I know you’ve been on a lemon kick, and the snickerdoodles just seemed right for February.”
“Millie,” Victoria says it with a kind of reverence, like she’s been dealing with very specific cravings for weeks. “You are my absolute favorite person in this entire fucking building.”
“What about Sin?”
“Sin doesn’t bring me lemon bars. Sin brings me unsolicited opinions about what I should be eating instead of lemon bars.” She lifts the edge of the tray cover, and the smell intensifies to something frankly unreasonable. “These are perfect. Sit down. Tell me everything.”
It is at approximately this moment that Millie looks across and finds me.
And that look lasts maybe a second and a half.
In that second and a half, I watch her go through something, a small, contained recalibration, the way a compass needle shakes before it finds north.
Then she smiles, and it’s real, just softer around the edges in the way her smiles sometimes get when she’s carrying something heavier underneath them.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey,” I reply.
Victoria looks between us with the kind of calm you only get after spending enough years around idiots making terrible decisions, so that nothing surprises you anymore.
Millie pulls off her jacket and settles into the armchair across from the sofa, curling her legs up beneath her the way she does when she’s staying a while.
She’s comfortable here.
Genuinely.
And I’m glad for it, because there was a time when she wasn’t comfortable in her own skin, and the memory of that still lives somewhere in the back of my chest.
“How’s your dad?” Victoria asks, reaching for a lemon bar like she hasn’t eaten in days.
Something crosses Millie’s face, fast and contained, gone before most people would catch it.
But I catch it.
“Good,” she says, her voice steady, warm, completely unimpeachable. “Busy. He’s still working away, always getting shit organized, you know him.”
Victoria nods, already reaching for another lemon bar because, apparently, pregnancy has turned eating into a competitive sport.
“That’s good,” she says. “Your dad is one of the hardest working people I know.”
Millie smiles faintly. “Yeah. Dad’s always been… particular about preparation.”
She reaches forward to pour coffee from the pot on the coffee table. Her hands are steady, but I watch them.
I’ve learned to read Millie in the spaces between what she says.
In the small tells she doesn’t know she has.
The steadiness she wears like armor. The way she keeps her chin level when she’s managing something difficult.
The slight, almost invisible tightening around her eyes when a question lands too close.
But she is managing something.
She has been managing something for weeks.
And I’m stuck here in this twenty-one-day limbo watching her carry all of it by herself, and the frustration that comes with that has become part of my daily routine at this point.
Wake up… pick it up… carry it around all damn day. Repeat.
Twenty-one days, Will.
Twenty-one days.
Victoria exhales heavily and shifts in her seat. “I swear this kid is trying to punch its way out,” she mutters, rubbing her stomach. “Also, nobody tells you about the… fluids.”
I curl up my nose while Millie blinks in confusion. “Fluids?”
“Oh my God,” Victoria says, lighting up in the way people do when they realize they have a captive audience. “There are so many fluids. Things I did not sign up for. Things that should require warning labels.”
Millie laughs, startled. “Victoria—”
“No, listen! Yesterday I sneezed, and something happened that I am not emotionally equipped to discuss with grown men present.”
This is where I draw the line.
I push up from the seat, already turning toward the kitchen. “Right,” I mutter. “That’s my cue.”
Millie looks up. Not quickly, not dramatically, but just enough that I feel it before I see it. For a second, our eyes meet.
There’s a question there.
Or maybe an apology.
Or maybe just the shared awareness that we both know why I’m leaving.
I don’t hold it because if I do, I won’t leave. So I break the look first, and keep walking.
Behind me, Victoria is still talking about bodily fluids like she’s delivering a TED Talk.
I exhale hard and rake a hand through my hair as I force my feet to move away.
Everything in me says, ‘Stay, get closer, don’t walk away.’
But wanting something doesn’t make it mine to take.
Deek finds me in the kitchen forty minutes later while I’m washing out my mug.
He doesn’t say anything immediately, which is unusual enough to be suspicious.
He pours himself a fresh coffee, takes a long drink, leans against the counter, and looks at me like he’s been lining something up in his head and has just decided now’s the moment to say it.
“Sooo,” he drawls out like he’s about to plot something inconceivable.
“No,” I say.
“You haven’t heard what I’m going to say.”
“I don’t need to.”
Deek ignores me, as he does most things that inconvenience him. “She brought you a snickerdoodle.”
I keep washing the mug. “She brought a tray of snickerdoodles. For the club.”
“She put one specifically on the counter right where you were sitting. With a napkin folded under it. A folded napkin, Will. That’s intentional. You don’t fold a napkin for just anyone.”
“Deek.”
“I’m a details man. This is my gift to the world, and I use it responsibly.” He tilts his mug in my direction. “Three weeks.”
“I’m aware, the fact you keep telling me doesn’t change it,” I say, with more flatness than I intend.
“You’ve been aware for two years, and awareness alone is doing absolutely nothing for you, brother. At some point, awareness needs a companion strategy.”
I set the mug down and turn to face him.
Deek and I came from the same father and somehow turned into completely different people.
He’s louder than me, wilder, and walks through life with this reckless confidence that makes it seem like embarrassment has never once touched him.
Part of me has envied that over the years.
Most of me just learned to accept it as pure Deek.
But underneath all the bullshit, the nonstop commentary, and the aggressively annoying optimism, he’s still my brother. Which means he knows me in that deeply irritating blood-brother way where privacy stops existing, whether you like it or not.
“Three weeks,” I say. “Then I’ll handle it.”
Deek searches my face for a moment. “She was scared last night,” he says, and his voice has lost most of its performance quality. “The guys were talking after the sweep. She held it together, but she was scared.”
“I know.”
“And you drove her home.”
“Yeah… I drove her home.”
He looks at me for a long moment. Then he finishes his coffee, sets the mug in the sink, and straightens off the counter.
“Will, don’t let her think she’s handling whatever she’s carrying by herself.
You can hold the line and still let someone know you’re on the other side of it.
Everyone knows you guys are gonna fuck like rabbits once you get your patch…
but it doesn’t mean you can’t be here for her in the meantime.
” He slaps my shoulder, the biggest shit-eating grin on his face, then he leaves as quickly as he came in.
I stand in the kitchen and think about what he has said for considerably longer than I mean to.
By early evening, the clubhouse has settled into the comfortable, slightly rumbling warmth that it always finds after a high-alert night.
The threat hasn’t gone away, none of them ever fully do, but the machinery of the club has absorbed it, filed it, distributed the response across the appropriate channels, and the ordinary rhythms have reasserted themselves with ease.