Chapter Three #2
Marley is at the bar with Millie, the two of them leaning together over something on Marley’s phone, their heads tilted close.
Marley’s laugh rings out, and Millie covers her mouth with her hand the way she does when something catches her genuinely off guard, her shoulders shaking.
Something in my chest does a slow, involuntary thing in response to the sight of her like that, unguarded, bright, and entirely herself.
Nitro is beside me.
He doesn’t say anything.
He doesn’t need to.
Nitro’s silence is a different animal from Dad’s silence.
His silence is bedrock. Nitro’s silence is the kind that has thought about what it wants to say and decided the saying isn’t the point.
He stands at my side, arms folded, his attention shifting between Marley and the room with that steady, alert ease that is uniquely his.
He’s already clocked it, what I’m seeing, what it’s costing me.
He doesn’t comment.
He doesn’t need to.
Across the room, Millie glances up, and she finds me without searching. I don’t know if she’s aware of it, the instinctive way she turns toward me in a room, her eyes finding mine like a compass finding north.
I’m not sure I know it consciously, either, except in the way you know things your body has been tracking for two years because your brain has been too careful to admit to.
The look lasts for a fraction of a second.
Her expression says something that has no single word for it.
Then Marley says something beside her, and the moment closes. She’s laughing again, and I’m still standing here next to Nitro’s pointed silence, and twenty-one days feels like both forever and nothing at all.
Because twenty-one days is all that stands between prospect and brother.
Twenty-one days between what I want and what I’m willing to risk.
And Millie McClane is not a risk I get to take lightly.
Not when her father’s gold has been feeding this club for years.
Not when McClane Mining and Vegas Defiance are tied together so tightly that the line between business and blood barely exists anymore.
Jonas trusted this club to bring his daughter home alive when the Alliance took her, and ever since then, he’s made sure the club never wanted for anything.
Gold leaves that mine every month and finds its way into Defiance’s hands with no paperwork, no records, just trust, loyalty, and a debt that turned into family somewhere along the line.
Millie grew up around these men.
Protected by them.
Loved by them.
Half the club looks at her like she belongs under lock and key, something precious and breakable after everything she survived at sixteen.
But I have never looked at her that way.
I see the woman who stays up with people when they’re hurting. The one who remembers birthdays nobody else remembers. The one who walks into a room carrying enough light to soften even the ugliest nights this club has seen.
I see her laugh.
I see her kindness.
I see the way she keeps surviving things that should have hollowed her out.
And that’s exactly why I can’t touch this before I earn my patch. Because if I make a move too early and it goes bad, it doesn’t just cost me. It risks the club’s relationship with McClane Mining. It risks the trust Jonas placed in us when he put his daughter’s life in Defiance’s hands.
It risks her.
And I could live with losing a lot of things.
But I could never live with being the reason this club lost Millie.
Nitro takes a drink from his beer bottle, says nothing, just smirks.
“Don’t,” I say.
“Wasn’t going to,” he replies, which is bullshit.
We stand there while Millie laughs again, bright and unguarded, the room warm around her, the club loud and alive, and twenty-one days sit in my chest like a lit fucking fuse.
Fuck my life.
* * *
The back porch of the clubhouse faces east, which means it catches neither the sunset nor the glare of the Strip, just the dark shelf of the Mojave stretching out into the distance, flat, honest, and entirely without performance.
I come out here when I need the kind of sky that clears my head.
The night is cold enough that I can see my breath, thin white clouds dispersing into the black above the railing. The city noise is present but distant out here, muffled into something almost abstract, the kind of sound that tells you the world is still moving without demanding you move with it.
I lean against the railing and look out at the dark.
I’ve done this before. Sat with something heavy in my chest and forced myself to wait it out instead of grabbing for it too early, but this doesn’t feel hopeless or numb.
It feels loaded. The kind of waiting that only works because you know there’s an end coming eventually, even if it’s taking forever to get there.
I know what I’m waiting for.
I know what I’m going to do when the waiting ends.
I’ve known for a long damn time. Probably longer than I ever wanted to admit out loud. It’s just been sitting there in my chest all this time, steady and stubborn, not demanding anything from me except patience.
Waiting for the timing to stop being a problem.
However, tonight there’s something else sitting alongside the patience, something that Deek put into words in the kitchen this afternoon in that uncharacteristically quiet voice, and it’s been moving around inside me ever since, looking for somewhere to settle.
‘She was scared last night.’
But she held it together. She called Sin, and she did everything right. And the whole time she was crouched behind that desk in the dark, she was managing it alone, the same way she manages most things, because life taught her a long time ago that she had to.
I drove her home and said none of the things I’m not allowed to say yet.
She sat beside me with her father’s documents on her lap, her composure carefully in place.
I watched her the way I always do, out of the corner of my eye, holding those twenty-one days between us like the mother of brick fucking walls.
I press my hands flat against the cold metal of the railing.
The mine check-ins start tomorrow. I’ll make two passes, morning and evening, fold them into the circuit as I said, keep it clean, professional, and exactly what it needs to be. I’ll report anything unusual to Ghost, keep my head straight, and do the damn job.
I have waited two years.
I can wait three more weeks.
I lean on the railing, breathe the cold desert air, and look out at the flat, honest dark, and I let the certainty of it settle back into place.
Three weeks.
And then everything changes.
I get my patch, and I finally get my girl.