Chapter Five #2
I’m standing near the bar, doing absolutely nothing in particular with a beer I stopped tasting twenty minutes ago, when Sin reappears and comes straight to me, like he knows exactly where he left me.
“Walk him through the security upgrades to the clubhouse,” Sin says.
“All of them. Take your time.” He doesn’t elaborate on the last part.
He doesn’t need to. Jonas’ gold pays for our security.
Hell, it pays for most of the shit in this clubhouse, so Sin likes to keep Jonas in the loop.
To make him feel a part of the club. To show him what his gold is paying for.
Jonas emerges from the Chapel behind him, and Sin peels away toward Ghost’s tech den without looking back, leaving us standing in the main room in the middle of a slow Monday afternoon with nobody nearby and more than enough space between us to make me painfully aware of him anyway.
Jonas looks at me with those gray eyes that have always reminded me of an overcast sky, assessing without performing the assessment.
He’s in his late fifties. Silver at his temples and a face that has been made by the kind of life that doesn’t apologize for what it costs.
He extends his hand, and I shake it. “Walk me through it,” he says.
So, I do.
We move through the clubhouse methodically, and I take him through every upgrade Ghost installed over the last week—the new camera coverage on the east and south perimeters, the recalibration of the motion-sensitive lighting, the reinforced door contacts on the secondary entrance, and the encrypted communication relay Ghost added to the existing network.
Jonas asks precise questions. He asks them once and doesn’t need the answers repeated, which tells me everything about how his mind works.
He listens with his hands in his pockets, his eyes moving over each installation with practiced focus, as if decades of looking at infrastructure have taught him exactly what to see.
We end up outside on the south side of the building, where the last camera mount is bolted to the wall at the roofline.
“Ghost’s work?” Jonas asks, looking up at the housing.
“All of it.”
He nods once, satisfied, and then he doesn’t move to go back inside.
He stands with his face tilted up toward the pale February sky for a moment, then drops his chin and looks at me with the same calm directness he’s had from the beginning.
“Tell me something,” he says. “When you have the patch. What then?”
The question lands without warning, and I find that I have no reflexive answer for it, which is unusual for me.
I’m generally good at reflexive answers.
I’ve been practicing them since the day I started prospecting, learning the balance between respect and hierarchy, and keeping my damn patience.
But Jonas isn’t asking a club question. He’s asking something with more weight than that.
“I stay,” I say, because that’s the part I’m certain of. “I’ve been building toward this for my entire life. My dad is here, my brother too. I’m not here for the novelty of it.”
“And the rest of your life?” There’s no pressure in his voice. He just throws the question out there and waits, steady and patient in that way that tells me he actually wants the truth and isn’t gonna push until I’m ready to give it to him.
“I figure that out as I go,” I say. “Same way everyone does.”
“Mmm…” He doesn’t look convinced, but he doesn’t look cynical either. He looks at me the way I’ve seen him look at a problem he finds interesting. “You’re twenty-one years old. You’ve given two years to become something. What does the man look like on the other side of it?”
I don’t have the easy answer for that one, so I give him the honest one instead.
“A man who keeps his word. A man the people he gives a damn about can count on without ever having to question whether they can trust him.” I pause, then add, because he’s earned the honesty, “And a man who stops treating the things he wants like they’re a liability. ”
Jonas is silent for a moment. He studies me with that gray-sky attention, and I let him, because I have nothing to hide in this conversation, and he seems to know it.
“You know what my daughter’s spent the last two years doing?” he asks.
My chest tightens immediately, something low and instinctive pulling beneath my sternum like a warning. I don’t let it reach my face. I keep my expression neutral, keeping my eyes on him.
“Waiting for something she thought she couldn’t have,” he says. “Stubborn girl.”
That lands somewhere under my ribs, mostly because I know exactly what he means and have no idea whether he’s letting me off the leash or telling me not to pull on it.
He pauses, and then something shifts in his expression.
Not quite a smile. More like the memory of one.
“She gets it from me.” He holds my gaze for a beat longer than the words require.
Long enough that I understand this isn’t casual conversation.
This is an assessment. A man measuring another man and deciding whether he’s worth the risk.
I feel the weight of that settle across my shoulders like something physical.
Not an accusation.
An expectation.
Then he turns and starts back toward the door.
I don’t respond.
There’s nothing I could say that wouldn’t sound smaller than what just passed between us. And Jonas McClane strikes me as the kind of man who doesn’t need reassurance once he’s made a decision.
He’s already said what he came to say.
The rest is mine to live up to.
He reaches the door, opens it, and, before he steps inside, looks back once and nods.
Slowly.
As if something has been confirmed—I just can’t tell what.
Holy shit.
***
Later that evening, I drive to Millie’s house.
I’ve been telling myself since I left the clubhouse that this is a straightforward visit.
That it’s a professional conversation about a security arrangement.
That I’m going because Sin made the call, I said yes in Chapel, and the arrangement needs to be communicated to Millie because she’s the person the arrangement exists to protect.
I’ve been telling myself that for four hours.
I park on the street and sit there for exactly three seconds, hands still on the wheel, engine ticking as it cools. Any longer than that and it starts turning into hesitation, and hesitation is a luxury I don’t get to indulge.
I step out into the night.
The air out here is colder than it was in town, carrying that dry Nevada stillness that lets every sound travel too far across the dark. Gravel crunches beneath my boots while I cross the yard toward the house, the porch light already burning, waiting for me before I even made the drive out here.
I take the steps two at a time, while the porch boards creak once under my weight.
I knock twice, trying not to sound too fucking nervous.
Jonas opens the door, dressed in a dark shirt, unhurried, unusually calm. His expression gives away nothing and everything simultaneously, which seems to be a characteristic he’s passed directly to his daughter.
“Will,” he states.
“Mr. McClane,” I say, regretting it instantly.
He furrows his brows, huffing at me. “I was Jonas today, kid. What’s with the formality tonight, because if you’re trying to impress me, it’s just fucking weird.” He stands aside to let me in without ceremony.
Running my fingers through my hair, I shrug. “I honestly dunno why I said that.”
Jonas smirks, but only a little, just enough for me to notice. “Come inside. And stop being an idiot.”
I nod. “Yes, sir… I mean, yeah, I will.”
He rolls his eyes, closing the door behind me, and from somewhere in the house comes the sound of the television, and under it, from the direction of the kitchen, the soft sounds of someone moving around with comfortable familiarity.
The smell of something warm and vanilla-sweet fills the entire hallway.
“She’s in the kitchen,” Jonas says, already moving back toward his armchair.
I find her at the counter with flour streaked all the way up both arms, hands buried in a mixing bowl while she works through the dough with the kind of effortless focus that tells me she’s done this so many times her body probably knows the motions better than her brain does.
She has her hair up, but pieces are coming loose around her face, and she doesn’t look up immediately when I come through the doorway, which gives me a full two seconds longer than I deserve to look at her before she registers that I’m here.
When she does, her expression does several things in rapid succession that she stops at somewhere in the vicinity of resignation.
“Sin sent you,” she says.
It’s not a question, so I don’t answer it as one.
“There’s a security arrangement.” I move to the end of the counter and rest my forearms on the edge, facing her.
“Chapel voted it in this morning. Ghost has six months of encrypted surveillance traffic, indicating that a threat has been conducting reconnaissance on the mine property. They’re moving to the next phase.
Until we understand what that looks like… yeah, you have a detail.”
She presses her lips together. Her hands keep moving in the bowl, kneading with a steadiness that doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “A babysitter,” she says.
“A detail.”
“Will… I’ve been coming and going from that mine since I was seven years old. I know that property better than anyone who’s going to be assigned to stand next to me, and I am not going to live my life in a bubble because some encrypted traffic—”
“Millie.”
She stops and looks at me with those hazel eyes that are currently doing the thing where they’re both very calm and very full at the same time.
The kitchen is warm with the smell of baking.
Somewhere in the next room, the television is murmuring to itself at a volume that suggests Jonas is either very uninterested in the program or not being subtle about eavesdropping on our conversation.
There is flour on her left cheekbone, a faint smear she doesn’t know is there.
Fuck! She’s intoxicating.
“I’m not here because Sin told me to be,” I say.
“I’m here because I couldn’t not be.” The words come out level and without drama because that’s how they’re true.
She goes still, not frozen but settled, as though something in her has exhaled.
She looks at me for a long moment, her hands still in the bowl, and I hold her gaze because I meant what I said, and I am not going to walk it back.
I reach across the counter and pick up her coffee mug, taking a sip, and set it back in front of her with a small, deliberate click, keeping my eyes on her face.
“I’ll take the sofa,” I say.
In the next room, the television volume increases by a single increment. One notch, precise and unhurried, announcing nothing and communicating everything.
Millie closes her eyes briefly, and the corners of her mouth press together in a complicated shape that she refuses to let become anything else.
Acceptance, and I’ll take that.
I don’t smile.
But I come very close.