Chapter Eight #2
Queenie gently takes hold of my arm, smiling at me in that calm way she does.
“That boy of Bear’s,” Queenie says it low and deliberate, pitched just right so only the people meant to hear it actually do.
“He’s been watching you the same way my Damon watched his Marley.
” She pauses and lets that land for exactly the right amount of time.
“Like you’re already his, and he simply hasn’t said it yet. ”
My coffee cup is warm in my hands, and I hold onto it for dear life.
I don’t know what to say, so I say nothing.
Queenie nods, as if silence is precisely the answer she expected and finds it entirely acceptable.
“Don’t make him wait too long, dear.” Her voice stays soft, but there’s real weight behind it, the kind that only comes from surviving enough life to understand exactly how expensive wasted time can become. “Life doesn’t.”
She pats the back of my hand once, like that single touch settles the entire conversation in her mind. Then she turns back toward the room with those sharp little eyes of hers, completely satisfied with whatever conclusion she’s already reached about me.
I sit with it.
I sit with all of it.
The phrase turning over and over in my chest alongside the stone that’s been there for two years, the two of them grinding together until the edges blur.
‘Like you’re already his, and he simply hasn’t said it yet.’
Nitro lets out a low laugh at something Marley says across the room.
Ro is at the bar telling a story, with enough aggressive hand gestures to suggest property damage might have occurred.
Victoria is currently correcting what she considers a catastrophic misunderstanding of the science behind gender prediction.
The clubhouse buzzes around me, warm and alive and familiar.
And underneath all of it, I can still feel the clock ticking down.
One week to go.
The room settles back into its usual warmth after Queenie turns away.
Victoria slides into the seat Queenie just abandoned, moving a little more slowly these days as she adjusts to the changing shape of her body.
She doesn’t make a big deal out of it. Just settles in beside me with one hand drifting automatically to her stomach, that tiny unconscious habit she’s picked up lately.
Now and then her fingers brush over the curve of it, and her whole face softens for a second, like she still can’t quite believe this is real.
She looks at me for a moment. Not the sharp, professional look she sometimes has, the one left over from the years of reading people for a living. This one is softer and more direct. “Can I ask you something?” she says, and her voice is gentle enough to be just for me.
“Yeah?”
“How much do you know about the Alliance?” The question lands differently than I expected. I set my coffee cup down carefully. “What Sin has told me, and my personal experience,” I say. “Which is what I need to know to stay safe. Which isn’t the same as the full picture.”
Victoria nods slowly, like this confirms something.
“Sin dealt with them before you were ever involved with the club,” she says.
She keeps her voice level, informational, the same register she uses when she’s explaining something she’s decided the other person deserves to hear straight.
“Last year, it was a significant operation. Detective Rourke, the casino, the sting that put Lorenzo, Dante, and most of the leadership structure in federal custody…” She pauses. “It was supposed to be over.”
Something in my body goes tight.
Not gradually.
Not subtly.
Immediate.
Instinctive.
A wire pulling hard through my spine.
My fingers curl into my palms before I realize I’ve moved them. My lungs forget what they’re doing for half a second, like breathing has become optional and my body hasn’t decided whether to resume.
‘It was supposed to be over.’
I watch her face.
“But?” I say.
The word comes out steadier than I feel.
She exhales through her nose. “But criminal organizations don’t have an off switch.
They’re not a person you can arrest and be done with.
They’re a structure, and structures absorb the loss of their leadership.
They reassign and keep moving because the infrastructure underneath is what matters, not the names at the top.
” She glances toward the door briefly, then back to me.
“Whoever is running things now has been moving under the radar… months of silence. No face, no name… Ghost is still building the picture. That’s what worries Sin more than anything else, I think.
He knows how to handle the version that makes noise. ”
My heartbeat is too loud. It sits high in my throat, like it’s trying to force its way out of me. For a second, the room tilts—not enough to move, not enough for anyone else to notice, just enough that I am suddenly, vividly aware of how easily it could.
The smell comes back first.
Metal.
Concrete.
Mildew and stale piss.
I blink once, hard, dragging myself back into the room before the memory can finish forming.
“And this one doesn’t make n-noise?” I ask. My voice is wavering now.
“This one watches,” Victoria says. “Maps access points. Routes payments through shell accounts. Sends formal offers to buy property it has already decided to take.” She holds my gaze steadily.
“The old Alliance under Lorenzo was about fear. Control through presence. Whatever this is, it’s trying to build something.
Rebuild, maybe. They lost their casino infrastructure when Sin took down the old guard, and they need a new financial base.
Something legitimate on paper. My guess… they want to take the mine, Millie.”
I feel it.
Not fear.
Recognition.
The kind that settles heavy, like something sliding into place that I didn’t want to name.
My hand finds the edge of the table beside me, fingers pressing into the surface hard enough that I feel the grain through my skin, and I focus on that.
The texture, the pressure, something real. Something now.
Because if they are still out there…
If they have been watching…
If they are rebuilding…
Then this was never over.
The words settle into me slowly.
My father built the mine after my mother died.
He poured himself into the ground and built something out of grief, love, and a stubbornness that didn’t know where else to put all the space her absence left behind.
It has been his for fourteen years. The dust of it is in his lungs, the record of it is in his hands, the whole history of our family since she died is mapped along its shafts, ridgelines, and in the faces of the men who have worked it for him since before I was old enough to carry my own hard hat.
They looked at all of that and saw a financial base.
“They won’t get it,” I say.
Victoria’s expression shifts into something that is not quite a smile but is close to one. “No,” she says, simply. “They won’t.”
Across the room, Marley has dissolved into laughter about something Ro said.
Queenie is watching the room with those bright, certain eyes.
The clubhouse continues in its usual warmth, as if the conversation I just had belongs to a completely different world from the one where Ro pours non-regulation coffee, and Victoria catalogs the indignities of the second trimester.
Maybe it does.
Maybe that’s the point.
The ordinary warmth of this place. The thing they’re all protecting underneath the noise, the violence, the reputation. This habit of carrying burdens together without turning it into a performance.
My father at the kitchen table drifts back into my mind.
Then the unopened documents sitting in my bag.
The diagnosis, the mine, everything he built, and all the things he’s apparently been doing for longer than I realized to make sure it survives him.
Victoria tops up my coffee without asking. “You’re doing well,” she says with the kind of understanding that tells me she’s survived her own version of this nightmare before. “Just so you know.”
I wrap both hands around the mug and let the warmth seep into my palms. “I’m faking a substantial portion of it,” I admit.
“Everyone is,” she says. “The trick is to keep showing up while you’re doing it.”
***
That night, back at home, I sit on the porch.
March darkness settles over the yard, the distant city glow tracing its edges beyond the hills. The air smells of desert, and faintly, from inside, the remnants of a dinner I didn’t quite manage to finish.
Through the front window, I can see Will.
He’s in the armchair, the one my father has apparently surrendered for the night with that grand, generous air that says he’s done you a huge favor and you’d better appreciate it.
He’s reading something with one ankle kicked over his knee, completely relaxed in that unfair way he has of making every space feel like it belongs to him the second he walks into it.
The lamp beside him throws warm light across the sharp line of his jaw.
I watch him for longer than I intend to.
Through the kitchen window, I can see my father. Dad is at the table with a glass of water, studying the woodgrain like it’s suddenly riveting, wearing the look of someone who has no intention of going to bed at a reasonable hour and wants that understood as a deliberate, fully informed choice.
I look at him.
I look at Will.
I look at the seven remaining days sitting inside my chest.
Queenie’s voice comes back to me on the cool air…
‘Don’t make him wait too long, dear. Life doesn’t.’
My mind drifts to my father sitting at that kitchen table, carrying those payments month after month in total silence, while no one around him realized how heavy they really were. To everything else, he’s held together over the years without ever letting anybody see the cracks.
Then to Will, and the look on his face when Sin’s call came through, his eyes finding me first before he could stop himself.
‘Like you’re already his.’
The porch boards are cool under me. The dark is soft.
Inside, a father I love in the uncomplicated, enormous way you love someone who built the world around you, is keeping himself awake for no discernible reason at the kitchen table, and a man I love, in terms I don’t yet have a word for, is sitting in the lamplight reading a book.
Seven days.
I breathe in the desert air, then let it out slowly.
Seven days, and then whatever this is becomes something else entirely.
I can wait seven days.
At least…
… I think I can.