Chapter Eleven #2
He exhales through his nose, the ghost of a smile tugging at one corner of his mouth. “Millie.”
“Will.”
There’s a beat where we look at each other, the kind that feels like it has an audience even though the yard is mostly calm.
Somewhere behind us, Deek whistles. “About damn time.”
I turn slightly. “I didn’t ask for commentary.”
“You don’t have to,” Deek calls back. “We’re invested.”
Will drags a hand over his jaw. “This was a mistake.”
“You’re the one who’s suggesting the bike,” I point out.
“I suggested the bike because it’s faster.”
“And dramatically more impressive.”
“That was not the goal.”
“It’s never the goal, but it’s always the outcome.”
He studies me for a second longer, something softer slipping into his expression when he thinks I’m not looking for it. “You comin’ or not?” he asks.
“I feel like this is a trick.”
“It’s not a trick, Mills.”
“You’re going to change your mind halfway down the road and make me get off.”
“That would require me to stop.”
“That feels like a technicality.”
Another pause.
Then he shakes his head once, short and decisive. “Helmet.” He holds it out, and I take it like it might vanish if I hesitate.
“Wow,” I say, fastening the strap. “Is this what personal growth looks like?”
“Get on the bike before I change my damn mind.”
I laugh under my breath and step closer, aware of how suddenly real the moment feels now that it’s actually happening. The engine’s low idle vibrates up through the soles of my boots, through my bones.
“Where do you want me?” I ask, softer now.
“Behind me,” he says, equally calm. “Hold on.”
“I was planning to cling like a Koala.”
“I’m counting on it.”
I swing my leg over, settling behind him, the shape of his back solid and familiar even before I lean in. When I slide my arms around his waist, he stills for half a second like he registers the contact somewhere deeper than muscle memory.
“Comfortable?” he asks.
“Dangerously.”
He huffs something that might be a laugh, then the engine growls properly to life, and the rest of the club fades into background noise when we pull out into the night.
The first surge of acceleration steals my breath, leaving me almost breathless.
The engine growls beneath me, the vibration climbing up my spine and settling deep in my chest, working against the knot that’s been locked there all damn evening until it finally starts to give under the raw, undeniable pull of movement.
Wind catches at the hair hanging free from the helmet immediately, tearing loose the last of the careful composure I’d been holding together inside Sin’s office. The night air is colder on the bike, sharper, alive with movement.
I tighten my arms around him without thinking.
He doesn’t react.
Which is, in itself, a reaction.
The city lights blur at the edges as we merge onto the road, the rhythm of the ride settling into something steady and sure. I press my cheek between his shoulder blades, the warmth of him radiating through leather and denim, through all the layers I pretend make a difference.
They don’t.
Every shift of his body communicates itself to mine. Every lean into a turn pulls me with him, an unspoken conversation conducted through balance and instinct. I find the cadence quickly, the way you do with something that feels like you’ve always known it, even if you haven’t.
Adrenaline hums low under my skin.
Not fear.
Not anymore.
Something brighter.
Something that feels suspiciously like relief.
At a red light, he eases to a stop, boots planting wide and solid on the asphalt. The engine continues its deep, steady thrum beneath us, vibrating up through my thighs and into the tight circle of my arms around his waist.
His hand leaves the throttle for just a second, and it reaches back to find my leg. He doesn’t grip, just rests his palm on my thigh, warm and grounding, a check-in that feels more intimate than anything he could have said out loud.
You still there.
I press closer in answer.
Always.
The light changes, and his hand returns to the chrome grip. We move again, faster this time, the road opening ahead of us in long ribbons of fluorescent glow and shadow.
Out here, the world reduces to simple things.
Speed.
Sound.
Contact.
Breath.
The noise in my head finally quiets enough that I can exist inside the moment, wrapped around the man I am absolutely not supposed to be wrapped around, riding toward a future that keeps shifting shape every time I try to define it.
I don’t think about tomorrow.
I don’t think about my father.
I don’t think about what this means.
I just hold on.
And for the first time all night, it feels like freedom.
And it leaves me utterly breathless.
The engine drops from a roar to a low, steady idle as we turn onto the familiar street, the speed bleeding off in stages until the world begins to feel recognizable again.
My father’s house comes into view in a warm wash of amber light, the kitchen window casting a long rectangle across the porch boards like something intentionally welcoming.
When he finally cuts the engine, the sudden stillness feels almost unreal, and for a second, neither of us moves.
The absence of motion makes me aware of everything all at once.
The press of my arms around him, the lingering hum of adrenaline in my bloodstream.
The way my heart keeps time with the engine that’s no longer running.
“Well,” I say into the space between his shoulders. “That was either a very good idea or an extremely bad one.”
He turns slightly to look back at me. There’s something unreadable in his expression, softened at the edges by the porch light. “You survived.”
“Barely,” I reply. “I’m deeply changed as a person.”
“You talk more after riding.”
“I talk more when I’m not trying to cling to my life.”
“You weren’t clinging to your life.”
I slide off the bike carefully, boots hitting the pavement with a small, grounding thud. My legs feel a little unsteady, the residual vibration of the ride still living somewhere in my muscles. “That’s debatable,” I say, handing him the helmet. “I’m fairly certain I saw my ancestors at one point.”
“Your ancestors would approve,” he says, matter-of-factly, setting the helmet on the seat.
I laugh, softly now, because the house is right there and the reality of it all is beginning to settle back into place. “Thank you,” I add.
“For what?”
“For not… doing a deep dive into my problems.”
He studies me for a moment, then gives a small nod like he understands more than I’ve said.
I stop and look back at him. “So just to be clear… that was an elite, invite-only experience?”
“Extremely.”
“Good. I’d hate to find out you hand out motorcycle privileges like loyalty cards.”
He exhales something that might be a laugh.
“Really… thank you,” I say again.
He nods once more, and we walk up the path together, gravel crunching underfoot.
Through the kitchen window, I see Dad’s silhouette move past, carrying something, probably his evening glass of water, and the sight of him upright and moving and entirely ordinary loosens something in my muscles that I hadn’t realized was braced.
“There’s soup on the stove,” he says. “Made too much.”
I cross the room and press a kiss to the top of his head and breathe him in, cedar, coffee, and something that is undeniably him, and I stay there one beat longer than is strictly necessary. “Thanks, Dad.”
He pats my hand. He doesn’t ask. He has never been a man who interrogates.
Will ladles the soup into bowls without being asked.
We eat at the kitchen table while the house settles into the same nighttime routine it’s fallen into over the last week.
Dad’s chair creaks from the living room.
The lamp clicks off at exactly nine, same as always.
A few minutes later, light appears beneath his bedroom door, telling me he’s in there reading again, trying to wear himself out enough to sleep and probably failing at it.
The mine documents are already spread across half of the table.
I’ve been living with them every evening now, pulling them out after dinner and working through them section by section because the alternative is letting the full weight of it land on me all at once, and I have learned over a lifetime of managing difficult things that the only way through a mountain is to take it one small step at a time.
I open my laptop and pull up the spreadsheet I was buried in last night, extraction records from the last fiscal year staring back at me in neat little rows of numbers. Then I drop back into the work the same way you sink into an old bruise you’ve stopped expecting to heal properly.
Will grabs a beer and sits back down across from me.
He doesn’t offer to help. He’s learned I don’t want help with the numbers, not because I can’t use it, but because the act of working through them myself is part of how I’m learning to hold this thing.
The mine is mine now, or it will be, and the weight of that is something I need to carry with my own hands for a while before I let anyone else near it.
He seems to understand this without me having to explain it, which is something I keep noticing about him and choosing not to think about too hard at night.
He reads.
I calculate.
The sounds of the house settle around us, old wood creaking now and then while the night drifts slowly forward.
At some point, I hear my father’s bedroom light click off. I glance at the sliver beneath his door and find it dark, and something in me eases further.
Time moves strangely when you’re doing numbers.
You look up and forty minutes have dissolved into the accounting.
The soup bowls are long since cleared, the kitchen has gone very still, and the house has settled into that deep silence of the small hours, all its sounds slowing, deepening, and retreating to the corners.
I look up at the clock…
Two in the morning.
I set my pen down on the table, very deliberately, and stare at the column of figures I’ve been working through for the last hour without seeing them anymore.
Will is still here.
He’s halfway through his second paperback, his beer’s been empty for who knows how long, and now and then I catch him looking over at me with that steady attention that says he’s got absolutely nowhere else he’d rather be right now.
“Why are you still up?” I ask.
He considers the question for approximately half a second. “Same reason you are.”
I look at him across the table. His face in the kitchen lamp’s light is calm and a little tired and completely present, and there’s something about the ordinariness of him sitting there, at two in the morning, in my father’s house, that makes my chest do something complicated.
“Will.” I fold my hands around my pen, looking at it rather than at him for a moment. “What was Dad like when the club first met him?”
He is quiet for long enough that I look up.
His expression has shifted, turned slightly inward, the way it gets when he’s reaching for something.
“Careful,” he says, and the echo of it makes the corner of my mouth lift before I can stop it.
“Smart. The kind of man who measures out everything before he says it, who doesn’t put a word down unless he means it to stay there.
” He pauses, and something moves across his face that I recognize as genuine warmth, the kind he doesn’t perform. “Reminded me of my dad, actually.”
Something warm settles in me at that.
“My dad likes Bear,” I say.
“My dad likes Jonas.” Will’s voice is certain.
“From early on… that’s not nothing. Dad doesn’t decide quickly, and he doesn’t change his mind easily, and he liked Jonas from about the third conversation.
” He tilts his head slightly. “I think Dad recognized something. Two men who built things slowly and meant them to last.”
I sit with that for a moment.
Outside, the city makes its low, distant sound, the one that never fully disappears even at this hour, that perpetual ambient hum that Las Vegas keeps running underneath everything else like a second pulse. I’ve stopped hearing it most of the time.
Tonight, I hear it, loud and unstoppable.
I reach for my laptop and close it, and the room grows quieter somehow with the screen dark. “Do you think Dad’s scared?” My voice comes out smaller than I intended, stripped of its working-hours steadiness. “Of what comes next?”
Will doesn’t answer straight away. He looks at me for a second, really looks at me, taking the question seriously instead of throwing some easy bullshit comfort at me to make the moment simpler than it is. “I think he’s sad about what he’ll miss,” he says, finally. “That’s different from scared.”
The words settle into the kitchen air, and I feel them land somewhere deep, somewhere below the spreadsheets, the legal language, and the two-in-the-morning arithmetic of owning something you never asked to own before its time.
I feel them in the place where my father still lives, as the person who knew where my bicycle was kept, which section of the newspaper to save for me, and how I take my coffee when I’ve had a bad day.
My eyes sting.
I reach across the table and put my hand over his. Not reaching for anything, not asking for anything. Two people at a kitchen table at two in the morning, being very real with each other in the way that’s only possible when you’ve stopped having anything left to perform for the night.
He looks down at my hand on his, and he turns his palm over, threading his fingers with mine.
We sit like that for a while, the lamp burning steadily between us, the documents spread across the table in their careful piles, the mine, the Alliance, and all the things that are coming next waiting patiently outside the circle of the light.
None of it has gone anywhere.
None of it will.
But for now, in this kitchen, in the silence of the small hours, it holds its distance.
The bedroom light under my father’s door stays dark.
The clock on the wall ticks on.
Five more days.