Chapter Fourteen
WILL
The Next Day
Two days out from my patch ceremony, and Ghost is watching every shadow, every angle, every flicker of activity on the dark web like a man waiting for a trap to spring.
Sin called me into his office this morning, kept it short, kept it tight.
‘Stay sharp. Stay close. Don’t give them a reason to move.
’ The words sat heavy the whole ride over to Millie’s place, and I turned them over the entire drive, searching for the thing I was supposed to be afraid of.
But when she opens the front door with flour on her forearm and something warm and sweet drifting out from the kitchen behind her, every thread of tension in my body starts to loosen, one by one.
“You’re here.” She says it like a soft exhale, not surprise, but relief. The kind that tells me she’d been waiting.
“Like clockwork,” I answer, stepping inside when she moves back to let me through.
The house is settled into itself the way it only gets after ten at night, Jonas’ door pulled closed at the end of the hallway, the stillness that takes over once he’s gone to bed.
I’ve been here long enough now to know the rhythms of this place.
Know that the third stair creaks if you step on the left side.
Know that Jonas sleeps with a fan running.
Know that Millie bakes when she can’t quiet her mind.
She is absolutely baking right now.
The kitchen counter is a comfortable wreck, measuring cups nested in a bowl of sugar, two cooling racks side by side on the stovetop. Whatever’s on them smells incredible, warm and brown-buttered and a little spiced, and I lean in close to look.
“What’s on the menu?” I ask.
“Browned butter snickerdoodles,” she says, sliding past me to check the oven, her shoulder brushing mine in that brief, unconscious way she has. “Therapy baking.”
“You do that a lot.”
She glances back over her shoulder, and her expression catches me, soft, knowing, and a little tired around the edges.
“I do it when I don’t know how to say what I’m feeling, so I put it somewhere else instead.
” She shrugs, like that’s a perfectly ordinary thing. “Better than screaming into a pillow.”
“Is it working?”
The corner of her mouth lifts. “Ask me after you try one.”
I reach for the cooling rack, and she doesn’t stop me, so I pick one up and bite into it while it’s still warm, the center soft and the edges barely set. It’s the kind of good that makes you close your eyes for a second without meaning to. “Fuck that is good,” I tell her.
“You don’t have to say that if it’s not.”
“Millie…” I hold her gaze. “It’s good.”
She ducks her head, but she’s smiling, color moving into her cheeks.
She turns back to the counter, starts fussing with the second rack, nudging the cookies to even out the spacing for no reason I can see except to give her hands something to do.
I lean against the counter beside her, close enough to talk, not so close that she has to feel crowded.
We’ve always kept a careful distance between us, and tonight I’m aware of every inch of it with an almost uncomfortable precision.
“Two more days,” she says, not looking at me.
“Yeah.”
She picks up a spatula and gently turns one of the cookies over, checking the bottom. “Are you nervous?”
“No.” I think about that for a second. “Maybe. Not about the ceremony.”
She finally looks over at me, and the question is sitting plainly in her eyes, patient and unhurried. She doesn’t push. She never pushes, and it’s exactly that quality, the way she gives me room to be as slow about things as I need to be, that has been making me half-crazy for two years now.
“About after,” I say. “About everything that comes after.”
She nods slowly, the spatula still in her hand, and the silence between us feels different than it usually does. Not the careful restraint of two people trying to keep themselves under control anymore. This is different. It’s charged with something neither of us is pretending not to feel now.
She puts the spatula down and turns to get something from the cupboard above her head, stretching up on her toes to reach a small glass jar on the top shelf. I move before I’ve decided to move, stepping in behind her to reach it easily, my chest coming to a stop just a breath behind her back.
I set the jar on the counter.
Neither of us moves away.
I can feel her breathing. Shallow and quick, the way it gets when she’s trying not to let something show.
My hand is still on the counter, braced beside hers, and when I look down, I see the fine dusting of flour on her forearm, the soft line of her shoulder, the way her hair has come loose from whatever she’d pinned it up with and is curling slightly against the back of her neck.
Two years.
Two years of standing right here and doing nothing with it.
“Millie.” Her name comes out low and rough, and she turns slowly, her back coming to rest against the counter edge so that she’s facing me. We are close. Very close. Close enough that I can see the exact moment she decides to stop pretending.
“Will,” she breathes.
I reach up and brush a strand of hair from her cheek, my thumb dragging just slightly along her skin, and the way her breath catches at something so small hits me low and hard. She tips her chin up like she already knows what’s coming, like she’s been waiting for it as long as I have.
This time, there’s no careful distance left to measure.
My mouth finds hers in a slow collision that’s softer than the need behind it.
I feel her hands fist in my shirt almost immediately, feel the subtle tremor in her fingers, and something in my restraint snaps loose at the edges.
I step closer, crowding her space, my hand sliding to her waist and pulling her into me until there’s no room left for doubt or second thoughts.
The sound she makes against my mouth is soft, but it hits me hard enough to feel it everywhere. We part for air, barely, both of us breathing harder than the moment should justify. Her forehead brushes along my jaw, warm and unsteady.
“You okay?” I murmur, though my voice sounds rougher than I intend.
“Yeah,” she says, but her grip tightens instead of loosening, fingers anchoring in my shirt like she’s already decided we’re past the point of retreat.
That’s all the permission I need.
The next kiss lands slower, deeper, the kind that takes its time because it knows exactly what it’s building toward.
My hands move over her instinctively, learning the curve of her waist, the heat of her back beneath my palms, and when she exhales into my mouth, it feels like something inside me locks into place.
I shift my head, changing the angle, taking more, and she meets me with a response that sends my pulse surging hard enough to blur the edges of the room.
My mouth drifts along her jaw, finding the sensitive skin beneath her ear, and the way she breathes my name hits like a sharp, dizzying rush straight through my chest.
I guide her backward, inch by measured inch, without breaking contact, until her hips meet the counter.
The solid impact grounds us for half a second, just long enough for the reality of what we’re doing to flicker through the heat.
Then I’m back on her mouth, hands framing her face, thumbs tracing the line of her cheekbones, committing them to memory.
There’s nothing hurried about it, but there’s nothing tentative left either.
This isn’t a question anymore.
It’s a decision we’re both finally making at the same time.
Two days.
Two days from standing in front of my brothers and earning the patch I have kept her at arm’s length for. Two years of discipline, distance, doing everything right, so I didn’t risk the one thing I’ve been working toward since I first walked through the clubhouse doors.
Walking her down that hallway right now could burn all of that to the fucking ground.
It could put me on the wrong side of everything I’ve built.
The thought hits hard enough to slow my pulse for half a beat.
Then she looks at me like that.
Like I’m already hers.
Like she’s already made the same calculation and decided the risk is worth it.
Oh, fuck it!
“We should…” she starts, then loses the thought when I press my lips to the corner of her mouth. “We should probably, um…” She swallows. “My room.”
“Your dad,” I say, pulling back just enough to meet her eyes.
“His door is closed. Fan is running.” She bites her lip. “But we have to be quiet.”
A relaxed laugh slips out of me. “I’m not the one who’s gonna be the problem.”
Her cheeks flush deep, heat blooming across her skin. “I resent that.”
“We’ll see,” I murmur, already taking her hand, knowing I’ve stepped over the line I swore I wouldn’t cross.
Her room is dim, the small lamp on the nightstand throwing out a warm, amber glow that softly catches the edges of everything.
I close the door behind us, she turns to face me, and the second the latch clicks, we both feel it, the shift, the permission of it, two years of distance finally run out, and nothing stands between us anymore.
She reaches for me at the same moment I reach for her, and then there is nothing careful about it at all.
The kiss is hungry, a little desperate, her hands fisting in my shirt and mine finding her waist and pulling her flush against me, and she makes a sound that is gratifying and entirely her.
Two years. The thought keeps crashing through me like a wave. Two years of turning away, two years of choosing carefully, and now Millie is in my hands, and I cannot seem to get close enough fast enough.