Chapter Seventeen #2
She reaches out and squeezes my arm once, brief and certain, and then composes herself completely—the McClane composure. I have come to love it, the way it doesn’t mean she doesn’t feel things, only that she chooses when and where.
Deek materializes at my shoulder as if he’s been waiting for the exact moment I’m too distracted to defend myself.
“You can’t stand there,” he mutters, already steering me half a step to the left with the heel of his hand between my shoulder blades.
“That’s where Ghost’s aunt’s friend’s cousin is supposed to sit. ”
I stare at him. “That’s not a real person.”
“She is emotionally real to Ghost’s aunt,” he says gravely. “Move.”
I let him reposition me like furniture, mostly because fighting him would require more energy than I currently possess.
Across the room, my dad catches my eye. He doesn’t smile. He has never been a man for public displays of anything. He inclines his head once, the kind of nod that carries approval, reassurance, and a lifetime of unspoken understanding in one economical movement.
Something tight in my chest loosens a fraction.
Nitro barrels in from my blind side a second later, his hand landing hard between my shoulders. “Jesus, you look like you’re walking to your own funeral,” he says, eyeing me with cheerful concern. “You want me to start a collection?”
“Shut up.”
He grins wider, entirely unbothered. “That’s the spirit.”
His laughter rolls off him, and into the room, loud enough to dissolve a pocket of tension I hadn’t even realized I was radiating.
Near the cake table, Marley has one hip propped against the edge of the long trestle, her hands animated as she talks, already halfway through building an argument she intends to win.
Millie stands at an angle toward her, head tipped slightly, listening with that attentiveness that makes people feel the most important thing in the room.
She laughs at something Marley says, the sound warm and easy, and Marley’s expression softens in response, like she’s pleased with herself for earning it.
They shift closer without thinking about it, shoulders almost brushing, already moving in that shared orbit they’ve developed over the last few weeks, the kind of unspoken alignment that only forms when people decide, consciously or not, that they’re safe with each other.
Watching her there, inside this space, surrounded by leather cuts, low voices, and the constant hum of a life she didn’t grow up in but has somehow stepped into without losing herself, something inside me finally settles.
The weight I woke up with this morning lifts off my ribs as if it had never been properly anchored in the first place.
I draw in a breath that feels cleaner than the last several have.
All right…
It’s time.
I turn, scanning the room for Sin, but suddenly, the proximity alarm sounds.
We all spin to Ghost, who is madly staring at the security feeds. His eyes shoot up, and he turns pale. “Shit, Pres, it’s the Five-O, and they’re not asking about coming in.”
Sin grunts, shaking his head. “Fuck, raid protocol, everyone get ready!”
We move as one to the center of the clubroom, guns stowed, hands raised as the front door opens. Two men step through it, dressed in suits, bringing with them an unshakable authority that doesn’t belong to this room but doesn’t need permission to be here.
One lifts a badge… LVPD.
The other has a folded document in his hand.
Behind them, SWAT pour in, weapons raised, poised and waiting.
The shift moves through the room fast and silent, men who read threat for a living going still, laughter dying mid-sentence, conversations cutting off, everybody angling toward the door.
“William Beckett.” The detective says my name with certainty, like it’s already been confirmed three different ways, and the sound of it carries farther than it should, cutting through conversation, laughter, and the low hum of music until everything seems to tilt toward me at once.
I straighten before I even realize I’m doing it. Habit, instinct, the body responds before the mind has caught up. “That’s me.”
He steps closer, measured and unhurried, reaching inside his jacket with easy, practiced calm.
When he speaks again, his tone is polite enough to almost pass for respect, but there is no room in it for misunderstanding.
“We have a warrant for your arrest.” The words land with a strange, hollow clarity, like hearing something underwater.
For a moment, they don’t connect to anything real.
They exist as sound first, meaning second.
He holds out a folded document, and I take it because there is nothing else to do with my hands. The paper feels heavier than it should, like the weight has nothing to do with the physical object and everything to do with what it represents.
My eyes move across the text once, then again more slowly, forcing comprehension where instinct is trying to refuse it.
Financial crimes.
Fraud.
Misappropriation of funds.
McClane Mining Company.
Something inside my chest tightens, not sharp panic but a dense, constricting pressure that makes breathing feel difficult.
I become acutely aware of the room around me in fragments.
The smell of spilled beer on wood, the faint whirr of the ceiling fan, the way someone has stopped mid-laugh and hasn’t resumed.
This isn’t confusion.
It’s worse than confusion.
It’s recognition that the ground has shifted, and I don’t yet know in which direction.
The detective is still watching me, his expression professionally neutral, the kind of neutrality that comes from years of delivering bad news in controlled environments. Another officer moves closer to my left, subtle but unmistakable, closing the geometry of the space.
“Mr. Beckett…” he says, his voice steady and rehearsed, “… you are being taken into custody in relation to an ongoing financial investigation.”
A sharp ringing fills my ears, like the echo after a gunshot, and suddenly my pulse is everywhere, loud, insistent, each beat hitting higher and higher until it crowds my throat.
“We are required to inform you that… You have the right to remain silent,” he says. “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford one, one will be appointed to you…”
Each sentence is delivered with the same careful cadence, a script honed by repetition, and I understand with a kind of detached clarity that this moment is routine for him.
It is not routine for me.
“Do you understand these rights as I’ve explained them to you?”
I hear myself answer before I consciously decide to speak. “Yes.” The word comes out controlled, which feels like an achievement considering the sudden, violent reordering of everything I thought the next hour of my life would contain.
And then, because there is only one place my focus can go, I turn.
Millie stands across the room beside Marley, her body so still, as if she has locked every muscle in place to prevent something from breaking through.
The color drains from her face, and my stomach drops, a cold, instinctive reaction that has nothing to do with the charges and everything to do with the look in her eyes.
Fear, yes.
But beneath it, something heavier.
Something closer to devastation than panic.
The realization that she believes this might be real hits me harder than the warrant itself.
My first instinct is to move toward her.
To close the distance.
To fix whatever this is with proximity alone.
But I don’t.
I force myself to remain where I am, to hold her gaze with as much steadiness as I can summon, because what she needs right now is not action. It’s certainty. It’s the visible proof that I am not unraveling, even if something inside me has begun to splinter in ways I can’t explain.
This is wrong. The thought settles in my mind with absolute conviction. Not defensive denial. Not unquestioning loyalty.
Fact.
The club will move on this.
Ghost will tear the data apart.
Sin will not let this stand if there is even a fraction of doubt.
And there is doubt. Already.
Even as the machinery of law closes around me, a deeper instinct runs parallel to it, cataloging, assessing, preparing.
Two seconds pass that feel like both an instant and a lifetime.
I turn back to the detectives before the moment stretches into something unbearable. “Let’s go.”
I don’t fight.
I don’t argue.
I don’t give them anything to write down.
“Don’t say shit, Will. Not till we get there. Do you hear me?” Sin calls out as the cops grab me, placing cuffs around my wrists, then begin to lead me out of the Las Vegas Defiance clubhouse between two LVPD detectives in my prospect cut with my hands behind my back.
Behind me, the room stays silent until I am through the door.
The patch ceremony cake is still sitting on the table near the window. The chairs are still arranged in a loose circle near the bar. Outside in the parking lot, on a March afternoon, I hear boots on gravel as brothers spill out behind us.
Bearing witness.
It is the most Defiance thing I have ever experienced, and I cannot look back at them because if I do, I will feel the full weight of this, and I need to stay focused.
The LVPD vehicle pulls away from the curb, and with it any chance at the life I thought I was going to have with Millie, and with the club.
This is not how I saw today going.
***
The holding room at LVPD is the kind of space designed specifically to remind you that time moves differently when someone else is in charge of it. A table that has had a thousand difficult conversations. A chair that offers nothing in the way of comfort.
Institutional gray.
They tell me I get one call.
I sit for a moment with that. One call. The calculation a man makes when he has exactly one shot to put the most important thing where it belongs.
I think about Sin.
Sin, who already knows the situation, will require Ghost, his tech, and his contacts, and will have started making calls before my vehicle had reached the end of the block.
I think about Dad. Dad, who will be sitting somewhere in that parking lot right now with his arms folded and his face doing the closed-down thing it does when he is furious, and there is nothing yet to direct the fury toward.
I think about Ghost, who is already, I’m almost certain, three tabs deep into McClane Mining’s financials, looking for whoever put my name on a document it doesn’t belong on.
Then I stop thinking about any of them.
And I dial Millie.
She picks up on the second ring. She doesn’t say hello, she breathes, a single, controlled exhale that tells me she has been holding herself together since the moment the LVPD vehicle left the parking lot and that the holding has been costing her considerably.
“Millie.” I keep my voice low and even. “Listen to me…”
She hesitates. “I’m listening.”
“I’m in holding at the Las Vegas Police Department.
They’re saying I’m part of some financial crimes involving the mine…
but Ghost will find the truth. That’s not optimism, that’s a fact.
I need you to trust that. Whoever did this put their fingerprints somewhere, and Ghost is going to find it. Okay?”
“Okay,” she says, her voice steady, and it breaks my heart a little how steady she makes it sound.
“But before he does.” I press my free hand flat against the table, grounding myself in the cool solidity of it.
“Before any of that happens, I need you to know something. Because I should have said it a hundred times before today, and I kept finding reasons why the timing wasn’t right, and I’m not willing to find another reason. ”
The silence on her end is complete. She is listening with her whole body. I know this about her.
“I love you, Millie.” The words come out without any of the difficulty I had expected them to have.
They are simply true, and the truth of them fills my chest. “I have loved you for two years, since before I had any right to say it, since before I was in a position to do anything about it. I love you, and I am going to get out of here, and when I do, I’m done waiting for the right time.
There is no right time. There is just now. ”
She makes a sound. Small, fractured, and immediately contained. “Oh, Will…”
She doesn’t say it back, but she doesn’t need to.
I can wait.
“I’ll wait however long it takes. But I needed you to know it was already real before any of this happened. The only thing that matters is that I said it out loud…” I pause. “That’s all. That’s the whole thing.”
She lets out a long, full breath from her end of the line. “Okay,” she whispers.
“Okay,” I say back, the way I always say it back to her.
I end the call and sit on the molded plastic bench in LVPD holding, still in the clothes I was arrested in, the taste of celebration gone sour in the back of my throat.
Somewhere across the city, there’s a cake with my name on it going stale under fluorescent lights, my brothers pacing asphalt and planning war, and my prospect cut is no longer on my shoulders.
It’s sealed in a property bag with my boots and belt, as if it’s just another item to be cataloged.
But I called Millie first.
The brothers will find out.
In a club the size of Defiance, there is no such thing as a private action, only actions that take longer to travel than others. They’ll find out, and not a single one of them will say a word about it. Because every man in that club, if they’re being honest, already knew.
She was always the first call.
She has been, for two years.
And, finally, I said it out loud.