Chapter Twenty-Four
MILLIE
Two Days Later
The living room looks exactly the same as it always has.
That’s the part that keeps catching me off guard, the way nothing in this house has changed its face even as everything underneath it has shifted.
The same worn sofa where Will slept for weeks.
The same side table with Dad’s reading lamp, his folded newspaper, and the ring-stain from twenty years of morning coffee mugs.
The same armchair with the slightly flattened left armrest where his elbow always rests.
The same space where the three of us ate breakfast, and moved around each other carefully.
It is the most ordinary room in the world, and today it feels like a courtroom.
Dad is home from the hospital and in his chair.
He looks smaller than he used to, and I know that’s not my imagination.
Days of hospital lighting and the exhaustion of illness have drawn something out of him, some physical substance that I cannot get back for him, no matter how much I want to.
But he is here, he is upright, and his eyes when they find mine across the room are exactly what they have always been.
Clear, steady, and full of things he will not say directly until he is ready.
Mr. Ellery is already seated at the dining table when I come in, his leather briefcase open at his elbow and a document resting in his hands like he’s been turning it over while he waited.
He doesn’t rush to speak. He sits there, patient in that professional way that makes it clear he knows whatever he’s about to say is going to land hard for someone in this room.
Sin is beside me on the sofa.
I called him this morning because Dad asked me to, and Sin showed up without asking a single question, which is exactly who he is.
He came wearing his cut too—a statement.
My father knows exactly what that patch means, and Sin knows it too.
He’s sitting across the room now with his forearms braced on his knees, completely locked in the way he gets when he’s paying attention to every damn thing around him.
Will’s outside on the porch. Dad asked him to wait, and Will said, “Yes, sir,” without hesitation.
I watched him walk out through the front door and take up a position against the porch railing where he’s been standing for the last twenty minutes in the March air, the kind that still hasn’t decided if winter is finished or if spring is about to slam Nevada with heat hard enough to crack pavement.
The fact that Dad asked him to wait out there, rather than not come at all, tells me something.
I’m just not sure what yet.
But I know my father well enough to understand that nothing he does is without a purpose.
Dad lifts a hand weakly from the sofa. “Millie, girl… you know that document you’ve been holding onto?” I raise my brow at him. “The one in your bag,” he adds when I don’t answer straight away. “Now’s the time. Get it and give it to Mr. Ellery.”
I started reading it at the hospital, but it made no sense to me—something about a second ledger for the mine.
That Manila folder has been in my bag for weeks.
Heavy cream paper. My name is written across the front in Dad’s handwriting.
God knows I thought about opening it enough times.
Late at night. Sitting at the kitchen counter, I was turning it over in my hands and wondering what could be important enough for Dad to look that serious when he gave it to me.
But every time, I stopped.
Because some part of me already knew opening it meant admitting this day was coming.
And when I did open it and start to read, I had no idea what it meant.
Maybe Mr. Ellery can clarify.
Slowly, I reach into the bag and pull the folder free. The paper feels heavier now than it ever did before, like whatever’s inside has gained weight sitting unopened all these weeks.
I stand and carry it across the room to Mr. Ellery, who takes it carefully. And something in the room changes.
Mr. Ellery opens the folder and nods. “This is the reading of Jonas McClane’s last will and testament.
” Mr. Ellery clears his throat, not loudly, not theatrically, just enough to signal he’s ready to begin.
Sin glances at me once from where he stands near the fireplace, and I give him the smallest nod. The room settles around it.
“I’ll proceed with the principal provisions first,” Mr. Ellery says, his voice measured and practiced in the way of somebody who has delivered life-changing news often enough to know there’s no graceful way to do it.
“And then the codicil, which was added approximately two months ago and forms an important part of your father’s intentions, Miss McClane. ”
I fix my eyes on Dad, still not sure why we are listening to my father’s will, prior to his death, but he wanted to let us all know what his intentions are. For us all to be informed beforehand, in case any other issues arise with the Alliance.
He is looking at Mr. Ellery with a settled certainty, like he has already thought it through and made his peace with it, and I can’t decide whether that comforts me or breaks something open in my chest.
“The family home and all personal estate to Amelia Rose McClane, in full and without condition.” Mr. Ellery moves the first page aside.
“McClane Mining Company, 80% ownership stake, to Amelia Rose McClane…” He pauses.
The kind of pause that has weight behind it.
“And the remaining 20% ownership stake in McClane Mining Co., in perpetuity…” he lifts his eyes from the document and glances between Sin and my father before he finishes, “… to the Las Vegas Defiance Motorcycle Club.”
The room goes completely silent.
Not quiet.
Silent.
I am looking at my father.
He is looking at Sin.
Sin has not moved.
He is as still as I have ever seen him, which for Sin is saying something.
I watch him process it, watch the shift move through him the way tectonic things move, slow, enormous, and irrevocable. His jaw tightens, and something passes through his eyes that I cannot read. Then he looks at Dad, and whatever he was going to say first, he doesn’t say it.
“Jonas.” His voice comes out low, stripped of its usual measured authority. “This isn’t—”
“It’s exactly what it is,” Dad says, his voice steady and unhurried, like he’s been ready for this argument for eighteen months.
“You saved her. You know that. The arrangement we had, the gold, the security, that’s been running for years.
I decided a long time ago that it deserved to be more than a handshake agreement between men who might not always be here to honor it.
” He holds Sin’s gaze, and there is something in him right now that is pure Jonas McClane, immovable and certain.
“So, two months ago, I made it legal. I made it permanent. Something that outlasts all of us.”
Sin opens his mouth, then closes it again.
“You’re family…” my father says. “I just made it official. And I would ask you not to argue with a dying man.” The last word falls into the silence, and I feel it in my sternum like a stone dropped into still water.
Dying.
He says it so plainly and without drama, as if it’s simply a fact to be accounted for, like the square footage of the house or the weight of an ounce of gold.
I press my lips together and look down at my hands.
Sin is still for a long moment, and when he speaks again, there is something rougher in his voice than there was before. “Two months ago?” he asks.
“When I knew what the diagnosis was going to mean,” Dad confirms. “I didn’t see the point in waiting.”
Two months. I do the math in the back of my mind, and feel the ache of it settle into my ribs.
He sat in this room, alone, with his lawyer, his diagnosis, and his enormous certainty about what he wanted to do.
He built this, and he never said a word to me about it.
He carried it, the way he has always carried things, and without needing anyone to share the weight until the moment came for it to matter.
I look at him, and I love him so much I can barely breathe.
“There is also…” Mr. Ellery says, his voice bringing me back to the room, “… the matter of the second ledger.”
Sin’s head turns toward the lawyer.
Mr. Ellery opens a second, thicker section of the document.
Multiple pages, tabbed and annotated, with the kind of deliberate organization that tells you someone built this specifically to be found and understood.
“Your father maintained a secondary financial record alongside the official company books,” he says to me, directly.
“This ledger documents every additional gram of gold extracted above the club’s agreed monthly quota, and where each corresponding payment was directed. ”
He slides the cover page across the table, and I reach for it with hands that are not entirely steady.
The figures are there in my father’s meticulous, clear handwriting. Dates, amounts, account numbers—a column marked simply Alliance, running back years.
“He knew,” I hear myself say.
“He always knew,” Mr. Ellery confirms. “And he documented it deliberately, Miss McClane. This is not a hidden record. It is a protected one. Filed with my office, signed, witnessed, and held under legal privilege until it was needed.
“Your father built this paper trail with one specific purpose. If the Alliance ever moved against you, if they ever attempted to use the mine’s payments as leverage, as evidence of complicity, as a reason to claim you were party to their operations, this ledger shows the opposite.
It shows exactly what those payments were…
” He pauses. “Extortion. Documented, dated, witnessed.”
So that’s what this ledger is? Jesus Dad!
I think about the nights I didn’t know. The years my father sat in that armchair with his newspaper, his coffee, his steady love for me, and, underneath it all, he was carrying this.
A weapon, built from patience and paper, made from the same material as everything else Dad ever built.
Grief, love, and the deep, immovable need to protect his daughter.
He wasn’t just paying them.
He was building the evidence that would eventually bury them.
“The Alliance…” Sin says, and his voice has changed again, hardened into something precise. “When they learn this exists—”
“They will understand what position they’re in,” Dad says simply.
I set the ledger page down on the table, press both palms flat against it, and look at my father across the room. He looks back at me, and neither of us says anything at all for a moment, because there are no words in my vocabulary that are right for what he has done.
He built me a shield out of their own hands. He did it quietly. He waited, and he never told me because he didn’t want me afraid.
“D-Daddy,” I manage. My voice breaks, and I cannot help it.
“I told you I’d handle it,” he says, in the tone he has used my entire life for everything from scraped knees to the worst moments I have known…
Perfectly calm, perfectly certain, perfectly him.
Sin turns on the sofa and looks at me, and there’s something in his expression I don’t have a name for, somewhere between awe, grief, and the understanding of something large and irreversible. He gives me a single, slow nod.
I press my thumb to the corner of my eye, dabbing at a welling tear, and pull myself back together.
“Bring Will in,” my father says.
Sin stands. He crosses to the front door, opening it, and then I hear boots on the porch steps.
Will appears in the doorway. He looks at the room, at Mr. Ellery with his documents, at Sin coming back toward the sofa, at me on the cushion with my hands still pressed flat against the table, and then his eyes find my father in the armchair.
He stops dead in the doorway. There’s something on Will’s face I’ve never really seen before. Messy around the edges. Like he’s finally starting to understand how big this whole thing actually is and is trying real hard not to let it knock him sideways.
Dad looks at him for a long moment, his gaze steady and unhurried, like he’s taken years to arrive at this moment and has no intention of rushing it.
“You take care of her,” my father says. “The business. The mine. Whatever she needs…” He pauses, a small, knowing look crossing his face.
“And I expect you to take care of her, not just the business.”
The silence after that is different from the silence before.
Will meets my father’s eyes and holds them, and in the two years I have known Will Beckett, I have never once seen him at a loss. He is always the steadiest person in any room he walks into, always the one with his feet planted and his chin level and his voice even.
He. Does. Not. Rattle.
He is not exactly rattled now.
But something about the way he draws a slow, deliberate breath before he speaks tells me that my father has handed him something that took him a moment to find his grip on. “Yes, sir,” he says with conviction.
My father gives one sharp nod, the kind that says the decision’s been made and, as far as he’s concerned, the conversation is over. “Good,” he says.
And in the warmth of my father’s living room, with his reading lamp, his armchair, and his twenty-year coffee stain, something enormous and permanent settles into place.
My father leans back in his chair and closes his eyes, and something in the room finally eases a little.