Chapter Twenty-Eight #2
I feel every set of eyes on my back.
Every breath.
Every piece of history that led here.
He finishes setting the last stitch in the center patch and ties it off with a finality that makes something inside my ribcage shift position.
For a second, he looks at me.
Then he reaches into his cut again.
This time, what he brings out is smaller.
Rectangular.
Black.
White thread.
A single word.
He doesn’t show it to the room first.
He shows it to me.
My stomach drops harder than I’m ready for.
Road names are not chosen lightly. They are not gifts. They are verdicts.
Sin speaks, voice low enough that it lands like a weight rather than a sound.
“You came in with your head down,” he says. “Kept your mouth shut and paid attention. Held your ground when it cost you. Didn’t lose yourself when shit got ugly. Didn’t fold when taking the easy road would’ve been simpler.”
Something tightens in my throat.
Dad lifts the patch slightly. “You held steady when everything around you was chaos.” He meets my eyes fully now. “So that’s what you are.”
He presses the patch into my palm.
ANCHOR
The word sits there like something that has always been waiting for me to pick it up.
The room is dead silent.
I don’t realize I’ve stopped breathing until Nitro lets out a slow, impressed whistle.
Deek mutters, rough and low, “Yeah… that tracks.”
Dad takes my cut, turns it slightly, and sews the road name to the left chest with the same steady hands he’s used for everything that matters. Every stitch feels like a nail being driven into something permanent. When he finishes, he pats the leather once.
Finality.
Then he steps in closer. For a second, he holds it there between us, his hands firm on the shoulders like he’s measuring something only he can see.
Then he slides it back over my shoulders.
The leather settles across my body, heavier than it has ever felt.
Not because it weighs more, but because I do.
I draw in a breath that doesn’t quite make it all the way through my chest the first time.
Two years of earning it.
Every mile, every choice, every time I stayed when it would have been easier to walk.
And Millie.
The way she looked at me when I didn’t have this.
The way she stood beside me anyway.
The way she never asked for anything I hadn’t earned.
It’s all there.
I roll my shoulders back without thinking, the cut shifting with me, fitting the way it always did… and not at all the way it did before.
Complete.
Not just for me.
For what I can give Millie now.
For what I can stand beside her as.
For what I can claim as mine.
Something in me locks into place with it.
Unshakeable.
I don’t say anything.
I don’t need to.
Then Dad steps back.
Sin studies me for one long second. “That’s it,” he says officially. “Don’t go getting arrested to get out of it this time.”
I let out a strangled laugh, trying to hold back my emotion. “Not on your fucking life!”
“It’s about damn time, brother!” Deek calls out, and the room erupts into cheers.
Dad turns me back to face the room, and then he does the one thing he hasn’t done since the morning I told him I was going to prospect for this club.
He puts both hands on my shoulders, both of them, resting with a weight that tells me everything he doesn’t say.
His eyes shine at the edges. He breathes in through his nose once, jaw tight, holding his expression steady.
He can’t quite manage it.
He doesn’t try for long.
Something in his face releases, and what’s left underneath is pure, absolute, unguarded pride, the kind you can’t construct, the kind that lives in the deep places a man carries his children.
My chest nearly doesn’t hold it.
From somewhere to my left, I hear Deek pull a breath through his teeth, and I don’t look at him because if I look at him right now, in front of every brother in this room, something is going to give way in me that is not for the strength of this moment.
Sin stands, walking over to me, and his hand comes out. I take it.
“Welcome home, brother,” Sin says. “It’s gonna be weird calling you Anchor from now on.”
“Yeah, I’m gonna call him wanker instead!” Deek calls out, and I laugh as Koa throws a beer bottle cap at his head.
“All right, drinks!” Sin calls out, smiling at me with a proud nod, and we all make our way out of the Chapel.
MILLIE
I’ve been holding Marley’s hand for the last ten minutes without either of us acknowledging it.
We are settled near the bar.
Victoria perches on a stool, one hand resting on the firm curve of her bump, the way she does when she’s trying to look comfortable and isn’t entirely succeeding.
Ro stands with her arms crossed and her chin lifted. Sage sits with her legs crossed, one foot swinging.
Queenie is perfectly still in the chair someone dragged over for her, like she’s presiding over all of this from a position of great personal authority.
Penny stands beside me, her shoulder against mine, wearing an expression somewhere between fascinated and delighted. Right now, she is gripping my arm with both hands in her apprehension. “Is it always this quiet?” she whispers.
“When the Chapel doors are closed…” Victoria says, without looking over, “… you don’t ask questions. You wait.”
Penny purses her lips with admirable composure for someone who runs a flower shop and is not used to being inside a motorcycle clubhouse.
The doors are thick, old, and built for exactly this kind of secrecy, and through them I can hear nothing, which is both the point and the source of my current inability to stay still. I am not a fidgeter by nature. My father raised me not to fidget.
I have shifted my hands three times in the last five minutes, though, and Marley’s caught every single one.
She keeps glancing at me with that look people get when they know exactly what this kind of waiting does to somebody because they’ve survived it themselves.
“He’s fine,” she says, in the low voice she saves for the things she means completely.
“I know he’s fine,” I say.
“Then stop doing that with your fingers.”
I press my palms flat against my thighs.
Queenie makes a soft sound beside me, something halfway between amusement and understanding.
Her hand finds my wrist and rests there, light and warm.
I look at her, and she gives me the look she has been giving me for the last several months, the one that says she knows exactly what this day costs me to stand still for, and she is proud of me for standing still anyway.
My father is behind me.
He came.
I brought him in a wheelchair, which he accepted with that steady kind of dignity that somehow makes accepting help look harder and braver at the same time.
Now he’s sitting six feet away near the edge of the gathering space, where he can see the Chapel doors, while also seeing me, and he hasn’t said much since we arrived.
But when I rolled him in, found his position, and locked the wheels, he looked up at me, put his hand over mine on the handle, and he held it there for three long seconds, which is Dad’s equivalent of a speech.
I have not looked back at him since, because if I did now, I would not be able to keep my face arranged the way it is today.
Finally, the Chapel doors open.
The sound of them is ordinary, solid hinges, old wood. The shift of air that moves through the room when a sealed space gives up its contents, and yet the entirety of me goes alert in an instant, every nerve ending firing at once.
The brothers file out, and there is something different in the way they move, a looseness, a warmth, the aftermath of something, and then Will comes through the door.
He is wearing his cut.
Not the prospect cut.
Not the half-promise he has carried on his back for two years like something waiting to be finished.
This is whole… complete. The Las Vegas Defiance MC full colors spread across his shoulders with a finality that changes the shape of him, or maybe the shape of how the world is allowed to see him now.
For a second, my brain refuses to process it properly. It lands in pieces. The leather first, the weight of the back patch. The way the room has shifted around him, the ripple of recognition that moves through the club like a current.
Then my eyes drop to his chest.
ANCHOR
The word hits somewhere low and deep, a memory I didn’t know I had just been handed back to me.
Of course, that’s his name.
Of course it is.
Because that’s what he has always been. Not loud, flashy, or the kind of man who takes up space by demanding it.
The kind who makes space feel safer simply by existing in it.
The kind you build your life around without realizing you’re doing it until you look up one day and everything solid in your world has his outline.
Something tightens in my throat so suddenly it feels as if my body has forgotten how to do something as basic as breathe.
I watch him step out of the Chapel, and the light catches on the stitching, on the clean authority of the patch, and it is terrifyingly beautiful to see him like this.
Terrifying because this is what he has been walking toward the entire time I’ve known him.
Because this is the version of him he chose over everything else, including me, when he stayed away all those months.
Because I understand, with a clarity that almost hurts, exactly what it cost him to stand here now.
Pride rises first. Fierce, bright, and almost unbearable. It swells in my chest until I feel I might split open with it, like I am witnessing something sacred, personal, and enormous all at once.
Then comes something softer. A deep, aching tenderness for the man who had to earn every stitch of that leather the hard way, who carried his restraint like armor and his patience like a second spine.
ANCHOR
The name keeps echoing through me, settling into place, rearranging things. It feels like the world just told me something I already knew but was too afraid to say out loud.