Chapter Thirty
ANCHOR
One Month Later
A month has a way of moving differently when everything inside it has changed.
It isn’t faster.
It isn’t slower.
It moves the way grief, relief, and new beginnings tend to move together, with a kind of deliberate, unhurried weight, as if the world itself is choosing its footing carefully, making sure the ground is solid before it commits to the next step.
One month since Jonas passed.
I think about that a lot.
How grief doesn’t arrive all at once the way you expect it to, like a wave you can brace for and let roll over you.
It comes in smaller, stranger ways. A Sunday morning when Millie pours the coffee and forgets, briefly, to start a conversation over the table.
The way she sometimes pauses mid-sentence in the kitchen, hand on the counter, and then breathes all the way out and keeps going.
She doesn’t fall apart. She never falls apart.
But I see her carrying it, and I stay close enough that she knows she doesn’t have to carry it by herself.
The Hidden Hand Alliance is finished.
Not with a warning.
Not with a threat left sitting in a drawer somewhere.
Ghost fired everything we had—the ledger, the forensic trail, the shell account architecture. All of it, sent at the same time, in the middle of the night.
By morning, the story was already moving.
Names were being said out loud, accounts frozen before the sun was fully up. Warrants drafted, signed, and executed in hours instead of weeks. Offices locked, phones seized. Men who had built their power on silence and distance suddenly became very visible, very reachable.
There was no version of that they could contain.
Roman understood that faster than most.
By the time the first reports hit, he was already trying to disappear. He didn’t get far. He was picked up before noon, processed, and held. For a few hours, it looked like the system might take its time with him.
It didn’t.
There was an incident.
At least that’s how it was reported.
There was a fight in custody, which was contained. Now it’s under investigation.
By the time the details started shifting into something closer to the truth, it didn’t matter.
Roman never walked out of that building.
The message moved through the channels we trust faster than anything public ever could.
Quiet confirmation.
No questions asked.
No follow-up needed.
Defiance handled it.
Sin didn’t say anything about it, but we all knew he called for the order.
The ones who weren’t picked up in the sweep didn’t get the chance to regroup.
They disappeared in smaller ways.
One by one.
Soft knocks that never got answered. Routes that stopped being safe. Names people quit saying out loud because there was nobody left alive to answer to them anymore.
No headlines.
No investigations that went anywhere useful.
Just absence.
The kind that doesn’t invite questions if you know how the world works.
The rest of the Alliance assholes followed.
Some were taken without a fight. Some went down swinging. Some are still trying to bargain their way out of a war that has already decided their fate.
It didn’t matter.
The structure that held them together collapsed under its own exposure. Every layer turning on the one beneath it, every account, every name, every transaction dragged into the light.
They understood it the only way they understood anything.
In leverage.
And this time…
There was none left to hold.
The Hidden Hand Alliance is done, for good this time—there’s no way they can come back from this.
The cut on my back still gets me sometimes. Not because it feels heavy, but because it feels right, like it belongs there. Now and then, I catch the weight of it when I move, and there’s this split second where my brain still hasn’t caught up to the fact that I earned it for real.
But prospecting drilled something hard into me.
You earn your place before you start acting like you own it.
So I don’t suddenly walk louder because there’s a patch on my back now.
Don’t start throwing my weight around trying to prove something.
I do the job the same way I always have…
head down, eyes open, work first, ego never.
The patch is confirmation.
It is not permission.
Dad hasn’t said a word about it.
But now and then, I catch him watching me across the clubhouse, or from the garage doorway, or from the other side of a crowded room when he thinks I won’t notice.
And something shifts in his face every single time.
Pride’s part of it, sure, but it runs deeper than that. He gets this look like he’s carrying around too much feeling to trust himself with words, so he keeps his mouth shut and watches me instead, letting the expression in his eyes say the things he can’t quite get out loud.
I understand that now better than I ever have.
I’m half-asleep, face buried in the pillow, when my bedroom door clicks open just enough to let a strip of pale hallway light spill across the floorboards. It stops at the edge of the bed like it’s waiting for permission.
“Anchor?” Millie’s voice is pitched low, but it carries something bright and restless under it. I roll onto my back, still fogged with sleep, and find her standing in the doorway in bare feet, a folder clutched against her ribs like she’s afraid it might try to escape.
Her hair is coming loose in rebellion, strands slipping free around her face.
There’s a faint blur beneath her eyes that tells me she hasn’t seen the inside of sleep.
She shifts her weight from one foot to the other, then stills, then shifts again, like her body can’t quite decide whether to pace or hold position.
“You’re awake,” she says, as if she hasn’t just woken me.
“Barely,” I manage.
She steps into the room, the light moving with her, and drops onto the edge of the mattress hard enough to make the springs complain. The folder lands in my lap a second later.
“Open it.”
Her knee starts bouncing before I’ve even pushed myself upright. She presses her lips together like she’s trying to trap a grin that refuses to stay put. When I glance up, she’s watching me with that intensity she gets when something matters more than she’s prepared to admit.
I flip the folder open.
Paperwork, stamps, signatures, and her name is written in a hand that looks steadier than the way she’s currently vibrating beside me.
“You signed?” I ask.
She exhales like she’s been holding that breath since midnight. Her hands come up, hover, then drop again, palms flattening against her thighs. “Yesterday,” she says, voice tight with excitement she’s pretending is composure. “Technically. It was yesterday.”
“And you came here at…” I glance at the clock. “… six a.m. to tell me this?”
“I waited until six,” she corrects, her chin lifting a fraction. “That’s restraint.”
I look at her properly, at the loose strands of hair, the shine in her eyes, the way her whole body seems wound around some invisible axis. “You didn’t sleep.”
She shrugs, a small, unapologetic movement. “I had things to think about.”
“Like opening a bakery?”
“Like opening a bakery,” she echoes, and this time the grin wins, breaking free in a flash of teeth and relief.
I smile as she leans sideways into me before I can react, forehead knocking lightly against my shoulder, energy finally spilling somewhere instead of ricocheting inside her.
“I did it,” she murmurs, as if the words are still new enough to test their shape.
“I have a meeting at nine,” she says, and the folder shakes slightly in her grip.
I look at her for one long second. “I’ll drive you.”
She blinks. “I was going to get a ride share—”
“Brightside.”
She closes her mouth, nods, and goes to make coffee, a smile she is trying very hard to keep from taking over her entire face, and failing at that, too.
Fuck she’s beautiful—even at six in the morning.
***
The signing takes forty-five minutes.
I sit outside the notary’s office on a wooden bench, drink bad coffee from a paper cup, and watch through the glass as she leans over the table with a pen in her hand and signs her name in the places the agent indicates, and something in my throat tightens, catching me off guard.
She signs the last page and sits back and does the thing she does when something matters so much she doesn’t trust herself to react to it in a room full of strangers.
She goes very still, very composed, and blinks twice, and then she collects herself, shakes the agent’s hand, and thanks him like she signs papers for bakeries every Tuesday of her life.
She comes out into the hallway, stands in front of me, and her composure lasts approximately three more seconds. “It’s r-real,” she says. Her voice breaks just slightly on the word.
I stand up, then set my coffee down. “It’s real.”
She lets out a breath that sounds like it has been sitting in her chest for about three years. “You think Sin will be okay continuing to help me with the mine while I also run my bakery?”
I pull her against me, her face pressed into my chest, while my arms wrap around her shoulders, and I hold onto her for a second right there in the hallway while the paperwork behind us finishes turning everything permanent.
“Your dad knew, Brightside. He knew you wanted a hand in both worlds. It’s why he gave a portion of the mine to the club.
So, you could do exactly this… he also knew the club would have your back while doing it,” I tell her.
She nods against my shirt.
She doesn’t say anything.
She doesn’t need to.
***
I lead her to my bike.
She’s been on the back of my Harley more times than either of us has bothered to count, but today she pauses beside it like she’s recalibrating the meaning of the machine. Her arms fold loosely, not defensive, just containing something she hasn’t decided how to name yet.
I hand her the helmet.