Chapter One #2
With shaking hands, I slide my cell out of my pocket, trying to keep the glow of the screen hidden from sight. I find his name by feel more than sight, my thumb knowing the screen well enough that I don’t have to look.
It rings twice, and he answers.
“Hey, Mill—”
“There are two men on the mine property.” My voice comes out quieter than I intend, stripped of everything except the bare facts.
It almost doesn’t sound like me. My heart slams hard enough to rattle my ribs, but keeping my voice steady settles something inside me too, enough to stop the panic from taking a real foothold.
“I don’t know who they are…” I say carefully, “… and I really don’t want to find out.
” My free hand presses flat against the floor beside me, my palm against the cool concrete, grounding myself to something solid.
The cold seeps into my skin, a small anchor amid the adrenaline rushing through my veins.
My fingers curl slightly, nails scraping faintly against the grit of dust tracked in from the yard.
He’s silent for a moment, clearly thinking through his plan. Then Sin’s voice comes back down the line, low and immediate. “Stay hidden. We’re coming. Be there in eight minutes.”
Nine words. Clear, precise, and absolute without hesitation.
I end the call and brace myself for the longest few minutes of my life.
Eight minutes.
Sin said ‘eight minutes,’ and I believe him instantly, because one thing I’ve learned about Defiance over the years is that when these men say something in that hard, certain tone, they mean every damn word of it.
But eight minutes feels like a long time from where I’m crouched behind my father’s desk with my knees folded against my chest.
Outside, a shape moves past the far fence line again, and I shift my weight carefully and angle my head just enough to see through the thin slit between the blinds.
The two men are still there.
One of them crouches near the fence, his phone lighting his face in pale blue for half a second before the glow disappears again. The other stands watch, his attention sweeping across the property in slow passes.
My stomach twists hard.
He’s studying the place, learning the layout, taking in exits, blind spots, distances.
Clearly preparing for something.
My thighs are starting to tremble from holding still. My pulse keeps trying to sprint ahead of my breathing, and I force air slowly through my nose, counting it out the way my therapist once showed me after everything that happened…
After the Hidden Hand Alliance had kidnapped me.
In for four.
Out for four.
Outside, the men keep moving. I shift slightly, careful not to let the blinds rattle, and peek again. They have reached the maintenance shed now.
One of them lifts his phone again.
Flash.
He takes a photograph.
My fingers tighten around my own phone until the edges bite into my palm. The folder Dad asked me to grab is wedged under my arm, the paper crinkling faintly when I adjust my grip, and the sound feels impossibly loud in the stillness of the office.
Eight minutes.
I breathe.
Slowly.
In for four.
Out for four.
And I watch through the blinds.
The two men move through the property as if they own it.
Like they have been here before, or at least have studied the maps carefully enough to know where to go.
They pause at the generator housing and photograph that too.
Then they walk the perimeter of the primary equipment shed, and one of them tries the doorknob, finds it locked, and notes something on his phone before moving on.
There’s no rush in the way they move.
That’s the part that twists my stomach the hardest.
There is no panic, no urgency.
They didn’t come here tonight to steal anything. This is reconnaissance. A slow, deliberate study of the property, the access points, the weak spots, every detail they might want later for whatever comes next.
My attention keeps snagging on the folder tucked under my arm and the documents inside it that I still haven’t read, because my father explicitly told me not to. Then my mind catches on his text message…
Dad: There’s something I need to tell you about the mine. About a deal I made years ago.
He still hasn’t told me. Dad’s been circling it, scheduling conversations and then canceling them, showing up at the clubhouse for monthly Sunday dinners with that tightness around his eyes that I recognize as the face he wears when he is managing something he doesn’t know how to say.
I’ve been patient with him. I’ve been trying to be.
But standing here in the dark of his office while strangers photograph his equipment bays, I feel the patience wearing thin at the edges.
Suddenly, a low vibration rolls through the desert night, so deep it almost feels like it’s coming up through the concrete beneath my palm rather than down the road, reverberating through the nighttime air.
For half a second, my brain doesn’t understand.
Then it does.
Harleys.
Plural.
The rumble grows fast, swelling from a distant tremor into something bigger, louder, unmistakable, and the relief that slams into my chest is so sudden it almost knocks the breath out of me.
They came.
Tears prick at the corners of my eyes, my body moving before my brain can catch up. I surge up from behind the desk, my heart leaping into my throat while I rush to the blinds and peel them back just enough to peer through.
Headlights blaze through the main gate while bikes pour onto the property, engines roaring hard enough to tear through the stillness of the mine yard with Will’s truck barreling in behind them.
There’s no hesitation.
No slowing down.
Just raw, aggressive speed while the club floods the perimeter.
For a split second, the sight of them makes my knees go weak.
I’m safe. The thought flashes through me so fast it almost hurts.
Then another one crashes right over the top of it. The men.
My stomach drops, and I duck instantly, dipping back down below the window as if the movement might erase the fact that I was just standing there like a damn lit beacon.
You idiot, Millie.
My pulse kicks into overdrive again while I inch back up, slower this time, careful to keep my head low while angling my gaze through the blinds.
The two figures bolt.
All that slow, careful pacing disappears instantly. Now they’re tearing across the property toward the southern fence, boots kicking gravel behind them in frantic bursts while headlights rip across the yard in sweeping flashes of white and the bikes spread wide around the perimeter.
One beam locks onto the fleeing car as it tears away from the fence line. The engine screams while the driver guns it toward the road, his tires fishtailing in the dirt. For a brief second, the vehicle is fully caught in the light.
Then the car tears onto the highway and disappears into the endless black desert beyond the mine while I’m still crouched behind the damn desk, hiding.
I stay there after the engine noise fades into the distance. After boots start pounding across gravel, after Defiance arrives in the only way these men know how, loud, fast, and carrying enough controlled violence to make the entire property feel smaller around them.
I stay here because my knees have decided they’re not entirely ready to cooperate yet, and because there is something in me that has been running on adrenaline for the last eight minutes and needs exactly one more moment to catch up with itself before it faces another person.
The office door opens.
I know it’s him before I even look up.
There are things about Will that are just part of the frequency I live on now, whether I’ve chosen that or not. The weight of his footstep, the way the air in a room seems to make space for him when he enters it.
I peer up through burning eyes, and there he is in the doorway, outside light catching along the hard edges of him—broad shoulders, solid muscle. His cut hangs heavy against his frame, worn-in enough to feel fused to him at this point.
His dark hair is shoved back messily, the kind of mess that comes from dragging both hands through it over and over while trying not to lose his shit.
There’s stubble along his jaw, rough and shadowed, framing a mouth set into something unreadable.
He pauses just inside the office, blue eyes cutting across the room fast and lethal, taking inventory of every corner, every shadow, every place somebody could be stupid enough to hide.
Then he finds me behind the desk.
And something in him locks down hard.
He is focused in that brutal, controlled way men get right before violence.
Then he’s moving toward me.
He crosses the room with that same steady confidence that always does dangerous things to my nervous system, controlled and deliberate in a way that feels protective right up until the moment you remember how violent men like him can become when they decide something belongs to them.
The entire room shifts around Will without meaning to. Space opens for him automatically, and attention follows him instantly.
I feel him before he reaches me—heat, leather, and clean skin. But there is a lingering edge of gasoline and road dust clinging to him from the drive over. And underneath all of it, tension wound so tight I can almost feel it leaching off him.
He crouches in front of me, bringing himself down to my level without making a show of it, forearms resting on his thighs, close enough now that the intensity of him presses in from every side. Those blue eyes hold mine, steady and unflinching.
“You okay?”
Two simple words.