Chapter Seven
WILL
The Next Day
Letting out a low groan, I haul myself upward again, my arms burning through another set of pull-ups on the bar Koa bolted into the doorframe of the gym room at the back of the clubhouse.
I’ve been in here longer than I meant to be.
Longer than the workout requires.
But the harder I push, the quieter my head gets, and right now that feels like a necessary trade.
Because something isn’t adding up.
I’ve watched Jonas McClane long enough to recognize when a man is conserving energy instead of spending it. He moves differently these days. Not weaker, exactly. Just more deliberate, as if every action has to pass through a filter before he commits to it.
And Millie…
Millie has started to move around him in an orbit, one that wasn’t there before and now feels almost instinctive. Low-key managing things, picking up conversations before they land somewhere uncomfortable, and making herself available in ways that feel less like habit and more of a strategy.
They haven’t said anything.
Not to me.
Not to the club.
But Jonas has been watching her too. More than usual. With a kind of attention that reads of preparation, as though he’s trying to make sure she’ll be all right once he’s no longer the one standing between her and the world.
That thought sits badly in my chest.
Worse is what it implies.
If something is wrong with Jonas, if the mine is about to become unstable in any way, that’s not just personal, that’s operational, and it is one hundred percent club business.
Which means, technically, it’s something I should be taking back to Sin.
And I haven’t.
Because there’s a difference between reporting facts and reporting instincts, and right now all I have is a collection of observations that feel too intimate to turn into intel.
Millie trusts me.
Or at least she doesn’t actively avoid me.
And whatever is happening between us, fragile as it is, doesn’t survive me turning her private world into a briefing note.
So, I keep my mouth shut.
And I work harder.
Another pull-up.
Another burn through my shoulders.
Rock… hard place. Repeat.
I pull up again just as Nitro appears in the doorway.
He doesn’t say anything immediately, which is how I know it’s serious.
Nitro is not a man who uses silence as a preamble.
He fills space. Takes up room with his voice the same way he takes up room with his body, automatically, without thinking about it.
The fact that he is just standing in the doorway, arms crossed, waiting for me to come down from the bar, tells me everything and nothing all at once.
I drop, land clean, and grab the towel off the bench, swiping the sweat beading across my temple. “What’s up?”
“Sin needs you in his office…” He pauses. “Ghost found something.”
Letting out a huff, I don’t ask what. There’s no point asking when the answer is going to be given to me in a room with the door closed, and I’ve learned in two years prospecting with this club that the things handled behind closed doors are handled that way for a reason.
My boots thump with a heavy thud, my mood darker these days than it normally is. Having to be closer to Millie the past couple of days and having to fight every fucking urge inside me to stay away from her is a new kind of hell.
So, I am already frustrated.
Exercise was supposed to help.
It’s not fucking helping.
Sin’s office is quieter than the rest of the clubhouse, the kind of quiet that presses in around you when the door shuts, and the ambient noise of the main room disappears.
Ghost is already sitting at the table with a laptop open in front of him, wearing that same dead-eyed focus he gets whenever he’s figured out something ugly and is seconds away from dropping it in someone else’s lap.
That person clearly is me in this shitty scenario.
Sin stands behind his desk with his arms folded and his poker chip moving between his fingers at a pace that tells me his mind is going faster than the room currently reflects.
I pull up my position at the wall, and I look at each of them in turn.
Waiting.
“I ran the routine security audit on the mine’s financial records last night,” Ghost begins, his voice steady and methodical, the way it always is when he’s laying something out brick by brick.
“I do it quarterly. Looking for anything that might indicate our extraction arrangement has been flagged, cross-referenced, anything that could put the club’s operation at risk.
” He turns the laptop so the screen faces me. “What I found wasn’t about us.”
I step forward and look at the spreadsheet pulled up on the screen. Numbers, dates, a column of figures that repeat at consistent intervals across what appears to be several years’ worth of records.
“There’s a secondary extraction stream,” Ghost continues. “Gold leaving the mine above the club’s agreed monthly quota. It’s not a lot in any single month, but it’s consistent, deliberate, and it leaves no record in Jonas’ official books.”
I study the screen. “So someone’s taking extra?”
“Someone has been taking extra for years,” Ghost says, and he lets that land before he keeps going.
“I traced the payments it generates to a shell account. Three companies deep in the ownership structure, which is about average for someone trying to make sure nothing comes back to them.” He reaches over and clicks through to another window on the screen, this one showing a web of company names and account numbers that branch out like roots.
“But the architecture of how it’s built, the way the shell companies are layered and connected, I’ve seen this pattern before.
When we were tracking the Alliance’s casino money after the Strip incident. ”
The room goes very still.
I lean back against the wall. My eyes move from the screen to Ghost, and then to Sin, who has stopped moving the poker chip entirely.
“You’re saying this is definitely the Hidden Hand Alliance?” I say slowly.
“I’m saying the fingerprints are consistent with their front organization structure,” Ghost replies, because Ghost doesn’t overstate.
He gives you exactly what the evidence supports, not a syllable more.
“But yes. Someone has been routing payments from the mine’s unrecorded gold directly into an account that traces back to the Alliance. ”
There is a beat of silence that sits heavy in the room, the kind that arrives when everyone present is individually processing the same conclusion from their own angle.
Sin unfolds his arms and leans forward with his hands flat on the desk. “Jonas wasn’t in business with them,” he says, his voice measured and precise, reading the situation the way Sin always reads situations, from the inside out and the bottom up. “He was buying freedom.”
Ghost nods. “The amounts support that. A partner gets a percentage. These are fixed figures. Regular intervals. The kind of number someone pays to keep a problem from escalating rather than the kind of number that represents a profit share.”
I look at Sin. “Extortion.”
“Consistent with it, yes,” Ghost says.
I press my thumb against my bottom lip and sit with that for a moment.
The numbers on the screen are just numbers until they aren’t, until you understand what they represent, which is a man paying, month after month, year after year, in deliberate silence, for something he never intended to be part of, to keep an arrangement that threatened his family from becoming something worse.
Jonas McClane has been paying the Hidden Hand Alliance, without a word to the club, without a word to anyone, for long enough that the payments have their own tidy column in the mine’s hidden financial record.
He has been running his business and his end of the arrangement with the club, shaking Sin’s hand at events with that polished composure and those exhausted eyes, arranging the monthly extraction that funds the club’s operations, and simultaneously cutting payments to the same organization that once kidnapped his daughter and threatened to take her again, reducing her to something unspeakable.
Not because he was loyal to them.
Because he was terrified of what they’d do if he stopped.
“Say nothing to Millie,” Sin says, and he says it directly to me, which means he’s been watching more than I’ve given him credit for. “Not yet. Not until we know the full shape of it.”
“Agreed,” I say, and my voice comes out steadier than I expect it to.
I mean it completely. Not as compliance, but as understanding, because I recognize immediately and without question why she can not be handed this tonight.
Not raw and unexplained, not when she is already carrying something with her father in silence.
I don’t know what it is, but I know it’s not good.
She cannot know that her father has been living in fear of the Alliance for years, never telling a soul.
Not yet.
Tonight, she should be allowed to just be his daughter.
At least for a little while longer.
***
The house smells like butter and vanilla when I get there in the evening, a familiar smell, which means Millie is baking, and with her, that could mean any number of things.
She bakes when she is happy, when she is processing, and when she wants to do something useful with her hands while her head works through something difficult.
She bakes the way other people talk, consistently, as a way to stay present in her own life.
Jonas is in his armchair in the living room, a thick-spined novel open across his lap, reading glasses on that he perpetually pretends he doesn’t need.
The lamp beside him throws a warm pool of light across the side of his face.
He looks up when I come through the door, gives me a nod that says enough without making a thing of it, then goes back to his page.
I settle at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee. Close enough to the living room that Jonas is visible from where I sit. I don’t make a show of looking. I keep him in my peripheral vision, piecing things together without letting him know I’m doing it.
I know what those monthly payments cost him.
What it takes to keep handing over pieces of yourself while still showing up steady, chin lifted, handshake solid, pretending the pressure isn’t slowly grinding through bone.
I know because I’ve spent two years watching him do it, and today is the first time I really understand what I was looking at.
Now I do, and it sits somewhere behind my chest like something warm and immovable.
Millie moves around the kitchen counter with focused energy, flour on her hands. She’s making something that involves the real vanilla, not the imitation kind she keeps at the back of the pantry for recipes that don’t deserve it.
“He built it from nothing, you know,” she says, in the way she has of picking up conversational threads that she started inside her own head several minutes before she lets them out. She tilts her head toward the living room without looking up from the bowl. “The mine. After my mom died.”
I say nothing because she needs to talk, not to be answered, and there’s a difference between the two that most people don’t bother to notice.
“He was completely wrecked,” she continues, her hands working the dough in a rhythm that’s become automatic.
“Anyone who knew him could see it. He just poured himself into the ground, literally. He’d owned that land for years and never done anything with it, and then she died, and suddenly he was out there every morning before dawn, organizing, planning, building it into something…
” She pauses, tilting her head. “I think it gave him somewhere to put his grief. Something he could dig into that would eventually become something real.”
She stops talking. The only sounds in the house are the soft work of her hands and the distant, unhurried turn of Jonas’ page.
I hold my coffee mug, looking at the table in front of me, and I think about a man who turned his grief into a mine and then turned that mine into the instrument by which he kept his daughter safe.
Who built something from loss and then spent years bleeding money out of it into the pockets of the people who’d threatened her, because the alternative was a world in which he failed her, and that was the one thing Jonas McClane was apparently willing to pay any price to prevent.
There is no word in my vocabulary large enough for what that is.
“You’re very easy to talk to, you know,” Millie says, looking up at me with flour on her chin and something a little wondering in her eyes. “For someone who doesn’t say much.”
I look up from my coffee. “You say enough for both of us.”
She blinks. Then she laughs, the real kind, the one that reaches all the way up into her eyes, and she grabs the dish towel off the counter and throws it at me in one clean arc across the kitchen.
I catch it without looking up from my mug.
A beat of silence follows.
Then another.
From his armchair in the living room, Jonas turns another page.
Nobody says a word about it, because there is nothing to say.
Some moments don’t need commentary. They’re complete exactly as they are.
Three people in a warm house—an old man reading, a woman who bakes with her whole heart, and a prospect sitting at the table with a secret he is keeping, not to deceive her, but because some truths deserve to be handled with more care than tonight allows.
I set the dish towel on the table and drink my coffee. Holding what I know, the way you hold something fragile and irreplaceable, with both hands, without squeezing, aware of exactly how much it weighs.
Her father pays for her safety.
And tonight, my silence weighs on my chest.
That’s the price I must pay.
But I’d pay anything for Millie, even if it means I lose a little of my sanity in the process.