Chapter Nine
WILL
The Next Morning
The McClane Mine doesn’t look like much from the outside.
A chain-link perimeter, a weathered security booth, a handful of vehicles scattered across a gravel lot that hasn’t been properly graded since probably the early nineties.
But the second Millie steps out of the passenger side of my truck, the guy manning the booth lights up as if she’s the highlight of his entire shift, and something moves in my understanding of this place.
“Mornin’, Miss Millie!” he calls, lifting the boom gate before she even reaches him.
“Morning, Dale.” She gives him a wave that’s so warm, so completely unaffected, that I watch the older man’s shoulders relax. “How’s the knee holding up?”
“Better for seeing you,” he says, and I can’t even be annoyed at the line because he means it the way a grandfather means it.
She does that the entire morning. Walks through the mine as though she was born knowing every tunnel, every shaft, every name of every worker we pass.
The miners greet her with an ease that tells me she’s been doing this for years.
She knows their wives’ names, their kids’ ages, and which ones are on night shifts and therefore running on no sleep.
She asks, she remembers, and she moves through this operation the way someone moves through a place that belongs to them, not in a proprietary way, but in the way of someone who genuinely loves what she sees.
I walk the perimeter first, check the entry points, note the blind spots, and do what Sin assigned me to do. But I keep finding reasons to circle back, which is not protocol.
It is, if I’m honest with myself, something else entirely.
I sit in her office for three hours while she works.
She doesn’t make a big deal of my presence, doesn’t treat me like an intrusion, just sets a mug of coffee on the corner of her desk without asking how I take it, and carries on.
Black, two sugars, she already knows, and I stare at that mug for a full minute before I pick it up.
The late afternoon finds us standing at the far edge of the main excavation area, looking down into the open cut while she explains the geological survey she’s been arguing with the board about for six months.
She uses her hands when she talks, more animated than she is at the clubhouse, fully herself here, and it pulls at something inside me.
“They think I don’t understand the financials,” she says, and there’s no bitterness in it, just the kind of hard-earned certainty that comes from knowing exactly how men like them think because she’s spent years surviving beside them.
“But Dad taught me this business from the ground up. Literally.” She glances down into the dirt.
“He used to bring me here when I was seven. Let me sit on the big machinery and pretend to drive.”
“He sounds like a great dad,” I say.
She pauses for a moment, and the quality of that silence changes.
Something careful moves through it. “He is.” She swallows.
“He’s also sick, Will.” She doesn’t look at me when she says it.
Her eyes stay on the cut earth below, on the darkness her family has been pulling a living from. “Pancreatic cancer. Stage four.”
The ground doesn’t actually shift beneath my feet.
It only feels that way. I’ve known something’s been sitting on her.
I’ve watched her carry it for weeks, that tight brightness she wears like armor whenever Jonas comes up in conversation.
I thought it was the usual worry that comes with having a father who works in close proximity to a one-percent club.
I had no idea it was this.
“How long has he known?” My voice comes out steadier than I feel.
“A few months. He made me promise not to tell anyone.” She finally turns to look at me, and her eyes are dry, which somehow makes it worse.
She has clearly already done the crying.
She’s in the part that comes after, the long, exhausting part where you carry it in silence.
“He wants to get things in order. Arrangements for the mine, for me. He doesn’t want people treating him differently. ” She holds my gaze, steady as bedrock.
My thoughts hesitate on Sin. On the patch sitting less than one week away, and everything that’s riding on it. On the reality that Jonas McClane’s deal with Defiance stopped being just business years ago and turned into one of the foundations this club stands on.
Then my brain circles back to the secret sitting in my chest and what keeping my mouth shut is probably going to do to my patch.
And what it means to my relationship with Millie not to.
The conflict sits in my chest like a wire pulled too tight.
But she is looking at me.
Not the club.
Not the future.
Me.
“Okay,” I say.
Because she needs to know I heard her, and that I understand the weight of what she’s handing me. I reach for her before I overthink it, my hand closing around hers, firm enough to be real, careful enough not to take more than she’s offering.
“I’m sorry,” I add. “That’s… a hell of a thing to carry on your own.” Her fingers tighten in mine. “You don’t have to do it alone,” I say. “Not with me. Whatever you need… appointments, paperwork, sitting in silence. I can do silence.”
A small, almost disbelieving breath leaves her.
I don’t make promises I can’t keep, but this one feels carved into bone.
“We’ll figure it out,” I tell her. “One step at a time.”
She nods, something in her shoulders loosening as if she’s finally set down a weight she’s been bracing against for too long.
“You wanna head home?” I ask her.
Her eyes begin to sparkle with the threat of tears, but just as quickly as they came, she blinks them away before she nods at me. “I really do.”
I weakly smile at her, taking her hand in mine, and I lead her toward my truck.
We drive home in the kind of silence that doesn’t need filling.
***
The knock hits the front door right as Jonas sets his fork down, sharp enough to cut straight through the house.
Millie’s head snaps up instantly. Her entire body changes before she even moves, that automatic reaction telling me she already knows exactly who’s standing on the other side of the door.
“I’ll get it,” she chimes, but she’s already moving, wiping her hands absently against the sides of her jeans as she crosses the room.
When she opens the door, the cool evening air follows the woman inside, along with the faint scent of outside, something floral from the garden.
She’s small, but there’s nothing slight about the way she occupies space.
Her dark eyes scan the room in a single pass before settling on Millie, and whatever she finds there softens her expression, like it’s been that way for years.
“Hey bitch,” she beams with happiness, holding a bottle of wine in her hand.
Millie exhales, as if she’s been holding her breath all evening, and the mere presence of this woman is like a relaxant. “Hey.”
They fold into each other without hesitation, her arms wrapping tight around Millie’s shoulders, her hand coming up to rest briefly at the back of Millie’s neck in a gesture that feels both protective and practiced.
When she pulls back, she studies Millie’s face with an unflinching attention that doesn’t feel intrusive so much as inevitable.
“You look tired,” she says.
“Pfft, I look amazing,” Millie replies, but there’s no real resistance behind it.
The woman hums softly, unconvinced, before shrugging out of her coat and turning toward Jonas with a warmth that shifts the room’s atmosphere almost as effectively as the hug had.
“Well…” she says, reaching for his hands and enclosing them between both of hers, “… you’re still upright. That’s promising. Thought you might have keeled over by now, old man.”
Jonas laughs, making me jerk my head back in shock. I didn’t know he had a sense of humor. “Last time I checked, Penny, I am stronger than you,” Jonas replies, his mouth curving in the smallest suggestion of amusement.
She leans in to hug him, careful, her hold adjusted as if she’s aware of exactly how much he can take, and when she steps back, her gaze lingers, soft but searching, concern left unspoken.
“I dunno, dude, I reckon I could take you.” She asks, “How’s the appetite been?”
“Improving,” he replies, a kindness in his tone.
“Hmm…” The sound she makes is noncommittal but not confrontational.
I watch the scene play out in front of me in a kind of daze. I have only ever seen Jonas the hardass, and what I am watching in front of me is like seeing a version of him I never knew existed. The version that Millie always talks about.
The gentle giant.
Only then does Penny’s attention shift toward me.
It isn’t abrupt, but it is deliberate. The kind of measured turn that suggests she’s been aware of me the entire time but chose not to engage until she was ready.
Her gaze is direct without being aggressive, but rooted in observation rather than suspicion. “And you must be Will,” she jabs.
Millie makes a soft, half-laughing sound that suggests this introduction has already been rehearsed in conversations I wasn’t part of.
“Penny,” she warns.
I push back my chair and stand, more aware than I’d normally allow that I’m being assessed by someone whose opinion carries weight in Millie’s world. “Nice to meet you.” I place my hand out for her to shake.
“Mm…” Penny says, like she’s filing that away for later consideration.
She doesn’t shake my hand.
The room settles again, but differently this time. It is as though another layer of history has just been added to the evening.
“So, you’re the famous biker,” she offers, her eyes moving over me in a slow, unapologetic inventory as she plants her hands on her hips.
Jonas’s mouth twitches. He’s enjoying this far more than he should.
“Last time I checked,” I reply.
The corner of Penny’s mouth lifts like she’s decided that answer was at least adequate.
“Millie talks about you, you know?”