Chapter Eighteen
MILLIE
The phone call lasts two minutes and thirty-seven seconds.
I know because I’m staring at the screen when it ends, watching the timer freeze at the top of the call log, and I count it the way my father taught me to count things that matter, so that nothing slips past you unrecorded.
Two minutes and thirty-seven seconds of Will’s voice in my ear, completely unlike a man who is sitting in a holding cell on the other side of the city.
Two minutes and thirty-seven seconds, then the line goes dead, and I’m standing alone in the clubhouse parking lot with my hand pressed flat against my chest like I’m trying to keep something inside.
He loves me.
He said it out loud, finally, on a phone call from a police station on the day that was supposed to be the best day of his life, and his voice didn’t waver once.
The urge to cry rises sharp and sudden, a pressure at the back of my throat I recognize too well.
I won’t cry. I swallow it down before it can become anything real.
I breathe the way my father taught me to when things hurt too much to name, until the feeling of him becomes something solid inside my chest, something I can stand on.
The McClane composure.
My grandmother had it.
My father has it.
I’ve always hated that I have it too, because it means the people who love me never know when I’m breaking, but right now I am grateful for every iron inch of it.
I find Sin inside, leaning into the bar like he’s been waiting for something to punch him in the mouth all afternoon. The moment he clocks my expression, he pushes off and crosses the room in three strides.
“Talk.”
“He called me,” I say.
That lands heavier than the arrest ever did.
“He’s in holding. Something about financial crimes, which is ridiculous. They’re somehow tying it to McClane Mining.”
Koa mutters something low.
Nitro doesn’t move.
That’s when I know this just got worse.
It starts small, laughter falters, and glasses pause halfway to mouths. Conversations taper off as attention locks in, hard and fast.
“Where is he?” Sin’s voice is low and controlled.
“LVPD. He called me from the station.”
Sin looks at Nitro for exactly one second.
Nitro is already pulling out his phone. Koa hasn’t moved, but his eyes have gone hard and still in the way that means he’s already calculating.
Bear, who stands ten feet away near the corridor, turns and looks at me with an expression I recognize, because it’s the same expression my father wears when something has happened that he intended to prevent and didn’t.
It’s not helplessness.
It’s a reckoning.
“Ghost,” Sin calls across the room, and Ghost is already at his laptop at the far table, already inside something the rest of us can’t see.
“I’m on it,” Ghost says, without looking up.
And the club mobilizes, the way the club does, without ceremony, every person moving to where they’re most useful without needing to be told.
***
I’m standing near the window, watching the parking lot, when Ghost comes to find me.
He takes the chair beside mine and sits carefully, like he’s carrying something he knows is going to land hard.
His long fingers are laced together over his knees, and he looks at me directly, which is not how Ghost usually looks at people, and so I brace.
“I found the discrepancy in the mine ledgers,” he says. “The skimmed gold. The payments have been going out for years, off the formal arrangement.”
I nod slowly. I’d heard that part in fragments from Sin earlier.
“Millie…” Something in the way he says it makes my stomach drop before he’s even finished the word.
“Your father was paying the Alliance. He’s been paying them for years.
Every extra gram that came out of the ledger, every off-the-record payment, he was buying them off.
” He pauses. “He was keeping your name out of their records. Out of their interests. Every payment he ever made to them was so that they never had a reason to look at you.”
For a second, my body forgets how to exist normally.
Breath comes shallow. My hands feel distant from the rest of me.
Then my father’s steadiness finds me the way it always has, settling into my bones like memory, like inheritance.
“Of course he did,” I hear myself say, and my voice is so soft I’m almost not sure it comes out at all.
“He never told me anything that would make me worry.”
Ghost holds the silence for a moment. He’s good at that and doesn’t rush to fill it. “He kept you safe,” he says.
“He always kept me safe.” I smooth my hands flat against my thighs and look at the window. “Even when it cost him things he didn’t have.”
Across the room, through the bodies and the noise of the club working, I can see my father in his chair.
He hasn’t moved since the arrest. He was there when the detectives walked Will out, and he sat in his chair while everyone else mobilized.
He’s still there now, watching me with something in his face that hasn’t resolved into any expression I recognize yet.
He looks like a man doing arithmetic in his head that he doesn’t want to finish.
I look back at Ghost. “Give Sin everything you have. All of it.”
“He already has it,” he says.
Of course he does.
I push away from the table before I can get stuck there, before the weight of waiting pins me in place.
The air feels thicker as I move through it, voices rising and falling around me, snippets of strategy, anger, and loyalty sharpened into action.
Someone brushes past my shoulder. Someone else touches my back as I pass.
By the time I reach the far end of the room, Victoria is already on the phone.
She’s standing near the window, one hand curved instinctively over her bump, her gaze fixed somewhere beyond the glass like she can force the world to cooperate through sheer will.
Her voice has that edge to it, the one she gets when she’s done negotiating and has started deciding.
I don’t interrupt. I don’t need to. Even from a few steps away, I catch enough to understand.
“Maria. It’s Victoria. Will has been arrested on a frame-up, and I need you to look at what your department has been handed.”
She pauses, listening intently. “Everything Ghost has, you’ll have within the hour.
I need you to look at the evidence chain before this goes any further.
” Another pause, shorter this time. Victoria nods once, to herself, then says, “Thank you,” clipped and certain, without a trace of sentiment, and ends the call.
She crosses to me, still holding her phone, and her eyes are steady.
“Maria’s looking at the evidence chain. She made no promises, but she asked for what Ghost has found, which means she’s already asking questions.
” She puts a hand on my arm, brief and warm.
“That’s Maria saying yes in the way that Maria says yes. ”
I believe her.
Sin’s mother, Maria Moretti, who happens to be the chief over at the department, did not get to where she is by ignoring things that deserve her attention.
Marley appears at my left side without announcement and takes my hand in both of hers, folding her fingers around mine with the kind of ease that says she knows touch will do more than anything she could say. She’s right. And I let her hold on.
Ro presses a mug into my other hand. She came up from somewhere behind me. I let go of Marley’s hand and cradle the mug automatically, letting the heat sink into my palms, steadying something inside me that feels close to slipping. I don’t need to ask. None of them needs to explain. They just know.
“Ghost’s gonna give Sin’s mom everything he has,” Victoria confirms, more to the room than to me. “We let Maria do her job. She hasn’t let us down yet.”
“And we trust Ghost to do his,” Nitro says from across the table, and there’s a certainty in his voice that lands just right.
I look again at my father, who’s watching me.
He’s been watching me all this time, through everything, the way he watched me learn to walk through the mine tunnels when I was seven years old.
Like a man who knows what you’re capable of before you do, and is waiting patiently for you to prove him right.
But I can’t sit here and wait, wait for this all to unravel around me.
I need to do something.
I need to find something to help.
And I can’t do that here.
“I have to leave,” I whisper to no one in particular, but the women all look at me with sympathetic eyes.
Marley reaches out, gently gripping my arm. Victoria simply smiles, and Ro reaches out to take my mug back.
“We get it, Mills. This is a tough situation. If you can’t be here for this—”
“No, it’s not that,” I interrupt Victoria, making sure to set her straight. “I want to be here for him. I am going to be! It just doesn’t make any sense. And the mine is involved, which makes me involved… so I’m gonna see what I can do on my end. See what I can find out.”
The girls all smile, like they’re proud of the woman I am becoming right before their eyes as I stand and make my way to the door. I don’t even wait to see if Dad wants to come with me. I need to try to figure this shit out.
So, I rush out the door and head for my car, hearing the voices of the guys calling out to me as I leave.
But I don’t stop.
I can’t.
I slip into my car and take the wheel, ignoring every protest thrown my way, because the road I know by heart settles something in me the clubhouse never could.
The streets are the same streets they always are, the house large at the end of the driveway, and I park in the driveway and sit for a moment with both hands on the wheel, looking at the lit windows and understanding, for the first time since the call, what I’m walking into.
It’s not an empty house. It’s a house with Will’s absence in it like a room that’s been rearranged, where everything is where it was, but the weight of the space has changed, and you keep reaching for things that aren’t where they feel like they should be.
I walk inside, and his coffee cup is still on the counter where he left it this morning.
I leave it there.
Twenty minutes later, the door clicks open behind me, and Penny comes in on a rush of cold air and determination.
She hasn’t said hello or asked anything yet.
She just looks at me, really looks, then unbuttons her coat and hangs it up with careful hands before crossing the kitchen and sitting opposite me like that space has always belonged to her.
My father’s documents are spread across the table. The recipe book is open somewhere in the middle, at a page I wasn’t looking at on purpose. My hands are in my lap as I stare aimlessly at the pile.
“I don’t know how to save everyone,” I say. Not to myself, not to the room, but to Penny, because she’s the only person I say the real things to when I can’t say them anywhere else.
Penny hesitates for a moment. She’s looking at the documents, at the recipe book, at me. When she speaks, she doesn’t offer comfort, because she’s known me long enough to understand that comfort right now would be useless.
“You don’t have to save everyone,” she says. “You have to save the one that matters right now.”
I look at the recipe book. At my father’s neat handwriting on the inside cover, where he cataloged the index forty years ago and never updated it because he liked the imperfection of the gaps. At Will’s name, which isn’t written anywhere in this house but is everywhere in it.
“Which one?” I ask.
Penny holds my gaze for a long moment. “You know which one,” she says.
And she’s right.
I do.
I press my palms flat against the table, I breathe in through my nose, out through my mouth, and I let the McClane composure do what it’s built to do, which is hold the pieces in place until you can figure out where they go.
Tomorrow, Ghost will work.
Maria Moretti will ask the right questions.
The club will move.
But tonight, I sit at my father’s table with my hands on the wood he chose and the book he loved, and I understand something about the kind of love that doesn’t announce itself. The kind that builds slowly, pays its dues without complaint, and keeps holding the line no matter how heavy things get.
My father had it.
He gave it to me.
Will has it too.
He called me first.
I hold that thought carefully, the way you hold something you don’t want to drop, and I let it be enough to carry me through until morning.
I have to, because right now, I don’t have anything else.