Chapter Nineteen
WILL
Day Two
The holding cell smells like goddamn industrial cleaner over something older and less identifiable, the layered scent of a space that has housed too many people moving through the worst hours of their lives.
The light overhead doesn’t change. There is no indication of whether it is morning or evening unless someone passes in the corridor with a meal tray, and even then, the fluorescent glow makes everything look the same shade of gray.
I have stopped trying to track time and started simply existing inside it.
I’m sitting on the edge of the narrow cot with my forearms on my knees, my hands loose between them, and I’m thinking clearly.
That, in itself, feels significant.
The detective who comes in looks like he hasn’t missed a detail in years. Lean build, pressed shirt, eyes that don’t wander. He sets his notes down carefully, like even paper has rules it should follow. He watches me longer than most would.
I’ve dealt with men who carry corruption like a scent. Detective Harlow does not. He looks like someone who’s been given a story that makes sense and intends to see where it leads.
I almost respect that.
It would be easier, in some ways, if he were someone I could write off.
“I understand some asshole’s built a paper trail to make it look like I’ve been skimming money out of McClane Mining,” I say.
He watches me. “And?”
“Doesn’t make it true.” I hold his gaze, not pushing, and not backing down. “I’ve never had access to McClane Mining’s accounts. Never worked for them in any capacity that puts me near their books. If my name’s tied to transactions, someone fucking put it there.”
He scribbles something down, but his expression doesn’t change. I catch the shift in his attention anyway, that tiny adjustment behind his eyes when he realizes the story he expected from me isn’t the one he’s getting.
“You’ve been in close association with the company’s owner,” he states.
“I’ve been in close association with Jonas McClane for two years, yes.
As part of a protective arrangement between the club and the mine.
” I don’t elaborate on what that arrangement is in its specifics, because that is Sin’s information to give, not mine.
“That association is personal, not financial. It has never been financial.”
Harlow asks me another six questions after that, and I answer every single one, completely and honestly.
Without deflection or misdirection, because the truth is the best defense I have, and because I am not the kind of man who performs innocence.
I either am or I’m not, and I am, and somewhere on the other side of these walls, Ghost is pulling apart a fabricated evidence trail thread by thread, and Harlow will have something very different to read by the time this is over.
I just need to be still enough to wait for it.
After the interview, they take me back through the corridor. The guard who processes the return is a broad, tired man who says nothing, expects nothing, and I’m grateful for it. I sit back on the cot in the silence of the cell and breathe out through my nose, slowly.
It is the third time I’ve done that interview, and it’s the same every time. Each time I give the same fucking answers, because they are the truth, and the truth doesn’t shift.
The afternoon passes in increments, so I stop counting.
And then they bring me to the visitation window.
I see him before he sees me, which seldom happens, because Dad has always had a way of tracking a room before anyone else moves through it.
He’s sitting in one of the plastic chairs against the far wall, and the damn thing looks way too small for him, creaking under the weight of all that size and solid, unmoving presence.
He sits with his arms folded across his chest, eyes on the floor, not defeated but contained, like he’s holding something in with the kind of discipline that comes from a lifetime of not letting anyone see everything he feels.
He looks up the second I walk through the door, and something cracks across his face before he locks it down again almost immediately.
It only lasts a second, just the slightest shift around his eyes, but I catch it anyway.
Two straight days of stress ease out of him for one brief moment, now that I’m standing in front of him.
It hits me right in the chest.
Something settles in me, and my spine straightens before I even think about it. My breathing deepens on its own. I have been calm in here, genuinely calm, and I didn’t understand until this exact second how much of that calm is something I learned from watching him do it first.
Deek is here too, off to Dad’s left, shoulder to the wall, arms folded tight across his chest. The usual spark in him has gone still, all that restless energy pulled inward and held. He watches me with a steadiness that lands heavier than any joke he’s ever made.
I sit down across from Dad. The glass between us is scratched and slightly clouded at the bottom edge.
“You look fine,” Dad says. His voice stays in its usual low, steady register, calm enough that you’d never guess he was speaking to his son through prison glass.
“I am fine,” I say, and I mean it, which is the thing that surprises even me.
His eyes move across my face with the slow precision of someone reading closely. Whatever he finds there seems to satisfy some calculation, because his shoulders drop a fraction.
“Ghost is close,” he says.
“I know.”
Dad uncrosses and re-crosses his arms, a rare concession to restlessness, and I say nothing about it. “Detective called Victoria’s contacts.”
“Maria Moretti?” I ask.
“She’s looking at the evidence.” He says it with deliberate blankness, each word measured like it matters who might be listening. Which means she found something, or she’s looking for something, or both. I nod once, telling him I understand what he isn’t saying.
Deek pushes off the wall and comes to stand beside Dad’s shoulder, leaning down slightly toward the glass. “For the record,” he says. “I told everyone you’d be out in two days.”
“You told everyone three days,” Dad groans, without looking at him.
“Two to three. There was a range.” Deek tilts his head at me. “You’re in the two-day window. I was right.”
I look at my brother and feel something warm move through me that has nothing to do with hope or relief and everything to do with the simple, steady fact of him being him.
His jaw is tight, his eyes are brighter than usual in the way they get when he’s feeling something too large for a joke to contain fully.
He’s here because he cannot not be in here with me, and we both know that, but neither of us will say it.
“Go home tonight,” I tell Dad, knowing he’s probably been waiting out in the lobby of the damn police department.
He looks at me with the exact expression I expected, which is none at all.
“Dad.” I hold his gaze. “I’m okay. Go home.”
His jaw moves slightly. He doesn’t agree, and he doesn’t argue, which is the closest thing to a concession I’m going to get from him, and I know it.
Deek puts a hand briefly on Dad’s shoulder. “I’ll make him eat something,” he says, in my direction.
“He’ll try,” Dad says.
Two sharp raps land against the metal frame, which carry more authority than volume.
“Time.” The guard doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t need to.
My father’s shoulders shift almost imperceptibly as he pushes back from the table.
The chair legs scrape across the concrete, a small, ordinary sound that somehow feels final.
He straightens his cut the way he always does before stepping into something he can’t control, fingers smoothing fabric that doesn’t need smoothing.
For a second, he stands there.
Then he steps closer to the glass.
I follow without thinking. The phone cord swings lightly between us, forgotten. The scratched plexiglass blurs the edges of his face, but not the steadiness in his eyes—that never blurs—and we hold each other’s gaze.
There are a thousand things that could be said. Apologies, reassurances, plans. None of them makes it past the tight, controlled space between my ribs.
His hand lifts first, palm flat against the glass.
I match it.
The barrier is cold.
He gives a single, small nod. The kind he’s always given me when something needed to be understood without discussion.
I return it before I even realize I’ve decided to.
The guard clears his throat softly.
My father lowers his hand, turns, and walks toward the door without looking back. The fluorescent light catches briefly on the silver in his hair before he disappears into the corridor.
The room feels larger once he’s gone.
I stay there a second too long, my hand still resting against the place his had been until the guard shifts his weight and gestures toward the door. “Let’s go.”
I push back from the table. The chair legs scrape, louder this time in the emptied room.
The corridor outside is colder than I remember, the fluorescent lights harsher after the dim hum of the visitation booth.
My shoes echo on concrete as we walk, the sound of it sharp and unfamiliar in a place where time feels measured in footsteps and locked doors.
We pass two turns, a set of barred gates that open and close with a mechanical finality. Other faces glance up as we move through—some are curious, and some are already bored with the spectacle of another man in transit.
My cell waits exactly where I left it.
The guard steps aside, I go in, and the door shuts with a heavy, practiced certainty that leaves no room for interpretation. I sit on the narrow bunk and let the moment catch up to me.