Chapter Twenty-One
WILL
Later That Day
The legal visit room is cramped as hell, barely enough space for the table, three chairs, and the heavy atmosphere baked into places built for bad news, bad choices, and people running out of options.
The walls are painted the color of something that was once white and has spent too long becoming some other shade of who knows what.
There is a single strip of fluorescent light overhead that hums at a frequency designed, seemingly, to make every thought feel slightly more exhausting than it already is.
I’ve been in here twice before. Both times with my attorney, running through the charges, walking through the evidence, mapping the territory we’re dealing with.
Both times I left with a clearer picture of the machinery closing around me and a steadier grip on the certainty, the deep, unshakeable certainty, that none of this is what they’re saying it is.
Today I sit with my hands flat on the table and watch my attorney, a sharp woman named Diane Pryor, who Sin retained within six hours of my arrest and who communicates almost exclusively in clean, declarative sentences, set a phone down in front of me.
“This came through a secure channel,” she says. “From your club’s tech associate. He was specific about how it needed to reach you. I’ve verified the chain of custody.”
She doesn’t say anything else. Just folds her hands over the folder in front of her and watches me with that practiced blank expression people get when they’ve delivered the message and know the fallout isn’t their problem anymore.
Dad’s in the chair to my left.
I don’t remember him coming in. He exists there now, sleeves rolled, hands folded, like he’s been part of this room all along.
He’s said a few things, practical things, the kind that don’t invite conversation. But mostly he just sits, and the longer he does, the less the walls feel like they’re leaning in.
I look at the phone.
Then I press play.
There’s a pause after that. Longer than usual, long enough that I check the screen to make sure it’s still playing. When Deek finally speaks, his voice is low, flat, and stripped clean of the usual edge he carries into every room like a second weapon.
No jokes.
No sideways commentary.
No drawled insult dressed up as affection.
Just a breath, and then, “I need you to hear this, Will.”
A faint shift of sound, like he’s moved the phone from one hand to the other.
“I didn’t record it to be part of it…” Another pause. “I recorded it because you have a right to know what someone said about you when they thought no one was listening.”
His exhale is audible this time. “And because she loves you.”
Silence stretches again.
“She told her dying father she loves you.” His voice tightens, almost imperceptible. “Figured … you should hear it from her.”
The sound cuts out for a second, like one recording ending while another kicks in over the top of it.
Then Millie’s voice fills the room.
It hits me hard enough to feel physical.
That punch straight to the chest that comes from hearing the right voice after too damn long without it—low and shaky around the edges—carrying a kind of exhaustion I’ve never heard from her before.
The sound of somebody who’s been holding herself together by sheer force for way too long and finally cracked the second nobody was looking anymore.
“Two years ago,” she says, and the first note of her voice hits somewhere low in my chest like an impact. “Will Beckett walked into your house…”
I go completely still.
Not on purpose.
My body just… locks.
The room I’m now standing in loses edges. Everything narrows down to the sound of her breathing between words, the small tremor she’s trying to control and mostly succeeding at.
She talks about coffee.
About the kitchen table.
About paying attention.
And my throat tightens.
‘He pays attention when he’s with you. Really pays attention. And somehow that always made the whole room feel steadier.’
Jesus.
I drag a hand down over my mouth and taste salt without remembering when I started sweating. My pulse is too loud, too close to the surface.
She keeps talking.
About circling each other.
About waiting.
About convincing herself it wasn’t anything.
A hollow laugh leaves me before I can stop it. It sounds wrecked, and I don’t recognize it as mine. Her voice changes when she talks about the porch. It softens, but there’s steel threaded through it, something resolved and fragile at the same time.
“He kissed me in the kitchen…”
My eyes close hard enough that light bursts behind them. I can feel that night like it never ended. The dishes in the sink. Our closeness. Her breath against mine. Her hands gripping my shirt, as if she were bracing for impact.
‘He said he needed three more days…’
My chest pulls tight, sharp enough that I have to lean my shoulder back against the wall to stay upright. Three days. I remember counting them down like they were oxygen.
The recording shifts. Cloth brushing the mic, and some kind of beeping sounds in the background that I can’t decipher.
She keeps going.
About fear.
About timing.
About all the ways she talked herself out of wanting me.
Something inside me twists. Not anger or regret, but something more helpless than either.
Then she confirms it. ‘I love him.’
The words don’t land softly. They slam into me with the force of something undeniable and final. My legs give before I can stop them, and I slide down the wall, the concrete scraping the back of my jumpsuit as I hit the floor.
I don’t even feel it.
The recording continues…
She talks about me being in a cell.
About not saying it back.
About being too late.
My hands brace on my knees, and my head drops forward. I stare at the floor because it’s the only thing in the room that isn’t shifting under the weight of what she’s saying.
‘And now he’s in a jail cell thinking I don’t love him!’
Something inside my chest fractures, and I breathe in through my nose, out through my mouth. It doesn’t fucking help.
Her voice breaks. Completely. There’s no composure left, no careful management, only grief, exhaustion, and love stripped down to its rawest form.
I have heard Millie cry before.
But I have never heard her sound like this.
The beeping keeps its indifferent rhythm.
The world keeps moving forward, as if nothing monumental just changed.
The recording runs a few seconds longer after she stops speaking—just breathing. Just the mechanical confirmation that time is still passing, whether we’re ready for it or not.
Then the recording cuts.
The silence that follows feels violent.
I sit here with my back against the wall, hands hanging uselessly between my knees, and try to understand how something can feel like both an injury and a lifeline at the same time.
Her love lands in me like a responsibility.
Like a promise I didn’t know I was waiting for.
Like something I will burn down cities to get back to.
I stay here longer than I mean to.
Not thinking.
Not moving.
Just holding the sound of her voice like it’s the only real thing left.
The room is completely silent.
I don’t move.
I’m not sure how much time passes. It might be thirty seconds, it might be longer. Diane doesn’t shift in her chair. She doesn’t say anything, and I find myself abruptly, profoundly grateful that she knows when silence is not something to fill.
Eventually, Dad’s hand comes down on my shoulder.
That’s all.
His palm, heavy and steady, settled onto my shoulder the way it has since I was a kid, the way it did at my mother’s funeral and the night I got my first stripe and every other moment in my life when the ground needed to feel solid again.
He doesn’t squeeze.
He doesn’t speak.
He simply lets me know he’s here.
I breathe in. Millie’s voice is still living somewhere in my chest, my hand resting flat against the floor, and I am more certain than I have ever been of a single fact in my twenty-one years on this earth.
She loves me.
She told her father, with no one listening, that she loves me. She used the word out loud for the first time, and she used it to him, which means she meant it more than she’s ever meant anything else she’s said.
Two years!
Two years of carefully maintaining distance, of choosing the club’s arrangement with Jonas over every instinct I had, of turning away from something that was right there because the timing never allowed for it.
I push myself upright and plant both palms against the concrete wall, letting the cold bleed through my skin until the world feels like it has edges again. “Thank you,” I tell her. The steadiness in my voice catches me off guard.
Diane inclines her head, professional as ever, her expression composed but not impersonal. “Don’t thank me yet. There’s more.”
Something in the way she says it tightens my spine. “What kind of more?” I ask.
“The kind that explains why you’re here in the first place.”
She opens the folder in front of her with deliberate care, sliding a document across the table but keeping one hand on the edge of it like she’s not ready for me to look at it just yet.
“The financial records linking you to McClane Mining’s secondary ledger did not originate from any system associated with the company.”
I frown. “Then where the hell did they come from?”
“That…” she replies, “… is where your friend Ghost becomes relevant.”
A slow breath leaves me.
Of course he does.
“He traced the architecture of the transactions backward,” she continues. “Server metadata. Original timestamps. IP routing patterns. Whoever built the digital trail assumed that layering enough shell accounts would obscure the origin.”
“And it didn’t,” I say.
“No,” she agrees. “It did not.”
She turns another page, taps a line with the end of her pen. “The receiving account. The one where the fabricated deposits were routed through. It is not new.”
My stomach drops. “Say that again.”
“It is an account previously identified in ongoing investigations into the Hidden Hand Alliance.”
For a moment, the room feels too damn small.
“They used Jonas,” I say slowly.
“They used his records,” she corrects. “Your Mr. McClane kept meticulous documentation of extortion payments. Secondary ledger entries. Off-book transfers.”
My jaw tightens.
“They inverted them?”
“Yes.”
The word lands with precision.
“They took evidence of their own crimes…” she continues, “… and repurposed it to construct a case against you.”
I let out a low breath that feels like it scrapes something raw on the way out. “That’s… bold.”
“It is effective,” she replies calmly. “Or it would have been, had your associate not identified the original data structure.”
I shake my head once, disbelief threading through the exhaustion. “Ghost doesn’t miss anything.”
“No,” she says. “He does not.”
She flips to the next section of the file. “He traced the source servers. None of them is tied to McClane Mining infrastructure. None of them is tied to you. The digital signature aligns with patterns previously attributed to Alliance financial laundering operations.”
“So, he took that to you.”
“He took it to Chief Moretti,” Diane says. “She took it to the detective handling your case.”
My gaze lifts. “And?”
“He read the entire file, every page, before making any decision.”
I study her face, searching for the part she hasn’t said yet. “And what decision did he make?”
Her expression shifts slightly, the smallest softening. “He is moving to dismiss the charges.”
The words don’t register immediately.
I stare at her. “Dismiss,” I repeat.
“Yes.”
“When?”
“In the morning.”
The air leaves my lungs in a rush, and I drop back into the chair, forearms braced on my thighs, hands hanging uselessly between my knees.
For a long moment, neither of us speaks.
Then I look up at her again. “The Alliance tried to bury me with their own records.”
“Yes,” she answers.
I nod once. “Then they just made a very expensive mistake.”
I let it settle through every layer of the last few days, through the arrest, the handcuffs, and the clubhouse going silent as they walked me out, through the charge sheets, the cell, and the loneliness of lying in a narrow institutional cot at night.
Knowing the people I love are out there somewhere in the city, managing things I can’t touch from in here.
Released in the morning.
Dad makes a sound beside me. Not quite a word, something lower, pulled from deeper than speech, the kind of sound that comes from a tension held too long, and finally letting go.
I look at my hands on the table.
Tomorrow.
***
That night, back in the cell, I don’t sleep well.
I’ve gotten used to the sounds of the place by now, the way you get used to sounds when you have no choice.
The low hum of the ventilation system, the distant clang of doors that have no predictable rhythm, and the acoustics of a corridor that carries sound further than it should.
I lie on my back, looking at the ceiling, and I let my mind go where it’s been trying to go for days…
Millie’s kitchen at two in the morning.
The lamp on the table, the mine accounts spread between us, her pen moving down columns of figures in that focused, unhurried way she has of approaching complicated things.
The way she handed me a mug of coffee without asking how I took it, because by then she already knew.
The way the house felt around us, lived-in and steady, every part of it carrying the kind of care you only notice in places that actually mean something to the people inside them.
Her voice in the recording cracked down the middle.
‘I love him, Dad.’
I think about the kitchen kiss, about the porch. The first time I let myself move toward her instead of away, the single honest moment of careful, deliberate distance, and how it felt like something in me had been waiting for exactly that long to finally stop pretending it wasn’t there.
I think about Jonas watching across the clubhouse at the ceremony that never happened.
The way Dad looked at me when I was arrested.
The fact that my father, a man who communicates more through silence than through speech and whose judgment I have trusted without reservation my entire life, has liked Jonas McClane from their third conversation, because he recognized something…
two men who built things slowly and meant them to last.
I think about the patch on the table back at the clubhouse. Moments from being mine and then suddenly on hold, and the ache of that, not rage, panic, or the desperate grab for what was almost in reach, just the steady, patient certainty that it will still be there.
Everything will still be there.
I close my eyes.
For the first time since they put cuffs on my wrists in the clubhouse and walked me out past the patch ceremony cake, I breathe in slowly, all the way, filling my lungs completely, and I breathe out again.
All the way out.
Long.
Slow.
Like a man who knows he’s going home.