Chapter Twenty-Six
MILLIE
Waiting hits different once Sin gets back. Before, it just felt endless. Now there’s something underneath it, direction, tension, something solid enough to grab onto instead of just drowning in it.
The room is warm, drinks are everywhere, and the television mumbles away in the corner while absolutely nobody pays attention to it.
The clubhouse has that feeling it gets sometimes, where the whole place seems to pulse with its own kind of life, packed with noise, movement, and people who’ve built something real together.
I’m at the bar when Will steps up next to me. He doesn’t say anything immediately, just moves in beside me, close enough that his arm presses against mine, and for a moment we stand here, looking out at the room.
Ro is telling a story to Koa and Mace that seems to involve significant physical demonstration.
Bear has claimed the armchair in the corner and looks profoundly at peace.
Ghost is in his customary position, slightly apart from everyone, except that Sage is sitting cross-legged on the floor beside his chair with a coffee and a phone.
She has apparently decided this is where she sits now, and Ghost has apparently decided he’s done arguing about it.
“How did it go?” I ask.
“Well,” Will says.
“How well?”
He raises his brow. “Apparently, Roman looked like he’d just done the math and didn’t like the answer.”
Something settles in my chest. I pick up my drink, take a sip, and feel the warmth of it move through me. “Dad’s ledger,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“He kept it for three years,” I say, not for the first time, but because it still lives somewhere unfinished in me. “Every payment, every amount, he just... kept building it.”
Will turns slightly so he’s facing me, just a few degrees, the angle he uses when he’s giving something his full attention without making a performance of it.
“He was building it for you,” Will says.
“He didn’t know when it would be useful or how.
He just knew that if he kept the record, someone might use it someday. Someday there’d be a way out.”
I don’t say anything.
“He couldn’t fight them himself,” Will continues. “So, he documented everything, and he waited for something strong enough to use it… he was waiting for the club.”
My throat is tight, and I don’t try to speak. I hold the feeling for a moment and let it be what it is, which is grief and gratitude tangled together so completely I can’t find the seam between them.
Will’s hand covers mine where it rests on the bar. He doesn’t do anything with it, just covers it.
I turn my hand over, hold his, and wait.
At eleven forty-five, Ghost calls out, “Fifteen minutes.”
The room shifts. Not in some dramatic record-scratch kind of way, but conversations start trailing off, attention pulling toward Ghost bit by bit until half the clubhouse is watching him without even realizing they’ve stopped talking.
Ghost has his laptop open, eyes locked on the screen with that dead-still focus he gets when he’s already planned for every possible way this could go sideways and is just waiting to see which one shows up first.
Sin is standing near the pool table, poker chip in his hand, but not moving.
For once, completely still.
Will hasn’t let go of my hand. I can feel the pulse in his fingers, even and steady. He is always even and steady. It is one of the things I love about him the most, and also, occasionally, the thing that makes me want to shake him to see something break the surface.
But tonight, it is exactly right.
Tonight it is the thing I’m anchoring to.
“Ten minutes,” Ghost says.
Ro, behind the bar, sets down the glass she was polishing.
Deek has gone uncharacteristically silent.
He is sitting on the bar, feet dangling, both hands wrapped around a bottle of beer, watching Ghost with an expression that is three parts anticipation and one part something more complicated.
He is Bear’s son after all, and Bear raised men who understand that some moments require you to be still.
Bear himself is standing near the door with his arms crossed, and I watch his face while the room watches Ghost. He looks worn down by more than just the last few weeks.
More like somebody who’s been carrying this moment around since the night his son got hauled out of this clubhouse in handcuffs while the patch ceremony cake sat untouched on the table.
I watch Bear watching the clock, and something in my throat aches.
“Five minutes,” Ghost says.
The chip starts moving through Sin’s fingers again. Not fast, more like a metronome.
I look at the space behind the bar, at the shelves of bottles and the low warm lights, at the photographs pinned along the side wall, cuts, bikes, and men who have been and men who still are.
At Marley’s hand inside Nitro’s. At Victoria’s head tilted back against the sofa cushion, eyes on the ceiling, one hand resting on the curve of her stomach, and at Koa, standing with his arms loose, already past the tension of it and into the other side.
This room has held harder nights than this.
And some that were harder without looking like it.
“Two minutes,” Ghost says.
Will’s thumb moves once across the back of my hand.
Ghost’s eyes flick once to the laptop, then to Sin.
Sin doesn’t move, he doesn’t speak, just holds his gaze, watching a fuse burn toward something he’s already committed to.
Ghost gives a single, decisive nod.
“It’s out.”
The room freezes.
Two seconds of absolute stillness.
Then Deek exhales, like he’s been holding his breath since 2019. “Well,” he says. “If we don’t get murdered now, it’ll honestly feel anticlimactic.”
Someone barks a laugh. Then another. Then Nitro swears loudly enough to wake the dead and slams his hand on the table.
Chairs scrape, boots hit floorboards, and the tension that’s been strangling the room for weeks finally snaps.
Koa grabs Ghost by the shoulders and shakes him hard enough to rattle his teeth. “Tell me you triple-checked it.”
“I quadruple-checked it,” Ghost mutters, already trying to escape.
Deek lifts a bottle off the table and smacks it into Sin’s chest. “Congratulations, boss. We just committed federal chaos.”
Sin doesn’t smile.
But he does drink.
And that’s when the room really detonates.
***
It’s late before people start leaving or heading to their rooms. Later than it should be, probably, given that Dad is home and is expecting me before too long, but the brothers don’t want to break apart, and I understand why.
These nights don’t come often. The ones where something that has been pressing on a group of people for a long time finally lifts, and you can feel the air change.
I want to stay inside this bubble for a little while longer.
Victoria is the first to head to bed, which she announces by trying to stand from the sofa, then taking Sin’s hand with the dignity of being six months pregnant and not about to pretend the sofa isn’t trying to eat her. “I’m going to sleep for fourteen hours,” she says, and means it.
“You’ll sleep for four and then start reorganizing the nursery,” Sin says.
“That is a terrible thing to say, but it’s also completely accurate,” she replies, and allows him to steer her toward the door.
She stops beside me on the way to the hall. Her eyes are warm, a little tired, and completely her. “He’s going to be okay,” she says, and she means my father.
“I know,” I say.
She squeezes my hand once, and then she goes.
Will and I are among the last. We sit at the bar when the room has thinned, just the two of us and the low sound of the clubhouse settling around us, the television finally off, the overhead lights turned down to the warmer set Ro switches to when the night is winding out.
I’m not thinking about anything in particular, just sitting with the weight of the last few weeks and letting it redistribute now that some of it has been set down.
“He’ll want to know,” I say, after a while.
“Yeah,” Will says.
I think about my father at home in his chair, or more likely in bed by now, his body slower than it was, his nights longer.
I think about him at his desk three years ago, opening a fresh ledger, writing the first entry in that careful, precise hand of his, making a record of the worst thing that had ever happened to him, because that was the only form of resistance available to him.
And Dad was not a man who accepted helplessness without doing the thing, however small, that wasn’t helpless.
He spent years building the weapon.
Tonight we fired it.
“Will,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“Thank you… for what you said earlier. About what Dad was building it for.”
He pauses. “It’s what I believe.”
“I know it is.” I look at him. “That’s what made it matter.”
He’s looking at me with that steady attention that I have spent two years pretending not to need and have entirely given up pretending about.
“Let’s go home,” I say. “Dad’ll be waiting.”
Will nods, and he doesn’t immediately reach for his keys. Instead, he looks at me for one moment longer, the kind of look that doesn’t need a word underneath it.
Then he stands, takes my hand, and we leave.