Chapter Twenty-Seven
WILL
The Next Day
Sunday has a quality at the clubhouse that weekdays never quite manage. Something slower and more settled. The kind of afternoon where the light comes through the high windows at a low angle, lands warm across the floorboards, and nobody feels the need to fill the quiet with purpose.
Two days since the will reading.
Two days since Jonas looked at me from his armchair and said, ‘You take care of the business, the mine, and whatever she needs. I expect you to take care of her, not just the business,’ and I stood in his doorway holding those words like something that needed both hands.
I’m leaning against the bar with a beer I haven’t touched much, watching the room.
This is where I tend to end up when I’m thinking about something.
The bar gives me a wall at my back and a clear line of sight to the rest of the space, which is a habit I picked up during two years of prospecting and never managed to shed.
The room’s packed the way it always is on Sundays. Not loud chaos, but it is not tense either. Just full of people who have spent enough years together that nobody feels the need to constantly fill the space with noise to prove everything’s okay.
Victoria is on the sofa, absolutely formidable, and has somehow also brought a throw pillow.
A good one, by the looks of it. The kind with actual structure.
It sits now in the corner of the sofa where she has settled herself.
Sin is seated at the opposite end of the same sofa, and I watched him clock the pillow when she put it there and say absolutely nothing.
He has learned.
It took him a while, but he has learned.
Victoria is currently annotating something in the notebook she carries everywhere, her legs tucked to one side, one hand resting on her bump.
Every so often, she looks up at the room with that precise, unhurried attention of hers, the instinct of someone who spent years reading situations professionally and never fully put it down.
Marley and Sage have found each other, the way they always do.
They’re at the far end of the room, heads tilted together over something on Marley’s phone.
Marley’s long red hair falls forward over her shoulder, her glasses are slightly crooked the way they often are by the afternoon, and she’s gesturing with one hand like she’s got plenty to say about whatever she’s looking at.
Ghost is in his corner. That corner has been his corner since before I started prospecting, and I suspect it will remain his corner until one of us carries him out of this building in a box.
Which, at Ghost’s current estimated rate of emotional self-preservation, could plausibly be some time away.
What is different today is that Sage has brought him coffee from outside.
Not the clubhouse coffee.
Not the communal pot that has been draining into the same ancient machine for six years.
Coffee from outside, in a paper cup with a cardboard sleeve.
I watched him look at it when she handed it to him. It was not a long look, but it was a considerable one, the kind Ghost gives to new information that requires him to update a prior assessment.
Then he took it.
Marley caught it straight away. One look between us and she was already leaning toward Victoria to whisper something that made Victoria smile down at her notebook like she’d been waiting for exactly this.
“He accepted the coffee,” Marley said.
“It’s over for him,” Victoria cooed.
“He doesn’t know it yet.”
“He will.”
I heard all of this because the bar is well-positioned to overhear, which is another benefit of the wall at your back.
Queenie arrived an hour ago on Nitro’s arm.
She moves with an energy that suggests age is more of an opinion, and she’s been disagreeing with it for years.
Her eyes are bright, and absolutely nothing in this room escapes them.
She found me early, held my cheek in her hand for a moment, the way she does, and told me I was looking better than last week.
I told her the bar had been low last week.
She laughed, patted my face, and went to sit beside Victoria, and within four minutes, they were deep in a conversation that appeared to involve neither of them needing to finish a full sentence.
Millie is beside me, not pressed close, not announcing anything, just beside me.
Her hip is near mine at the bar, one arm resting on the surface, her coffee held loosely in both hands.
She has her hair down today, the dark waves settling around her shoulders, and she’s wearing something soft and warm-colored that does something to the light around her.
She smells like vanilla and the warm sweetness of bread flour, a smell I have become accustomed to without ever realizing it.
She’s watching the room too, taking everything in with that steady attention she’s always had. The kind that comes from growing up around Jonas McClane, where noticing things wasn’t optional and paying attention to people mattered.
“Ghost is going to be furious with himself,” she says, watching Sage lean over to say something in Ghost’s ear.
“He’ll manage it,” I say.
“He’ll manage it by pretending nothing is happening for approximately six more months.”
“Probably closer to eight.” She makes a small sound that isn’t quite a laugh but contains one, and the warmth of it moves through the side of my chest.
Nitro’s been off all afternoon. I noticed it maybe forty minutes ago.
Not because he stopped talking or moving around, but because there’s been tension sitting under everything he does, the kind that says he’s carrying something around in his head and hasn’t decided what to do with it yet.
He’s been on the sofa near Queenie for most of the past hour, and he keeps a hand near hers, not quite holding it, close enough that she could take it.
Queenie leans in so only he hears her. I can’t make out the words, but I see the way her fingers wrap around his forearm, the way she holds him there for one extra beat like she’s steadying something enormous before letting it go.
Nitro looks at her.
Something settles behind his eyes.
A decision.
He nods once.
Queenie sits back, satisfied in the way only women who know exactly what they have just done ever look, and turns back to Marley like she hasn’t just shifted the axis of the night.
Nitro reaches into his pocket.
At first, I think he’s checking his phone.
Then the music starts, just loud enough to thread through the conversations.
Just a small-town girl…
Marley freezes.
Her head lifts slowly, like something inside her recognized the first note before her brain caught up.
Across the room, Bear mutters a low, stunned laugh.
Koa stops mid-sentence.
Even Deek shuts up, which honestly might be the first genuine miracle this clubhouse has ever witnessed.
Nitro doesn’t rush.
He walks toward Marley through the rising swell of Journey’s power ballad like he’s crossing the distance between past and future in real time, each step deliberate, grounded, the room peeling open around him without needing to be told.
Marley’s hand has gone to her mouth. Her glasses slide slightly down her nose, and she doesn’t fix them. She’s staring at him like she’s seeing every version of him at once. The man in the Uber, the man in the business suit, and the man who held her together when she didn’t know how.
The song hits the first chorus.
He stops in front of her.
For a moment, he just looks at her.
Then he drops to one knee.
The sound that leaves Marley is small and completely unguarded.
Nitro exhales once through his nose like he’s about to jump out of a plane. “The first night I met you…” he says, voice rough but steady, “… you were crying in the back of my Uber because some idiot didn’t know what he had. I didn’t know you either. But I knew two things real fast.”
He gestures lightly toward the speakers. “That song was non-negotiable.” A ripple of soft laughter moves through the room. “And you were going to matter to me.”
Marley shakes her head through tears, already completely undone.
“I didn’t plan to fall in love with you,” he continues. “I didn’t plan to build a whole damn life around the sound of your voice at two in the morning, or the way you sing like you think nobody’s listening, or the way you make this place feel less like war and more like home.”
He reaches into his cut, pulling out a ring, and it catches the light.
“My grandmother wore this through forty-three years of marriage to a man who didn’t deserve her half the time but loved her every second.
She told me once that the right woman doesn’t make your world smaller, she makes you brave enough to live in it properly. ”
His gaze never leaves Marley’s. “You make me braver. You make me better. You make me want a future I used to think wasn’t built for men like me.” The music swells behind him. “I don’t want another day where you’re not mine in every way that matters.”
He lifts the ring. “Marley… will you marry me?”
Marley doesn’t move at first. She’s crying so hard she’s half laughing through it, her hands shaking as she reaches for Nitro like she needs physical confirmation he’s real. “Yes,” she gasps. “Yes, obviously yes, you ridiculous, perfect man.”
He stands before she collides with him, and when his arms wrap around her, the club explodes. Cheers, whistles, chairs scraping, someone already turning the music up like subtlety was never invited to this moment anyway.
Queenie cries openly.
Victoria is sobbing.
Deek yells something deeply inappropriate that somehow sounds like a blessing.
Nitro buries his face in Marley’s hair for one brief second before pulling back just enough to slide the ring onto her finger.
The song keeps playing.
And this time, she sings.
Dad starts a slow, heavy clap that gathers momentum before anyone else joins in, and then everyone does—Koa, Mace, Deek, and Ro, and somewhere behind me, Millie makes a sound against her palms that is half-laughing and entirely cheerful.
I find I am clapping too.
Queenie is still crying, one hand pressed to her heart while the other disappears into her sleeve, producing a tissue that suggests she expected this.
After a moment, the noise settles into something warm and wordless. Marley’s glasses are fogged, her vision blurred, but she doesn’t reach up to clear them. Instead, she laughs softly through the tears, shaking her head like she’s overwhelmed by it.
Nitro keeps his eyes on her, like there’s nothing else in the room worth seeing.
Queenie reaches over and finds my arm. Her hand is small, firm, and deliberate. “Don’t wait as long as he did, dear,” she says.
I look down at her, and she looks back at me with those clear, certain eyes, smiling through the last of her tears.
She said it softly, just for me.
But there’s nothing questioning in her expression.
She’s already reached her conclusion. This is just her choosing the moment to say it.
I don’t answer her.
I don’t have to.
She pats my arm once, satisfied, and turns back to the room.
Deek, from the other side of the space, tips his beer toward Nitro and shakes his head, dragging the moment out with theatrical grief, like he’s putting on a show.
“Between Will and Nitro…” he announces, to nobody and everybody, “… who’s left for me to drink with?
The way Ghost is going, he’s gonna fall next! ”
Ghost’s voice comes from his corner, flat and final. “Don’t.”
Sage is sitting right beside him, and when she turns to look at him, her whole face lights up, eyes bright with the kind of excitement she’s making absolutely no effort to hide. “He said don’t,” she replies, clearly and with enormous satisfaction.
Ghost looks over at her like her backing him caught him off guard. It only lasts a second, but something slips through the cracks anyway. Something underneath all that control and that flat expression he hides behind on purpose. Then it’s gone before anybody else in the room would’ve noticed it.
But I’m watching from the bar, and I have a good line of sight.
I lift my beer and take a long, slow drink.
Who are they kidding?
Millie’s hand finds my arm at the bar. A light touch, unhurried, settling against my sleeve the way something belonging finds its place.
I look sideways at her. Her eyes are still soft from the tears, still warm from what she just watched, and she’s not pretending she wasn’t moved by it because Millie doesn’t pretend things aren’t what they are.
She looks up at me, and there is something in the look that I feel settle through the middle of me like a weight finding ground.
I turn my hand over on the bar, palm up.
She sets her hand in mine.
The room moves around us, full and warm, celebrating.
I hold Millie’s hand and say nothing, and it is enough.
It is more than enough. It is the kind of quiet that doesn’t need filling, the kind you only reach after you’ve earned it, and I think about Queenie’s hand on my arm, and her voice saying, ‘Don’t wait as long as he did, dear. ’
I think about Jonas in his armchair, saying, ‘Take care of her, not just the business.’
I close my fingers around hers.
Sunday afternoon holds its shape around all of us, and across the room, Nitro has his arm around Marley, who is showing Queenie the ring, and Queenie is touching it with the reverence of someone recognizing something beloved coming home.
Sage is watching Ghost not react to anything, her attention patient and luminous, like she’s already decided this is exactly where she belongs.
Dad catches my eye from across the room.
He nods once.
I nod back.
And he knows that as soon as I get my patch, whenever that may be, that I am making Millie my Old Lady.
No ifs, ands or buts.
This woman is MINE!