Chapter Thirty #4
Across the room, Sin’s leaning against the wall with his arms folded while Victoria stands beside him, eight months pregnant and still somehow the most intimidating person in the clubhouse.
She’s got that look on her face that says she already knows exactly how things are gonna go, and everybody else is just lagging behind the plan. “The party is happening Saturday,” she says.
Sin looks at her. “Victoria.” His voice carries that measured edge, like he already knows he’s not going to win this and is just working out the terms.
“I have already booked the caterer.”
“You need to rest.”
“The caterer is booked, Sin.”
“We can have the club girls cook. You don’t need catering.”
“It’s an arrival party… for your son. I am not having your son’s arrival party without catering.” She tilts her chin up slightly, and her expression is serene, absolute, and completely immovable. “The party is happening.”
Sin looks at Nitro.
Nitro studies his beer with unwavering focus, like it’s the most pressing thing in the room and also an excellent excuse not to engage.
Deek appears to have become very interested in the texture of the bar.
Koa is reading a label on a peanut container.
Ghost starts typing frantically on his laptop.
I take a long sip of my beer, but I can’t hide my smirk.
Sorry, Sin… you’re on your own, buddy.
Victoria looks around at all of us, as if this outcome was obvious from the start. Sin lets out a slow breath through his nose, the fight draining out of him before it even properly starts, like he’s already decided she matters more than whatever argument he could make.
After a second, he gives one short nod.
The party is happening.
Millie settles in beside me a little after three.
She finds her place at my side with the same ease she has always found it, her shoulder against mine, her feet tucked up under her on the seat, her coffee going cold in her hand because she has been talking to Marley and Sage for the better part of an hour and forgot about it.
I lift my arm, she shifts in, and my arm drops around her shoulders like it belongs there, because it does, because it has always belonged there, even in the years before I dared let myself say it.
I look around the room.
Nitro and Marley, her head tipped back and her red hair loose, laughing at something he’s said into her ear. The ring on her finger catches the light as she reaches up to his face, the gesture effortless, as though she’s settled exactly where she’s meant to be.
Koa’s standing near the pool table with Dad beside him, both of them settled into that easy familiarity that only comes from years spent side by side.
Sage leans slightly toward Ghost, and he doesn’t lean away.
The club is alive in the way it is supposed to be alive. Full of people who chose each other, who keep choosing each other, who have been through enough together now that the choosing feels less like a decision and more like a state of being.
Millie breathes out beside me, slow and uneven, like she’s trying to force the tension out of her body one breath at a time.
I think about two months ago, and then about two years ago, and I let both of those timelines sit in my chest for a moment without flinching from them.
There was a moment. A brief, cold moment, somewhere in the weeks before everything resolved itself, where I thought I could see the shape of losing all of it.
The patch I had waited two years for, the woman beside me, and the life I had been patient for, the one I had done the work to deserve.
I could see all of it in my hands and I could feel the fingers uncurling.
That is the thing no one tells you about the good moments.
That when they’re close enough to touch, the fear of losing them gets sharper, not duller.
You have more to lose when you can see it clearly.
I sat in that cell, and I thought about Millie’s voice on the phone.
I thought about the patch ceremony cake sitting on a table somewhere and whether it ever got eaten.
I thought about every small thing I was missing from the outside, and the list was endless, unbearable, and I held it all in the dark, and I waited.
Because waiting is the thing I have always been able to do.
The Hidden Hand Alliance is finished.
Not dramatically, not a last stand, not fire and noise.
Finished the way real power moves usually are. No explosions or speeches. Just paperwork signed in a lawyer’s office, and a message clear enough nobody needed to repeat it twice.
That’s how it looks from the outside.
Inside, it was… handled.
The ones who made it past the arrests didn’t get the chance to rebuild.
Didn’t get the chance to run.
They were found.
And they were taken care of.
No headlines.
No second chances.
Nothing left to come back.
There is no version of events now in which they come back for Millie, the mine, or this club because the ledger ensures it. Jonas ensured it with the same unhurried, deliberate love he applied to everything else in his life, building the protection before anyone knew to ask for it.
He gave me his daughter, he gave us all a shield, and he did both without making a sound about either.
I breathe out.
It is a breath I feel like I have been holding since February. Since the night we got the call about Millie at the mine with the intruders, or even before it. Since the first time I understood what the Alliance was, what they were capable of, and how close Millie sat to the edge of all of that.
I let it out now, slow and complete, in a warm clubhouse on a Sunday afternoon with the woman I love against my side.
Millie shifts beside me, settling her head more comfortably against my shoulder.
Her eyes are on the room, watching Marley laugh at something Sage says, her expression warm, open, and more settled than it has been in months.
Millie is still carrying the weight of Jonas.
She will carry it for a long time, but she is carrying it standing up, the way he raised her to carry things.
And I am standing right beside her.
I intend to keep standing there, for every version of what comes next.
She is my life.
Not a destination, not an ending, a real life. The one I live every day.
Mornings that smell like coffee, like her hair.
Her, in the middle of it.
A place I’ve earned in this club. A home that matters more than all of it, somehow holding everything together.
I can live my life with my Old Lady by my side, with my Defiance patch proudly on my back, and I can hold my head high, knowing I did everything I could have done, the only way I could have done it.
She makes me breathless, and in a world where oxygen is survival… I’d still choose suffocation over living without her.
Every. Damn. Time.