“Yeah,” I say, already standing.
Sin turns before I’ve finished speaking, trusting I’ll follow.
I do, of course.
The hallway feels cooler than the clubroom. Each step echoes just enough to remind me I’m moving toward something I am unsure of. Sin opens his office door and steps aside to let me go in first.
The office smells of old leather and cigarette smoke from a habit Sin quit years ago, the kind of smell that seeps so deep into the walls that no amount of time or good intentions will fully drive it out. I notice it every time I walk in here, and I always find it oddly comforting, like the room has absorbed too much of the club’s history to pretend it’s anything other than what it is.
Tonight, it doesn’t comfort me at all.
I sit in the chair across from his desk, my hands folded in my lap because I need something to do with them. I’m watching Sin’s face the way I watch the mine equipment when something sounds slightly off. I’m looking for the tell, looking for the piece of information that explains whatever is happening.
He doesn’t make me wait long. “The Alliance reached out,” he says, bracing his forearms on the desk, his voice flat in that way it gets when he’s already dealt with whatever reaction he had privately and has moved straight into business mode. “Back channels. Formal enough to be intentional, informal enough to keep their hands clean.” He pauses. “They want to buy the mine.”
I hear the words individually.
I understand them individually.
But it takes a moment for them to arrange themselves into something that lands.
“The mine?” I repeat.
“They put a number on it.” Sin’s jaw tightens fractionally. “Low enough to be insulting. Low enough that the price isn’t really the point. That’s why they’ve been scoping the place.”
“It’s a message,” I reply, though even I can barely hear the words leaving my mouth.
“It’s a threat dressed up in paperwork.” He holds my gaze steadily. “I declined on behalf of your father. Why they came to me, and not to your father, in the first place tells me they are posturing. Seeing how far they can push before we push back.”
The air in the office is deeply still, and I sit with the information, letting it arrange itself properly.
The Alliance sent a number.
A low one.
Through back channels.
An offer to buy the mine.
“Why?” I ask. Sin looks at me. “Not why they want it,” I clarify, because I can construct that answer well enough on my own. They’ve been surveilling the property for months. They’ve tested the perimeter. The want is obvious. “Why like this. Why a formal offer? Why not just… move, the way they moved last time?” I hold his gaze. “The last group sent men with guns.”
Something shifts in Sin’s expression. It’s only fractional, a subtle shift as he weighs how much he knows to share, and ultimately decides to give me more than he normally would.
“The last group…” he says, “… had a working empire. Casino infrastructure. Police protection in Rourke. A trafficking operation that had been running for years.” He sets his forearms on the desk, even and measured. “We dismantled it, publicly, on live television. No way to bury it, no way to settle it. Lorenzo’s in federal custody, Dante too. The organization took a seriousstructural loss…” He pauses. “What’s running things now is building back. They need a clean financial base… something legitimate on paper that can absorb and redirect income. Something off the strip, both operational and profitable.” His eyes don’t leave mine. “Your mine fits that picture very precisely.”
I think about the spreadsheets I’ve been working through at the kitchen table every night. The extraction volumes, the quarterly yields, the payroll that runs to forty-seven people, the equipment maintenance schedule, and the legal structure that Dad built so carefully over fourteen years, that it essentially runs itself if you know how to read it.
He built all of that.
From nothing.
From grief.
From a stubbornness that needed somewhere to put the love that had nowhere else to go.
“So, this isn’t personal,” I say slowly.
“It was personal when they came after you,” Sin says, and there’s something under his voice that carries the weight of someone who doesn’t forget that history. “This is them trying to rebuild on top of something that belongs toyourfamily.”
