You idiot, Millie.
My pulse kicks into overdrive again while I inch back up, slower this time, careful to keep my head low while angling my gaze through the blinds.
The two figures bolt.
All that slow, careful pacing disappears instantly. Now they’re tearing across the property toward the southern fence, boots kicking gravel behind them in frantic bursts while headlights rip across the yard in sweeping flashes of white and the bikes spread wide around the perimeter.
One beam locks onto the fleeing car as it tears away from the fence line. The engine screams while the driver guns it toward the road, his tires fishtailing in the dirt. For a brief second, the vehicle is fully caught in the light.
Then the car tears onto the highway and disappears into the endless black desert beyond the mine while I’m still crouched behind the damn desk, hiding.
I stay there after the engine noise fades into the distance. After boots start pounding across gravel, after Defiance arrives in the only way these men know how, loud, fast, and carryingenough controlled violence to make the entire property feel smaller around them.
I stay here because my knees have decided they’re not entirely ready to cooperate yet, and because there is something in me that has been running on adrenaline for the lasteight minutesand needs exactly one more moment to catch up with itself before it faces another person.
The office door opens.
I know it’shimbefore I even look up.
There are things about Will that are just part of the frequency I live on now, whether I’ve chosen that or not. The weight of his footstep, the way the air in a room seems to make space for him when he enters it.
I peer up through burning eyes, and there he is in the doorway, outside light catching along the hard edges of him—broad shoulders, solid muscle. His cut hangs heavy against his frame, worn-in enough to feel fused to him at this point.
His dark hair is shoved back messily, the kind of mess that comes from dragging both hands through it over and over while trying not to lose his shit. There’s stubble along his jaw, rough and shadowed, framing a mouth set into something unreadable. He pauses just inside the office, blue eyes cutting across the room fast and lethal, taking inventory of every corner, every shadow, every place somebody could be stupid enough to hide.
Then he finds me behind the desk.
And something in him locks down hard.
He is focused in that brutal, controlled way men get right before violence.
Then he’s moving toward me.
He crosses the room with that same steady confidence that always does dangerous things to my nervous system, controlled and deliberate in a way that feels protective right up until themoment you remember how violent men like him can become when they decide something belongs to them.
The entire room shifts around Will without meaning to. Space opens for him automatically, and attention follows him instantly.
I feel him before he reaches me—heat, leather, and clean skin. But there is a lingering edge of gasoline and road dust clinging to him from the drive over. And underneath all of it, tension wound so tight I can almost feel it leaching off him.
He crouches in front of me, bringing himself down to my level without making a show of it, forearms resting on his thighs, close enough now that the intensity of him presses in from every side. Those blue eyes hold mine, steady and unflinching.
“You okay?”
Two simple words.
And somehow he nailed it, because anything bigger than that probably would have cracked something open in me that I’m barely holding together. I nod, still holding onto the composure I’ve been forcing into place since the second those floodlights came on. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I’m aware I probably look strangely calm for a woman sitting on the floor of a dark office with her back pressed against a desk and adrenaline still tearing through her bloodstream.
But I’ve always been good at looking okay when I’m not.
It’s a survival skill at this point.
One I learned the hard way after the Alliance, after those rooms and those men and everything they did to me in them, that I avoid thinking about whenever humanly possible.
Put-together is armor.
Put-together gets things done.
With a hint of a smile, he extends his hand to me. It’s not a gesture of assistance, or the mechanical offer of help that someone makes when they want to move a situation along. Hesimply holds his hand out, open, and waits, and the gentleness of it hits me somewhere underneath the armor in a place I wasn’t entirely expecting.
