I think that might be enough to carry me through anything.
Chapter Fourteen
WILL
The Next Day
Twodays out from my patch ceremony, and Ghost is watching every shadow, every angle, every flicker of activity on the dark web like a man waiting for a trap to spring.
Sin called me into his office this morning, kept it short, kept it tight. ‘Stay sharp. Stay close. Don’t give them a reason to move.’The words sat heavy the whole ride over to Millie’s place, and I turned them over the entire drive, searching for the thing I was supposed to be afraid of. But when she opens the front door with flour on her forearm and something warm and sweet drifting out from the kitchen behind her, every thread of tension in my body starts to loosen, one by one.
“You’re here.” She says it like a soft exhale, not surprise, but relief. The kind that tells me she’d been waiting.
“Like clockwork,” I answer, stepping inside when she moves back to let me through.
The house is settled into itself the way it only gets after ten at night, Jonas’ door pulled closed at the end of the hallway, the stillness that takes over once he’s gone to bed. I’ve been here long enough now to know the rhythms of this place. Know that the third stair creaks if you step on the left side. Know that Jonas sleeps with a fan running. Know that Millie bakes when she can’t quiet her mind.
She isabsolutelybaking right now.
The kitchen counter is a comfortable wreck, measuring cups nested in a bowl of sugar, two cooling racks side by side on the stovetop. Whatever’s on them smells incredible, warm and brown-buttered and a little spiced, and I lean in close to look.
“What’s on the menu?” I ask.
“Browned butter snickerdoodles,” she says, sliding past me to check the oven, her shoulder brushing mine in that brief, unconscious way she has. “Therapy baking.”
“You do that a lot.”
She glances back over her shoulder, and her expression catches me, soft, knowing, and a little tired around the edges. “I do it when I don’t know how to say what I’m feeling, so I put it somewhere else instead.” She shrugs, like that’s a perfectly ordinary thing. “Better than screaming into a pillow.”
“Is it working?”
The corner of her mouth lifts. “Ask me after you try one.”
I reach for the cooling rack, and she doesn’t stop me, so I pick one up and bite into it while it’s still warm, the center soft and the edges barely set. It’s the kind of good that makes you close your eyes for a second without meaning to. “Fuck thatisgood,” I tell her.
“You don’t have to say that if it’s not.”
“Millie…” I hold her gaze. “It’s good.”
She ducks her head, but she’s smiling, color moving into her cheeks. She turns back to the counter, starts fussing with the second rack, nudging the cookies to even out the spacing for no reason I can see except to give her hands something to do. I lean against the counter beside her, close enough to talk, not so close that she has to feel crowded. We’ve always kept a careful distance between us, and tonight I’m aware of every inch of it with an almost uncomfortable precision.
“Two more days,” she says, not looking at me.
“Yeah.”
She picks up a spatula and gently turns one of the cookies over, checking the bottom. “Are you nervous?”
“No.” I think about that for a second. “Maybe. Not about the ceremony.”
She finally looks over at me, and the question is sitting plainly in her eyes, patient and unhurried. She doesn’t push. She never pushes, and it’s exactly that quality, the way she gives me room to be as slow about things as I need to be, that has been making me half-crazy for two years now.
“About after,” I say. “About everything that comes after.”
She nods slowly, the spatula still in her hand, and the silence between us feels different than it usually does. Not the careful restraint of two people trying to keep themselves under control anymore. This is different. It’s charged with something neither of us is pretending not to feel now.
She puts the spatula down and turns to get something from the cupboard above her head, stretching up on her toes to reach a small glass jar on the top shelf. I move before I’ve decided to move, stepping in behind her to reach it easily, my chest coming to a stop just a breath behind her back.
I set the jar on the counter.
