But I don’t.
I force myself to remain where I am, to hold her gaze with as much steadiness as I can summon, because what she needs right now is not action.It’s certainty.It’s the visible proof that I amnotunraveling, even if something inside me has begun to splinter in ways I can’t explain.
This is wrong.The thought settles in my mind with absolute conviction. Not defensive denial. Not unquestioning loyalty.
Fact.
The club will move on this.
Ghost will tear the data apart.
Sin will not let this stand if there is even a fraction of doubt.
And thereisdoubt. Already.
Even as the machinery of law closes around me, a deeper instinct runs parallel to it, cataloging, assessing, preparing.
Two seconds pass that feel like both an instant and a lifetime.
I turn back to the detectives before the moment stretches into something unbearable. “Let’s go.”
I don’t fight.
I don’t argue.
I don’t give them anything to write down.
“Don’t say shit, Will. Not till we get there.Do you hear me?”Sin calls out as the cops grab me, placing cuffs around my wrists, then begin to lead me out of the Las Vegas Defiance clubhouse between two LVPD detectives in my prospect cut with my hands behind my back.
Behind me, the room stays silent until I am through the door.
The patch ceremony cake is still sitting on the table near the window. The chairs are still arranged in a loose circle near the bar. Outside in the parking lot, on a March afternoon, I hear boots on gravel as brothers spill out behind us.
Bearing witness.
It is the most Defiance thing I have ever experienced, and I cannot look back at them because if I do, I will feel the full weight of this, and Ineedto stay focused.
The LVPD vehicle pulls away from the curb, and with it any chance at the life I thought I was going to have with Millie, and with the club.
This isnothow I saw today going.
***
The holding room at LVPD is the kind of space designed specifically to remind you that time moves differently when someone else is in charge of it. A table that has had a thousand difficult conversations. A chair that offers nothing in the way of comfort.
Institutional gray.
They tell me I getonecall.
I sit for a moment with that.One call.The calculation a man makes when he has exactly one shot to put the most important thing where it belongs.
I think about Sin.
Sin, who already knows the situation, will require Ghost, his tech, and his contacts, and will have started making calls before my vehicle had reached the end of the block.
I think about Dad. Dad, who will be sitting somewhere in that parking lot right now with his arms folded and his face doing the closed-down thing it does when he is furious, and there is nothing yet to direct the fury toward.
I think about Ghost, who is already, I’m almost certain, three tabs deep into McClane Mining’s financials, looking for whoever put my name on a document it doesn’t belong on.
