Then I stop thinking about any of them.
And I dial Millie.
She picks up on the second ring. She doesn’t say hello, she breathes, a single, controlled exhale that tells me she has been holding herself together since the moment the LVPD vehicle left the parking lot and that the holding has been costing her considerably.
“Millie.” I keep my voice low and even. “Listen to me…”
She hesitates. “I’m listening.”
“I’m in holding at the Las Vegas Police Department. They’re saying I’m part of some financial crimes involving the mine… but Ghost will find the truth. That’s not optimism, that’s a fact. I need you to trust that. Whoever did this put their fingerprints somewhere, and Ghost is going to find it.Okay?”
“Okay,” she says, her voice steady, and it breaks my heart a little how steady she makes it sound.
“But before he does.” I press my free hand flat against the table, grounding myself in the cool solidity of it. “Before any of that happens, I need you to know something. Because I should have said it a hundred times before today, and I kept finding reasons why the timing wasn’t right, and I’mnotwilling to find another reason.”
The silence on her end is complete. She is listening with her whole body. I know this about her.
“I love you, Millie.” The words come out without any of the difficulty I had expected them to have. They are simply true, and the truth of them fills my chest. “I have loved you for two years, since before I had any right to say it, since before I was in a position to do anything about it. I love you, and I am going to get out of here, and when I do, I’m done waiting for the right time. There is no right time. There is just now.”
She makes a sound. Small, fractured, and immediately contained. “Oh, Will…”
She doesn’t say it back, but she doesn’t need to.
I can wait.
“I’ll wait however long it takes. But I needed you to know it was already real before any of this happened. The only thing that matters is that I said it out loud…” I pause. “That’s all. That’s the whole thing.”
She lets out a long, full breath from her end of the line. “Okay,” she whispers.
“Okay,” I say back, the way I always say it back to her.
I end the call and sit on the molded plastic bench in LVPD holding, still in the clothes I was arrested in, the taste of celebration gone sour in the back of my throat. Somewhere across the city, there’s a cake with my name on it going stale under fluorescent lights, my brothers pacing asphalt and planning war, and my prospect cut is no longer on my shoulders.
It’s sealed in a property bag with my boots and belt, as if it’s just another item to be cataloged.
But I called Millie first.
The brothers will find out.
In a club the size of Defiance, there is no such thing as a private action, only actions that take longer to travel than others. They’ll find out, and not a single one of them will say a word about it. Because every man in that club, if they’re being honest, already knew.
She was always the first call.
She has been, for two years.
And, finally, I said it out loud.
Chapter Eighteen
MILLIE
The phone call lasts two minutes and thirty-seven seconds. I know because I’m staring at the screen when it ends, watching the timer freeze at the top of the call log, and I count it the way my father taught me to count things that matter, so that nothing slips past you unrecorded. Two minutes and thirty-seven seconds of Will’s voice in my ear, completely unlike a man who is sitting in a holding cell on the other side of the city. Two minutes and thirty-seven seconds, then the line goes dead, and I’m standing alone in the clubhouse parking lot with my hand pressed flat against my chest like I’m trying to keep something inside.
He loves me.
He said it out loud, finally, on a phone call from a police station on the day that was supposed to be the best day of his life, and his voice didn’t waver once.
The urge to cry rises sharp and sudden, a pressure at the back of my throat I recognize too well. I won’t cry. I swallow it down before it can become anything real. I breathe the way my father taught me to when things hurt too much to name, until the feeling of him becomes something solid inside my chest, something I can stand on.
