I look back at Ghost. “Give Sin everything you have. All of it.”
“He already has it,” he says.
Of course he does.
I push away from the table before I can get stuck there, before the weight of waiting pins me in place. The air feels thicker as I move through it, voices rising and falling around me, snippets of strategy, anger, and loyalty sharpened into action. Someone brushes past my shoulder. Someone else touches my back as I pass.
By the time I reach the far end of the room, Victoria is already on the phone. She’s standing near the window, one hand curved instinctively over her bump, her gaze fixed somewhere beyond the glass like she can force the world to cooperate through sheer will. Her voice has that edge to it, the one she gets when she’s done negotiating and has started deciding.
I don’t interrupt. I don’t need to. Even from a few steps away, I catch enough to understand.
“Maria. It’s Victoria. Will has been arrested on a frame-up, and I need you to look at what your department has been handed.”
She pauses, listening intently. “Everything Ghost has, you’ll have within the hour. I need you to look at the evidence chain before this goes any further.” Another pause, shorter this time. Victoria nods once, to herself, then says, “Thank you,” clipped and certain, without a trace of sentiment, and ends the call.
She crosses to me, still holding her phone, and her eyes are steady. “Maria’s looking at the evidence chain. She made no promises, but she asked for what Ghost has found, which means she’s already asking questions.” She puts a hand on my arm, brief and warm. “That’s Maria sayingyesin the way that Maria says yes.”
I believe her.
Sin’s mother, Maria Moretti, who happens to be the chief over at the department, did not get to where she is by ignoring things that deserve her attention.
Marley appears at my left side without announcement and takes my hand in both of hers, folding her fingers around mine with the kind of ease that says she knows touch will do more than anything she could say. She’s right. And I let her hold on.
Ro presses a mug into my other hand. She came up from somewhere behind me. I let go of Marley’s hand and cradle the mug automatically, letting the heat sink into my palms, steadying something inside me that feels close to slipping. I don’t need to ask. None of them needs to explain. They just know.
“Ghost’s gonna give Sin’s mom everything he has,” Victoria confirms, more to the room than to me. “We let Maria do her job. She hasn’t let us down yet.”
“And we trust Ghost to do his,” Nitro says from across the table, and there’s a certainty in his voice that lands just right.
I look again at my father, who’s watching me. He’s been watching me all this time, through everything, the way he watched me learn to walk through the mine tunnels when I was seven years old. Like a man who knows what you’re capable of before you do, and is waiting patiently for you to prove him right. But I can’t sit here and wait, wait for this all to unravel around me.
I need to do something.
I need to find something to help.
And I can’t do that here.
“I have to leave,” I whisper to no one in particular, but the women all look at me with sympathetic eyes.
Marley reaches out, gently gripping my arm. Victoria simply smiles, and Ro reaches out to take my mug back.
“We get it, Mills. This is a tough situation. If you can’t be here for this—”
“No, it’s not that,” I interrupt Victoria, making sure to set her straight. “I want to be here for him. I amgoingto be! It just doesn’t make any sense. And the mine is involved, which makes me involved… so I’m gonna see what I can do on my end. See what I can find out.”
The girls all smile, like they’re proud of the woman I am becoming right before their eyes as I stand and make my way to the door. I don’t even wait to see if Dad wants to come with me. I need to try to figure this shit out.
So, I rush out the door and head for my car, hearing the voices of the guys calling out to me as I leave.
But I don’t stop.
I can’t.
I slip into my car and take the wheel, ignoring every protest thrown my way, because the road I know by heart settles something in me the clubhouse never could. The streets are the same streets they always are, the house large at the end of the driveway, and I park in the driveway and sit for a moment with both hands on the wheel, looking at the lit windows and understanding, for the first time since the call, what I’m walking into.
It’s not an empty house. It’s a house with Will’s absence in it like a room that’s been rearranged, where everything is where it was, but the weight of the space has changed, and you keepreaching for things that aren’t where they feel like they should be.
I walk inside, and his coffee cup is still on the counter where he left it this morning.
