“I know,” I say. “I heard.”
She pulls back slightly, enough to see my face, searching it the way she does when she’s checking whether she needs to be worried about something.
“Deek sent it,” I tell her.
“I know… he recorded it without my knowledge, and then he sent it to Ghost, and Ghost apparently had it delivered through your attorney, which is, objectively, an unhinged sequence of events.”
“It worked.” I tilt my head with a sly smile.
She looks at me for a moment, and there’s something in her expression that is fighting between exasperation, gratitude, and losing badly to both. “He’s going to be insufferable about this.”
I glance over her shoulder. Deek is openly watching us, looking like he considers himself the primary architect of this outcome and expects full recognition. He doesn’t even pretend to look elsewhere. Arms crossed, chin tipped up, his smile has pushed well beyond anything that could be called subtle.
“He already is,” I say. “I can see his face from here.”
Deek’s voice, for the second time this morning, carries through the gap with unshakeable cheerfulness. “Still counts. I can still feel the love from here. This is my moment. I aminthis moment!”
Koa loses it. The laugh that comes out of him is big and unguarded, and it sets off Nitro, and even Ghost, usually the last man to crack, tips his head back with his eyes closed in the way that means he’s suppressing something genuine and failing.
Millie makes a sound against my shoulder, trying very hard to be dignified and not succeeding.
I look down at her.
She looks up at me, and something in her expression lands sour immediately. Not fear or grief exactly, but something deeper. Like she’s been holding herself together with both hands and is running out of grip.
“What’s happened?” I ask.
Her mouth opens, closes, and she swallows hard enough that I can see the movement in her throat. “It’s Dad.”
The words hit like a fist I didn’t see coming.
“What about him?”
“He… collapsed. At the house.” Her voice is steady. It’s the only thing she’s got left under control. “Heart complications. They rushed him in. He’s… stable, for now. But it was bad, Will. It wasreallybad.”
Something cold moves through my chest. “When?”
“Two in the morning, two nights ago.”
Two in the morning.
I was sitting under fluorescent lights while she was watching her father fight to breathe.
My jaw tightens.
Hard.
“And nobody thought to fucking tell me?” It comes out angrier than I mean it to.
Her eyes flinch at the edge my voice contains. “Sin said it would complicate your release. We didn’t tell you because there was nothing you could do,” she says quickly. “And because we know you. You’d have tried to get out. You’d have made it worse.”
I look away for a second because the alternative is saying something I can’t take back. My hands curl into fists at my sides, leather creaking softly. “They let me sit there,” I say. “While you were—”
“W-Will.” She steps closer, her voice breaking for the first time. “They didn’t let you sit there. They protected you. And me. And him. They were trying to get you out.” Her eyes shine, but she refuses to let the tears fall.Typical Millie. Managing even now.
“I wanted to tell you,” she continues. “I tried. I called Sin at the hospital. But he was already moving pieces. And I… I trusted him.”
I drag a hand through my hair, my breath coming harder than I like. The anger is there—a hot, instinctive reaction to being cut out of something that matters.
