I think about the nights I didn’t know. The years my father sat in that armchair with his newspaper, his coffee, his steady love for me, and, underneath it all, he was carrying this. A weapon, built from patience and paper, made from the same material as everything else Dad ever built. Grief, love, and the deep, immovable need to protect his daughter.
He wasn’t just paying them.
He was building the evidence that would eventuallyburythem.
“The Alliance…” Sin says, and his voice has changed again, hardened into something precise. “When they learn this exists—”
“They will understand what position they’re in,” Dad says simply.
I set the ledger page down on the table, press both palms flat against it, and look at my father across the room. He looks back at me, and neither of us says anything at all for a moment, because there are no words in my vocabulary that are right for what he has done.
He built me a shield out of their own hands. He did it quietly. He waited, and he never told me because he didn’t want me afraid.
“D-Daddy,” I manage. My voice breaks, and I cannot help it.
“I told you I’d handle it,” he says, in the tone he has used my entire life for everything from scraped knees to the worst moments I have known…
Perfectly calm, perfectly certain, perfectly him.
Sin turns on the sofa and looks at me, and there’s something in his expression I don’t have a name for, somewhere between awe, grief, and the understanding of something large and irreversible. He gives me a single, slow nod.
I press my thumb to the corner of my eye, dabbing at a welling tear, and pull myself back together.
“Bring Will in,” my father says.
Sin stands. He crosses to the front door, opening it, and then I hear boots on the porch steps.
Will appears in the doorway. He looks at the room, at Mr. Ellery with his documents, at Sin coming back toward the sofa, at me on the cushion with my hands still pressed flat against the table, and then his eyes find my father in the armchair.
He stops dead in the doorway. There’s something on Will’s face I’ve never really seen before. Messy around the edges. Like he’s finally starting to understand how big this whole thing actually is and is trying real hard not to let it knock him sideways.
Dad looks at him for a long moment, his gaze steady and unhurried, like he’s taken years to arrive at this moment and hasno intention of rushing it. “You take care of her,” my father says. “The business. The mine. Whatever she needs…” He pauses, a small, knowing look crossing his face. “And I expect you to take care of her, not just the business.”
The silence after that is different from the silence before.
Will meets my father’s eyes and holds them, and in the two years I have known Will Beckett, I have never once seen him at a loss. He is always the steadiest person in any room he walks into, always the one with his feet planted and his chin level and his voice even.
He. Does.Not. Rattle.
He is not exactly rattled now.
But something about the way he draws a slow, deliberate breath before he speaks tells me that my father has handed him something that took him a moment to find his grip on. “Yes, sir,” he says with conviction.
My father gives one sharp nod, the kind that says the decision’s been made and, as far as he’s concerned, the conversation is over. “Good,” he says.
And in the warmth of my father’s living room, with his reading lamp, his armchair, and his twenty-year coffee stain, something enormous and permanent settles into place.
My father leans back in his chair and closes his eyes, and something in the room finally eases a little.
Chapter Twenty-Five
SIN
The Next Day
The Chapel feels different when the mood turns cold.
This is the atmosphere you get when a room full of bikers has spent too long holding something back and finally decided they’re done waiting.
