“Well,” Will says.
“How well?”
He raises his brow. “Apparently, Roman looked like he’d just done the math and didn’t like the answer.”
Something settles in my chest. I pick up my drink, take a sip, and feel the warmth of it move through me. “Dad’s ledger,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“He kept it for three years,” I say, not for the first time, but because it still lives somewhere unfinished in me. “Every payment, every amount, he just... kept building it.”
Will turns slightly so he’s facing me, just a few degrees, the angle he uses when he’s giving something his full attention without making a performance of it. “He was building it for you,” Will says. “He didn’t know when it would be useful or how. He just knew that if he kept the record, someone might use it someday. Someday there’d be a way out.”
I don’t say anything.
“He couldn’t fight them himself,” Will continues. “So, he documented everything, and he waited for something strong enough to use it… he was waiting for the club.”
My throat is tight, and I don’t try to speak. I hold the feeling for a moment and let it be what it is, which is grief and gratitude tangled together so completely I can’t find the seam between them.
Will’s hand covers mine where it rests on the bar. He doesn’t do anything with it, just covers it.
I turn my hand over, hold his, and wait.
At eleven forty-five, Ghost calls out, “Fifteen minutes.”
The room shifts. Not in some dramatic record-scratch kind of way, but conversations start trailing off, attention pulling toward Ghost bit by bit until half the clubhouse is watching him without even realizing they’ve stopped talking.
Ghost has his laptop open, eyes locked on the screen with that dead-still focus he gets when he’s already planned for every possible way this could go sideways and is just waiting to see which one shows up first.
Sin is standing near the pool table, poker chip in his hand, but not moving.
For once, completely still.
Will hasn’t let go of my hand. I can feel the pulse in his fingers, even and steady. He is always even and steady. It is one of the things I love about him the most, and also, occasionally, the thing that makes me want to shake him to see something break the surface.
But tonight, it is exactly right.
Tonight it is the thing I’m anchoring to.
“Ten minutes,” Ghost says.
Ro, behind the bar, sets down the glass she was polishing.
Deek has gone uncharacteristically silent. He is sitting on the bar, feet dangling, both hands wrapped around a bottle of beer, watching Ghost with an expression that is three parts anticipation and one part something more complicated. He is Bear’s son after all, and Bear raised men who understand that some moments require you to be still.
Bear himself is standing near the door with his arms crossed, and I watch his face while the room watches Ghost. He looks worn down by more than just the last few weeks. More like somebody who’s been carrying this moment around since the night his son got hauled out of this clubhouse in handcuffs while the patch ceremony cake sat untouched on the table.
I watch Bear watching the clock, and something in my throat aches.
“Five minutes,” Ghost says.
The chip starts moving through Sin’s fingers again. Not fast, more like a metronome.
I look at the space behind the bar, at the shelves of bottles and the low warm lights, at the photographs pinned along the side wall, cuts, bikes, and men who have been and men who still are. At Marley’s hand inside Nitro’s. At Victoria’s head tilted backagainst the sofa cushion, eyes on the ceiling, one hand resting on the curve of her stomach, and at Koa, standing with his arms loose, already past the tension of it and into the other side.
This room has held harder nights than this.
And some that were harder without looking like it.
