I press my palms flat against my thighs.
Queenie makes a soft sound beside me, something halfway between amusement and understanding. Her hand finds mywrist and rests there, light and warm. I look at her, and she gives me the look she has been giving me for the last several months, the one that says she knows exactly what this day costs me to stand still for, and she is proud of me for standing still anyway.
My father is behind me.
He came.
I brought him in a wheelchair, which he accepted with that steady kind of dignity that somehow makes accepting help look harder and braver at the same time. Now he’s sitting six feet away near the edge of the gathering space, where he can see the Chapel doors, while also seeing me, and he hasn’t said much since we arrived. But when I rolled him in, found his position, and locked the wheels, he looked up at me, put his hand over mine on the handle, and he held it there for three long seconds, which is Dad’s equivalent of a speech.
I have not looked back at him since, because if I did now, I would not be able to keep my face arranged the way it is today.
Finally, the Chapel doors open.
The sound of them is ordinary, solid hinges, old wood. The shift of air that moves through the room when a sealed space gives up its contents, and yet the entirety of me goes alert in an instant, every nerve ending firing at once.
The brothers file out, and there is something different in the way they move, a looseness, a warmth, the aftermath of something, and then Will comes through the door.
He is wearing his cut.
Not the prospect cut.
Not the half-promise he has carried on his back for two years like something waiting to be finished. This is whole… complete. The Las Vegas Defiance MC full colors spread across his shoulders with a finality that changes the shape of him, or maybe the shape of how the world is allowed to see him now.
For a second, my brain refuses to process it properly. It lands in pieces. The leather first, the weight of the back patch. The way the room has shifted around him, the ripple of recognition that moves through the club like a current.
Then my eyes drop to his chest.
ANCHOR
The word hits somewhere low and deep, a memory I didn’t know I had just been handed back to me.
Of course, that’s his name.
Of course it is.
Because that’s what he has always been. Not loud, flashy, or the kind of man who takes up space by demanding it. The kind who makes space feel safer simply by existing in it. The kind you build your life around without realizing you’re doing it until you look up one day and everything solid in your world has his outline.
Something tightens in my throat so suddenly it feels as if my body has forgotten how to do something as basic as breathe.
I watch him step out of the Chapel, and the light catches on the stitching, on the clean authority of the patch, and it is terrifyingly beautiful to see him like this. Terrifying because this is what he has been walking toward the entire time I’ve known him. Because this is the version of him he chose over everything else, including me, when he stayed away all those months. Because I understand, with a clarity that almost hurts, exactly what it cost him to stand here now.
Pride rises first. Fierce, bright, and almost unbearable. It swells in my chest until I feel I might split open with it, like I am witnessing something sacred, personal, and enormous all at once.
Then comes something softer. A deep, aching tenderness for the man who had to earn every stitch of that leather the hardway, who carried his restraint like armor and his patience like a second spine.
ANCHOR
The name keeps echoing through me, settling into place, rearranging things. It feels like the world just told me something I already knew but was too afraid to say out loud.
He takes one step out of the Chapel, and his eyes find me immediately.
The way they always do.
As if the line between us has never once been in doubt.
My feet carry me to him before I’ve consciously decided to move. The room tilts into motion around us, sound, bodies, and laughter rising again after the gravity of the Chapel, but it all feels distant, like something happening on the other side of glass.
He holds out his hand.
