They understood it the only way they understood anything.
In leverage.
And this time…
There was none left to hold.
The Hidden Hand Alliance is done, for good this time—there’s no way they can come back from this.
The cut on my back still gets me sometimes. Not because it feels heavy, but because it feels right, like it belongs there. Now and then, I catch the weight of it when I move, and there’s this split second where my brain still hasn’t caught up to the fact that I earned it for real.
But prospecting drilled something hard into me. You earn your place before you start acting like you own it. So I don’t suddenly walk louder because there’s a patch on my back now. Don’t start throwing my weight around trying to prove something. I do the job the same way I always have… head down, eyes open, work first, ego never.
The patch is confirmation.
It is not permission.
Dad hasn’t said a word about it.
But now and then, I catch him watching me across the clubhouse, or from the garage doorway, or from the other side of a crowded room when he thinks I won’t notice.
And something shifts in his face every single time.
Pride’s part of it, sure, but it runs deeper than that. He gets this look like he’s carrying around too much feeling to trust himself with words, so he keeps his mouth shut and watches me instead, letting the expression in his eyes say the things he can’t quite get out loud.
I understand that now better than I ever have.
I’m half-asleep, face buried in the pillow, when my bedroom door clicks open just enough to let a strip of pale hallway light spill across the floorboards. It stops at the edge of the bed like it’s waiting for permission.
“Anchor?” Millie’s voice is pitched low, but it carries something bright and restless under it. I roll onto my back, still fogged with sleep, and find her standing in the doorway in bare feet, a folder clutched against her ribs like she’s afraid it might try to escape.
Her hair is coming loose in rebellion, strands slipping free around her face. There’s a faint blur beneath her eyes that tells me she hasn’t seen the inside of sleep. She shifts her weight from one foot to the other, then stills, then shifts again, like her body can’t quite decide whether to pace or hold position.
“You’re awake,” she says, as if she hasn’t just woken me.
“Barely,” I manage.
She steps into the room, the light moving with her, and drops onto the edge of the mattress hard enough to make the springs complain. The folder lands in my lap a second later.
“Open it.”
Her knee starts bouncing before I’ve even pushed myself upright. She presses her lips together like she’s trying to trap a grin that refuses to stay put. When I glance up, she’s watching me with that intensity she gets when something matters more than she’s prepared to admit.
I flip the folder open.
Paperwork, stamps, signatures, and her name is written in a hand that looks steadier than the way she’s currently vibrating beside me.
“You signed?” I ask.
She exhales like she’s been holding that breath since midnight. Her hands come up, hover, then drop again, palms flattening against her thighs. “Yesterday,” she says, voice tight with excitement she’s pretending is composure. “Technically. It was yesterday.”
“And you came here at…” I glance at the clock. “… six a.m. to tell me this?”
“I waited until six,” she corrects, her chin lifting a fraction. “That’s restraint.”
I look at her properly, at the loose strands of hair, the shine in her eyes, the way her whole body seems wound around some invisible axis. “You didn’t sleep.”
She shrugs, a small, unapologetic movement. “I had things to think about.”
