“You need to rest.”
“The caterer is booked, Sin.”
“We can have the club girls cook. You don’t need catering.”
“It’s an arrival party… for your son. I am not having your son’s arrival party without catering.” She tilts her chin up slightly, and her expression is serene, absolute, and completely immovable. “The partyishappening.”
Sin looks at Nitro.
Nitro studies his beer with unwavering focus, like it’s the most pressing thing in the room and also an excellent excusenotto engage.
Deek appears to have become very interested in the texture of the bar.
Koa is reading a label on a peanut container.
Ghost starts typing frantically on his laptop.
I take a long sip of my beer, but I can’t hide my smirk.
Sorry, Sin… you’re on your own, buddy.
Victoria looks around at all of us, as if this outcome was obvious from the start. Sin lets out a slow breath through his nose, the fight draining out of him before it even properly starts, like he’s already decided she matters more than whatever argument he could make.
After a second, he gives one short nod.
The partyishappening.
Millie settles in beside me a little after three. She finds her place at my side with the same ease she has always found it, her shoulder against mine, her feet tucked up under her on the seat, her coffee going cold in her hand because she has been talking to Marley and Sage for the better part of an hour and forgot about it. I lift my arm, she shifts in, and my arm drops around her shoulders like it belongs there, because it does, because it has always belonged there, even in the years before I dared let myself say it.
I look around the room.
Nitro and Marley, her head tipped back and her red hair loose, laughing at something he’s said into her ear. The ring on her finger catches the light as she reaches up to his face, the gesture effortless, as though she’s settled exactly where she’s meant to be.
Koa’s standing near the pool table with Dad beside him, both of them settled into that easy familiarity that only comes from years spent side by side.
Sage leans slightly toward Ghost, and he doesn’t lean away.
The club is alive in the way it is supposed to be alive. Full of people who chose each other, who keep choosing each other, who have been through enough together now that the choosing feels less like a decision and more like a state of being.
Millie breathes out beside me, slow and uneven, like she’s trying to force the tension out of her body one breath at a time.
I think about two months ago, and then about two years ago, and I let both of those timelines sit in my chest for a moment without flinching from them.
There was a moment. A brief, cold moment, somewhere in the weeks before everything resolved itself, where I thought I could see the shape of losing all of it. The patch I had waited two years for, the woman beside me, and the life I had been patient for, the one I had done the work to deserve. I could see all of it in my hands and I could feel the fingers uncurling. That is the thing no one tells you about the good moments. That when they’re close enough to touch, the fear of losing them gets sharper, not duller. You have more to lose when you can see it clearly.
I sat in that cell, and I thought about Millie’s voice on the phone. I thought about the patch ceremony cake sitting on a table somewhere and whether it ever got eaten. I thought about every small thing I was missing from the outside, and the list was endless, unbearable, and I held it all in the dark, and I waited.
Because waiting is the thing I have always been able to do.
The Hidden Hand Alliance is finished.
Not dramatically, not a last stand, not fire and noise.
Finished the way real power moves usually are. No explosions or speeches. Just paperwork signed in a lawyer’s office, and a message clear enough nobody needed to repeat it twice.
That’s how it looks from the outside.
Inside, it was…handled.
