He doesn’t need to.
Across the room, Millie glances up, and she finds me without searching. I don’t know if she’s aware of it, the instinctive way she turns toward me in a room, her eyes finding mine like a compass finding north.
I’m not sure I know it consciously, either, except in the way you know things your body has been tracking for two years because your brain has been too careful to admit to.
The look lasts for a fraction of a second.
Her expression says something that has no single word for it.
Then Marley says something beside her, and the moment closes. She’s laughing again, and I’m still standing here next to Nitro’s pointed silence, andtwenty-onedays feels like both forever and nothing at all.
Becausetwenty-onedays is all that stands between prospect and brother.
Twenty-onedays between what I want and what I’m willing to risk.
And Millie McClane is not a risk I get to take lightly.
Not when her father’s gold has been feeding this club for years.
Not when McClane Mining and Vegas Defiance are tied together so tightly that the line between business and blood barely exists anymore.
Jonas trusted this club to bring his daughter home alive when the Alliance took her, and ever since then, he’s made sure the club never wanted for anything. Gold leaves that mine every month and finds its way into Defiance’s hands with no paperwork, no records, just trust, loyalty, and a debt that turned into family somewhere along the line.
Millie grew up around these men.
Protected by them.
Loved by them.
Half the club looks at her like she belongs under lock and key, something precious and breakable after everything she survived at sixteen.
But I haveneverlooked at her that way.
I see the woman who stays up with people when they’re hurting. The one who remembers birthdays nobody else remembers. The one who walks into a room carrying enough light to soften even the ugliest nights this club has seen.
I see her laugh.
I see her kindness.
I see the way she keeps surviving things that should have hollowed her out.
And that’sexactlywhy I can’t touch this before I earn my patch. Because if I make a move too early and it goes bad,it doesn’t just cost me. It risks the club’s relationship with McClane Mining. It risks the trust Jonas placed in us when he put his daughter’s life in Defiance’s hands.
It risks her.
And I could live with losing a lot of things.
But I could never live with being the reason this club lost Millie.
Nitro takes a drink from his beer bottle, says nothing, just smirks.
“Don’t,” I say.
“Wasn’t going to,” he replies, which is bullshit.
We stand there while Millie laughs again, bright and unguarded, the room warm around her, the club loud and alive, andtwenty-onedays sit in my chest like a lit fucking fuse.
Fuck my life.
