Nitro, across the table, lets out a heavy exhale. He looks at the surface of the table, then back up at me, and whatever he’s thinking stays behind his eyes where it belongs.
Sin’s chip resumes its rotation, and Deek smiles at me in that older brother way that tells me I just royally screwed myself in the ass. But it’s my father’s expression that really shocks me. He half smiles, giving me a small head bob in what appears to be approval.That’s not what I was expecting at all.
Sin clears his throat, banging his gavel on the table once more. “Well then, now we have that shit settled. Will is on Millie while the rest of us figure out if it is the Alliance that is scopingout the mine. Nitro, put a call out to Jonas… I want him to come in so we can fill him in on everything we know so far.”
Nitro bobs his head in understanding. “Got it.”
Sin’s eyes meet mine across the room with a knowing stare. “And prospect…” I raise my brow in response. “You’re close to your patch, don’t do anything fucking stupid.”
“You got it, Pres,” I tell him.
Sin waves his hand through the air with a heavy grunt. “Right, everyone get the fuck out, and someone tell Liam to get me a beer. These prospects are too damn lazy.”
I smirk as the rest of the guys stand from the table, and we start heading out of the Chapel.
The first thing I do is head for Liam to tell him to get Sin a damn beer.
***
Jonas arrives at the clubhouse at two in the afternoon, same as he does every month. He parks his truck in the same spot he always uses, comes through the same door, accepts the same offer of whiskey from Ro, who appears from somewhere, and hands it to him before he has time to ask twice. There’s a syncopated rhythm to Jonas McClane at the clubhouse that the whole place seems to reorganize itself around when he walks in. He’s not club, and everyone knows it, but there’s a quality to the way he carries himself through these rooms that isn’t civilian either. He occupies the space between those two things with an easy comfort, as if he’s long since made peace with living in the gray.
He and Sin disappear into the Chapel for forty minutes.
While I wait.
I’m standing near the bar, doing absolutely nothing in particular with a beer I stopped tasting twenty minutes ago, when Sin reappears and comes straight to me, like he knowsexactly where he left me. “Walk him through the security upgrades to the clubhouse,” Sin says. “All of them. Take your time.” He doesn’t elaborate on the last part. He doesn’t need to. Jonas’ gold pays for our security. Hell, it pays for most of the shit in this clubhouse, so Sin likes to keep Jonas in the loop. To make him feel a part of the club. To show him what his gold is paying for.
Jonas emerges from the Chapel behind him, and Sin peels away toward Ghost’s tech den without looking back, leaving us standing in the main room in the middle of a slow Monday afternoon with nobody nearby and more than enough space between us to make me painfully aware of him anyway.
Jonas looks at me with those gray eyes that have always reminded me of an overcast sky, assessing without performing the assessment. He’s in his late fifties. Silver at his temples and a face that has been made by the kind of life that doesn’t apologize for what it costs. He extends his hand, and I shake it. “Walk me through it,” he says.
So, I do.
We move through the clubhouse methodically, and I take him through every upgrade Ghost installed over the last week—the new camera coverage on the east and south perimeters, the recalibration of the motion-sensitive lighting, the reinforced door contacts on the secondary entrance, and the encrypted communication relay Ghost added to the existing network. Jonas asks precise questions. He asks them once and doesn’t need the answers repeated, which tells me everything about how his mind works. He listens with his hands in his pockets, his eyes moving over each installation with practiced focus, as if decades of looking at infrastructure have taught him exactly what to see.
We end up outside on the south side of the building, where the last camera mount is bolted to the wall at the roofline.
“Ghost’s work?” Jonas asks, looking up at the housing.
“All of it.”
He nods once, satisfied, and then he doesn’t move to go back inside. He stands with his face tilted up toward the pale February sky for a moment, then drops his chin and looks at me with the same calm directness he’s had from the beginning. “Tell me something,” he says. “When you have the patch. What then?”
The question lands without warning, and I find that I have no reflexive answer for it, which is unusual for me. I’m generally good at reflexive answers. I’ve been practicing them since the day I started prospecting, learning the balance between respect and hierarchy, and keeping my damn patience. But Jonas isn’t asking a club question. He’s asking something with more weight than that.
“I stay,” I say, because that’s the part I’m certain of. “I’ve been building toward this for my entire life. My dad is here, my brother too. I’m not here for the novelty of it.”
“And the rest of your life?” There’s no pressure in his voice. He just throws the question out there and waits, steady and patient in that way that tells me he actually wants the truth and isn’t gonna push until I’m ready to give it to him.
“I figure that out as I go,” I say. “Same way everyone does.”
“Mmm…” He doesn’t look convinced, but he doesn’t look cynical either. He looks at me the way I’ve seen him look at a problem he finds interesting. “You’re twenty-one years old. You’ve given two years to become something. What does the man look like on the other side of it?”
I don’t have the easy answer for that one, so I give him the honest one instead. “A man who keeps his word. A man the people he gives a damn about can count on without ever having to question whether they can trust him.” I pause, then add, because he’s earned the honesty, “And a man who stops treating the things he wants like they’re a liability.”
Jonas is silent for a moment. He studies me with that gray-sky attention, and I let him, because I have nothing to hide in this conversation, and he seems to know it.
“You know what my daughter’s spent the last two years doing?” he asks.
