Outside, the city makes its low, distant sound, the one that never fully disappears even at this hour, that perpetual ambient hum that Las Vegas keeps running underneath everything else like a second pulse. I’ve stopped hearing it most of the time.
Tonight, I hear it, loud and unstoppable.
I reach for my laptop and close it, and the room grows quieter somehow with the screen dark. “Do you think Dad’s scared?” My voice comes out smaller than I intended, stripped of its working-hours steadiness. “Of what comes next?”
Will doesn’t answer straight away. He looks at me for a second, really looks at me, taking the question seriously instead of throwing some easy bullshit comfort at me to make themoment simpler than it is. “I think he’s sad about what he’ll miss,” he says, finally. “That’s different from scared.”
The words settle into the kitchen air, and I feel them land somewhere deep, somewhere below the spreadsheets, the legal language, and the two-in-the-morning arithmetic of owning something you never asked to own before its time. I feel them in the place where my father still lives, as the person who knew where my bicycle was kept, which section of the newspaper to save for me, and how I take my coffee when I’ve had a bad day.
My eyes sting.
I reach across the table and put my hand over his. Not reaching for anything, not asking for anything. Two people at a kitchen table at two in the morning, being very real with each other in the way that’s only possible when you’ve stopped having anything left to perform for the night.
He looks down at my hand on his, and he turns his palm over, threading his fingers with mine. We sit like that for a while, the lamp burning steadily between us, the documents spread across the table in their careful piles, the mine, the Alliance, and all the things that are coming next waiting patiently outside the circle of the light.
None of it has gone anywhere.
None of it will.
But for now, in this kitchen, in the silence of the small hours, it holds its distance.
The bedroom light under my father’s door stays dark.
The clock on the wall ticks on.
Fivemore days.
Chapter Twelve
WILL
The Next Day
I’ve been sitting at the far end of the main table for the better part of an hour, nursing a beer I stopped tasting about forty minutes ago, and watching the front door of the clubhouse with a steady, unhurried patience, like the last few days spent on a sofa in Jonas McClane’s living room have convinced him there are worse ways to exist.
The beer’s gone warm.
I don’t particularly care.
She’ll be here soon.
Not for me.
But to bring the club her baked goods, she’s been working on all morning.
A small smile crosses my lips at the thought of seeing Millie as Sage’s loud voice filters through the clubhouse. Sage comes to see Marley these days, drops by the clubhouse the way any friend of an Old Lady would, easy and natural, like she belongs in the peripheral edges of this world. Which, by proximity and association, she increasingly does.
She’s got that quality some people carry around without seeming to notice it, a kind of effortless forward motion, like she’s always moving toward something, and whatever room she walks into simply adjusts around her. Short blonde hair, easy stride, and a bulk deli bag dropped onto the table with a satisfying thud, packed with jerky and cured meats, that genuinely stops conversation.
Deek looks at it, then at her, then back at it, unusually quiet, like he’s just witnessed something sacred and isn’t sure what to do about it.
Then Deek says to no one in particular, “I think I love her.”
Ghost snorts out a mocking laugh as Deek grabs a stick of meat and gnaws on it like a rabid animal. But Sage doesn’t head for Marley, who is over by the bar talking to Victoria. Sage’s gaze moves across the room, landing on Ghost’s orbit.
And then she gravitates there.
Ghost is installed at his table in the corner, his laptop open, his focus locked on whatever encrypted project he’s currently buried inside. The man runs his world through a screen like a conductor who prefers to keep the orchestra invisible, and he does it with the same calm efficiency whether the clubhouse is empty or half the chapter is present.
