The McClane composure.
My grandmother had it.
My father has it.
I’ve always hated that I have it too, because it means the people who love me never know when I’m breaking, but right now I am grateful for every iron inch of it.
I find Sin inside, leaning into the bar like he’s been waiting for something to punch him in the mouth all afternoon. The moment he clocks my expression, he pushes off and crosses the room in three strides.
“Talk.”
“He called me,” I say.
That lands heavier than the arrest ever did.
“He’s in holding. Something about financial crimes, which is ridiculous. They’re somehow tying it to McClane Mining.”
Koa mutters something low.
Nitro doesn’t move.
That’s when I know this just got worse.
It starts small, laughter falters, and glasses pause halfway to mouths. Conversations taper off as attention locks in, hard and fast.
“Where is he?” Sin’s voice is low and controlled.
“LVPD. He called me from the station.”
Sin looks at Nitro for exactly one second. Nitro is already pulling out his phone. Koa hasn’t moved, but his eyes have gone hard and still in the way that means he’s already calculating. Bear, who stands ten feet away near the corridor, turns and looks at me with an expression I recognize, because it’s the same expression my father wears when something has happened that he intended to prevent and didn’t.
It’s not helplessness.
It’s a reckoning.
“Ghost,” Sin calls across the room, and Ghost is already at his laptop at the far table, already inside something the rest of us can’t see.
“I’m on it,” Ghost says, without looking up.
And the club mobilizes, the way the club does, without ceremony, every person moving to where they’re most useful without needing to be told.
***
I’m standing near the window, watching the parking lot, when Ghost comes to find me. He takes the chair beside mine and sits carefully, like he’s carrying something he knows is going to land hard. His long fingers are laced together over his knees, and he looks at me directly, which is not how Ghost usually looks at people, and so I brace.
“I found the discrepancy in the mine ledgers,” he says. “The skimmed gold. The payments have been going out for years, off the formal arrangement.”
I nod slowly. I’d heard that part in fragments from Sin earlier.
“Millie…” Something in the way he says it makes my stomach drop before he’s even finished the word. “Your father was paying the Alliance. He’s been paying them for years. Every extra gram that came out of the ledger, every off-the-record payment, he was buying them off.” He pauses. “He was keeping your name out of their records. Out of their interests. Every payment he ever made to them was so that they never had a reason to look at you.”
For a second, my body forgets how to exist normally. Breath comes shallow. My hands feel distant from the rest of me. Then my father’s steadiness finds me the way it always has, settling into my bones like memory, like inheritance. “Of course he did,” I hear myself say, and my voice is so soft I’m almost not sure it comes out at all. “He never told me anything that would make me worry.”
Ghost holds the silence for a moment. He’s good at that and doesn’t rush to fill it. “He kept you safe,” he says.
“He always kept me safe.” I smooth my hands flat against my thighs and look at the window. “Even when it cost him things he didn’t have.”
Across the room, through the bodies and the noise of the club working, I can see my father in his chair. He hasn’t moved since the arrest. He was there when the detectives walked Will out, and he sat in his chair while everyone else mobilized. He’s still there now, watching me with something in his face that hasn’t resolved into any expression I recognize yet. He looks like a man doing arithmetic in his head that he doesn’t want to finish.
