For the first time in my life, that certainty lives somewhere entirely outside the club. It doesn’t come from my patch, or my rank, or the brotherhood at my back, though I love all of those things with everything I have. It comes from a woman in a kitchen and a father in a chair, and two in the morning when there’s nothing left in the room except the things that actually matter.
I breathe out.
The cell holds its silence around me.
And I close my eyes to fall asleep.
Because what else is there to do?
Chapter Twenty
MILLIE
Sleep has come lightly the past two days.
I am aware of the weight of the blankets, of the faint hum of the ceiling fan, of the shape of the house settling around me in its usual nocturnal rhythm.
Somewhere in the distance, a car passes. Somewhere closer, the pipes sigh as the water heater cycles. I drift in and out of dreams that don’t quite form into images.
Suddenly, a loud crash comes from the kitchen. The sound of breaking glass carries through the house with a violence that pulls me upright before I fully understand what it is. My heart is already racing by the time my feet hit the floor. For a second, I sit here, disoriented in the dark, listening hard enough that the silence afterward feels louder than the noise itself.
“Dad?” The word leaves my mouth before I’ve consciously chosen it, pulled up from somewhere instinctive and childlike. The house gives nothing back. No shuffle of movement or irritated response about the noise, just an eerie silence that sits uneasily under my skin.
For one sharp, ridiculous second, my mind lands on the only explanation that makes sense at this hour.
Someone is in the house.
My heart surges so hard it makes my vision pulse at the edges. I stand, the floorboards cold against the soles of my feet, and I listen with every part of me, straining for the sound of breathing that isn’t mine, for footsteps that don’t belong to me.
The crash replays in my head, glass, impact, and something heavier beneath it.
“Dad?” I say it louder now, but the sound comes out thin, beyond my control.
Still nothing.
I move into the hallway slowly, my hand brushing along the wall as though the house might be able to steady me. The light from the streetlamp leaks through the curtains in long gray stripes, turning everything unfamiliar.
Halfway down, I stop and double back, grabbing the heavy ceramic lamp from the side table without thinking. It feels absurd, yet necessary at the same time, the weight of it grounding in my grip. I hold it awkwardly, trying to be ready for something I’ve never been trained for, my pulse thundering so loud I’m certain it could give me away to anyone listening.
The silence stretches.
Something else pushes through the fear, quieter but more insistent. A different kind of dread. The memory of the way Dad had looked at dinner. The way his hand had lingered against his ribs.
I reach the kitchen doorway and stop so abruptly that my shoulder clips the frame.
Dad is on the floor.
For a suspended second, my brain refuses to translate what I’m seeing, as though the image is in a language I don’t understand. The heavy ceramic lamp slips from my fingers without warning, striking the tile with a violent crack that explodes through the room. The sound splinters the silence, ceramic shattering outward in jagged pieces that skid beneath the cabinets.
I don’t even look at it.
All of me is fixed onhim.
Broken glass lies scattered around his body, catching the dim light like something decorative instead of lethal. One of the drinking glasses from the cabinet has shattered near his hand,water spreading slowly across the tile in a thin sheet that keeps widening, creeping toward his shoulder. He is half-curled on his side, his back pressed against the base of the kitchen island, one arm drawn tight across his chest as though he is trying to physically hold something inside himself that refuses to stay contained.
This isnothow he is supposed to exist in the world.
This isnotsupposed to happen.
