There were things I wanted to say. Questions I wanted answered. Emotions I wanted to unpack.
But I couldn’t find the words.
Neither, apparently, could Luka.
I rolled my shoulders and stretched my neck. “Traffic’s lighter than I expected.”
Luka’s eyes never left the road. “Traffic? That’s what you want to talk about?”
I shrugged. “Felt the safest.”
He finally glanced over. “Are you going to let me take down the bastard now?”
“I…” I rolled the cuff of my coat between my fingers—the one Luka had bought for me. “I’m going to report him when I meet with my boss tomorrow. Tell him everything that happened. Like I said, I need to walk into that meeting clean. I won’t have much leverage if I’ve gone scorched earth.”
Luka shook his head and barked out a humorless laugh. “You think it matters? Reporting him? These high-power executivesare all the same. All in the same club. And they take care of each other. Not us.”
“Greg’s not?—”
“Your mercy will cost you everything,mila. While they lose nothing.”
I pressed my lips together and drew in a long breath through my nose. “I have to do this the right way. For my conscience. So I can sleep at night.” I blew the breath out. “At least, I have to try.”
Luka shrugged but said nothing.
I pulled out my phone to check my flight status. Still on time.
He pressed his lips into a line, then broke the silence. “Do me one favor.”
“Okay.”
Luka shot me a quick glance before returning his gaze to the road. “Stay off public Wi-Fi.”
I frowned. “What’s wrong with Wi-Fi?”
“Nothing,” he said dryly. “If you enjoy making people like me wealthy.” He drummed on the steering wheel. “We can’t all be saints like you.”
I tucked my hands under my thighs, steadying the tremor in my fingers. The car’s heater pushed lukewarm air at my knees. Headlights streaked across the median, the world outside washed in feverish orange and gray. I tried to imagine a version of this scene in which I wasn’t on my way out of Luka’s orbit—maybe even on my way home with him, to his cold, sparsely furnished flat that already felt more familiar than my own bed ever would. But that was a fantasy.
The flight confirmation in my inbox was real. The Hallstrom contract termination was real. Greg’s reedy voice on the phone was real.
And Luka was real, so real that the veins on his hands stood out as he gripped the wheel, his knuckles pale against the dark.
He cleared his throat. “And before you ask, I’ve disabled the mirror on your phone. I can’t see your calls or texts anymore.”
I blinked. “I’d completely forgotten about that.”
His mouth curled in the barest shadow of a smile. “I know. That’s why I switched it off.”
I should have felt relieved. Instead, all I felt was the dark, sinking gravity of loss pooling in my stomach. Out the window, the turnoff for Terminal 3 rose from the dark, yellow signage flashing across rain-slick asphalt.
“What happens now?”
He laughed, a dry scrape of a sound. “This again?”
I shrugged, stiff inside my coat. “I mean it. I’m sorry I have to go home. I wish we had longer.”
He took his eyes off the road just long enough to spear me with a look. “So do I. But I can’t change it.”