I didn’t want to be the girl they wrote about in the afterword—the one who flinched, who stepped away from the fight, who let a man like Richard keep his kingdom.
“Fuck it,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
Luka didn’t smile, but approval settled in his expression. He turned back to the keyboard, fingers moving—not frantic, not triumphant. Focused.
A thousand ways to say thank you jammed in my throat. None made it to the surface. Instead, I sat—knees to chest—watching him work.
He paused once, scanning a window. Clicked. Dragged. Sent.
Then he leaned back, folding his arms. “It’s out.”
He nodded to the screen where the ripple had already begun: newsfeeds refreshing, social media accelerating, the Hallstrom Slack channel unraveling in real time.
The smile that tugged at my mouth felt dark. For the first time, I felt powerful. In control.
I’d had power before—or what passed for it. Deals closed. Contracts signed. Decisions that always seemed to benefit someone higher up the food chain than me.
This was different. This didn’t flow upward. It started and stayed with me.
My phone rang twice, followed by a cascade of text notifications. All from Greg.
I ignored them and put the phone on silent.
chapter
twenty-nine
The smell of cheap vanilla air freshener and stale coffee clung to the inside of my Honda. I gripped the steering wheel, knuckles blanched, as if the city’s endless grid might pitch me off the map if I didn’t keep the car pinned to its lane. Beside me, Luka sprawled in the passenger seat, methodically disassembling one of his burner phones.
I flicked my blinker and merged onto Peachtree. “So, where do you want to go for dinner? We’ve been living on takeout for two days. Time for a change.”
Luka didn’t look up. “Your fridge is embarrassingly empty.”
“Going to the grocery store hasn’t exactly been a high priority since I got back.” I kept my eyes forward, watching the blue dusk settle over the chain restaurants and payday loan shops. “And cooking isn’t my thing. So what’ll it be?”
He shrugged, rolling his neck. “Something local. Surprise me.”
I glanced over at him, just long enough to catch the flick of his eyes. “You don’t strike me as a ‘surprise me’ kind of man.”
Silence stretched, thin but loaded.
I braced my forearms on the wheel and forced my tone toward casual, but the question sat in my mouth like crackedglass. “And, I guess there’s not a great time to ask this, but…don’t take it the wrong way—how long are you staying?”
Luka didn’t answer right away. He pried the SIM card from the corpse of the phone, snapped it in half, and dropped the pieces into the cup holder. “How long do you want me to stay?”
The words hovered, acidic and sweet. A city bus burbled past, passengers pressed like fish against the fogged windows. “I meant, did you book a round trip, or?—”
“Open-ended ticket.”
“Is that a thing?”
“It is.” He slid the hollowed phone shell into his jacket pocket. “I can stay ninety days.” A beat. “Or until you tell me to leave. Whichever comes first.”
I hit the brakes at a yellow light that I probably could have made. The car behind me honked as it closed in, its headlights flaring in the rearview.
“Okay.” I swallowed. “That begs the bigger question—why are you here?”
“Tired of me already,mila? I can find my own place if you’d prefer.”