The PI’s file had burned lines of text etched into my head. Darren’s name. Last traceable the night Mila swore he died. House sold. Proceeds deposited. And then nothing—no sightings, no calls, no slip-ups.
A man doesn’t vanish clean—not unless he wants to. Or unless someone makes him. If Darren was hiding, he was damn good at it. If he was dead, then someone had gone to a lot of trouble to bury the proof. Either way, we were chasing a ghost.
And ghosts didn’t move alone. Not this one. Dunn’s money in Langley’s account pointed one way—Langley was feeding Dunn intel while he worked at King Enterprises. Not only that, but Dunn’s daughter was already playing her own games, pushing until someone broke.
Elise—her fingerprints were all over Avery being slipped a drug last night. Dunn had to know. My father knew because I’d told him who was behind it. Elise’s dad wasn’t blind, no matter how many meetings he buried himself in. Which left two possibilities: he’d sanctioned it, or he was letting Elise spin out on purpose. Either way, she was still dangerous. And to Dunn, the end justified the means.
I thought about Chase. He’d shown up to school this morning, but it had taken all of us to pull him back before he went after Elise—to keep him steady in her crosshairs.
Jax stood at Avery’s side, as solid as stone. Theo flanked them, silent but unmovable. Mila blocked whenever Elise drifted too close, her voice enough to keep the wolves back. And me—I drove the truth into Chase until he couldn’t dodge it, and Elise’s smoke had nowhere to catch.
Chase hadn’t forgiven us. Not by a long shot. But he’d stayed in the circle. And for now, that was enough.
We’d moved as one, forming armor around Avery. Every rumor died before it could breathe, every whisper shut down with a look. Elise hadn’t liked it. I’d caught her watching, eyes glittering, phone in her hand as though she was already setting her next fire.
We’d won the day. Barely. But tomorrow?—?
Mila shifted against me, eyes closed, lashes brushing my sleeve. I bent my head and pressed a kiss into her hair. She deserved a world without shadows chasing her. A world where truth didn’t cut her open.
But I couldn’t give her that. Not yet. What I could do was hold the line. Keep the walls up until we knew who was trying to tear them down.
Darren. Elise. Dunn.Lorne. Too many names, too many cracks in a foundation we were still pretending was solid. And ifit all broke—then I’d keep my promise. I would build something new with her. Out of ruins if I had to.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
MILA
The smell of coffee pulled me out of sleep before the sunlight did—dark, rich, familiar, promising a normal morning I didn’t trust.
I pushed off the couch, my arm light where Luke’s weight had been. He’d left sometime in the night, tugging the blanket over me before he went. A line where his body had warmed the cushion cooled under my palm. The house held the kind of quiet that felt staged—no TV murmuring from a bedroom, no clatter of pans. Just the coffee.
Then a hard crack split the silence, followed by an ugly, splinteringthunk. I flinched—my knee clipping the coffee table. The next sound was fast, steel on something small and breakable. Another. Another. Finality punched into the stillness.
I crossed the hall barefoot, heartbeat lodged in my throat.
Mom stood at the kitchen counter, hair in a knot that had lost the fight, robe hanging open over a tank and shorts. One hand braced on the butcher block. The other clenched a hammer. On the cutting board in front of her, black shards glinted—plastic, metal, the guts of something once whole. Her breath came quick, eyes glassy, mouth set.
She exhaled, shoulders dropping when she spotted me. Then she swept the pieces with her free hand, fingers shaking, and dumped them into the trash as if the can could erase what had existed a minute ago.
Unease slid under my skin, a cold, crawling thing. “What did you do?”
She stilled. The hammer hung loose at her side, as if she’d only just noticed what she held. “Something that needed doing.”
“What was it?”
A pause. A small lift of her chin I recognized from every time she wanted me to stop asking questions—don’t push me. “Old files—from when I worked for King.”
The lie landed wrong. Not the words—those were neat, chosen—but the way she delivered them. Tight. Careful. Not looking directly at me. “Old files on a… thumb drive?”
My gaze tracked the trash—the scatter of black bits on top of a layer of coffee grounds. The hammer clinked as she set it on the counter. Her voice steadied by force. “There are things that shouldn’t exist anymore, Mila—things that could hurt us.”
Darren’s name ran cold through me. The PI’s report still burned behind my eyes—deposits from Dunn Industries into Darren’s account in the weeks before he went missing. The sale of his house. The money moved neat as a blade. Then nothing. No withdrawals. No sightings. Just silence and a tidy ledger.
“Who would hurt us?” I asked.
Her lips thinned. “Anyone who thought we were in the way.” She moved to the sink, turned on the water, and rinsed the cutting board clean of the small, leftover bits of black plastic. Steam curled up. She didn’t meet my eyes. “It wasn’t mine to keep.”
“You kept it anyway.” The words scraped out before I could soften them.
