“This isn’t just a … bruised feelings situation,” he said. “He crossed a line with you. That matters.”
“I know,” I said quietly. “And I’m not minimizing it. But I also know he’s not a monster. He’s scared. He let himself be used. That’s on him. So is putting his hands on me. I won’t forgive that. But I also won’t pretend he’s the same as the people who are pulling his strings.”
Around the table, a shift. Small, but palpable. The Dane men, all of them, listening hard now—not just to the logistics, but to the lines I was drawing.
“This family doesn’t kill good men by mistake,” Atlas said, speaking for the Charleston side. “We’re not executioners. Not unless someone really earns it.”
“No one’s shooting your editor in the back of the head, Amelia,” Charlie added, gentle but firm. “Not if he’s willing to cooperate. But he doesn’t get to walk away like nothing happened, either.”
“That’s all I needed to know,” I said.
I looked at Levi again. “Let me do this. If it goes sideways, your guys are right there. Worst case, you get to burst in and rescue me. Again.”
That got me half a huff of reluctant amusement from him. The room felt it, too. The tension eased a notch.
He stood, rounding the table to me, his hand coming to rest at the small of my back like he couldn’t not touch me while he weighed this.
“You sure?” he asked quietly.
“No,” I said honestly. “But this is my mess, too. My industry. My old life being used as a weapon against you. I’m going to clean up the part I can.”
His eyes searched mine. Whatever he saw there tipped the balance.
“One of our guys goes with you,” he said. “Door stays open. If he so much as raises his voice, you walk out. If you don’t, I come down and drag you out myself.”
Warmth flared under my ribs.
Possessive. Protective. Maddening. Irresistible.
“Deal,” I said.
I could feel the brothers watching us, but it didn’t feel intrusive. If anything, there was a quiet recognition there—a shared understanding. They knew what it meant for a Dane to set conditions like that. To be willing to hand control over, but not concern.
Marcus pushed his chair back. “Come on, Canada,” he said, jerking his chin toward the door. “I’ll walk you down. Let’s go talk to your ex-boss.”
I nodded, and we went.
The hallways below Dominion Hall felt different than the ones upstairs.
Less polished. More functional. The kind of spaces you built when you expected to need them and hoped you never would.
Marcus walked beside me, hands loose at his sides, but I could feel the readiness in him. A coiled thing, similar to Levi’s but flavored differently. Less intimate, more professional: the readiness of a man whose job was to anticipate trouble and be bored if it never came.
“So, you want to run his company,” he said as we turned a corner.
“I do,” I said. Saying it again made it settle deeper, like a stone finding its place in a riverbed. “Or at least, steer it. Shape which stories get oxygen. Protect reporters who are doing good work from being used as pawns.”
“You know that makes you dangerous,” he said. Not a warning. A fact.
I thought of my mother at the kitchen table, walking me through fact-checking a campaign ad. My father insisting we correct ourselves out loud if we misstated something, even in private. The bone-deep training that truth was a moral absolute.
“It already made me dangerous,” I said. “I just didn’t have the infrastructure to do anything big with it.”
He grinned sideways. “Levi’s right. You can handle him.”
“Don’t tell him that,” I said. “He likes thinking he’s in charge.”
Marcus laughed, low and brief, then sobered as we reached a closed door. Two Dominion Hall men flanked it—both big, bothcoiled in that same quiet readiness that seemed to be a house standard.
