Suspended pending investigation. No saving face. No quiet resignation. He’s out. And the grant—the thing he used to hold a knife to our throats—is safe.
Another message.
Dad:
I’m proud of you.
Of all of you.
Thank you.
My chest cracks open—hot, sudden pressure building behind my eyes.
I look up toward the massive windows, toward the quad, toward—
There. The rink path.
And I see him.
My dad.
He’s walking with Genny—two coffee cups in hand.
Suddenly, Genny’s “loose end” makes sense. She didn’t go to hack anything. She went to find him. She went to make sure he heard the news from a friend, not a headline.
My dad’s posture is lighter. His face… God. He’s smiling. Actually smiling. Not a strained, weary attempt. A real one.
He says something. Genny responds, looking up at him.
He throws his head back and laughs.
That laugh—the one I haven’t heard in months. The one that sounds like the weight of the world finally slid off his shoulders.
He reaches out and claps her on the shoulder—a coach gesture, sure, but his hand lingers for a fraction of a second longer than usual. There’s a warmth to it, a strange, magnetic sort of gravity that makes me blink.
Genny just smiles her quiet, unassuming smile and hands him his coffee like she’s been doing it forever.
It’s… unexpected. A puzzle piece I don’t have the box for yet.
I look away with a small, genuine smile.
He deserves every bit of this.
“So,” Zoë says, dragging her feral grin back to me, lowering her voice like she’s about to deliver scandal. “Now that we’ve successfully committed a massive act of whistleblowing andsaved the world… what about Reid? He hasn't answered any of Adrian's texts. Or mine.”
Heat rises up my neck.
“I… I don’t know.”
The truth is—I haven’t seen him since last night. When the world cracked open. The war line was drawn. His voice in my ear—It’s just beginning—set every nerve in my body on fire.
Before I can answer again—
The front doors of the Union slide open.
And he walks in. No posturing. No theatrics. Just Declan.
And yet the entire room reacts like a bomb just detonated.
