Downstairs, my men wait in a small living area near the back door. Their expressions shift when they see me.
“What do you want done with her?” one asks. “We can get information quickly if you want. Rough her up a little. Scare her.”
“No.”
The answer leaves me before I consider it.
Another man speaks. “We could go to her apartment. Destroy her equipment. Make it clear she shouldn’t touch this again.”
“No.”
They exchange looks. Not open defiance. Confusion. Curiosity.
“She’s different,” I say.
That quiets them. They don’t know what I mean, and I’m not sure I do either. I only know what I don’t want.
“She doesn’t get touched. She doesn’t get threatened. She doesn’t get spoken to. Keep watch on the perimeter and stay out of her line of sight.”
One of them shifts. “So what do you want from her?”
“I want the truth.”
“She said she told you the truth,” another reminds me.
“I don’t believe her.”
I’m not sure if that’s accurate or if I just refuse to accept that the story is this simple—that a twenty-one-year-old wrote my name because she believed she had the right to.
My men wait for more instructions. I give none.
“Stay alert,” I say instead. “No mistakes.”
They nod and scatter to their posts.
When I’m alone, I lean against the far wall and let out a slow breath. Her face hangs stubbornly in my thoughts—wide eyes, tight jaw, anger fighting fear.
She wrote my name because she thought it mattered. She sat in that car and demanded answers instead of collapsing.
She doesn’t understand the world she provoked, but she walked into it anyway. She’s different, and I’m not sure why that bothers me more than it should.
With a sigh, I shove that to the back of my mind and focus on something else. Her laptop sits open on the table where my men placed it.
They didn’t touch the files inside; they know better than to go through something I haven’t reviewed myself. I pull the chair out and sit, the cold wood pressing through my shirt. The screen glows with the last document she worked on.
I expected chaos. Notes scattered everywhere. Dead links. Guesswork dressed up as journalism. Instead, her folders are organized in a way that makes it easy to follow her entire process. Timelines. Names. Public records. Budget discrepancies. Property transfers. Nothing sloppy, nothing rushed.
She’s young, but she’s not careless.
I click through her drafts, reading lines she never published. She catches patterns most professionals overlook. She leaves herself honest comments in the margins. Questions. Doubts. Reminders to double-check sources. There’s a notebook scan of her handwriting—dense, pointed, impatient, with words crossed out only when she finds something cleaner.
She barely touched the surface of what I do, but she had the right instincts. Given time, she could’ve found more. Much more.
That thought sits uncomfortably in my chest.
Her ambition makes her a threat. That should be the only thing that matters. Most problems disappear. A car crash.A mugging. An overdose. There are a hundred clean ways to remove someone who digs too deep.
When I picture doing that to her, something in me rejects it before the idea even forms fully.
