God. The worst part wasn't the crying. It wasn't even the reaching for him out of panic. It was that he'd turned me down and gathered me close, and I'd stayed. Until morning. Curled into him like my body had decided he was safe and my brain hadn't gotten the veto.
Fantastic. Really great decision-making, Charlie.
I brushed my teeth. Splashed cold water on my face. Pulled my hair into a knot that wouldn't scare small children.
Focus. Yesterday we'd pulled the cloud backup and built a timeline, narrowed the suspect list, flagged the connections. But a thought kept scratching at the back of my brain. The shredded photos hadn't been random — whoever picked them had studied my work. Which meant the answer wasn't in the suspect list. It was in the photos themselves. We needed the original files on the drives at Morty's office and a closer look at what I'd missed the first time around.
When I came out, Dominic was sitting up on the couch with his laptop open. Eyes clear. Already working.
He'd been awake the whole time. Of course he had.
"Morning," he said, not looking up. Giving me the out. Letting me pretend I hadn't spent the whole night using him as a pillow.
I loved him for that. Hated him for it, too.
"Coffee," I said, and went to make some.
We didn't talk about last night. Didn't talk about waking up tangled together, or what it meant, or what was happening. He drank his coffee black and I drank mine with enough sugar to make a dentist weep, and we moved around my small kitchen like people who'd been doing it for longer than four days.
CUPID CONFIDENTIAL'Soffice smelled like cold pizza and stale weed, which meant Morty had been here late. His desk was buried under printouts, three monitors glowing with traffic analytics, an ashtray full of vape cartridges balanced on top of a stack of competitor sites he was hate-reading.
"Charlotte. And the beefcake." Morty barely glanced up. "Tully photos are gold. Traffic's through the roof. Senator's office already called demanding a retraction. I told them to sue me."
"Charming." I dropped into the chair across from his desk. "I need my backup drives."
"In the safe. Help yourself. Don't mess up my filing system."
Morty's filing system was three external drives rubber-banded together in a fireproof safe behind a poster ofThe Wolf of Wall Street. I grabbed them, set up at the spare desk, and went straight to the Walsh files.
Around eleven, Dominic's phone buzzed. He stepped away, voice low. When he came back, his jaw was tight.
"June traced the partial plate from the car that hit us. It's registered to a shell company. Pacific Ridge Holdings."
The itch I'd woken up with sharpened.
"I want to look at something," I said, and turned back to the screen.
I pulled up the Walsh files. Six months of photos from the kickback investigation. The party at the Riverside Club where I'd caught him taking the envelope from the real estate developer.
I'd gone through these files dozens of times when I was building the original story. I knew every frame. But I'd been looking for one thing then -—Walsh taking the envelope. I hadn't been looking at the background.
Now I was.
I scrolled slowly. Him arriving. Shaking hands. Working the bar. Him on the terrace with the developer, envelope visible between them -—the shot that had earned me the Scarlett Sinclair byline and made Morty enough money to upgrade his monitors. And then, three frames after the money shot, a photo I'd never given a second look.
And then — the corner of the terrace. Walsh talking to a man I didn't recognize. The man was partially blocked by a pillar, but the angle caught his profile: dark hair, sharp features, expensive suit. Walsh was handing him something. Not a handshake. A transfer.
I zoomed in. The image was clear enough to see Walsh's face but the other man was half-turned. I couldn't ID him from the photo alone.
"Dominic."
He leaned in. I watched his eyes move across the image, the same systematic sweep he used on rooms. Cataloging details.
"Who is that?" I asked.
"Don't know. But Walsh isn't shaking his hand. He's making a handoff." Dominic straightened and pulled out his phone. "I'll get this to June. If he's in any federal database, she'll find him."
I sat back and let him work while I stared at the screen.
