I take a breath. It’s like oxygen for my soul.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
“Don’t thank me,” she says. “Earn it. Now go wash off the stink. You’ve still got a future if you want it.”
Coach was right. I needed to wash off the stink.
But first, I walked the two blocks over to the police station and filed a report.
The officer behind the desk was young, distracted, and more interested in the leftover donuts on his side table than the fact someone had filled my car with rotting fish like it was some mafia warning.
Still, he handed me a clipboard.
“Name?” he asked without looking up.
My pen hesitated for only a second.
“Jade Morgan Bryan,” I said.
The lie rolled off my tongue easily. It had to.
Real name? Real identity? That belonged back in the life I’d left behind. The one I was running from. The one that still had reporters sniffing around and lawsuits half-written. That name came with too many strings—and too many people who’d love to yank them.
He typed it in like it was nothing.
And just like that, the paper trail began.
I signed, filed, and left without giving it another thought.
Not realizing that little slip of a name—so carefully constructed—was the thread that would begin to unravel everything.
Chapter Twenty-Two
LEO
I neededto get the stench of lies, privilege, and everything I used to think made me untouchable out of my damn lungs. So I did what I always do when the pressure builds—I took the boat out. Past the jetties, until land looked like a postcard someone else sent.
Salt air. Freedom.
And yet, all I could see behind my eyelids was her face.
Jade. Walking across the quad with steel in her spine and pain in her eyes. That look—like she was holding herself together with dental floss and hope—it haunted me.
I cut the engine. Let the waves carry me.
She never asked for this. Not for the cameras. Not for the court of Royal Oaks turning on her. And definitely not for her car to be filled with dead fish.
What the actual fuck?
My parents trained me well. Smile at the gala. Shake hands at the board meeting. Play the martyr if the narrative needed a fall guy—just so long as the Holt name stayed squeaky clean.
But this? This was beneath evenus.
I yanked my phone from the console and turned it off. Tossed it onto the leather seat like it burned me.
Minutes passed. Maybe hours. Until a rumble of another boat pulling alongside broke my spiral.
Tristan, grinning like a pirate. “Thought we’d have to send out the Coast Guard.”
