Later, when they let us see her, she’s unconscious but breathing steadily, machines humming softly around her. I stand by her bed for a long time, watching the rise and fall of her chest, committing it to memory like a promise.
We return to the waiting room after that, the adrenaline gone, leaving only exhaustion in its wake.
Now we wait again. For Titan and Justin to come home, and the night to finally loosen its grip on us.
I sit back in the chair, one hand resting protectively over my stomach, the other linked with Rowan’s. The world feels fragile and brutal and unbearably precious all at once. Even as it sleeps.
I’ve always known how to be useful without being seen. Toabsorb the damage so others didn’t have to. Love, to me, was endurance. Service.
But that instinct died the second I saw the gun.
The fear didn’t hit my chest—it dropped lower, instinctive and absolute. My hand went to my stomach before I could think. Not panic. A claim. Because there was no room for self-sacrifice anymore. There was someone inside me who couldn’t run, couldn’t choose, couldn’t be brave on their own.
I didn’t freeze because I was afraid. Fear is loud. This was quiet—cold and precise. My mind stripped the moment down to distance and angles, to the fastest way to get down, to make myself smaller. When the shot cracked the air, my body obeyed before thought could catch up. I folded over my belly, instinct carving me into a shield. There was nothing noble in it. No bravery. Only necessity.
Protection.
I would give my body, my breath, my life without hesitation if it meant my child kept theirs. That truth rooted itself in me the instant I found out I was carrying a child. It became a deep, unmovable certainty that rewired everything I thought I knew about love and sacrifice.
I’m still the woman who offers more than she asks for.
But there is a line now. Solid. Absolute.
Because the most important thing in my world isn’t me anymore.
It’s the life growing inside me.
50
JUSTIN
The answer had been staring us in the face the entire time. We just couldn’t see it. Or maybe we didn’t want to.
Dean Stockton had done an exceptional job of bending the truth into something palatable. Respectable. He was careful that way—always presenting just enough honesty to seem transparent, while quietly shaping the narrative to suit him. It was how he’d survived for so long. How he’d thrived.
And why every time Scott-Evans crossed a line, the dean looked the other way. Not out of loyalty. But out of fear. Because Scott-Evans knew too much.
He knew where the bodies were buried—figuratively and literally—and if Scott-Evans ever decided to talk, the dean’s carefully cultivated reputation would collapse under the weight of its own evil. So the dean protected him. Enabled him. Cleaned up after him.
Not because he was family. But because Scott-Evans was leverage.
That was the pattern once you knew how to look for it.
Dean Stockton wasn’t just a predator. He wasacurator.A master manipulator who understood weakness the way other men understood power. He didn’t target strong men—he targetedfracturedones. Young men desperate to feel valued. To feel chosen. To feel important.
Scott-Evans’s ADHD wasn’t a liability to the dean. It was an entry point. A way in.
The dean gave him structure. Praise. Permission. He made him feel seen—then quietly twisted that need into obligation. Into loyalty. Into acts that escalated from immoral to monstrous, all framed as favors. As secrets. As shared sins that bound them together.
Missy Hale hadn’t been the first.
She’d just been one more name in a long, silent line of girls whose pain had been swallowed by influence, money, and institutional blindness. Assaults buried. Reports dismissed. Lives quietly rerouted to avoid consequences.
But Missy was the first to die. Not because she was careless. But because she fought with everything in her.
She fought them until her body broke beneath the damage, until the dean realized—with sudden, chilling clarity—that this one couldn’t be covered up. That her injuries were too severe. Too visible. Too final.
And something inside him snapped. His patience was gone. His control slipping. So he ended it.
