Slowing it down will have to be enough.
“What about the rest?” I ask.
Maverick shifts his weight. “He’s scared. Of the case. Of the fallout.”
A beat.
“And he remembers what you have on him.”
Good.
I shift my gaze back to the screen showing Violet’s apartment. Ella is there now, moving through the space with restless energy, papers spread across the table. Violet’s relief when she walked through the door was instant—visible even to someone who didn’t know how to read her the way I do.
The police file sits open on the tablet beside me.
Witnesses claim Violet was at the penthouse.
Witnesses are wrong.
The timestamps don’t match. The descriptions don’t line up. Security footage places her across the river that night, inside her apartment, exactly where she said she was. Rinaldi’s people fed the cops a story and hoped no one would look too closely.
They underestimated me.
“They’re calling it circumstantial,” Mav says. “Weak. Sloppy. Rossi says it won’t hold—but it’ll still make noise.”
I let out a quiet, humorless breath. “Rinaldi poisoned his own play.”
“He wanted to drag you into the light,” Mav says. “Make the Order look reckless. Make it look like Zephyra was ours.”
“They wanted blood on my name,” I reply. “Instead, they exposed their reach.”
My eyes return to Violet. She’s holding the scholarship papers now—Langport’s seal stark against the table. Her hand tightens around them like they might disappear if she loosens her grip. She doesn’t see the threads yet. She doesn’t see how carefully this was laid.
The Scarlet Zephyr Group was easy to build. A clean shell. A believable benefactor. Quiet money placed exactly where it needed to be.
Ella’s future extracted from the blast radius forming around Violet.
She thinks it’s luck.
She needs to believe that.
If Violet knows I touched this, she’ll push back. She’ll dig in. She’ll refuse the help even as the walls close in.
I won’t let that happen.
“She’s still spiraling,” Mav notes, watching the same feed. “Cops rattled her.”
“They shouldn’t have touched her,” I say, voice flat.
Mav doesn’t argue.
Rinaldi made this move because he thought I’d hesitate. Because he thought I’d protect my image instead of my territory. Because he thought using Violet would force my hand.
He was right about one thing.
This will force my hand.
Ella leaves the room, calling something over her shoulder. Violet waits until she’s gone before her posture collapses, head dropping into her hands. The sight hits low and hard—a tight, dangerous pull in my chest.
