She shivers in my arms. "You don't have to?—"
"I do," I cut in quietly. "Because you and Jace are mine. And because both of you matter more than anything I've built on my own."
Her mouth opens like she wants to argue, then closes again. Her fingers curl into my shirt, holding on.
I kiss her forehead, slow and steady. "You hear me?"
She nods into my chest, voice barely a whisper. "Yeah."
"Good," I murmur, tightening my hand on her thigh. "Because I'm not letting some jealous coward breathe near you again."
22
GABE
"We should get home." Lena's voice is soft and drowsy, and her cheeks glow as she sighs against my chest.
"Yeah." I stroke her cheek once more. "But I want you to hear this before we move."
She looks at me, waiting.
"I'm going to find something on him," I say. "Something clean, something real. One thing that puts him back in whatever hole he crawled out of. And I'll do it without dragging you through hell."
Her throat works. "You'll tell me what it is?"
"When it's done." I kiss her slowly, and she leans into it. "You don't need more stress. Just trust me."
She nods, tired but sure. "Okay."
I help her straighten her dress. She fixes her hair, cheeks pink, lips bitten. She looks like she just got wrecked in an SUV behind an abandoned strip mall, which is… accurate. I brush my thumbalong her jaw again before I climb into the front seat. She sits next to me now, flushed but composed. "You'll text me when you're home?" she asks.
"You can count on it."
I walk her to her door when we get back. She kisses me once, lingering like she doesn't want to let go, then slips inside. I hear voices and then the sitter laughs about something, and she responds with a little giggle of her own. Smiling to myself, I wait until the light in her bedroom comes on, then head out to where I left my car. Once I'm there, I get in and head home.
And now I let my mind settle into the place it used to live before Lena and Jace. Before I remembered what normal people look like when they're happy.
My focus now is on intel, and nothing else. I sit at the table, crack my knuckles, and pull out my laptop. Hotspot on. Screen up. I key in the name I've already pulled from the phone messages she showed me.
Tom Easton.
I hate his face already and I still haven't seen it.
I open three browser tabs and start running my usual back-end sweeps. Not hacking—just using the public traces the average idiot forgets exist. Half the world leaves digital footprints the size of tank tracks. Tom is no exception.
The first sweep covers the basics—phone number, email, any old usernames tied to either. I plug them into a few search tools, nothing fancy, just the kind of thing I used to do on bored stakeout nights when command needed dirt on a local informant.
He's sloppy. Every username links to another, each one recycled across sites he probably forgot he ever made accounts on. There's no separation between his personal email and his throwaway one. The man treats the internet like a laundry basket—everything goes in one pile and he hopes nobody notices the stains.
Within five minutes, I have his old dating profiles up on my screen. Not one. Not two.
Three.
All active.
He calls himself "self-made" and also claims to be "great with kids" and "looking for a partner who's serious about the future"—yet somehow, shockingly, he remains single because he's been "taken advantage of".
I keep scrolling, my jaw grinding. He calls himself "emotionally mature", too— interesting choice of words for a man who's been threatening Lena over voicemail like a kid trying to start a rumor in a school hallway.
