“Fair enough.”
“Em.” A beat. “Whatever happens with the article, whatever the fallout — you matter more to me than any headline. I need you to know that.”
My throat tightened. “Don’t make promises you might not keep.”
He laughed, low and humorless. “That’s the problem. With you, I seem to keep making them anyway.”
The call ended.
I stood in the middle of my kitchen, phone pressed against my sternum, staring at the ceiling while Chicago moved indifferently outside my windows. Five years of rebuilding. One month of something real. And now a twelve-hour countdown to a story designed to make the real thing look like the corrupt thing.
The unfairness of it moved through me like something corrosive, looking for weak points.
I grabbed my bag. Sitting here wasn’t changing anything, and doubt was exactly what they wanted me swimming in. I needed to move. To think. To do something that wasn’t waiting for the next threat to arrive.
I called Marco. He picked up on the second ring.
“I need everything you can find on Richard Hartley’s offshore accounts,” I said without preamble. “Every transaction, every shell company, every name connected to the payments.”
Marco’s hesitation was brief but weighted. “Em, that’s dangerous territory. The people involved?—”
“I know exactly who’s involved. That’s why I’m asking.”
A long pause. “What happened?”
“They’re trying to bury me. Publishing an article tomorrow that paints me as a gold-digger sleeping my way to access.”
“Christ.”
“Yeah.” I shouldered my bag, purpose hardening into something clean. “So I’m going to bury them first. You in?”
Marco’s sigh held years of exhaustion and the particular weariness of a man who’d seen too much corruption to believe in clean victories. But when he spoke, his voice was steady.
“Send me what you’ve got. I’ll see what I can dig up.”
“Thank you.”
“Em?” A pause. “Be careful. These people don’t play by rules.”
“Neither do I. Not anymore.”
I was halfway to the door when I noticed the envelope.
Someone had slipped it under my threshold while I’d been distracted. Plain white. No return address. My name in precise, anonymous script across the front.
My hands were steady when I opened it. I’d decided, somewhere between the phone call and the article and Marco’s voice on the line, that I wasn’t going to let them have my hands.
Inside: a photograph and a note.
The photo showed me leaving Sebastian’s building two nights ago — after the car, after everything, my hair still loose, my expression soft in ways I hadn’t realized were visible from the outside. Private. Unguarded. The violation of it was specific and deliberate and designed to tell me that nowhere was safe.
The note contained three words:
Leave now, Emilia.
I stared at it for a long moment.
Then I folded it carefully, tucked it into my bag alongside the evidence I’d been building for a month, and walked out of my apartment into the February cold.
