My phone buzzed.
The sound cut through the tension like a blade. I pulled back, already knowing from the specific pattern of the vibration — Daniel’s emergency signal — that it was nothing good.
The message on the screen made my blood run cold.
Transparency has consequences. She’s not the only target anymore. Your mother’s nursing home — lovely facility. Be a shame if something happened to it.
Victor.
Emilia must have seen my expression change, because her hand found my wrist, her grip tight enough to bruise.
“What is it?”
I showed her the screen. Watched her face harden into something dangerous and clear — the expression of a woman who had just been handed confirmation of everything she’d suspected.
“He’s threatening your mother.”
“He’s threatening everyone I care about.” I was already pulling back, my mind shifting into the cold operational mode I’d developed for exactly these moments — triage, prioritize, act. “I need to make calls. Security needs to be tripled at her facility tonight. She needs to be moved by morning.”
“Sebastian—”
“I know.” I took her face in my hands — briefly, carefully, the way you hold something you know you’re about to have to put down. “I know. But I need to do this now, and I need to do it alone, and I need you to go home and lock your door and let me handle the immediate threat.”
“That’s not?—”
“Not forever.” I pressed my lips to her forehead. “For tonight. One night. Let me do what I know how to do.”
She looked at me for a long moment, those hazel eyes calculating, weighing. Then something softened — not surrender, never that, but the specific grace of someone choosing to trust a process they didn’t fully agree with.
“One night,” she said. “Tomorrow morning we do this together.”
“Tomorrow morning,” I agreed.
She held my gaze for one more beat — long enough to tell me she meant it, long enough to tell me she expected me to mean it too. Then she picked up her bag, straightened her blazer, and walked to the elevator with the steady unhurried steps of a woman who had decided something and was at peace with the decision.
The doors closed.
I stood alone in the lounge with Victor’s threat glowing on my screen, the city spread out below me, and the weight of everything I’d just handed her — every secret, every wound,every carefully buried truth — pressing against my chest like something newly alive.
Everything I’d built was about to be tested.
This time, I wouldn’t be facing it alone.
I made the first call.
Chapter Fourteen
Emilia “Em” Rivera
I’d been awake since four in the morning.
Going home had been the right call — I’d known it even as I’d watched the Obsidian’s elevator doors close between us, even as I’d taken a cab back to Logan Square with the weight of Sebastian’s confessions sitting in my chest like something still settling. He’d needed to make calls. I’d needed to think. We’d both needed the space to process what the night had cracked open before we could figure out what to do with it.
What I hadn’t anticipated was that thinking would lead directly to Marco’s files, and Marco’s files would lead directly to four hours at my kitchen table with cold coffee and the growing certainty that this investigation was about to become something neither of us had fully prepared for.
The documents spread across the table told a story I hadn’t expected to find.
Marco had come through. The offshore account records he’d dug up painted Richard Hartley as exactly what Sebastian suspected: a puppet with expensive tastes and no loyalty. Wiretransfers to shell companies in the Caymans. Payments that coincided perfectly with the substandard concrete deliveries to the Lakefront project. A paper trail so damning it made my fingers itch for my keyboard.
