He shrugged. “So, tell me again. It might help.”
She hesitated. Then she took a deep breath and started sharing. “My mother testified against a financial syndicate that thought they were untouchable. Shell companies stacked inside shell companies. Offshore laundering and political payoffs. She was an accountant for one of their front operations, and she figured it out by accident. Then she found that video.”
Bobby sipped his coffee, just letting her speak.
“She tried to walk away. At first they tried to bribe her, give her a cut to keep quiet. When that didn’t work, they sent threats, men who sat in cars across the street, even tried to snatch me at school.”
“You said it happened while I was at football practice. I wish you would’ve told me all this was going on.”
“I didn’t want them to go after you, and your mom was already so sick…” She sighed, shaking her head. “But now I wished I would have told you too. Then you would’ve at least known what happened to me.”
Her reflection stared back at her from the glass as she stared at the window. “Anyway, my mother went to the feds regardless of everything happening. Or maybe because of it. Who knows?”
She blew out a slow breath, the memory of it all tightening a knot in her stomach. It was as if it all was happening again and she was on the verge of losing everything.
“They moved fast after that. Marshals showed up at our door at two in the morning. Told us to pack one bag each. Said we had thirty minutes and then told us more of what we couldn’t take rather than what we could.”
Her voice didn’t break. She had done that enough already. “I remember standing in my bedroom trying to decide what version of myself I could keep. I grabbed a hoodie and a photo of you from prom night and left everything else behind.” A devilish grin slipped across her face. “They still don’t know I took the picture. I still have it, tucked away in my room.”
She glanced over at him, his face soft, smiling.
“I watched strangers inventory our lives while my father signed forms with shaking hands. I watched my mother apologize to my sister and me like it was her fault.” She turned then, feeling crestfallen. “Bobby, I watched my childhood get erased in real time, and there was nothing I could do about it.”
He didn’t move. Nor did he interrupt, for which she was glad. She didn’t think she could keep talking if he did. He didn’t even try to fix it, probably knowing there was no way he could.
She kept going.
“They changed our names. Our schools. Our everything. I learned to make myself smaller. Learned not to get attached. Learned that disappearing was safer than staying, but it hurt like hell.”
Her chest tightened. “And then I became Delaney Mae Rhodes.”
Bobby set his cup down and reached across the table to take her hand in his, still not speaking.
“I stopped apologizing for surviving a long time ago,” she said. “But sometimes it still feels like I don’t get to exist unless someone else signs off on it. You don’t know the headache I had starting my own company, the concessions I had to make, like someone else pretending to be me in the public eye.”
He squeezed her hand, rubbing the back with his thumb. “You exist,” he said. “With or without their permission.”
Her throat burned, and she gave him a curt nod, too choked up to speak anymore.
Later, she set up at the small desk near the window, Blaze patched in remotely, her laptop balanced on a stack of old paperbacks Callen had left behind. She traced Serrano’s shell companies through layers of corporate camouflage, following money the way others followed blood trails.
She refused to sit idle, refused to be cargo while someone else did all the work to protect her. She was finished being a passenger in her own life.
Every connection she mapped gave her something solid to hold.
Bobby stayed nearby, cleaning weapons, checking sightlines, letting her work without hovering.
By the afternoon, her eyes burned, and her shoulders ached, but something inside her had shifted.
She wasn’t running anymore.
She was standing.
And for the first time in a long time, she stopped apologizing for that. It was her life, and she was taking it back.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
THE CALL CAME THROUGH just after noon, after Elvis received a text telling him to expect it. He had been standing near the cabin’s front windows, watching Delaney move slowly across the small clearing while Abe cleaned up breakfast inside and Donovan paced the porch like a caged animal.
