“I need your resources. Your reach. I need to get her to Boston, and she needs to be untraceable.”
Paxton leans back in his chair. His fingers tap once on the armrest and then stop.
“Are you okay?”
Three words. Three simple words. And they break me into a thousand pieces.
My eyes burn and I look away.
“No,” I say. “I haven’t been okay in a long time.”
He nods once. Doesn’t push. Doesn’t try to comfort me, because Paxton doesn’t know how to do that, and we both know it. But he reaches for his phone, and when he speaks again, his voice has shifted. The brother is gone. The CEO is here. The man who runs an empire and dismantles problems with the efficiency of a surgeon.
I watch him work, my mind tumbling from relief that I’ve shared this burden and fear that I’ve just made everything worse.
“Two days,” he says. “I’ll have a car that can’t be traced. A property in Boston that’s not in any Calloway name. Cash, not cards. New phones. I’ll set up a security detail that reports directly to me.” He pauses. “And Lance?”
“Yeah?”
“When this is over, you and I are going to have a much longer conversation about our father.”
It’s not warmth, exactly. It’s not a hug or a declaration. But it’s Paxton’s version of “I love you.” It’s a promise that he’s going to handle this, and a warning that whoever did this will pay.
“Thank you, Pax.” My voice cracks.
“Don’t thank me yet.” He stands, buttoning his jacket. “Thank me when you’re out.”
He moves toward the door, then stops. Without turning around:
“Six years?”
“Six years.”
His hand tightens on the doorknob, and his shoulders drop just enough for me to see the weight land.
Then he straightens and walks out.
I stand in his office alone, my knuckles bleeding from whereI smashed them against the stone, the sounds of the party filtering through the walls.
In the main room, my best friend’s fiancée is wearing a ring she doesn’t want.
And in two days, I’m getting her out of here.
Chapter 36
Lance
I find her in the garden.
Not the manicured part with the topiaries and the fountain where guests sometimes wander with their champagne. The back garden, past the hedge wall, where the Calloway estate bleeds into old-growth trees and the landscape lighting doesn’t reach. There’s a stone bench tucked into an alcove of ivy that Jules and I used to hide in as kids when the house got too loud.
Genevieve is sitting on it, her teal dress pooling around her like water, her shoes kicked off into the grass. The ring catches the moonlight every time she moves her hand, and she keeps looking at it like she’s waiting for it to disappear.
She hears me before she sees me.
“If you’re here to tell me I did the right thing, I don’t want to hear it.”
“I’m not.”
