Page 5 of Make Them Pay

My thumb brushes the edge of it and we both go still. We’re close enough that I see the gold flecks in her green eyes and feel her breath warm against my wrist. For years I’ve dodged this moment.

I pull back and stand, the chair suddenly feeling like a pitiful barrier between us.

“Get some sleep,” I say. “I’ll watch.”

“Render.”

“Yeah?”

She opens her mouth, then closes it. Something passes through her eyes that I can’t quite read and it bugs me. I’ve studied her from safe distances for years. “Thank you,” she breathes.

I nod, grabbing a blanket and dropping it by the door. The concrete is going to be miserable, but that’s fine. It’ll keep me sharp.

She lies down fully clothed, curling up facing me with her knees pulled up and one hand tucked under the pillow. The dim light catches her raw wrists. I look away.

I stretch out on the floor with my knife close and stare at the ceiling. I listen to her breathe, catching every inhale and every small shift.

Sleep won’t come and I don’t expect it. I lie here with the woman I’ve wanted for years just ten feet away and think about Poe bleeding somewhere, Serafina’s bored voice promising ruin, and the way Enley’s pulse felt under my fingers earlier.

She’s not fine.

Neither am I.

But she’s alive. Tonight that’s enough. Tomorrow we plan. Tomorrow we fight.

Right now I listen to her breathe and let that be enough.

2

Enley

I don’t sleep.

I close my eyes because he’s watching and I don’t want him to see the storm inside my head. If I look calm and rational, maybe I can buy myself enough time to actually process everything that’s happened. But behind my eyelids my brain races the way it always does when I feel cornered. I’m not thinking about the room or the man in it. I know this place is safe. I know Render is safe. I have known Render James for years. I’ve watched him at crew dinners and in crowded lofts, noticing the way he moves through spaces with confidence, seeing everything while disturbing nothing. He’s Poe’s best friend. He’s the person my brother trusts with secrets he won’t name. He would never hurt me.

That’s not the problem.

The problem is that I’m lying in a bed in a cabin in the woods while my brother sits in a cell somewhere, and the reason he’s there is because of me.

Render doesn’t know this yet. Nobody does, except Poe, who figured it out six months ago and buried the evidence instead of confronting me. That’s what Poe does. He protects. He absorbs the weight of everyone else’s mistakes and carries it because his love is stubborn and his instinct to shield the people he cares about runs bone-deep.

The truth is simple and ugly. I’ve been running my own secret operations against Goldenbell for months. Not approved. Not authorized. Just me, from my apartment in the middle of the night, digging into places I was never supposed to touch. I started because Poe wouldn’t let me in. Years of hearing it’s too dangerous and you don’t need to be involved. Years of watching my brother and his friends do work that mattered while I stayed on the other side of the wall he built out of love.

So I stopped asking. I taught myself. When I was good enough, I began using what I knew. I found weaknesses in Serafina’s world. I gathered information that confirmed everything the crew already suspected. I was careful at first. Then I got reckless. Effective and reckless are not mutually exclusive, and I crossed that line months ago.

Serafina noticed the disturbances. She traced them back to Poe’s network because my work carried traces that connected to the Maddox systems. My fingerprints led her to Poe. Poe led her to the crew. And now everyone’s in cells because I was too skilled to stop and too stubborn to ask for help.

Poe found out six months ago. He didn’t yell. He didn’t shut me down. He quietly built contingency plans around the possibility that my actions would blow up in all our faces. One of those plans included Render. The failsafe. The person he trusted to come get me when everything went wrong.

And now here I am, in a bed in a cabin, while Render lies on the floor and my brother sits chained somewhere, protecting the secret that I’m the reason everything fell apart.

The mattress smells like clean laundry and faint dust. The sheets are fresh, which means Render prepared this place in advance. Poe planned for this. My brother spent months expecting the disaster I created and chose to build an exit strategy instead of telling me to stop.

I can’t lie here anymore.

The thought hits me with sharp clarity. Poe’s in a cell because of me. The crew is locked up because of me. And Render, for all his loyalty and careful planning, still thinks I’m just the innocent sister who got taken as leverage. He’s got no idea I’m the cause.

He thinks I’m a victim. A package he carried out of that warehouse. If I stay here and let him protect me the way Poe’s been protecting me, I’ll only make the same mistake again. Someone else carrying the weight of my choices.