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“I hear myself just fine.”

There it was.

The shit underneath the polished suits and professional voice.

Yonas wasn’t some helpless executive who had gotten caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was calculating.

Maybe not Caspian Black calculating, but enough to know how to move pieces around a board and let somebody else take the first fall if it kept him standing.

I smiled without humor.

The man on the phone went quiet for a second before changing subjects. “So where you staying while you’re down there?”

“With Lakelyn.”

“Lakelyn?” The surprise in his voice was immediate. “Your ex?”

Yonas frowned. “Yeah. You know another one?”

“Nah. I’m just saying, I didn’t think she’d let your ass stay with her after y’all broke up.”

Yonas walked toward the bedroom door and checked the hallway again before easing it shut.

“She ain’t heartless. I told her what was going on with work, and she let me stay through the weekend.”

The man gave a low laugh. “Don’t you mean the lie you told her? Then again, Lakelyn always was a sweet girl… probably too damn sweet for her own good. If she knew you weren’t some innocent executive getting railroaded at work and yo’ ass had been right there benefiting from the same bullshit as the rest of us, she probably would’ve sent you straight to a hotel.”

I slowly turned my head toward Yonas.

Oh, this nigga is worse than I thought.

Yonas lowered his voice. “That’s business. It ain’t got shit to do with me and Lakelyn.”

“It became personal when you walked into her house and gave her some cleaned-up version of why yo’ ass was in trouble.”

Thank you.

“I didn’t ask her to save me. She offered me somewhere to stay for a few days.”

“Because knowing you, yo’ ass probably made it sound like you were catching hell behind everybody else’s decisions. You think she would’ve made the same offer if you’d told her the truth from the jump?”

Yonas didn’t answer.

“Exactly,” the man said. “You knew what you were doing.”

My jaw tightened.

That settled it. Yonas knew what kind of woman Lakelyn was, and he had given her exactly enough of the truth to make sure her sympathy landed where he wanted it.

Yonas rubbed his jaw. “Lakelyn don’t need to know every detail of what I do at work.”

“There’s a difference between keeping work shit to yourself and letting somebody believe you’re innocent when you know damn well you ain’t.”

Yonas didn’t respond.

The man let out a short laugh. “Whatever. That’s between you and her. I still don’t understand why you’re even staying there. You went down for a Halloween party, not to move back in.”

“I already told you, she let me stay through the weekend.”