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Danny.

Yeah baby?

When you say "handle this," what does that mean exactly?

It means I'm going to find whoever pointed a journalist at the woman I'm falling for and I'm going to make them regret it with a thoroughness they won't recover from. It means I've spent four years building a club on the principle that staff are protected, and someone has just proven that the protection has a gap, and I'm going to close that gap so hard it welds shut.

It means I'm going to find out who did this and make sure it doesn't happen again.

That's vague.

It's accurate.

Those aren't the same thing and you know it.

She's right. They aren't. The truth is that Danny Sterling the boyfriend and Danny Sterling the man who destroys threats are different operating systems, and right now I'm booting up the second one.

Trust me?

A pause. Then:

I do. Just don't do anything that would make me not trust you.

I think about her face this morning. The pillow crease. The smudged mascara. The way she'd said hi over her coffee like it was the most natural thing in the world, like waking up in my bed was somewhere she could live.

I think about that, and I think about someone pointing a stranger at her building, and the two thoughts sit next to each other in my chest and the combination produces something cold and precise and very, very patient.

I dial Aries. Aries Pierce is an attorney of the legal kind, a fixer of the illegal kind, and all round morally gray man.

He picks up on the second ring. "Sterling. What do you need."

"Someone sent a journalist after a woman I'm... protecting. I need to find the source and I need the source dealt with. Completely fucking done."

"Define that for me."

"Every board. Every investment. Every club. Every social register. Every door that currently opens for them closes by Monday."

A beat.

"This connected to the Hargrove revocation?"

"That's my guess."

"So a man you banned for touching a waitress is now sending reporters to that same waitress's home." I can hear Aries doing what Aries does — assembling the picture, finding the angles, the pressure points, the places where a person's life can be disassembled with the right phone calls. "That's escalation. And escalation from a man who's already demonstrated poor judgment is a pattern. Patterns are useful."

"I need this done, Aries."

"Paperwork filed by tonight. He'll be radioactive by Monday lunch."

"Good."

"Danny?"

"What?"

"The woman. This is real?"

I look at my phone. Anna's last text. The trust she'd offered me alongside a boundary I intend to keep.