chapter 8

The city was still half-asleep when Ruth stepped onto the street.

Morning mist clung to her skin, cool and sharp, cutting through the haze in her head. 

Each step away from the hotel felt unreal, as though the night had fractured her sense of time. Her fingers trembled as she tightened the bathrobe around herself, not from cold, but from the weight of what she refused to look back at.

She did not run.

She walked.

Pride straightened her spine even as her body screamed. She had learned long ago that running invited pursuit. Walking told the world you were not afraid…. even when you were breaking apart from the inside.

****

Behind the tinted glass doors of the presidential suite, Leonard stood utterly still.

The room still smelled like smoke and heat and something disturbingly intimate. Torn fabric lay scattered like evidence no one would ever dare catalog. The silence was heavy now, unnatural after the chaos.

He stared at the door long after it had closed.

The cash remained where it had fallen.

White. Clean. Insulting. 

Leonard bent down slowly, picking up one bill between his fingers. His grip tightened, not enough to crumple it, but enough to crease it slightly.

A line.

A mark.

Just like the ones he couldn’t quite stop seeing in his mind.

He had built empires by controlling narratives by deciding what the world was allowed to see, believe, remember.

And yet last night had slipped through his fingers like smoke.

“Escort,”.... he repeated softly.

The word tasted wrong.

Derrick arrived less than twenty minutes later, his expression grim, tablet already in hand. He stopped short the moment he took in the state of the room.

“…Someone moved fast,” Derrick said carefully.

Leonard’s gaze never left the city beyond the window.. 

“Too fast,” he replied… 

Derrick swallowed. “The people who broke in weren’t paparazzi. Three of them have prior records: private event crashers, paid setups. They were tipped off anonymously.”

Leonard turned.

Slowly…. 

“Anonymous doesn’t exist,” he said quietly.

Derrick nodded. “There’s more.”

He tapped the screen, hesitating for half a second longer than usual.

“The woman,” Derrick continued, “Her name isn’t in any escort registry. 

No agency. No payment trail. No digital footprint consistent with that line of work.”

Leonard’s eyes narrowed.

“What is consistent?” he asked.

Derrick exhaled. “Debt. Medical bills. A younger brother was hospitalized three times in the last year. And….. ”

“Stop,” Leonard said.

Derrick froze…. 

Leonard’s jaw tightened, something dark flickering beneath his composed exterior.

“So she wasn’t sold,” Leonard murmured. “She was cornered…. ”

That realization landed heavier than anger.

Across the city, Ruth stood in front of a pharmacy window, her reflection staring back at her like a stranger. Pale. Bruised in places she couldn’t hide. But her eyes…. 

Still sharp… 

Still unbroken…. 

She pressed her palm against the glass, grounding herself, then pulled out her phone. Dozens of missed calls blinked on the screen.

Unknown numbers…. 

Private lines….. 

She deleted them all without listening.

Only one message remained unopened.

From an unknown ID…. 

“You shouldn’t have walked away.”

Her fingers hovered for a second…. Then she typed back.

“You shouldn’t have mistaken silence for weakness”.

She powered the phone off.

Back at Knight Enterprises, Leonard stood before the floor-to-ceiling windows of his office, city sprawling beneath him like a living board of pieces he usually controlled with ease.

But one piece had moved on its own.

And that was unacceptable… 

“Find her,” he said calmly.

Derrick hesitated. “And when we do?”

Leonard’s reflection stared back at him in the glass.. cold, precise, unmistakably dangerous.

“She thinks she paid for a night,” he said, with a mischievous smile. 

“Make sure she understands the debt hasn’t even begun.”

But as Derrick turned to leave, Leonard’s hand curled slowly at his side.

Because beneath the fury, beneath the insult to his pride, something far more dangerous had taken root.. 

Curiosity.

And the unsettling truth that for the first time in years, someone had touched his world…

and walked away alive.