CHAPTER SIXTEEN

MARA

I want to be clear about something: I did not go to the coffee shop to talk to Knox Blackthorn. I went to the coffee shop to get an Americano and maybe a croissant if they still had the good ones, and Knox Blackthorn was sitting alone at the corner table looking like he was thinking about something that weighed about four hundred pounds.

I sat down across from him.

He looked at me.

"Mara," he said.

"Knox," I said.

The waitress came. I ordered the Americano. Knox had coffee already and it looked like he'd been there a while.

I've been in Riley's corner since the second year in Seattle, which means I've been in her corner for most of the important parts. I was there when she found out she was pregnant and sat on my kitchen floor for two hours without saying anything. I was there when she worked thirty-hour weeks seven months in because there was no other option. I was in the waiting room alone the night she delivered early — thirty-six weeks, small hospital, two in the morning, and the nurses kept asking if someone was coming and I kept saying I was who was coming because there wasn't anyone else.

Knox didn't know any of that. I knew he didn't know because if he'd known he would've looked like this a lot earlier.

I told him.

I told him the whole year. The pregnancy alone, the almost-miscarriage at seven months that the doctor said was stress-related and which Riley had dismissed with a wave of her hand and immediately gone back to work because what else was she going to do. I told him about the delivery. The waiting room. The drive home in my car with a baby in each arm because we couldn't afford a cab and the car seats were borrowed and everything was borrowed and improvised and held together by Riley's complete refusal to fall apart.

He didn't say anything while I talked. He didn't interrupt, didn't make the sounds people make when they're listening performatively. He just listened. By the end his hands were flat on the table in front of him, very still, in the way I've come to understand is Knox Blackthorn's version of barely keeping it together.

"How much does she owe you?" he asked.

I looked at him.

"For the rent coverage, the babysitting, whatever you covered. Tell me the number."

"I didn't do it for money."

"I know." He held my gaze. "I'm paying it anyway."

I looked at him for a long moment. Revised some things.

"She knows about Selene," I said. "Riley. She googled her. She's not scared — but Riley's version of not scared is the one you should be worried about, because Riley's version of not scared means she's already making a plan and she doesn't feel obligated to tell you what it is."

Something moved through his expression. "What do you mean she's making a plan."

"I mean she's been a target long enough that she's very good at threat assessment. You should tell her everything you know about Selene. Everything. She'll do more with complete information than you'll do protecting her from incomplete information."

He was quiet.

"Also," I said. "Damien's been in her property files. He had a conversation with her landlord that wasn't about her lease. I know because the landlord called me by accident — he had my number from when I used to handle her rental payments the first year."

Knox looked at me for a moment, then picked up his phone.

"Thank you," he said.

"Don't thank me," I said. "I'm not doing this for you either. I'm doing this because she's been alone with this for a long time and she's stubborn enough to keep being alone with it if nobody tells her she doesn't have to be."

The door opened. Grayson walked in — big, cheerful, running on the particular energy of a man who hadn't yet encountered a morning bad enough to dim him — and stopped when he saw us.

"Oh," he said. "Hi."

"Grayson," I said.

"Mara." He said it like my name was a word he was still working out the pronunciation of, which was not because he didn't know how to say it. He sat down.

He said something. I answered it concisely and without softening it. He paused, recalibrated, and sat down anyway.

I chose not to tell him to leave.

I thought about Knox on the way home. About the way he'd said Hunter's name when the twins were first introduced — *Hunter* — like it was a word he'd been waiting his whole life to know. Like the name of something he'd lost and then been handed back.

He was exactly as dangerous as advertised, Knox Blackthorn. The elders were right to be nervous about him, the rogues were right to want leverage over him, and Selene was right to think he needed removing from the board if she wanted what she wanted.

What none of them had accounted for was that he was also exactly the kind of dangerous that Riley Harper specifically needed, and I was rooting for him for that reason alone, and I was going to keep being in her corner which now, apparently, overlapped with his.

Fine.