LOGINNot really having any destination in mind, I fished my phone out of my pocket and thumbed through to Lex’s number with fingers that wouldn’t stop shaking. It rang twice before he picked up. “Yo,” he answered, voice muffled like he had the phone wedged between shoulder and ear while he was doing something else. “Where are you?” I asked. “What?” “I’m asking where the fuck are you right now?” I repeated, sharper this time, my frustration bleeding through. “Um… I’m at the dive bar on 14th, the one with the shitty pool table and the bartender who never cards anyone,” Lex answered after a beat, his tone shifting from distracted to slightly more alert, like he could hear the edge in my voice and knew better than to fuck around. “Ellis is here too. Why? You sound like hell, man. What’s going on?” I didn’t answer right away. I just sat there in the driver’s seat with the engine rumbling under me, snowflakes melting on the windshield faster than the wipers could clear them, turning the
I tossed the USB drive at them like it was radioactive garbage, watching it arc through the dim warehouse air before smacking into their open palm with a dull plastic thud that echoed off the rusted girders overhead. My ribs pulled tight with the motion, sending a fresh spike of pain through my side that made me grit my teeth so hard I tasted blood again, but I didn’t give a fuck. The drive was out of my possession now, and that tiny act of release felt like shedding a layer of skin. They caught it without blinking, fingers closing around the black rectangle like they’d been waiting their whole life for this exact moment. Their face was half-shadowed by the weak sodium light leaking through the broken windows, but I could see the corner of their mouth twitch upward in a cold, satisfied. “You don’t look so good,” they said, voice amused. I didn’t answer. Didn’t have the energy for their bullshit small talk. Just stood there breathing through my teeth while they turned the dr
I couldn’t go out the way I came in; the hallway was too open and the stairs were too visible from the foyer. But fortunately for me the study had a secondary narrow door, almost hidden behind the floor-to-ceiling shelves on the east wall that connected to the private corridor leading to the service stairs. Gage had installed it years ago for “discreet meetings,” which everyone knew meant mistresses and shady business partners. I’d used it exactly once as a teenager, sneaking out after curfew to meet some girl whose name I couldn’t even remember now.I moved toward it, every step measured so my boots wouldn’t squeak on the hardwood. My good hand stayed braced against the bookshelf for balance; the sling kept my left arm pinned uselessly across my chest. Pain ripped out from my shoulder in hot, vicious fucking waves, but adrenaline was screaming louder, drowning the shit out of it.The secondary door was concealed behind a false panel that looked like just another section of shelving
NOAH°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:・ I stepped back into the penthouse, the door closing behind me with that heavy thud that always sounded too final. The place was too fucking quiet for my liking, pressing against my eardrums and making me hear my own pulse louder than anything else in the room. No Mrs. Harlan puttering in the kitchen, no faint clink of dishes, no soft radio playing those old boleros she loved. Just the low hum of the HVAC and the distant city drone leaking through the glass.Lucky, my father wasn’t home.Lucky, Thea wasn’t here either.The silence felt almost obscene after everything that had happened.I stood in the foyer for a long moment, coat still hanging off one shoulder because getting both arms into it hurt too much, sling digging into my neck like a noose I’d tied myself. My boots left wet smears on the marble but I didn’t fucking care. I didn’t have the energy to care about floors or messes or anything that wasn’t the burning need to get this over with.They had been very cl
Dr. Harlan wasn’t that type of person.The thought hit me so hard I almost laughed. Hilarious wasn’t it.Here I was, standing in his ex-wife’s driveway, watching her scream about how he “collected broken girls” and “enjoyed talking to them,” and all I could think was how fucking wrong she was. He wasn’t a predator and he certainly wasn’t a collector. He was… good. Quietly, stubbornly, infuriatingly good. The kind of good that sat with my worst days for fifty minutes at a time and never once made me feel small. The kind of good that had let me fall apart in a park and still tried to hold the pieces. I trusted him.Even now—especially now—I trusted him.And that trust made Lisa’s accusations feel like nothing but a ugly static, loud, but a far cry from the truth.I stepped forward, putting myself between them without thinking. “You don’t know him,” I pressed on, looking straight at Lisa. “You think he’s some kind of predator because he listens to women who are hurting? Because he
“Experience?” “Yes,” he let out quietly, almost reluctant, like the word itself tasted bitter on his tongue. “Lisa was five years older than me.” I frowned so hard my forehead hurt. The math wasn’t mathing at all. “Caleb is twenty-nine,” I said slowly, like maybe he’d misheard the year or forgotten how numbers worked. “That means… you were seventeen when he was born.” He didn’t flinch. Didn’t bother to deny it. Just looked at me with those steady eyes. “Is Caleb your biological son?” I pressed, voice dropping lower because the question felt too big and impossible to fit into the space between us. “Yes.” My frown deepened until it felt like my whole face might crack. “That doesn’t make sense. You were seventeen!” He stayed silent, eyes fixed somewhere over my left shoulder like the neighbor’s fence had suddenly become the most interesting thing in the world. “You were groomed!” I exclaimed, the words bursting out louder than I meant them to, raw and furious and horrifie
NOAH°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:・I stumbled out of Mia’s apartment building, the door slamming shut behind me like a final fuck-you from the universe. The cold air hit me like a brick wall, slicing through my coat and straight into my bones, but I barely felt it. Honestly? I don’t feel a fucking thing anymore.The
I pushed myself to my feet using the crumpled hood for balance. The car was fucked. Totaled. With the frame bent and fluids leaking dark onto the snow. My blood was on the steering wheel, on the doorframe, and smeared across the airbag that had finally deployed after the second impact.“Fuck,”
I let out a small, embarrassed giggle, the sound wobbly and half-hearted. “Well, that’s unbecoming.”He didn’t laugh, but the corners of his eyes crinkled. “Well, you don’t have to be composed right now, Mia.”I exhaled and dropped the ruined tissues into the empty coffee cup. The cold dregs sloshe
I opened my eyes to white.And a thin curtain drawn halfway around the bed, letting in slivers of pale daylight from a window I couldn’t yet see.My mind was preoccupied with how wrong my body felt.Like someone had poured concrete into my veins while I slept. My fucking left arm was strapped tigh







