All Chapters of When He Begs Me To Stay: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

Sleep has stopped being real and the nights were long sheets of silence, the kind that presses on your chest while waiting for you to break first. The abandoned building creaked and shifted with every gust of wind, each sound making me flinch as if it knew I was here and, the rain slipped through the cracks in the roof, collecting in quiet puddles. I laid the burner phonr on the floor beside my mattress, the only thing that still connected me to the world i walked away from. I stared at it until my eyes blurred, then shifted my gaze to the laptop which lines of code filled the screen and the blueprint of my revenge. It had taken me days to stitch everything together, the trail of hidden accounts, shell companies, off-the-books transfers that Killian built when we were still one team, one dream. I knew every corner of that empire because I helped build it. Now I was going to dismantle it, one at a time. My fingers hovered above the keyboard and for a second, I couldn’t move.

The laptop’s glow painted my face in cold light, the kind that made everything look too honest. I hadn’t slept, not really and the air in this new apartment was thin, smelling of damp walls and exhaustion, plus my hands wouldn’t stop shaking no matter how tightly I pressed them together. Lucas had left an hour ago to check the exit routes. He moved like someone who’d learned to survive by never saying more than he had to and when he left, he said, “If you’re doing it tonight, do it clean.” I told him I always did things clean. It was a lie, but he didn’t call me out and on the screen was the folder that could set the world on fire. A mess of voice notes, emails, and hidden files I’d dug out of Grayson’s archive. They weren’t just proof of Killian’s affair, they were evidence that he’d faked financial audits, laundered through shell companies, and shifted blame to my name to cover it all. Everything I lost, my reputation, my company, my freedom, was the shield he

It started with a sound I almost mistook for thunder, that heavy, rolling crack that rattled windows and made the air feel tight, like something was holding its breath, but this wasn’t thunder because thunder dosen’t come with the glass shattering and the high-pitched ring that followed a bullet slicing through the air. My stomach dropped at the sharp smell of gunpowder that hit me, and in that moment, I realized all the precautions, the abandoned locations, the fake names, had meant nothing if someone had already found us. “Down, Ava!” Lucas shouted, shoving me down before I even realized what was happening, with his sharp commanding voice, cutting through the chaos like a lifeline. I hit the floor as another shot tore through the window frame, with splinters spraying across my arms, my heart hammering in rhythm with the violence outside. I crawled toward him with my palms scraping against the concrete, and shards biting at my skin, I pressed against him as he crouched

Lucas hadn’t slept in two days and his bandaged shoulder bled through again, but he waved off every attempt I made to help. He just sat there with his jaw locked and eyes on the flickering burner phone lying between us. The message glowed like sunlight. “You hide well, but not well enough.”For hours, none of us spoke, the silence wasn’t peace — it was waiting, the kind that settles when you know something’s coming, but you can’t tell from where. Grayson broke it first. “It’s not just a threat, they are tracking movement, just something physical they can’t know this much unless they’re close.”Lucas shifted, grimacing from the pain. “We burned every trace, the sims, the cameras, even the car. Whoever this is…”“…already had eyes inside before we ran,” I cut in with my voice sharper. Lucas turned towards me slowly, like he wanted to argue but didn’t have the strength. “You think I—” “I didn’t say that.” The look he gave me said he’d heard the

The elevator groaned like it knew what was coming. I pressed my hand to the cold metal with my heart beating fast and pulse syncing with the quiet thrum of the machinery. Lucas leaned against the wall, with his breathing shallow and each step toward this moment was a testament to his stubbornness and pain. I glanced at him, wanting to tell him to rest and to let me carry the weight of this, but the fire in his eyes stopped me. He was here because he had to be and he refused to be sidelined. Grayson’s voice, low and steady, cut through the tension. “We hit the server room first. Anything we uncover there will guide us to the main control. Killian won’t see this coming.” I swallowed hard, letting my grip tighten on the burner phone. Every document we’d traced, every transfer, every shadowed connection led here and yet knowing how precise Killian was, how careful he’d been, my stomach twisted with the certainty that there would be traps, both digital and ph