Chapter Twenty-Seven
MILA
The smell of coffee pulled me out of sleep before the sunlight did—dark, rich, familiar, promising a normal morning I didn’t trust.
I pushed off the couch, my arm light where Luke’s weight had been.
He’d left sometime in the night, tugging the blanket over me before he went.
A line where his body had warmed the cushion cooled under my palm.
The house held the kind of quiet that felt staged—no TV murmuring from a bedroom, no clatter of pans. Just the coffee.
Then a hard crack split the silence, followed by an ugly, splintering thunk. I flinched—my knee clipping the coffee table. The next sound was fast, steel on something small and breakable. Another. Another. Finality punched into the stillness.
I crossed the hall barefoot, heartbeat lodged in my throat.
Mom stood at the kitchen counter, hair in a knot that had lost the fight, robe hanging open over a tank and shorts.
One hand braced on the butcher block. The other clenched a hammer.
On the cutting board in front of her, black shards glinted—plastic, metal, the guts of something once whole.
Her breath came quick, eyes glassy, mouth set.
She exhaled, shoulders dropping when she spotted me. Then she swept the pieces with her free hand, fingers shaking, and dumped them into the trash as if the can could erase what had existed a minute ago.
Unease slid under my skin, a cold, crawling thing. “What did you do?”
She stilled. The hammer hung loose at her side, as if she’d only just noticed what she held. “Something that needed doing.”
“What was it?”
A pause. A small lift of her chin I recognized from every time she wanted me to stop asking questions—don’t push me. “Old files—from when I worked for King.”
The lie landed wrong. Not the words—those were neat, chosen—but the way she delivered them. Tight. Careful. Not looking directly at me. “Old files on a… thumb drive?”
My gaze tracked the trash—the scatter of black bits on top of a layer of coffee grounds. The hammer clinked as she set it on the counter. Her voice steadied by force. “There are things that shouldn’t exist anymore, Mila—things that could hurt us.”
Darren’s name ran cold through me. The PI’s report still burned behind my eyes—deposits from Dunn Industries into Darren’s account in the weeks before he went missing. The sale of his house. The money moved neat as a blade. Then nothing. No withdrawals. No sightings. Just silence and a tidy ledger.
“Who would hurt us?” I asked.
Her lips thinned. “Anyone who thought we were in the way.” She moved to the sink, turned on the water, and rinsed the cutting board clean of the small, leftover bits of black plastic. Steam curled up. She didn’t meet my eyes. “It wasn’t mine to keep.”
“You kept it anyway.” The words scraped out before I could soften them.
A muscle jumped in her cheek. “When I left King Enterprises, I took what I could to protect you. That hasn’t changed.”
The room shrank around me. The lemon cleaner on the counters burned my nose. Sun found the metal rim of the trash can and turned one jagged shard into a mean little star.
“Protect me from who?” My voice roughened. “From Dunn? From the Kings?”
Her shoulders tightened at the names. “From anyone who thought you were an easy pressure point.”
My mind flashed to Elise on the edge of Tori’s living room—red lipstick and hunger in her eyes, the way she’d watched Avery crumble.
The hissed phone call I’d overheard after school months ago: “I’m trying!
He’s chasing her—what do you want me to do, drug him?
” Back then, the target had seemed to be Luke—or I’d thought it had.
Yesterday, Elise had chosen the closest wound, and it had harmed us.
“Was that Darren’s drive?” I asked, barely above a whisper.
Her hand stilled on the faucet, but she didn’t turn it off. Water ran and ran, drilling the basin. The sound filled the space between us.
“His name is in a lot of places,” she answered at last—not yes, not no. “And names get people killed.”
“It’s already gotten people hurt,” I pressed, pulse climbing. “There were deposits into his account from Dunn. Before he disappeared. We saw them—Luke showed me. If that drive had anything tied to that—”
“Then it shouldn’t be here,” she cut in, sharper than she’d meant to. She shut the water off and turned, finally meeting my eyes. “Do you understand me? It should not be in this house.”
“Because Dunn would come for it?”
“Because everyone would.” She stepped closer, fingers damp. “You think King doesn’t have people who would turn this place inside out? You think Dunn doesn’t already have a way to get in?”
The floor might as well have tilted. My back hit the doorframe. “Did you double-cross them?” The question tasted metallic in my mouth. “Did you double-cross the Kings?”
Her mouth parted—offended and wounded at once. “I protected us.”
“That isn’t a no.”
“It’s the only answer that matters.”
I stared at the trash. The black grit of plastic looked harmless there, almost ordinary. Something a child could pluck out by accident. Something to empty without noticing.
My voice slipped low. “Who was Mr. Langley?”
Mom’s face didn’t move—only her eyes. “Darren? You knew him.”
“No. Mr. Langley.”
A slightest flicker—as if tracking a memory she’d buried deep. “Where did you hear that name?”
“Elise,” I forced out. “On the phone—she used it when she thought she was alone.”
Careful as threading a needle, she said, “You need to leave that alone.”
“Was it Darren’s?”
“Don’t ask me that.”
“Mom.”
The word shook something in her. She pressed her fingers to her mouth then dropped them. “The more you stay out of things, the safer you are. Do you hear me?”
Safe felt as if it belonged in a children’s book—pretty, useless. “You smashed evidence in our kitchen.”
“I smashed bait,” she corrected, backing away from the counter as if the trash could jump up and implicate her. “You aren’t the only one people try to corner.”
Her hands shook. She tucked them into the pockets of her robe to hide it, but I saw—I always saw. The tremor ran through me, too.
“Does Luke need to know?” I asked, the question ripping clean even as my stomach knotted. “About what you destroyed?”
Her face softened at his name and went wary at the same time. “If you tell him, you can’t untell him.”
“He’s already in this.”
“So are you.”
We stared at each other across a tile floor that suddenly felt as long as a runway. Coffee steamed in the pot behind her. A car rumbled past on the street outside, tires humming against asphalt—ordinary sounds in a room that felt anything but.
“If you put this in King hands,” she warned, quiet again, “Dunn will know by dinner. That’s how these worlds move.”
Mom hadn’t said Luke specifically—only insinuated that by telling him I would be informing the entire family. “I’m already in it.” The truth came out steady. “Dunn made sure of that when he pulled us back here.”
She closed her eyes, only for a second, and when she opened them, something resigned had settled. “Then be smart. Be careful. Don’t let love make you stupid.”
I didn’t answer—couldn’t. The hammer lay on the counter between us, heavy and dangerous.
When I turned for the door, her voice followed, softer. “I’m doing the best I can.”
I paused, hand on the frame. “Me too.”
The shards sat in the trash—harmless and not. I left them there and carried the weight of Mom’s secret upstairs, where it pressed behind my ribs until school.
School was a blur. My goal was to make it through and corner Luke afterward.
When the final bell rang, I pulled Luke aside before he could vanish into the locker room.
The late afternoon sun had warmed the quad, heat rising off painted benches and old brick.
Our tree gave thin shade, leaves clicking in a breeze that smelled of salt and cut grass.
We’d stood here before, pressed up against truths neither of us wanted.
He came without hesitation—just that crooked look he wore when he already knew everything between us was about to shift.
“We need to talk,” I said.
His eyes flicked to my mouth then to my hands. “Tell me.”
So I did. In pieces at first—coffee, a hammer, plastic splitting, her careful answers that weren’t answers.
“Put together,” I finished, throat raw, “it looks like Dunn planted Darren, and Lorne eliminated him—or made him disappear. And if Mom destroyed anything tied to it, maybe it was what Darren found. Or what he stole.”
Luke didn’t move for a beat. Then the air left him slowly, as if breathing had become work. His grip whitened on the branch, tendon standing out in his wrist. His eyes tracked the ground, the bark, my face, then back to the ground, as if he needed somewhere safer to land than my words.
“And your mom,” he said finally, voice low, as if not trusting it.
“She destroyed something that shouldn’t be here,” I said. The words scraped. “Her phrasing.”
He braced a shoulder against the trunk. “Lorne—” He stopped. The denial dried up on his tongue. A muscle jumped in his jaw as he forced the rest through gritted teeth. “If Darren was a Dunn plant at King, it’s possible that Lorne moved to neutralize the threat.”
I swallowed, the taste of metal and coffee turning my mouth bitter. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
He stared past me, eyes gone far. Then he looked back—rawness cutting through. “Thank you for telling me.”
“We promised,” I reminded him, softer. “No lies. No power plays.”
His mouth curved—not a smile but an ache. “Partners.”
“Not—” I couldn’t finish the line we used without feeling the ground tilt. Not today. “Partners,” I repeated anyway, and it steadied something in both of us.
“Okay,” he breathed. “I’ll look into Lorne’s potential role.”
He stepped in then, forehead to mine—a pause that made the world quiet. His breath brushed my cheek. The tree’s shadow cut a wobbly line across the grass between our shoes.
“Be careful,” I whispered.
“You too.”
We broke apart because we had to. He headed for the rink. I watched him go then pressed my palms to my eyes until the afterimage of him burned away.
If I told him too little, I’d lose him. If I told him too much, I might lose him anyway. Either way, Mom’s hammer kept slamming in my head.
I didn’t go home—not yet. I stayed until the shade crept over my toes and the wind picked up, rattling the leaves. Then I went to find Avery—because if the world was going to keep swinging, I was going to hold on to what I could.