Chapter Thirty-Five
Jo
His words still hung in the air like a challenge I’d never trained for.
No running.
No hiding.
What if we do this together?
What if we both go all in?
I’d spent my whole life building escape routes in my mind.
Contingency plans for my contingency plans.
Trust was something other people could afford—people with families, stability, childhoods untouched by the kind of chaos my father lived in.
Even he hadn’t told me everything. And if I couldn’t trust the man who raised me and taught me to build the things that could save the world . . . then who the hell could I trust?
Nate.
That was the answer trying to rise inside me like a spark, and it scared me worse than Raymean ever had.
I exhaled slowly. Then said the bravest thing I’d ever said in my life: “If I said yes . . . what would it look like?”
He answered me like an engineer being asked about structural integrity.
Practical.
Clear.
Steady.
He told me more about Tanner Morales—what Tanner had seen, what he knew, what he suggested. The resources Nate now had access to. The channels Tanner could open. The timelines. The leverage points. The vulnerabilities his team had identified in Raymean.
He spoke my language: Pressure points. Variables. His lawyers. Worst-case scenarios. Fail-safes. And he’d covered everything. Even the angles I hadn’t seen. Not to override me but to save me.
I felt it with each word; he wasn’t trying to control or contain me. He was building a platform underneath us both.
He finished with quiet finality. “More resources mean more time. More eyes. Better odds. The more people we pull to our side—carefully—the safer you and your father will be.”
I swallowed. “What about me?” I asked. “You want me to trust your network. Who do I have?”
His eyes softened a fraction. “Is there anyone you trust outside your father?”
That question hit like a punch. Not because the answer was no—But because the answer was . . . maybe.
I thought of the names—not real names—code names and the people I’d worked with for years.
People whose work I respected. People who had collaborated with me without knowing who I was.
People who had profited enough from our association that they just might feel like they owed me something.
“One,” I said. Then corrected myself. “Two. Maybe three.”
He nodded like that was enough to start with. And suddenly—I felt hopeful.
We could be a team.
A partnership.
Have a future.
I stood and moved to a dry erase board. “Okay,” I said. “These are the contacts we should try pull in.” I wrote a short list on the board.
And our war room was born.
It started with that one whiteboard.
Then two.
Then four.
We drew connections between the shell companies that had stolen my father’s work. We came up with scenarios and strategies.
I joined encrypted chat rooms and put the problem we faced out into the world with only a digital handshake that it would be kept secret.
Ideas flowing across continents without hesitation.
Some of my sources provided missing intel that led us to someone we thought was pulling the strings at Raymean: Edgar Stellin.
Together with Tanner and my contacts, we planned information leaks timed to trigger panic.
Our pattern was designed to make our target feel like someone was digging into his connection to Roy Ashby and implicating him as an accomplice.
If my father was going down as terrorist, he wasn’t going down alone.
We wanted our target to decide the only way he could save himself was to clear my father’s name.
And then, and only then, would we dismantle Edgar’s life.
Piece by piece.
Reputation.
Finances.
All of it.
After hours of planning, I capped a marker, set it down, and said the words that sealed my choice: “We removed failure from the equation.”
Nate looked up from his tablet.
I kept going, steady as steel. “When we do this—not if—we hit Edgar and Raymean everywhere they don’t expect. And we don’t stop hitting until my father is free and I never have to dye my hair again.”
He walked to me, slow, sure, like approaching something sacred. He wrapped his arms around my waist and lowered his forehead to mine. “I’m only agreeing to all this,” he murmured, “because I like you better as a brunette.”
The laugh punched out of me, unexpected and warm. I smacked his chest lightly, and he caught my hand gently.
And then he kissed me.
Hungry.
Claiming.
Our partnership was sealed without a single word about love even though the room was thick with it.
I kissed him back.
And for the first time in my life, I wasn’t planning how to run.
I was planning how to stay.