Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty-One
ELI
Everything was spinning out of control faster than I could manage to hold on.
Fucking Emmett.
Sylvie stood there, inching away from me. And after the way Emmett had thrown Silas’s name out there, I couldn’t explain, because now I looked like a liar. How did I make her understand? I hadn’t been lying. I just…
“Sylvie,” I said, flinching at the ragged pain in her eyes when they met mine. “I can explain.”
Her hands came up, waving, palms out as if warding me off. “It’s fine. I don’t need an explanation.”
What she meant was that she didn’t want to hear it.
But I wasn’t backing off. I could make her understand. She had to understand. My gut clenched, feeling her slipping away, her pain drawing her further from me—but it was only because she didn’t get it.
“Sylvie,” I said again. I closed the space between us, sliding an arm around her shoulders, steering her to the side of the room to an empty office. I herded her inside, closing the door behind us, then turned to drop the blinds and block out everyone else.
Fucking traitors.
I leaned back on the door and crossed my arms over my chest. “Just give me a minute to explain.”
Sylvie shifted to face me, standing with her hands in her back pockets, her shoulders braced, her chin lifted.
“Explain what? How you let me believe that I had to sign an NDA because you were protecting a client’s interests?
How you let me think that this was only a case to you—that it was about finding Emily Shaw’s killer, the same person who tried to kill me—when really you’re looking for Silas Creed, and Emily is your best lead? ”
When she put it like that, it sounded damning.
“It’s not that simple,” I said.
“It sounds pretty simple to me,” she shot back.
“That’s because you’re not listening,” I snapped, hearing the frustration in my own voice.
Tone it down, man, I told myself. She’s already pissed off. Getting defensive isn’t going to help.
I dropped my arms to my sides and took a deep breath, trying to slow my racing heart, anxiety spiraling through me.
Goddamn it. I didn’t get anxious. I didn’t get scared.
I handled my shit. I thought before I talked.
I was not this guy—nervous, palms sweating, feeling everything that mattered to me slipping away, and unable to stop it. I didn’t even recognize myself.
I braced against the door as if I could keep her here and somehow fix it by shutting us in this room together.
“Sylvie, look. I should have told you about Silas,” I said. I lifted my palms, feeling suddenly helpless. “I didn’t want you to think?—”
“What?” she interrupted. “That you had a conflict of interest? That finding your missing mentor might be more important than solving the murder of a random woman in Tennessee?”
I didn’t know what to say to that, because she wasn’t wrong.
When this started, when Sylvie was just an annoying podcaster whose situation connected to our search for Silas, I hadn’t felt bad about keeping information from her.
Who was she, that she deserved everything we knew anyway?
In our business, we didn’t exactly walk around sprinkling bits of knowledge on people who didn’t need to know.
And in the beginning, Sylvie hadn’t needed to know.
“Look,” I said, wishing I could defuse Sylvie as easily as I could a bomb, “I should have told you. Maybe not day one.”
“Maybe somewhere around the time I almost got blown up again,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest, tilting her head to the side—sarcasm a hard barrier between us. And again, she wasn’t off base.
“Yeah. That would have been a good time,” I admitted, nodding.
“Or before you fucked me.” Her hazel eyes glittered like gemstones.
“Don’t bring that into this,” I said, wanting to reach for her and knowing better.
“I wasn’t honest with you about why I was working the case, and that was wrong.
It’s fair that you’re mad about it. I get it.
I fucked up. But us sleeping together has nothing to do with Silas or Emily Shaw or whatever the hell is going on. That was about us.”
“There is no us,” Sylvie said, her voice cracking on the last word in a way that stabbed through me, shattering all the dreams I’d had just that morning.
I’d thought about keeping Sylvie, but that wasn’t going to happen if she didn’t want to be kept and if she didn’t want to keep me.
“We’re going to figure this out, Sylvie. Just because I want to find Silas doesn’t mean I can’t look out for you, too. We’re going to find whoever killed Emily Shaw and neutralize them so you can be safe. I’m not backing off that.”
She shifted, looking down at her feet, her fingers curling around her biceps until her crossed arms looked more like a shield. When her eyes raised to me, they were resolute and bruised. “I don’t think you can do both. Not when you don’t know what you really want.”
“I know exactly what I want. I want you. I want to find Emily Shaw’s killer. And I want to find Silas.”
“What if we find out that Silas killed Emily?” she asked.
“No way,” I said, shaking my head. “There’s no way Silas killed Emily Shaw.”
“But you don’t know that,” she said, “because you’re not really investigating her murder.
You’re trying to find Silas. And as long as you don’t believe he could be guilty of anything, as long as your true goal is to figure out where he is, you can’t promise me that you’re going to keep me safe.
” Her voice tightened. “If it comes down to it and you have to choose—” She tilted her head to the side and looked up at me.
A universe of pain bloomed in her hazel eyes.
“We both know you’re not going to pick me. ”
She crossed the room to stand in front of me, her agony leaving me frozen.
When she said “Move,” I did.
Stepping away from the door, I watched, numb, as she swung it open. She looked back at me over her shoulder.
“I’m going up to the apartment. I have some backup options—cases I wanted to look at if Emily Shaw didn’t pan out. We don’t have any leads at the moment, so I’m going to put some time in on my actual job, assuming I still have a career to go back to when this is all over.”
“Fine,” I clipped, wanting to beg her to stay and talk this out, but knowing that would only make this worse. “Don’t go anywhere.”
“I wasn’t asking permission, Eli. Just telling you where I’ll be as a courtesy.” She turned and stalked out of the small office and down the hall, heading for the elevators.
Fucking fuck. I hadn’t handled that well. Why hadn’t I just told her that if it came down to her or Silas, I’d choose her?
Because I couldn’t.
I wanted to, which said a lot. But Silas—Silas had been in my life for years. He wasn’t my dad. Not even a father figure exactly. But far more than a boss. He’d seen something in me, the potential to be greater. He’d created the team, the closest thing I had to a family.
And while I wasn’t privy to Silas’s secrets, I couldn’t believe he’d done anything to hurt Emily Shaw. She might have been one of the last people to communicate with him before she died and he disappeared, but that didn’t mean he was guilty of anything except dropping off the map.
Until we knew why he’d done that, where he’d gone, I couldn’t explain to Sylvie how I could be so sure that I could protect her, find Emily’s killer, and still search for Silas.
And what would you do, a little voice in the back of my head asked, if it was a choice between Sylvie and Silas?
Everything in me pushed that question away.
I didn’t know. The only answer I had was that I’d never have to choose.
But you don’t know that, the little voice reminded me. Not for sure.
I shrugged it off, closing the office door behind me as I left.
“That didn’t go well, huh?” Maddox rumbled, looking at me with a combination of sympathy and impatience.
“Fuck off.” I didn’t have a better retort.
“We all saw that coming like a train wreck in slow motion,” he muttered as I glared at Emmett.
Emmett looked up from the papers in front of him and raised one dark eyebrow, his brown eyes cold. “Something to say?”
“Would it do any good?” I asked. “You fucking stabbed me in the back.”
“No, I didn’t,” Emmett said. “I did you a favor. It was only going to get worse, man. Someone needed to rip off the Band-Aid, and she deserved to know.”
“That wasn’t your call,” I said.
“If it was yours, you weren’t going to make it,” Emmett said. “Somebody had to.”
“I just needed more time,” I said, looking down the hall where Sylvie had disappeared, knowing that as much as I’d been lying to her, I’d been lying to myself even more. I hadn’t needed time, I’d needed some fucking balls. If I’d told her about Silas earlier…
But I hadn’t, and now I had to figure out how to fix this before I lost Sylvie completely.