Epilogue
SIX MONTHS AGO, I came to Halo City to destroy a man. I built a life instead.
A life with Diana.
The foreman gives me a two-finger salute on my way out, and I return it.
Behind me, the whine of a power sander cuts through the morning.
The crew is finishing the drywall on what will be the main training floor.
The space is coming together. Every visit, it looks more intentional, and every visit, the knot in my chest loosens a fraction more.
I step onto the sidewalk and start the six-block walk home.
Diana gave me a gym. More accurately, Diana found the space, negotiated the lease herself, and put the two-year worth of deposit down before I could form a full sentence of protest.
My first reaction was panic, and not the good kind. She was giving me a project, which meant she needed distance. The twenty-four-seven shadow I’d become was finally too much for her.
I sat with that panic for a full night. Then I thought about the storage room. Build a life so full that the people who hurt you become irrelevant.
So I agreed.
But instead of just any other gym, I made it a self-defense and training center for women and survivors. The idea had lived in my head since the first time she told me her story.
Every day I visit, and every time I walk through that space and watch it take shape, I find myself looking forward to the next one. That’s new. For twenty-five years, the next day was only ever a step closer to revenge.
Now it’s the thing I want.
I turn the corner onto our street.
I’m still poor by every measure a bank cares about. I resigned from Halo Protective Group. Vance took it well, which is to say he poured two fingers of bourbon, told me good luck, and I signed the paperwork. The man knew I wasn’t leaving the work. I was leaving the middleman.
I became Diana’s full-time, exclusive bodyguard. My paycheck comes directly from her now, deposited into the same modest account it’s always been, and my professional network is no wider than it was the day I first walked into her life.
The gym will be my side gig, but it’ll only be a small revenue stream.
My target clients aren’t the high-profile or the well-funded, and I knew that going in.
I’ve applied for government grants and non-profit funding, and I have contracts now with two social services agencies and a women’s shelter on the east side.
Diana pointed out that early mornings, and days the floor isn’t in use, I could rent the space to yoga instructors or for corporate bootcamps. I’m still deciding on that one. Either way, no one’s calling me rich anytime soon. I doubt they ever will, and I’m okay with it. More than okay.
This is the first thing in my life I’ve chosen that isn’t revenge. The gym. The work. The women who will eventually walk through those doors because they need to know how to fight back in a world that’s already shown them exactly what it’s capable of.
It’s mine. Not inherited. Mine because I chose it.
I want to use what I know for that. I want to teach. I want that to be the point.
Six months ago, the gap between her world and mine was eating me alive. Her penthouse. The suits. The Rolex.
Somewhere in those six months, the gap stopped being a thing that fed on me.
It’s still there. I’m not delusional. But it doesn’t have teeth anymore.
Diana never held it over me. She also never shrank herself down to make me comfortable, which I’ve come to understand is a more important kind of love.
Above all, Diana is my biggest wealth. I say it to her often, and she meets it by telling me I sound like a greeting card. It’s still the truth. Nothing else comes close.
I stop at the florist on the corner. This I can afford, so I buy her a bouquet every day.
She isn’t a flower person. I’m not a flower person either.
I buy them anyway. Yellow tulips, mostly.
Yellow roses or daffodils when the tulips aren’t in.
Yellow isn’t even her color. I buy it because she reminds me of the sun, and she is my sun. My only light.
Greeting card. I know.
The elevator opens straight into the penthouse, and I step inside.
Carol, Diana’s secretary, is sitting at the dining table with her laptop. She looks up when she sees me, and I give her the same nod I always give her. Minimal.
“She’s in her office,” Carol says before I ask. “Mr. Thayer is with her.”
I walk down the hallway. I knock twice, then push the door open just enough to get my head and half the bouquet through.
“Sorry to interrupt.”
Diana is behind her desk, eyes on me. Thayer has his back to the room, looking out at the view, but he turns. I remember him now, the new barrister on the pedo case.
“Hey.” The warmth in her eyes isn’t something she performs. “Come in, come in.”
I push the door open the rest of the way, holding the yellow tulips with one hand.
“Geoffrey,” she says, standing and walking toward me in her pristine off-white pencil skirt and matching top, “this is Kai.”
Thayer extends a hand, and I shake it. His grip is firm.
“Kai is my husband,” she adds.
“When? I had no idea. Congratulations.”
“Four months ago,” she says. “It was a private affair.”
Private was an understatement. It was her, me, a registrar. Carol and her husband signed as the witnesses.
She was the one who proposed. I’d been turning the idea over in my head, trying to figure out the best way a man with nothing proposes to a woman who has everything. While I was busy wrestling with that, she cut straight through the noise.
One night, she looked at me over her laptop and said she wanted to get married. I asked if she was joking. She told me she never jokes about contracts. I bought the rings the next morning.
“Congratulations to you both. I mean that sincerely.”
“Thank you, Geoffrey.” The professional edge in her voice smooths out for a second.
“Sit down,“ she says to me. “We’re almost done.”
I take the chair by the window, set the tulips across my knees, and shut up. When Thayer finally gathers his folders and lets himself out, Diana stands by the window and lets a long beat pass before she speaks.
“We won.”
“Torresse?”
“Guilty on all counts.” She beams. “The man did what he did to those children for over a decade.”
I step closer.
“His team will appeal. We know that. Geoffrey’s on it, which is what that was about.” She exhales through her nose. “But we won the first round. He doesn’t get to walk away. Not today.”
I pull her into my arms. She is small against my chest, but the sharpest mind in a city full of sharp minds.
“I’m so proud of you, love.”
She eases out of my arms to look at me. “Thank you, but don’t get sentimental.”
“I’m not.” I definitely am. “I’m stating a fact.”
She holds my gaze a second longer, then breaks the hug and slumps into her chair, head tipped back.
“I’m so stressed,” she says, not even looking at me.
The first time she dragged me to bed, she called sex a stress reliever, and that line is burned into me. I think about it every time that crease shows up between her brows. Every time her shoulders go tight. Every time she drops her head back and closes her eyes.
“I’ll go shower first.”
“Why?” She reaches up and catches my hand before I can pass the desk. “You know I like licking the sweat off you.”
Instantly, I’m hard. No slow trip south. Just blood, gone from my head and straight to my cock. Her crossed legs in that pencil skirt aren’t helping the cause either.
“Come here.”
I grab her wrist and haul her up. The leather sofa is at the far wall, facing away from the glass, and I walk her there with single-minded intent.
I sit first. My fingers find the zipper of her tight skirt and drag it down.
Then she’s in nothing but the matching top and a lacy black thong so thin it’s see-through and clinging to her wet slit.
I need to slow down. Take a moment to just look, but my hands are already moving faster than my head.
I pull her down onto my lap. She swings one leg over to straddle me; I get both hands on her face, and I kiss her.
My hand drops between her legs. I shove the lace aside and touch her cunt.
Her folds are slippery and swollen, her clit’s a pebble in my fingertips.
I drag two fingers, slow and steady, spreading her wetness around while I keep my mouth fused to hers.
I do the same thing. Lazy tease. My tongue probes her mouth, circling, matching the same unhurried rhythm my fingers are working between her thighs.
The wet sounds are audible, and she pushes into it, hips rolling to meet my hand.
“You better pick up the pace.” The words come out muffled.
I deepen the kiss. She matches it, her fingers pressing into my shoulders.
My hand keeps the same pace. Slow side-to-side.
Unhurried drag up and back down through her folds.
I gather the wetness on my fingers and smear her clit with it.
I circle again. Taking my time. Making her feel every second of the wait.
She exhales sharp through her nose. “I don’t have the whole day.”
Her free hand shoots to my neck, then my head, gripping the back of my skull and pulls. Demanding.
I give her more. Tighten the circles, move faster, rubbing the swollen little nub until her hips start to buck, chasing friction she can’t control. The smell of her cunt rises between us.
“Kai,” she moans, and I use my free hand to work open the first button of her blouse. Then the second. The third. I pull the cup of her bra aside and close my mouth over her nipple, sucking it against the roof of my mouth and flicking it with my tongue. I graze it with my teeth until she whines.
Her chest rises and falls. Her head tips back.
“This is not what I want,” she says, but her cunt is telling a different story. It’s gripping my fingers, pulsing, desperate to be filled.