Chapter 25
TWENTY-FIVE
DAEMON
After Nadia kicked me out, I sat in my truck outside for longer than I should have, the parking lot empty but for her van.
I was still sitting there when the lights inside were turned off, which meant she'd locked up and left through the front and taken an Uber home. That or she was spending the night on the couch in her office.
Whichever was true, it meant she didn't want to talk to me, and I couldn't blame her for that.
I'm sorry. For all of it.
I know. It changes nothing.
I drove back to Sofia's and sat in my apartment, surrounded by crocheted doilies and ceramic cats, and the silence of a place that had always felt like enough until recently. The hideous lamp cast its usual pink glow across the room. Overhead in the main house, Sofia's radio murmured.
I didn't sleep. I couldn't.
When five AM rolled around, I gave up trying, made coffee, and sat at the small table with my phone face down in front of me. I'd picked it up four times during the night to call her. Put it down four times.
There was nothing I could say that would cover what I'd done, and saying the wrong thing would only make it worse.
I'd been in tighter spots than this. That was the thing I kept coming back to, sitting there in the dark with cold coffee and Sofia's ceramic cats judging me from the shelf.
Not tighter in the way anyone would want to compare. But I knew what it was to stand in a bare concrete room at two in the morning, heart going, waiting for a door to open.
I knew what it felt like to be genuinely afraid and do it anyway, because the alternative was watching everything fall apart and knowing I'd had a chance and hadn't taken it.
The street fights hadn't made me brave. They'd stripped everything else away until the only thing left was a choice.
Move or don't. That was all it ever was.
The difference was that back then I'd been fighting out of desperation. Out of a twenty-two-year-old's blind, stupid refusal to let his mother die without trying everything. I hadn't been thinking about courage. I'd been thinking about how expensive those treatments were.
This was different. This required something I hadn't needed then, because then I'd had nothing to lose. Now I did.
And it was what kept me from picking up the phone.
The hardest thing I'd ever done down a filthy back alley wasn't getting hit. It was stepping forward when every instinct said stay back. Lifting my foot and moving it. That was the whole thing. Everything else followed from that.
It was something I knew how to do with my eyes shut, often thanks to the other guy's knuckles.
Now I had to figure out when.
I sat with that for a while. The lamp hummed. Sofia's radio went quiet upstairs.
At six-fifteen, Sofia knocked.
Much as I didn't want to let her in, experience told me resistance was useless. She took one look at me, went to my kitchen, and started making eggs without asking. I didn't have the energy to argue.
"It’s over," I said, because Sofia would find out eventually, and I preferred to control the narrative.
"I know. I heard. Then I saw your face," she said, cracking eggs into the pan. She didn't look up. "What did you do?"
"Told her it might have been a mistake."
Sofia made a sound that conveyed both disappointment and the complete absence of surprise. "Stupido," she said, not unkindly. "You are built for speed, yes? But not always in the right direction."
She put a plate in front of me. I ate because refusing Sofia's food required more fight than I had in me.
"She's a good woman," Sofia said, settling across from me with her own coffee. "The sort you don't find twice."
"I know that."
"Then why are you sitting here?"
I didn't have an answer for that. Or rather, I had too many answers, none of which sounded like anything other than fear dressed up in better clothes.
Sofia studied me over the rim of her cup. "My husband, he was scared too. When he first came to this country, he had nothing. No English, no money, no family here. He almost didn't ask me out because he thought I deserved someone with more to offer."
She set her cup down. "I would have missed forty years with the best man I ever knew."
She patted my hand with her papery fingers and left me with the dishes.
I called Malakai at eight.
"I need to talk," I said.
"Hell yes, you do. Come in."
His office felt smaller than usual, thanks to a stack of cardboard boxes in one corner. Or maybe it was me, too much of whatever I was carrying to fit comfortably in a room with one small window.
I sat in the chair Nadia had taken when we'd watched the footage together, my gaze landing on the topmost box. It was taped shut and marked in Malakai's blocky handwriting. Pacific Watch.
He caught me looking. "Lighthouse lease is close," he said. "State's got more red tape than a Christmas parade, but it'll come. Chase and I are making it official."
He didn't say more, and I didn't push. There was bigger trouble in the room than wherever those two were setting up shop.
I told him about Nadia's kitchen. About Samantha Morrison's visit, the revised offer, the threat about my record. About what Nadia had said to me and what I'd said back, which hadn't been enough and had come too late.
Malakai listened the way he always did. No interruptions, no reactions, filing everything away. When I finished, he was quiet for a minute.
"Pippa from Durango's material holds," he said.
I looked at him. "Chase and I spent the week pressure-testing everything she sent.
The filings, the correspondence, and the two phone recordings.
All of it checks out, and her lawyer's name for the play is the right one.
Tortious interference. Angie Morton backed that up. "
He rubbed the back of his neck. "Using an associate's background to coerce a sale.
Elevate's own counsel knows exactly what it is, which is why, across three markets and three years, they've never once let any of it get near a courtroom.
Every time an operator pushed back with representation, they withdrew and moved to the next town. "
He turned the monitor toward me. The pattern sat there, laid out cleanly. Boulder. Durango. Bend. And ours, the fourth town, right on schedule. "Your bar-stool intelligence was better than anything I'd have dug up in a month."
"Nadia won't take it from me," I said. "She made that clear last night. Daylight, through somebody she can stand to receive it from."
"Already in motion. I called Seth Adams yesterday. He and Cole are paying her a visit this morning." He nodded to himself. "I figured it'd land better coming from someone she trusts right now."
Someone she trusts right now, and that wasn't me.
"Is she going to fight them?" I asked. "Elevate, I mean."
"I think so. If she knows the ground is solid." He leaned back. "There's a business association meeting tonight. Word's gotten around about what Elevate's been doing. Other local operators want to talk. The collective idea she floated has been generating interest."
"She organized the meeting."
"She did. The question is whether she shows up to it." He looked hard at me. "Question is whether you've got the guts to go."
I looked out the small window at the yard beyond. A crew was loading equipment onto a flatbed, moving with the unhurried energy of people who knew what they were doing.
Ethan was out there somewhere, clipboard in hand, probably wondering why two of his crew were sitting having feelings instead of doing their jobs.
"If I show up, she'll think I'm trying to make it about us," I said.
"Maybe. Or maybe she'll see a man who stopped running." Malakai crossed his arms. "You told her you were sorry. That's a start. But sorry rebuilds nothing on its own. At some point you have to show up and do the work, even if she's not ready to let you."
"And if she never is?"
"Then you still fought for something that mattered.
" He said it simply, like it was obvious.
"Elevate is about to walk into a room full of people they've been quietly threatening for months.
Nadia built that collective. You helped her build it.
Walking away now because things got complicated doesn't strike me as who you're trying to be. "
I looked at this man, who understood better than most what it cost to show up for someone when you had no guarantee of how it would go.
"What time?" I said.
"Seven. Community hall."
I nodded. Stood up.
"Daemon." He stopped me at the door. "Own it when you get there. All of it. Your record, your fear, what you did wrong. Don't manage it. Own it."
I thought about what he'd said about Amelia. His wife. About deserving her, instead of just trying to protect her from his own damage.
"Yeah," I said. "I know."
I went back to work. Spent the rest of the day on the job site doing what I was supposed to do, being where I was supposed to be, trying to be useful in the hours I had before seven o'clock.
It was harder than it sounds, knowing what was coming.
And easier, too. Because for the first time in weeks, I wasn't running in any direction.
I stood still and waited to see if I was brave enough for what came next.