Chapter 36
CASSIDY
“Hey, sis,” Holt greets, stepping into the shade of the patio. He’s carrying a weathered duffel bag and a small cardboard box. He sets them at my feet with a heavy thud.
“Are these my things from the club?” I whisper, looking at the meager collection of belongings. Just a few toiletries, clothes, and some books. It looks so small in the face of this mansion.
“So, I ran into lover boy.”
I straighten, almost afraid to ask.
Holt rolls his eyes. “Max.”
I freeze. “You spoke to him?”
“If you want to call it that. Let’s just say, I gave him a piece of my mind.”
I drop my face in my hands and groan. “No.”
“I merely told him you were moving on to someone who actually shows up.”
“What? Holt!” I grouse. “But that’s not true. I never wanted it to end up like this.” I loved him. Loved.
Love.
I love him.
I suddenly feel a sharp, cold ache in my chest. Despite his disappearing act and the Katy Perry, Hot N Cold routine, that man was the love of my life.
Well, if love can be one-sided, I think bitterly, my brow furrowing.
To him, I was probably just a talented asset with a knack for finding needles in haystacks.
“He didn’t deserve a polite goodbye,” Holt says gently. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a cream-colored envelope.
My heart leaps. My fingers tremble as I reach for it, a desperate, foolish hope flaring in my chest. Is it a frantic apology?
Maybe a confession of love? Okay, I’ll settle for just about anything.
But as I take it, I see the loopy, glitter-inked handwriting on the front.
It’s not from him. It’s from Lala. I sink into the lounger and tear it open.
To my favorite DPG Girl,
The floor feels empty without you. I keep looking toward your station expecting to see you biting your lip at something Candice or Fern is saying, and it bums me out that you’re gone. But honestly? I’m so happy you got out. You always felt like you were meant for something brighter than this place.
I’m going to miss you. Just wanted you to know that I consider you a real friend—the kind that doesn’t just happen in a place like this. I’m always here if you need a drink, a laugh, or a place to hide.
And even if you don’t need me, I’m still here.
Go be brilliant. Don’t look back.
Love, Lala
I fold the paper carefully, a stray tear hitting the glitter ink. It isn’t the letter I wanted, but it’s the one I needed. “She’s a good one,” Holt mutters, watching me.
“Yeah,” I reply, tucking the letter into my sketchbook. “She is.”
I take a shaky breath, smoothing out Lala’s letter and tucking it into my pocket. The sweetness of her words is a brief reprieve, but I can tell by the way Holt is shifting his weight that the deliveries aren’t over yet.
He looks more settled than I’ve seen him in weeks, a grim sort of satisfaction playing at the corners of his mouth.
“There’s more,” he says, leaning against one of the heavy stone pillars of the lanai.
“Our lawyer reached out this morning. Some... odd happenings regarding the assailants at the jail.”
I sit up straighter, the old 5-4-3 panic trying to claw its way up my throat. “What do you mean by odd?”
“Well, the two inmates who jumped you? They’re gone.
Transferred out of Virginia entirely.” He ticks them off on his fingers.
“One was moved to ADX Florence in Colorado. The ‘Alcatraz of the Rockies.’ It’s the most secure federal hole in the country with a twenty-three-hour lockdown in a concrete box with zero human contact.
The Bureau of Prisons doesn’t just send people there for a playground scuffle.
They send the ones they want the world to forget. ”
I blink, stunned. “And the other one?”
“Louisiana State Penitentiary.” Holt tuts.
“A prison-farm in the middle of a swamp. He’ll be spending the rest of his life doing hard agricultural labor in a hundred-degree heat and humidity.
From what the lawyer says, the paperwork for both transfers was fast-tracked by someone with a lot of leverage. ”
The air between us suddenly feels charged. I think of Max. The way his jaw went tight when I told him about the chest tube, the white-hot rage I felt simmering under his skin. My eyes narrow.
“And Henry.” He chuckles. “Turns out Henry wasn’t cut out for law enforcement.
Not that he didn’t prove that on a monstrous scale.
He’s out of the department. Apparently, working at a shoe store in the local mall now.
Someone leaked his cowardice to every precinct in a three-state radius.
He couldn’t get a job as a crossing guard if he tried. ”
My eyes go wide, the realization hitting me with the force of a physical blow.
Henry. My despicable former boyfriend. The recruit from the police academy who I’d been secretly dating.
The one caught on camera standing by the heavy steel door, watching while they broke me and apparently did nothing to stop them.
The same man who never once reached out to see how I was doing.
These things hadn’t been luck. This was a surgical strike. This was someone with the power to move mountains without ever leaving their keyboard.
“Did Max do this?” I ask, my heart hammering.
Holt looks out over the pool, his expression unreadable. “Don’t know. Don’t care.” He pauses, then adds with a reluctant nod, “But if so, he’s earned a few extra points in my book.”
Max
The blue light of my triple-monitor setup bleeds into the darkness of my home office, reflecting off the glass of a half-empty scotch I’ve stopped drinking. My fingers are hovering over the mechanical keyboard.
I’ve already bypassed the initial security layers of the club’s payroll archive. I’m three keystrokes away from pulling Cassidy’s last known address, her emergency contact’s GPS pings, and the metadata from any resignation email she may have sent Gianni.
Don’t do it.
Don’t do it.
Don’t do it, man.
I pull my hands back as if the keyboard is electrified. I rub my face, feeling the grit of thirty-six hours of sleeplessness behind my eyelids. The hacker in me, the version of Max that views the world as a series of locks to be picked, is screaming that this is the only way.
But then there’s the other version of me. The one who watched her face in the morning light. And wishes desperately to have that chance back.
If I hack her, I’m no better than the shadows she’s running from. I’m just another powerful man, refusing to let her live her life on her own terms. That’s the exact thing she was hiding from—the feeling of being a target in someone else’s crosshairs.
Stay focused, Max. Get your life under control.
I think about the way I pushed her away because I was afraid she’d see how fucked up I was. If I’m ever fortunate enough to get the chance to stand in front of her again, I don’t want to admit I’d invaded her privacy.
With one swift and deliberate motion, I close the terminal window. The code vanishes. And the ghost of her digital footprint disappears.
Fuck, I miss her.
A week later, I walk into DPG to meet Gianni and his cousins. If I can’t fix my own love life, at least I can help them protect the women they love. But before I can walk into Gianni’s office, Lala approaches.
“Max?”
“Yeah?”
“I thought you should have this.”
“What is it?”
I open the envelope to find an address in Hanover, Virginia. My heart rate picks up as I peer up at her. “Is this?”
Her angelic smile could light up a night’s sky.
Pulling her into my arms, I kiss her on the top of her head. “Thank you! I won’t let you down.”