Chapter 25
Luke
I pour two coffees. Not because I’m calm. Because my hands need something to do. I open three cabinets before I find the mugs. Nothing’s where it used to be. Nothing’s where Emily put it.
Except that mug, I’d know it anywhere. Live, Laugh, Love. What a joke.
I take it and a plain white mug and fill them. I don’t sit down. I stand at the counter and drink and think about the man upstairs.
Padded leather cuffs. The kind you don’t find at a hardware store.
Professional grade. She bought them somewhere specific, somewhere that knew what they were for, and she bought the good ones—I could tell by the tension, the way they held.
She thought about that. She thought about a lot of things.
The water. The ibuprofen. The protein bars.
She’s not torturing him. She’s keeping him.
There’s a difference. I shouldn’t know that, but I do.
I think about Ryan McCall on the locker room floor.
Naked. Broken ribs. Breathing in sips. I think about the way I stood over him and felt nothing except the satisfaction of a job done well.
I think about the father-in-law who hired me—the soft voice on the phone, the careful language, the way he said I just want it handled like he was ordering landscaping.
Everyone has a line. They just draw it in different places.
I hear her upstairs. Footsteps in the bedroom.
A drawer opening and closing. She’s getting dressed, which means she’s composing herself, which means when she comes down those stairs she’ll have a new version ready.
A better lie. A tighter pitch. That’s what she does—I’ve watched her do it on every phone call, every interaction, every time something catches her off guard. She recalibrates. Adjusts. Sells.
I’m not buying. But I still want to hear what she’s selling.
The stairs creak. She appears in the kitchen doorway wearing jeans and a t-shirt, hair still wet, no makeup.
She looks younger without the armor. Smaller.
She sees the coffee and something crosses her face—not gratitude, not relief.
Confusion. Like she can’t figure out why a man who just found a body in her bedroom is making her coffee instead of making a phone call.
She picks up the mug. Studies it.
“I wasn’t sure you’d still be here,” she says.
I take a sip. Set the mug down. Shrug. “I haven’t figured out what this is yet.”
It’s a lie and it lands like one. It wasn’t the response she was expecting.
She was expecting anger, or conditions, or an ultimatum.
Something she could push against or negotiate around.
Instead she got patience, and patience makes Marin nervous.
I can see it—the way her fingers tighten around the mug, the way she shifts her weight like she’s recalculating her footing.
“What do you want to know?” she says.
“How long?”
“A few days.”
“Before that?”
She hesitates. First time I’ve seen her hesitate about anything.
“We were together for two years,” she says. “He wants to end it. I don’t accept that.”
“So you—what—kidnapped him?”
“I relocated us.”
“You drugged him and drove him to a farmhouse and strapped him to a bed.”
“When you say it like that, it sounds—”
“Like what it is.”
She goes quiet. Drinks her coffee. I watch her throat move when she swallows and I file that away with everything else—the strip of skin, the scar on her shin, the way she smells after a shower.
I’m still cataloging her. Even now. Especially now.
Something is wrong with me and I’m not sure it started today.
“He cheated,” she says again. Like that’s the key that unlocks the whole thing.
And maybe it is. Not because it justifies anything, but because it tells me what this is about.
It’s not about love. It’s about refusal.
Marin doesn’t lose. Marin doesn’t get left.
Marin doesn’t walk away from a deal that hasn’t closed.
I understand that better than I should.
“What’s your plan?” I say.
“My plan?”
“With him. Long term. You can’t keep a man strapped to a bed forever, Marin. What’s the endgame?”
She stares at me. And for the first time—the very first time—I see her without the pitch. Without the performance. Just a woman standing in a kitchen holding a mug that mocks her, realizing she doesn’t have an answer.
“I don’t know,” she says.
I believe her.
I finish my coffee. Rinse the mug. Set it upside down on the rack.
“I’m going to finish the soundproofing,” I say. “We can talk about the rest later.”
She stares at me like I’ve grown a second head.
“You’re—you’re going to finish the soundproofing.”
“That’s what you’re paying me for.”
“Luke, the situation upstairs is—it’s complicated.”
“I know. I met him.” I pick up my keys. “Foam’s in the truck. I’ll start with the far wall.”
I head for the front door. She doesn’t follow. I can feel her standing in the kitchen behind me, holding that mug, trying to figure out what just happened.
Good. Let her wonder.
I’ve spent two years fixing things for people who can’t fix them themselves. Porches. Fences. Marriages. Men who hit their wives.
This isn’t the strangest thing I’ve walked into. It’s just the first one I didn’t want to walk out of.