Chapter 26
AMELIA
After Levi left, the hotel felt bigger in the wrong ways.
He’d kissed me once more in the breezeway, balancing the paper bag of soup in one hand and the compass in the other, and I’d had the insane urge to tell him not to go.
Don’t step into the street. Don’t leave my line of sight.
Instead, I’d let him. Because I was trying to be a functioning adult human and not the kind of woman who clung to a man.
I went back to my room, and the door clicked shut.
I put the soup in the little fridge, the yogurt next to it, the compass on the nightstand where I could see it. North, the tiny red needle insisted, even when it trembled.
“Me, too,” I muttered, because apparently, I talked to inanimate objects now.
Then I did the thing I’d been avoiding.
I opened my laptop.
The blank document stared back at me, cursor blinking like a metronome marking time.
The memo I’d promised my editor hovered in my peripheral vision like a ghost—outlines of facts and non-facts, what I could say and what I refused to, words that would slot me into a narrative I wasn’t sure I believed anymore.
I typed a headline:
CHARLESTON – PRELIMINARY NOTES
Then deleted “PRELIMINARY.” Then all of it.
My fingers hovered. Dropped. Hovered again.
What was I doing?
Protecting Levi, my mind supplied.
Endangering the story, my training argued back.
I closed the laptop. The snap sounded too loud in the quiet room.
Ten minutes passed. Maybe twenty. Enough for me to pace the strip of carpet between bed and window, enough for me to check my phone twice to see if Levi had texted.
Nothing.
He’d said he’d be right back, I reminded myself. There was no reason to panic.
By the time the knock came, I’d finally settled onto the edge of the bed, fingers linked loosely between my knees. My heart jumped in relief.
Levi.
The thought put a stupid, automatic smile on my face as I crossed the room. I didn’t even look through the peephole. I just opened the door.
And froze.
It wasn’t Levi.
It was Derek. My editor. Here. In Charleston.
“Amelia,” he said.
His voice was the same—brisk, clipped, a little too fast—but the rest of him was wrong.
He looked like he’d been poured into his clothes and forgotten to set.
Shirt wrinkled from a long flight, tie loosened and hanging askew, his usually neat dark hair flattened on one side like he’d slept on a plane.
There were shadows under his eyes that hadn’t been there the last time I saw him in person.
“Hey, Derek,” I said slowly. “What are you doing here?”
“In town on business,” he said automatically, then seemed to hear how thin that sounded. His jaw flexed. “Can we talk?”
Every instinct I had sat up, alert.
“Now?” I glanced at the hallway over his shoulder, like maybe there’d be a camera crew, a surprise ethics board, anything that would make this make sense. “You didn’t email. Or call.”
“I’m calling now,” he said. “In person.” His gaze flicked past me into the room. “May I?”
For a second, the old reflex answered: of course. He was my editor. My mentor. The man who had shepherded my work when half the industry thought I’d crashed and burned.
Then Meghan’s voice brushed my memory: Don’t let them convince you that loving him means you have to set yourself on fire to keep him warm.
And underneath that, an older one: my mother at our kitchen table, saying, You get to decide who comes into your house and who doesn’t.
I slipped out into the hallway and pulled the door shut behind me.
“We can talk here,” I said. “What’s going on?”
A faint line appeared between his brows. “You don’t trust me in your room?”
“I don’t trust anyone in my room,” I said lightly. “Occupational hazard.”
He exhaled once through his nose, a half-laugh that didn’t reach his eyes. Close up, I could see his hands faintly tremoring where they curled around the strap of his laptop bag.
“You told me you’d send a memo,” he said without preamble. “Instead, I hear you’ve been playing dress-up with billionaires’ fiancées.”
Heat pricked the back of my neck. “You’ve been talking to my sources?”
“To my funders,” he shot back. “To my board. To people who are starting to wonder if I’ve sent my rising star to Charleston to take a vacation on someone else’s dime.”
I inhaled slowly. “That’s not fair.”
“What’s not fair,” he said, and something in his voice frayed on the last word, “is that I stuck my neck out for you after Afghanistan. I took the hits. The board wanted you gone. The lawyers wanted you muzzled. And I said, ‘No, Amelia is the one who tells the truth when everyone else is afraid to.’”
“I know.” Guilt bit sharp. “I haven’t forgotten that.”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
His eyes were brighter than usual, almost feverish. He wasn’t just angry. He was scared.
I’d seen that look in war zones—in fixers who’d had visits from the wrong men, in local officials who’d started getting anonymous calls at night. People under pressure they couldn’t name.
“When exactly did you fly down?” I asked carefully. “Because the last time we talked, you were in D.C.”
He ignored the question. “I need to know what you have,” he said. “Today. Not next week. Not in some polished memo you send when you’ve decided how much truth you feel like releasing. Now.”
“You will get everything that’s relevant and safe,” I said. “I’m still verifying.”
“You’ve been here for days,” he snapped. “And all I have is ‘threads.’”
“Because that’s what it is,” I said, matching his volume. “Threads. A complex, dangerous situation I don’t fully understand yet. You taught me not to publish blind.”
“And I taught you not to get in bed with your subjects,” he said, low and vicious.
The words landed like a slap.
“That’s not—” I stopped, forced my voice back under control. “You don’t get to barge into my hotel and throw that at me. Not after every married reporter you’ve ever defended for writing about politicians they play golf with.”
“This isn’t golf,” he said. “This is a black-box fortress full of men whose money we can’t trace and whose influence we can’t quantify.
This is a story that could finally put us back on the map.
I’ve got donors breathing down my neck, Amelia.
Board members calling my personal phone.
Asking when the Dane piece drops. Asking if I’ve lost the plot again. ”
“You mean asking if I’ve lost the plot,” I said quietly.
He flinched. Just a twitch at the corner of his mouth, but I saw it.
“Someone talked to you,” I said.
His eyes flicked down the hall, checking the elevator, the stairwell door, as if expecting someone to step out. “Donors talk,” he said. “They always do.”
“Donors don’t send you to a reporter’s hotel unannounced,” I said. “Donors don’t make your hand shake.”
He curled his fingers tighter around the strap, as if that would still them.
“Who’s pressuring you?” I asked softly. “Is it the same people who fed me that tip? Because if they’re in your ear, too—”
“That’s not your concern,” he cut in. “Your concern is this: you are on thin ice. The kind that cracks clean through if you misstep. One more debacle, and they will gut our investigative budget, and I will lose my job, and you will be lucky if anyone lets you rewrite wire copy about celebrity divorces.”
The words should have scared me. Two years ago, they would’ve.
Now, all I felt was a cold, quiet anger.
“And you think the solution is to force me to burn my sources?” I asked. “To hand you unverified names and half-understood structures so you can toss them into a pitch deck for your donors?”
“I think the solution,” he said, stepping closer, “is that you remember which side you’re on.”
“I haven’t changed sides,” I said. “I’m still on the truth’s.”
“You’re on his,” he said. “Be honest.”
Levi’s face flashed in my mind. His hands on my skin. His voice saying, I don’t want you giving up too much for me.
I swallowed. “Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
He laughed once, harsh. “Na?ve. I didn’t think you had that in you anymore.”
“That’s enough,” I said. My voice was shaking now, but not with fear. “I’m not doing this with you in a hotel hallway. I’ll send you what I can. If that’s not good enough, you can pull me from the story. But you don’t get to show up here and bully me.”
I turned toward the door. His hand shot out and slammed flat against it, right next to my head. The sound cracked through the hallway.
“Don’t walk away from me,” he said.
The position was bad. Classic bad. My body remembered it before my brain did—briefings about harassment, the posture of a man blocking an exit. I felt the old, familiar rush of adrenaline and something darker, a ghost of every time I’d been pinned in a crowd, jostled too close in a riot.
“Move your hand,” I said. My voice came out low. Calm.
He didn’t.
“I’m trying to save your career,” he said, leaner now, almost pleading under the anger. “Do you understand that? They are already looking for excuses to cut us. They want you to fail so they can say we were wrong to bet on you.”
“And who are ‘they’?” I asked. “Name them.”
He swallowed. His throat worked. He couldn’t.
Of course, he couldn’t. Because it wasn’t just “the board” or “donors.” It was something else. Something he was too afraid to say out loud in a beige hotel hallway with a reporter who might still be recording.
His other hand came up, catching my forearm as I reached for the latch. His grip was too tight, fingers digging into skin.
Pain flared. My breath stuttered.
“Stop,” I said.
He didn’t. “You owe me the truth,” he said. “You owe me your notes. Your sources. If you’re in over your head, you don’t get to drag the rest of us down with you.”
My ribs felt tight. The hallway was too narrow, the carpet too soft, like it might swallow my feet whole if I tried to run. I could break his nose if I needed to, I thought distantly. Heel of my hand up and out. I’d been trained. I knew how.
But this was Derek. The man who’d sent me into war zones with a mixture of pride and worry. The man who’d called me from a bar at midnight once, voice hoarse, to tell me he’d just watched my piece run and “Kid, you did it.”
Seeing him like this—cornered animal, flailing in a trap I couldn’t see—hurt more than his grip.
“This isn’t you,” I said quietly. “Whoever got to you—”
“You think everything is about sources,” he snapped. “Sometimes it’s about consequences.”
The elevator at the end of the hall dinged. Neither of us looked.
“Let go,” I repeated.
His fingers tightened. “Not until you tell me what you’re hiding.”
The voice that came from behind him was low and lethal.
“She told you to let go.”
Derek jerked, half-turning. I looked past his shoulder.
Levi was standing at the end of the hallway.
He looked like he’d been through a war. His shirt was rumpled, a dark smear at the collarbone that might have been dirt or dried blood.
There was a cut at his hairline, angling through his temple, the skin around it just beginning to swell.
His eyes, though, were crystal clear. Sharp.
Locked on the place where Derek’s hand wrapped around my arm.
“Levi,” I breathed.
He walked forward, unhurried. Each step was controlled, precise, the way I’d seen him move in combat zones when he was trying not to spook a skittish crowd. The air around him felt charged, like the moment before a storm breaks.
Derek’s fingers spasmed on my arm. He dropped it, finally, as if it had burned him.
“This is a private conversation,” he started, trying for authoritative. It came out strained.
“No,” Levi said. “It isn’t.”
He stopped a foot away, close enough that I could feel heat coming off him, see the muscle flex in his jaw.
“Did he hurt you?” Levi asked me, not taking his eyes off the man in front of him.
My arm throbbed where the fingers had been. It would bruise. “I’m okay,” I said. Then, because it was also true: “He grabbed me. He blocked the door.”
Levi’s expression didn’t change much. Just a slight narrowing of his eyes, a subtle shift in his weight. But I felt it, like a pressure drop.
Derek lifted his hands, palms out. “This is a misunderstanding,” he said quickly. “I flew down here to talk to my reporter about a sensitive story. She’s under a lot of stress, you’re under a lot of stress—”
Levi took one smooth step forward and put himself between us, his back a solid wall in front of me.
“Face me when you talk,” he said. “And choose your next words very carefully.”