Chapter 28
AMELIA
Ifloated down the hallway like my legs had disconnected from my brain.
Do what you need to do, I’d told him.
The elevator doors slid open. I stepped inside, stabbed the button for the lobby, and only when the doors closed did the adrenaline loosen enough for another feeling to rush in.
Heat.
It spread through me in a slow, stunned wave, starting in my chest and rolling outward until my fingertips tingled.
He’d walked up that hallway like a loaded weapon someone had finally taken the safety off. Calm. Controlled. Absolutely lethal.
For me.
I braced one hand on the elevator wall, suddenly aware of my own reflection in the brushed metal—wide eyes, blown pupils, mouth parted like I’d just run a sprint.
The scene replayed itself in my head on a loop: Derek’s fingers biting into my arm, the wrongness of it. The way my ribs had locked, every self-defense course I’d ever taken cycling through options—
And then Levi’s voice behind him, low and deadly:
She told you to let go.
The expression on Derek’s face as he’d jerked around. The one on Levi’s—flat, focused, all his usual warmth carved away until there was nothing left but intent.
Mine, that intent said. Don’t touch what’s mine.
The elevator chimed. The doors opened into the lobby, and I stepped out, the carpet catching my bare feet through the thin soles of my sneakers. I crossed to a grouping of armchairs near a potted palm and sat, my pulse still skidding.
I pulled out my phone, fingers not quite steady, and dialed the number Levi had given me earlier.
“Dominion Hall,” a calm male voice answered.
“It’s Amelia,” I said. “Levi asked me to call. He said to tell you to bring a duffel bag.”
There was a brief pause. No questions. No surprise.
“We’ll handle it,” the voice said. “Sit tight.”
The call ended.
I lowered the phone to my lap, exhaled slowly, and let the adrenaline rush catch up to me.
That was so hot.
The thought slid through me uninvited, and this time I didn’t bother batting it away.
Because it was.
I was a grown woman. A journalist who’d spent years chronicling the damage men could do when they treated violence as currency. I’d stood in hospitals and morgues and watched what happened when obsession turned into explosions. Intellectually, I knew all of that, down to my bones.
And yet.
My pulse was drumming at the base of my throat. My skin felt too tight. Under the adrenaline, something needy and old and bone-deep unfurled, like a big cat stretching after too long in a cage.
I pictured him back upstairs: big hands on Derek’s collar, shoving him through the doorway. That controlled, lethal energy turning inward instead of radiating down a hallway.
What would it be like to sit on his lap right now?
I wondered, dazed. To straddle him on that stupid hotel bed, his hands still rough from a fight, his knuckles split and warm as they slid up my thighs?
To feel all that dangerous, barely-leashed power and know—really know—that not one ounce of it was aimed at hurting me?
That it was all pointed outward.
Protecting me. Shielding me. Claiming me.
A small, inappropriate bubble of laughter rose in my chest. I smothered it behind my palm, glancing around the lobby to make sure no one was paying attention.
A couple with a stroller. A businessman arguing quietly into his phone.
The front-desk clerk tapping something into a computer.
No one cared that there was a woman in leggings and an old university T-shirt sitting in an armchair, slowly coming apart at the seams because her boyfriend had just gone full ex–special forces on her editor.
Boyfriend.
The word should have made me flinch. It didn’t. It just slotted into place with a kind of reckless, dizzy rightness.
I slouched lower in the chair, tipping my head back. My body felt like a contradiction—still amped with flight-or-fight, but underneath that, softer, looser. My thighs pressed together on their own, a small, private answer to everything my brain was pretending not to think.
You’re supposed to be the rational one, I reminded myself. The woman who writes about power structures, not the one who gets weak-kneed because a man growled on her behalf in a hotel hallway.
Except it wasn’t just the growl. It was the line underneath it—the one that said, without words: I will end you before I let you hurt her.
I’d spent my adult life proving I didn’t need saving. That I could walk into dangerous places under my own power and walk back out again. That I could file the story and fix my own lock and talk down my own threats.
And I’d done it. I was proud of it.
But sitting there, breathing hotel air and trying to slow my heart, I realized something I hadn’t let myself admit:
Not needing protection and not wanting it were two different things.
“I can handle myself,” I murmured under my breath, testing the words.
I believed them. It wasn’t bravado. If Derek had pressed me harder, if Levi hadn’t appeared, I would’ve done what I had to do—heel of the hand, broken nose, scream loud enough to bring half the floor running. I’d done worse in worse places.
But the idea of not having to. Of knowing that, for once, someone else had seen a threat and stepped in before I had to bleed for it—
That did something to me I wasn’t ready to name.
My mind drifted to all the other ways Levi’s capacity for violence lived under his skin.
The precision of his movements. The way his hands could be gentle on my body one moment and devastating in a fight the next.
The stored kinetic energy of him, like a coiled spring that only unwound for a purpose.
I imagined going back up there after all this. Finding him with bruised knuckles and a split lip. Climbing into his lap and just … staying. Letting that dangerous energy curl around me like a shield while I kissed every place that hurt.
“Get a grip, Emerson,” I muttered.
The giddy, schoolgirl part of me—apparently back from the dead after a decade in the field—did not get a grip. It kicked its legs, metaphorically, in the back of my mind.
Did you see his face? it squealed. Did you see what he’d do for you?
My cheeks heated. If my younger self could see me now, I wasn’t sure if she’d be horrified or taking notes.
Slowly, the sharp edges of adrenaline began to dissolve, leaving something steadier in their place. The arousal didn’t vanish—if anything, it settled deeper, less like fireworks and more like embers—but my brain finally started doing what it did best.
Thinking.
What were they doing up there?
I glanced at the lobby clock. At least twenty minutes had passed. Maybe Thirty. Long enough for a confrontation, but not long enough for … whatever came after. Unless Levi had decided to call hotel security, or the cops, or—
I winced. Levi was not a call-the-cops kind of man.
Images tried to crowd in—too vivid, too specific.
My imagination had never had trouble filling in blanks, but now I had actual footage to overlay it with.
Levi with his brothers, talking matter-of-factly about missions I’d only heard whispered about.
Levi describing how he’d neutralized mercenaries to stop a massacre.
My fingers found the faint ache on my forearm where Derek’s grip had been. It would bruise. A petty part of me hoped Levi saw it before it faded.
The giddiness ebbed, replaced by a different weight.
Derek hadn’t just flown halfway down the coast to badger me about a memo. He’d been rattled—more rattled than I’d ever seen him. There’d been too much behind his eyes, too much unsaid in the spaces between “board” and “donors” and “pressure.”
Someone had gotten to him. The same someone, maybe, who’d fed me the original tip. The same someone Byron Dane claimed had his sons in their sights.
I’d held onto my sources like a security blanket, convinced that if I could just keep all the pieces close long enough, I’d see the shape of the puzzle before anyone else did. That I could control the narrative by controlling the information.
But Derek showing up at my hotel like that—flying across state lines under invisible duress, putting his hands on me because he was more afraid of whoever was pulling his strings than he was of losing my trust—that changed the equation.
This wasn’t just a story anymore.
It hadn’t been for a while, if I was honest.
The truth hadn’t stopped being the truth just because I’d fallen in love with one of the subjects. But the way to get at it might have changed.
A woman in a navy blazer and sensible shoes crossed the lobby, pulling a wheeled suitcase. The front-desk clerk welcomed a new guest. Somewhere, an ice machine hummed.
Life went on. Responsibility pressed down.
What are they doing up there? morphed into a better question:
What am I going to do now?
I straightened in the chair.
I could wait. Sit here like a good girl until Levi came back down, blood on his knuckles or not, and let him take the lead.
Or—
I could act like the person Meghan and Hazel and the others seemed to think I was. The woman they’d watched across a table and decided was capable of standing beside a Dane without losing herself.
Levi had gone to protect me, no questions asked.
Maybe it was my turn to protect him. And his family. In the one way I knew how.
By sharing what I knew.
Once that thought landed, it didn’t leave.
I stood, my legs a little shaky but functional, and headed for the elevators.
He’d told me to stay in the lobby.
Sorry, Levi.
The elevator ride up felt longer than the one down, even though I knew it wasn’t.
My fingers brushed the faint ache on my arm again, a reminder of why I was doing this.
When the doors opened onto my floor, the hallway looked exactly the same—beige wallpaper, patterned carpet, exit signs humming faintly.
I walked toward my room, half expecting to hear raised voices, a thud, something.
Nothing.
The door was still closed. For a second, irrational fear pricked: what if Derek was here, waiting?
He wasn’t. The hallway was empty.
I unlocked the door and stepped inside.
The room was … normal.
Too normal.
No editor bleeding on the carpet. No giant men in tactical gear. No boyfriend with bruised fists and a wild look in his eyes.
The bedspread was rumpled the way I’d left it. The paper bag from the soup sat on the dresser. My laptop rested where I’d abandoned it. The compass on the nightstand pointed north like it had never considered any other direction.
They were gone.
All of them.
I stood there in the doorway for a moment, a stupid, hollow disappointment mixing with relief.
I’d wanted, against my better judgment, to see what Levi looked like in the aftermath.
To trace the line of his jaw, check the set of his shoulders, ask how far he’d gone and whether he regretted any of it.
But, of course, he’d gone.
He had a half-dead editor as leverage and a father with enemies older than my career. There was only one place they’d take Derek Price.
Dominion Hall.
The thought came with the calm certainty of fact.
If Derek had been compromised—and I was increasingly sure he had—then keeping what I knew to myself wasn’t protecting him. Or me. Or Levi.
It was protecting The Vanguard.
Byron Dane wanted my intel. He’d asked for it bluntly through Levi, and I’d hesitated, because giving a shadow billionaire patriarch my sources felt like handing a lit match to a man standing over a gas leak.
But Derek showing up in my hallway, talking like a man with a gun to his head—I didn’t know the whole story yet, but I knew enough:
The situation had escalated.
So, would I.
I crossed to the desk, grabbed my phone, and scrolled to the number the driver had given me when he dropped me off earlier.
“Ms. Emerson?” the driver answered after two rings, his voice as composed as it had been earlier.
“Hi,” I said. “It’s Amelia. I—I could use a ride back to Dominion Hall.”
“I was already on the way,” he said, as if I’d asked him to run to the corner store. “Be there in three minutes.”
“Thre minutes is perfect,” I said.
I hung up before I could talk myself out of it.
Then I opened my suitcase.
If I was going to walk into Byron Dane’s fortress and hand him my threads, I wasn’t doing it in leggings and a T-shirt that smelled faintly of airplane.
I pulled out jeans, a soft button-down shirt in a peachy color my mother said made my eyes look less tired, and the blazer I’d brought in case someone insisted on interviewing me on camera.
In the bathroom, I splashed cold water on my face, twisted my hair into something vaguely intentional, and swiped on concealer and mascara. It didn’t turn me into one of the glossy women at the Promenade lunch, but it made me look like a version of myself I recognized.
Back in the main room, I slid my laptop into its sleeve and into my bag. Alongside it went my notebook, my recorder, my charger, and a handful of printouts I’d been marking up—the tip email, background clippings, a jotted map of how the names might connect.
At the last second, I snagged the cheap little compass off the nightstand and slipped it into my pocket.
This wasn’t about geography. But I had a feeling I was about to walk deeper into the maze, and a symbolic north felt better than nothing.
In the mirror by the door, I caught my own gaze. My eyes looked … different. Still wary. Still tired. But there was a steadiness there I hadn’t seen a few days ago.
“You’re walking into a house full of billionaires and ex–special forces with a laptop and a five-dollar compass,” I told my reflection. “Sure. Why not?”
Downstairs, somewhere out front, a car with tinted windows would be pulling up, ready to carry me back into the center of everything.
Back to the man who would break someone’s face for putting a hand on me.
Back to the family whose secrets had started this whole thing.
Back to the truth, wherever it led.