Chapter 9 #2
"Do you have any idea what they're capable of?
" His voice rose. Not shouting. Will didn't shout.
He got quiet and intense, and this was the loud version of that, which meant something had broken loose.
"They cut your brakes, Lindsey. They could have killed you with a three-ton vehicle.
The only reason you're standing here is luck, and I will not.
.." His voice fractured. "I can't just sit here and hope.
I can't just... trust that luck holds. I needed thirty seconds.
If something happened, thirty seconds of warning to get to you, to send help, to do something besides. .."
"Besides what?"
"Besides watch." The word came out wrecked. "Besides standing three car lengths away watching your car spin into a guardrail and not being able to do a goddamn thing about it."
The room was very quiet. The morning light came through the windows and made shadows on the floor and neither of us moved.
He wasn't performing. I could see that. I'd spent my whole life learning to spot performances, and this wasn't one.
The crack in his voice, the way his hands had curled at his sides, the look on his face, it was real.
He was terrified. Genuinely, deeply terrified, and the tracking app was what terror looked like when it came from a man who didn't know how to be afraid without also being in control.
But my father had been genuine too. Every justification, every excuse, every "I did it for the family." He'd meant it. He'd meant all of it. And it hadn't mattered, because meaning it didn't make it okay.
"I understand why you did it," I said. And I did.
That was the terrible part. I understood completely.
"I understand you were scared. I understand the crash was traumatic.
I understand that you have spent seven years trying to make sure you never feel helpless again, and this was how you made yourself feel less helpless. "
He was staring at me. Waiting. Knowing there was a 'but.'
"But you promised me, Will. In the hallway of my apartment, with the police sirens getting closer.
You looked at me and said you'd ask. That we'd decide together.
That you wouldn't..." I stopped. My throat had gone tight despite the calm.
"Was that just something you said? In the moment? Because it was the right thing to say?"
"No."
"Then what happened between that promise and this phone?"
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
"I watched your car get hit. And after that.
.. the promise felt like a luxury I couldn't afford.
Like following the rules while someone is.
.." He pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead.
"I know that's not an excuse. I know it's exactly what. .. I know."
"What do you know?"
"That it's what your father said. 'The rules don't apply because the situation is different.
' 'The circumstances justify it.' I know.
" He dropped his hand. His eyes were red.
"I knew while I was installing it. I knew it was wrong.
I did it anyway because the alternative was lying awake imagining your car spinning into a wall, and I couldn't... I couldn't live in that.
So I chose this instead. Chose to be the person who. .."
He stopped. Swallowed. Looked at the floor.
"The person who controls things," I finished quietly.
"Yes."
The word sat between us. Small and honest and terrible.
In the apartment hallway, I'd been angry.
Furious. The fight had been hot, loud, two people colliding at full speed.
This was different. This was the aftermath kind of pain, the kind that comes when you realize the problem isn't a single bad decision but a pattern, and patterns are harder to fix than decisions because patterns are who someone is.
And here's what I hadn't expected: the thing I felt most wasn't betrayal.
It was grief. For the version of this that I'd been building in my head, the version where he kept his promise and I stopped waiting for the other shoe to drop and we just..
. figured it out. The version where I didn't have to be afraid that the person I was falling for would turn out to be another person I couldn't trust.
"I need you to delete it," I said. "Right now. While I watch."
"Okay."
"And then I need you to understand something." I stood up, and the ribs screamed, and I ignored them. "This is the second time. The apartment was the first. The phone is the second. There isn't going to be a third."
"I know."
"If it happens again, I'm done. Not as a threat.
Not as leverage. Just... done. Because I can't be with someone who.
.." The word 'love' was right there. Right at the edge of the sentence, ready to fall out.
I felt it in my throat, heavy and terrifying, and I swallowed it back down.
"I can't be with someone I have to check up on.
I spent my childhood doing that. Watching my father for signs that something was wrong.
Scanning for lies. It nearly destroyed me. I won't do it again."
He pulled out his phone. I watched his hands, watched his thumbs navigate the settings, watched him find the application, watched him hesitate for one second, two, three, before he pressed delete. The hesitation told me everything. It wasn't easy. It cost him something real.
Good. It should cost him.
"It's gone," he said. Held the phone out so I could verify.
I took it. Checked. It was gone.
"Thank you," I said, and the word tasted like nothing.
He stood there in the middle of the guest room, phone in his hand, morning light making him look washed out and young. He looked like a man who had just broken something and was staring at the pieces and didn't know which ones to pick up first.
"Lindsey."
"I need some space right now." I said it as gently as I could manage, which wasn't very gentle. "Not forever. Just... for now. I need to be in this room by myself for a while."
"Okay." He didn't argue. Didn't negotiate. Didn't try to fix it with words. He just nodded, and backed toward the door, and stopped on the threshold. "I'm sorry. I know that's not enough. But I'm..."
"I know."
He left. The door closed quietly behind him.
I sat on the edge of the bed and pressed my palms flat against the mattress, the way I'd pressed them against the conference room table on my first day at Sterling & Steele, back when the only thing I was afraid of was a man with cold blue eyes and a reputation for destruction.
That felt like a lifetime ago. A different Lindsey. A simpler problem.
I didn't cry. I wanted to, in a distant way, the way you want to sneeze but can't. The tears were there, behind my eyes, behind the calm, but they wouldn't come. Maybe because crying required letting go of something, and I was holding on too tight to too many things.
Instead, I sat there and thought about trust. About how many times it could break before it couldn't be repaired.
About my father, who'd broken my mother's trust so many times it had become a kind of chronic condition, a low-grade fracture that never fully healed.
About Will, who'd promised to ask and then hadn't, who'd known it was wrong and done it anyway, who'd looked at me with fiery eyes and said "I knew" like confession was the same as absolution.
It wasn't. But it was more than my father had ever offered.
That distinction again. I kept coming back to it.
The distinction between my father, who'd hidden his crimes and maintained the lie until it collapsed, and Will, who'd installed the tracker and then stood in front of me without denying it.
Who'd said "I knew it was wrong" without being cornered into saying it.
My father had never said those words. Not once, in the entire unraveling. Not until the sentencing hearing, when his lawyer had coached him on what contrition was supposed to look like.
Will had said them unprompted. While I was still holding the evidence. Before I'd even asked.
It didn't make it okay. But it made it different.
And different mattered, because if everything was the same, if every broken promise was identical to every other broken promise, then trust was impossible and love was a trap and I might as well go back to being the ghost who moved through investigations without being seen.
I didn't want to be a ghost anymore. That was the problem. I'd been fine with it for a decade, and then Will Steele had made me an omelet and argued about restaurant hygiene ratings and ripped a car door off its hinges, and now invisibility felt like a prison instead of a sanctuary.
An hour passed. Maybe two. The light in the room shifted from morning to afternoon.
Then I got up, went to the bathroom, washed my face, looked at myself in the mirror. The bruises were fading. The stitches were healing. I looked tired and pale and like someone who'd been having a very hard week, which was accurate.
"Okay," I said to my reflection. "Okay."
I didn't know what I meant by it. But it felt like a decision.
I walked back out to the living room and found Will at the dining table, laptop open, not typing.
Just sitting there, staring at a screen that had probably gone to sleep twenty minutes ago.
He looked up when I entered, and his face was a careful blank, the kind of blank that took effort to maintain, and I could see the effort it was costing him.
"The Eric Mendez operation," I said. "What's the timeline?"
Something moved in his expression. Not relief, exactly. More like the recalibration of a man who'd been preparing for the worst and gotten something else instead.
"Tomorrow night. Bates confirmed the security window. 10 to 10:15 PM at Reeves's residence."
"Then we have twenty-four hours to prepare.
" I moved toward my laptop, and my ribs protested, and I let them protest because pain was at least something I understood.
"I found some additional financial links while I was recovering.
More connections between the Cayman entities and the Delaware sub. It might give us leverage with Mendez."
"You've been working?" He sounded somewhere between impressed and exasperated. "You're supposed to be resting."
"I was bored." I pulled up the files I'd been quietly assembling. "Besides, someone had to do something useful while you were busy installing spyware on my phone."
He winced. "I deserved that."
"You deserve worse. I'm being generous because I'm injured and it makes me magnanimous."
"Magnanimous." The word came out rough, but something in his face loosened. Not a smile. Not even close. But the absence of the terrible blankness, replaced by something that looked like cautious hope. "Is that what we're calling it?"
"It's what I am." I looked up at him, and despite everything, the tracking app, the fight, the raw places we'd just opened up, I didn't want to be anywhere else.
And that probably said something important about either my character or my judgment, and I'd figure out which one later.
"Now get over here and help me figure out how to turn a gambling addict into an informant.
We've got a trafficking ring to destroy. "
He moved to stand beside me at the counter, close enough that our shoulders almost touched.
Close enough that I could feel the warmth of him, solid and present and here, which was the thing he kept choosing to be, even when I was furious with him, even when he'd messed up, even when the smart move was to retreat behind his walls and wait for the storm to pass.
He didn't retreat. He stood there and took it and came back.
My father had never done that either.
"Twenty-four hours," he said quietly.
Outside the penthouse windows, the city glittered with indifferent light. Somewhere out there, Victor Reeves was planning his next move, probably congratulating himself on the car accident that should have taken me out of the game.
He had no idea what was coming.
And standing beside Will in the kitchen, shoulder to shoulder, close enough to touch but not touching, I realized that the door I'd walked through back at the storage unit had led somewhere I hadn't expected.
Not into his world. Into ours. A messy, complicated, frequently infuriating world where the man I was falling for had a tracking problem and a hero complex and the best omelet recipe I'd ever tasted.
It wasn't what I'd planned. None of this was what I'd planned.
But the plan, like the lo mein argument and the wobbling second table and every other carefully constructed excuse we'd built between us, had never been the point.
He was the point. We were the point. And tomorrow, we'd find out if that was enough.