Chapter 28 Daniela
DANIELA
Hawk watches me across the small table, candlelight twitching in his eyes like he’s swallowing back something that burns.
“I wish I could tell you everything,” he says. “I don’t want to overburden you.”
I open my mouth to argue, but then decide against it.
I’m also keeping secrets, after all.
“Before anything else,” he continues, voice low, “I need to be straight with you about my brother. Eagle’s OD was staged.”
I nearly drop my fork. “Staged? By whom?”
“We don’t know yet,” he says. “But it wasn’t a relapse. Someone dosed him. It was a hit to rattle me.” He frowns. “To rattle all of us.”
A cold wind seems to slip under the tablecloth and crawl under my skin. I picture Eagle’s white face, the machines, the bloom of bruises at his veins. Staged.
Hawk keeps going. “And Reyes… He escaped. I was dealing with that. That’s why I wasn’t with you last night.”
My pulse snaps. “Escaped? From where you kept him?”
His jaw shifts. He nods once. “Yeah.”
I lean back, gripping the napkin in my lap. “And you didn’t tell me.”
“I’m telling you now.” He swallows. “It’s handled.”
“How?” The word feels like a shard on my tongue. “How is a man like that ever ‘handled’?”
Hawk drops his gaze to the table for a moment. “He asked for a favor,” he says. “One favor, later.”
I go very still. A ringing starts in my ears. “What kind of favor?”
His mouth pulls tight. “He wanted a building on Bellamy land burned. A forgotten place. I… I went out there.”
For a second I can’t hear the restaurant sounds at all.
“Did you do it?” I whisper.
“No.” He leans in. “No. I used AI to make it look like I did. It buys us time—me time—to figure out why he wants it gone. There has to be something in that building tied to him. I won’t torch evidence that could bury him for good.”
A laugh breaks out of me. “So you let yourself be owned by a man like Reyes and now you’re…counter-owning him with fake photos?”
“It’s not ownership,” he says quietly. “It’s chess.”
“Chess,” I repeat, staring at the trembling flame between us. “My father used to call it that too. He said a man is a piece. Move him right and he’ll kneel on his own.” I lift my eyes to Hawk. “Men who owe bloody favors are how my father built his empire. You know this.”
His hands flatten on the table. “I do.”
“Then why would you step into the same trap?”
“Because I thought I was protecting you,” he says. “Because Reyes sniffed around you in Colombia. Because he touched your life. Because I thought I had a chance to stop him. And I took it.”
Heat floods my cheeks. He went after Reyes because he thought he was sending me the gifts.
I push my chair back an inch. The scrape is loud. Heads turn and then turn away. I hear my own breath. It sounds like I’m running though I’m sitting still.
“I can’t do this,” I say. “I can’t watch you make the same bargains that turned my life upside down before I was old enough to even have a life.”
He sits back too. His chest rises and falls once.
“This is the end of it,” he says. “I’m not making more bargains. I bought time, that’s it. I’m not going off half-cocked again. I’m not disappearing, locking people in basements, pretending I know better than the law. I’m out of that spiral. I promise you.”
I stare at him. “You can’t control what a man like Reyes will do.”
“I’m not saying that I know what he’ll do.” He shakes his head. “I’m promising what I know I will. I’ve untangled myself from the mess I made. I’m not stepping back into it.”
A dry laugh catches in my throat. “You think a fake fire untangles anything? What if he calls your bluff tomorrow?”
“Then I take the hit,” he says. “I’d rather take it than let it ripple into you.
” He watches me like he’s trying to memorize something.
“The minute you appeared in my life,” he says quietly, “I was willing to throw every rule out the window if it meant keeping you safe. That’s not noble.
It’s not smart. But it’s where I started.
I’m trying to be the man you deserve, but first I have to clean my own messes. ”
A server squeezes past with a tray of oysters. A moment of deafening silence between us.
Until—
“You keep saying end,” I say softly. “There’s never an end with men like him. There’s only a pause.”
“I know,” he says. “But there can be an end with me. That part I control.”
I look at him. Really look. At the tension at his mouth, the grip on his napkin, the exhaustion in his eyes. He’s wrecked himself for days over Reyes, Eagle, the barn, my test. He’s a storm and a shelter at the same time.
“Okay,” I say.
He blinks. “Okay?”
I smile. “Let’s have dinner. A nice dinner.”
Something in him loosens. It’s visible. The line of his shoulders drops a fraction, the air between us warms a degree. He doesn’t smile, not exactly. There’s still a lot to worry about.
We don’t call the waiter back. Neither of us is hungry. We just sit. He tells me about the building, how it’s isolated, how moonflowers grow around it.
“Why moonflowers?” I ask. “Who plants something that only wakes up at night?”
“My mother, I guess,” he says. “Though why she’d be at that old barn I have no idea. Maybe someone who wants beauty when other people sleep. Or someone who wants to be unseen.”
I picture white blooms opening in the dark, leaning toward the moon.
“Do you think it’s all tied to your father?” I ask.
“Maybe. I used to think he did a bad thing because he was bad. Now I wonder if he did it because he was cornered.”
“Cornered men still choose,” I say.
“I know.” He pauses. “I’m choosing you.” He reaches for his glass of water but then sets it down untouched.
“I’m not asking you to forgive me for every wrong step.
I’m asking you to let me take the next step the right way.
With you watching. With you telling me when I’m about to screw it up. I can take that. I need that.”
It sounds like humility, but it’s heavier. It makes something inside me both ache and want.
“Okay,” I say again, barely a breath. “Then we finish dinner.”
We do. Or we perform the ritual of finishing it—two more bites each, a slow sip of wine, the waiter’s soft inquiry about dessert turned down in unison.
Outside, the night is thick and soft, city heat rising from the sidewalk in waves. Hawk offers his arm and I take it.
“Come home with me,” he says.
I nod. Because I’m already inside the choice I made before we sat down. Because tomorrow morning I will dress in blue and go where the note tells me. Because this is my last night as a free woman, and I want it to be warm and human and mine.
Hawk doesn’t know. He can’t. If he did, he would throw his body across the door and set the city on fire to keep me from going. He’ll try to dam the flood. But floods come anyway. I won’t let Belinda drown so I can keep pretending I get to be saved.
In the car, he drives with one hand and holds mine with the other.
“You’re quiet,” he says.
“I’m thinking,” I reply.
“About what?”
“Moonflowers.” I don’t look at him. “About how some things only show their face in the dark.”
He squeezes my hand. “Then we’ll bring flashlights.”
I smile at the windshield.
Silence rolls with us for a few blocks. He turns onto a residential street lined with trees that make a tunnel out of the night.
An hour later, we pull off the dirt road into the driveway at Hawk’s place.
He sighs. “I’m going to do this right.”
“I know,” I say.
“Stay,” he whispers against my lips.
“I am,” I whisper back.
Later, I’ll slip into the bathroom and splash water on my face and meet my own eyes like a stranger. Later, I’ll rise before the sun and write three sentences on his kitchen notepad that will ruin him and save him in the same stroke.
But now…
Now I will stay.
Because this is the last time I get to choose something only for me.