29. Cali
CALI
The number sits there. It doesn't blink. It doesn't apologize. It just is.
I built this thing, so I know better than anyone exactly how good it is. I've watched it catch a man who thought he was too smart to be caught—and then do it again.
It.
Does.
Not.
Miss.
So I should get up. I should call Mercer back and tell her she's right, and that I need her to help me and my children get away from this murderous monster before it's too late.
But before I can make up my mind to do that, I hear his feet on the stairs.
"Cali?" Ronan's voice floats down ahead of him. "They're finally asleep. Isabella was out before her head—"
He comes around the corner into the kitchen and stops.
He sees my face first.
Then he sees the laptop.
Then he sees the folder fanned across the island in Mercer's neat, damning spread, and it all makes sense to him at once.
He goes very still.
"Cali," he says, "what is that?"
I turn the laptop around so he can see it. The dashboard. The clean timeline. The little dots that follow him around like a shadow on every night I could name. The number, big and red, sitting at the bottom like a verdict.
He looks at it for a long moment. His jaw grinds. His hands, at his sides, curl and uncurl.
"Todd's dead," I say. "Mercer came by and told me.
Someone shot him in a motel outside Harrisburg two nights ago.
" I swallow. "Somebody spoofed radio codes to pull the feds off him first. And then somebody sent Mercer a burner map that pins a phone next to you on every single relevant night I could vouch for.
Plus a payment trail that runs through shells six deep.
" I can't stop this last part: "The good ol' Akov pattern. "
"Is that what you think it looks like?"
"It doesn't look like anything. I ran the engine, Ronan.
" I point at the screen without touching it, like it's too hot to bear.
"I fed everything Mercer gave me into the only tool on earth I trust more than my own eyes, and it came back at ninety-eight percent. Damn near one hundred percent certainty that my current husband killed my previous one.”
The word husband twice in one sentence. It would be funny some other day.
He doesn't come toward me. He knows better. He stays on his side of the island, both hands planted on the marble now. "I didn't do it," he says.
"The number says—"
"I don't give a fuck what the number says!" he roars. "I care what you— Cali, look at me. Not the screen. Me."
I want to look at him. I do. I want to more than anything.
But the last time I trusted my eyes over my data, I ended up married to a man who stole my company and told me it was for my own good.
The number is right there. Ninety-eight percent. My own machine. The one thing that never lies to me.
And Ronan is right there, too. Bloodshot. Devastated.
What to trust? What to choose?
I close my eyes.
Then I open them.
And I look at him.
I look at the man, not the dashboard. I look at the man who took the mirrors out of my house because he couldn't stand to watch me shrink.
Who heard my son shout a fact through a doorway and rented an aquarium around it.
Who got down on his knees on my daughter's floor and said goodnight to a caterpillar.
Who came when the killer was on my stairs.
Who should have been dead from two bullets and cried into my hair under fluorescent lights when it was his cousin bleeding out instead.
I look at the man who has never, not once, told me I was crazy.
Every receipt I have says he did it.
I hear myself say it anyway.
"Okay. I believe you."
He was already still, but at those four words—my turn to surprise him with four of them—he goes even stiller.
"What did you say?" he whispers.
"I believe you," I whisper, just a little bit louder.
"The world is stacked up against you, all the receipts…
and I think I might actually be in love enough to choose you anyway.
Can you believe that? I made myself a rule, Ronan.
I said I'd never trust a man on faith again.
Not ever. Not one point of data less than certainty. "
He nods. "I know."
"And yet here I am." A tear slides down my cheek. "I've got nothing but faith, and I'm choosing you anyway."
He comes around the island then. He drops down in front of the stool so his face is below mine, so I'm the one looking down at him the way he always looks down at me.
"I have done terrible things, kotyonok," he murmurs.
"You know most of them now. I took your company.
I put a spy in your house. I have hurt men and I have not lost sleep over it.
I will not sit here and pretend I'm clean, because you know better, and I promised you I'd never lie to your face again.
" He takes a breath that shudders through his whole body.
"But I did not do this. On my mother's grave.
On Hayden and Isabella. I would never take their father from them.
Not for a business. Not for anything. Do you understand me? Never."
It's my turn to whisper, "I know."
"Someone did this to us." His hand comes up, hovers at my knee, asking. I let it settle.
"Lev." I put my fingers in his hair. It's the first thing I've been sure of all day. "You're going to find him?"
His face twists into an inhuman snarl. "I am going to find him and make him wish the man who shot Navi had shot him instead.
He tried to take you and the kids away from me by dressing a murder up in my clothes, and for that—" He stops.
He presses his forehead to my knee. "For that, I will make him pay. "
I slide off the stool so I can get down on the floor with him, right there on the kitchen tile. I take his ruined face in both my hands and I kiss him.
His arms come around me and haul me in. It's the savage, heart-rending embrace of a man who thought he'd lost everything twenty seconds ago and just found out he hasn't.
"Say it again," he growls against my throat.
"I believe you."
"Again."
"I believe you, Ronan."
He pulls me up off the floor and onto the island, scattering the folder, Mercer's damning pages sliding to the tile, and I don't care, I don't care about any of it.
He shoves the laptop away without even closing it, ninety-eight point one percent glowing red at the wall, and he peels me out of my clothes right there in the kitchen with the moon coming through the window over the sink.
"The kids—" I gasp.
"Asleep. Both of them." His mouth is at my collarbone, my breast, lower. "Be quiet for me, kotyonok. You know how."
He worships every part of me the way he always does, the stretch marks, the soft places, the parts I spent a decade learning to hate, like they're evidence of something good instead of something wrong.
And when he finally comes up over me, when he pushes inside me with nothing between us because there's never anything between us anymore, he grabs my jaw and makes me look at him.
"Eyes open," he says. "I want to see that trust in your eyes."
"It's there," I sob as he spears me open.
"Show me. Fucking show me, my queen." His forehead drops to mine. "I don't deserve it. You know that. Every receipt says I don't."
"I know."
"Then why—"
"Because the receipts aren't everything," I tell him, and I wrap my legs around him and pull him deeper, and he shudders. "Sometimes, the data's wrong and the person's right. I've spent my whole life trusting the numbers and this one time—this one time, Ronan—I'm trusting you instead."
He buries the deepest he's ever gone, and then we finish together, silent and trembling, the only two solid things left in a world that keeps falling to pieces again and again.
As we settle back down, he presses kisses into my hair. "We're going to fix this," he promises. "And when it's done, you'll never have to run a query about me ever again."
I laugh, wet against his skin. "That's a big promise."
"I'm good for it." He tips my chin up. His eyes are still red, but there's something in them now that wasn't there an hour ago.
Something that looks a lot like the thing at the lake, the thing he said to Isabella, the thing he swore he'd do his best at.
"I love you, Calista Meadows. I know the timing is grotesque.
A normal man wouldn't say it here and now.
But I'm not a normal man, and I love you, and I need you to have heard it tonight of all nights. In case."
"In case of what?"
"In case the world does the thing it always does." He kisses my forehead. "I love you. That's the only receipt that's ever mattered."