Chapter 26
Chapter
Twenty-Six
MALLORY
Control was a funny thing.
People thought it was loud—assertive statements, raised chins, dramatic refusals packaged for social media and broken down into viral sound bites. Noise passed for power now. Outrage masqueraded as authority. If you dominated the room long enough, people assumed you were winning.
But volume was a tell.
The louder someone got, the more obvious it became that they were compensating. That they’d already lost the thread and were trying to drown out the silence where truth lived.
If you actually had control, you didn’t shout like a panicked gibbon.
Real control was far more intimate than performative. It knew when to lean in instead of raise its voice. It knew how to hold eye contact and wait. Like a good interview, it wasn’t about forcing the answer—it was about creating enough pressure that the truth volunteered itself.
Control knew how to stand perfectly still while everyone else rushed forward, waiting for you to fall.
Waiting for you to crack.
That was the energy in my dressing room.
The air was charged—not with chaos, but with restraint. With proximity. With all the things none of us were saying—between me and Flint, me and Brewster, and the silent standoff between Flint and Brewster—crowding the space until it felt volatile and dangerous all at once.
I didn’t need to raise my voice. Arguing with either of them would have been indulgent, and indulgence was a weakness I couldn’t afford—not now, not with this much at stake.
Emotion, left unchecked, dressed itself up as truth.
And that kind of self-indulgence was how words slipped their leash—how people were misquoted, misread, or buried by what they couldn’t take back.
I needed to go on air. I needed to stay clean. I needed the story to hold when everything else was threatening to fracture.
Flint stood near the mirror, jacket discarded, sleeves rolled to his forearms, posture loose in that way that came from shared history and earned trust. He scrolled through the final language on his tablet, thumb moving with quiet precision, jaw set—not tense, just focused.
When he spoke, it was low and economical.
One word adjusted. A clause cut. A sentence sharpened until it could survive impact.
I was halfway out of my blouse, bra visible, fabric caught at my elbows, and neither of us acknowledged it. We never had. We’d worked like this before—compressed timelines, cramped spaces, truth prioritized over modesty. Journalism stripped down to function and nerve.
But this wasn’t the same, because Brewster was there.
He hadn’t moved from the doorframe. Hadn’t spoken.
He leaned back against it like he was holding the room together by force of will alone, phone in his hand, knuckles white enough to betray how tightly he had it gripped.
His gaze cut to me and away again—too fast, too controlled.
Every so often his jaw flexed, the muscle jumping like something trying to break free beneath the skin.
He was making calls. Quiet ones. Surgical ones. The kind meant to shut doors before anyone realized they were open. That was what gave his stillness its edge. It wasn’t calm. It was restraint sharpened to a blade.
The air wasn’t chaotic. It was compressed. Pressurized. Like the moment before ice gives way underfoot—silent, lethal, unforgiving.
Flint glanced up as I slipped fully out of the blouse and slacks, his eyes flicking over me only long enough to register the shift in tone. Not my body. The moment. The signal.
I pulled the dress my assistants kept ready for crisis days—pressed, untouched, black as ink. Structured. Clean lines. The kind of dress that made people listen before you opened your mouth.
The little black dress was perfect for television. Perfect for control. Perfect for hiding what you couldn’t afford to show.
The grief came anyway.
A hard, breath-stealing punch to the gut. I stilled myself around it, shoulders back, spine straight, because I’d learned a long time ago that feeling something didn’t mean you were allowed to stop functioning. Especially not now.
Black meant authority.
It also meant mourning.
And Colin had been my friend.
Flint didn’t say anything. He didn’t look away either.
He stood near the mirror, tablet lowered, watching me with that steady, infuriatingly perceptive calm of his—like he knew exactly what this cost and wasn’t going to cheapen it by naming it. His jaw tightened once. Just once. Not grief on display. Respect.
Brewster was across the room, half-shadowed near the door.
He hadn’t moved since I’d reached for the dress.
His gaze tracked me with surgical precision—not hunger, not softness. Something colder. Sharper. The kind of restraint that felt less like discipline and more like violence turned inward. Like every instinct he had was locked down under threat of detonation.
I felt it anyway.
The heat of it. The pressure. The way his attention wrapped tight without ever touching.
I stepped into the dress and Flint turned slightly, giving me space without turning away—muscle memory from years of working side by side in rooms like this. I zipped up, smoothed the fabric, grounded myself in the familiar ritual.
Brewster’s eyes flicked to the line of my throat. The cut of the dress. The fact that I was choosing to go on air like this.
Not fragile.
Not hidden.
Weaponized calm.
His jaw flexed.
I felt it like cold pressure at my spine—possession stripped of tenderness, discipline wrapped tight around violence. Not the steady familiar gravity Flint offered, but something harsher. Territorial. Contained. A predator forced to watch his target walk deliberately into the open.
Good.
If he was struggling, it meant he understood what this was.
Two men. Two kinds of control.
And me, standing between them, already committed to the only thing neither of them could interrupt or override.
The truth.
Flint lifted his eyes to mine in the mirror. “You ready?”
I met his gaze. Saw the unspoken offer there—not to shield me, not to stop me, but to stand exactly where I needed him.
“As I’ll ever be,” I said.
The red light would come on soon.
And when it did, I wouldn’t just be speaking for Colin.
I’d be reclaiming the narrative from everyone who thought grief would make me careless.
We went back to the script without missing a beat. “We don’t open with Colin,” Flint said, already rewriting it in his head.
“No,” I said, agreeing around the lump that kept trying to form in my throat. “We want to start with how this actually happens,” I replied.
“Then bring him in as consequence, not catalyst.” Rough sympathy underscored the words, but he didn’t project it into our conversation.
I nodded. “And I don’t canonize him.”
“No,” Flint said, holding my gaze for a long beat as I got my breathing back under control. “You humanize him.”
“Friend,” I said quietly. “Not symbol.”
He added another mark to the screen, then nodded before he glanced at me again. “Precisely.” That mattered. That he didn’t flinch from it. That he wasn’t trying to protect me from the truth of my own grief or weaponize it for effect.
I adjusted the neckline of the dress, smoothed the fabric flat over my ribs. My hands were steady. That was how I knew I was ready.
Behind us, Brewster lingered near the door. While he wasn’t pretending to not watch, he did seem to think his watching didn’t matter.
Phone pressed to his ear, voice low and clipped—he was shutting things down. I recognized the cadence. Washington. Legal. Someone attempting to apply brakes after the vehicle had already cleared the cliff.
It wasn’t going to work.
Flint didn’t look at him. Not once. That felt deliberate.
“Keep the line about fraud not being a capital crime,” Flint said.
“Agreed,” I replied. “Because someone needs to say it out loud.”
“Exactly,” Flint said. “You deliver it like it shouldn’t be controversial.”
I lifted my eyes to meet his in the mirror, holding the look a beat longer than necessary before turning back to my reflection.
I didn’t correct the pallor under my eyes or the faint flush still clinging to my cheekbones.
The makeup team would try to smooth it later.
I wanted them to have to work around it.
Grief wasn’t something to be concealed. Not today.
“It isn’t,” I said quietly. “Not if we’re still pretending the law means something.”
Something flickered across his face—approval, yes, but also relief.
He agreed with both the statement and the sentiment.
We’d worked together long enough now to finish each other’s sentences.
To trust the silences. To know when a push would fracture the story—and when it was the only thing that would make it hold.
I turned slightly, checking the fall of the dress. Flint reached out without thinking, taking over setting up the mic wire on my back. His fingers were warm, practiced, sure.
The contact lingered half a second longer than necessary. I didn’t pull away. Neither did he.
In the mirror, Brewster’s jaw tightened.
Good.
Let him see it. Let him understand that whatever had burned between us in the dark didn’t own me. That my alliances were chosen in the light, with intention.
“You ready?” Flint asked quietly.
I nodded. “I won’t flinch.”
“I know.”
That was the thing.
He didn’t say be careful. He didn’t say don’t make it worse. He trusted me to step into it and decide how much heat I could withstand.
The producer knocked once, then opened the door. “Thirty seconds.”
Flint stepped back, professional again, but his hand brushed mine as I passed.
Brewster moved aside without comment as I walked past him toward the set. But I could feel the weight of his eyes as he tracked me—dark, unreadable, a storm held behind glass.