Chapter Six | TORIN #3
Noa looked up at me. “You dance.”
“I do many things.”
“Apparently.”
“You sound surprised.”
“I assumed your formal training stopped at glowering and property damage.”
“Those were advanced courses.”
Her fingers tightened lightly on my shoulder. “Did you learn this in Ireland?”
“I learned it from a woman in Galway who told me I had two choices. Dance properly or stop stepping on her shoes.”
“Terrifying.”
“She was five feet tall and feared by better men than me.”
“No one better than you was available?”
I laughed under my breath.
Noa’s eyes changed when I did. Every time. Like the sound caught her somewhere she didn’t want anything catching her.
I wanted to put my mouth against her throat and feel her pulse. I wanted the night over. I wanted every threat in the room handled, every door locked behind us, every excuse stripped away until she had nowhere to stand but with me.
Instead, I turned her under my hand and watched the room over her shoulder.
Simmons appeared at the edge of the main hall.
He touched two fingers to his phone, then looked at Landon’s woman in emerald near the auction table.
Ready.
Noa saw my face. “Publication?”
“Close.”
“Then I need to step away.”
“Noa.”
Her name came out rougher than I intended.
She looked at me, and the room moved around us in silk and music and soft lies.
“I’m not waiting for them to decide whether I get to live,” she said. “We make them move.”
I could have argued. I could have told her every reason my body rejected the idea of letting her walk away from me, even across a ballroom. She already knew them. She knew because the same fear was under her skin, held down by will and red satin and a spine made of steel.
So I did the only thing worth doing.
I leaned in and brushed my mouth against her temple. To the room, a date stealing a second. To Noa, a promise I didn’t have time to say prettily.
“You come back to me,” I said.
Her hand slid once against my lapel, right over the place my heart had stopped pretending not to belong to her.
“I’m planning on it.”
She stepped away.
I let her go.
Noa crossed the edge of the dance floor, accepted a passing smile from a donor without slowing, and moved into the corridor that led toward the ladies’ room and the east gallery.
Red against marble. Dark hair down her back.
Gold cat charm flashing once as she adjusted the clutch she no longer needed to guard.
I stayed where I could see the corridor entrance and the ballroom both.
Simmons moved to the bandstand.
Landon’s voice came into my ear. “Simmons is live in thirty seconds.”
“Copy.”
Noa’s voice followed, low and clear. “I’m at the ladies’ room. Corridor is quiet.”
“Take your time,” I said, because the room didn’t need me speaking like a man whose skin was too tight for his body.
“Did you just tell me to take my time?”
“I’m evolving.”
“Try not to hurt yourself.”
The comm clicked quiet.
Twenty seconds passed.
Thirty.
Simmons stepped up to the microphone near the bandstand with the confidence of a man about to become unwelcome in every rich room in Halo City.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, and the band faltered because people always listened when someone took a microphone without asking. “Gideon Simmons, Halo City Chronicle. I apologize for interrupting the dancing, but this can’t wait.”
The first ripple moved through the room.
Phones lifted.
Pamela turned from a donor, irritation flashing over her face before she smoothed it.
Hughes looked toward Simmons.
Not alarmed. Not yet.
My gaze cut to the corridor.
Noa hadn’t come back.
I moved.
Not fast enough to spook the room. Fast enough that Landon’s woman in emerald shifted with me. The man near the south corridor touched his cuff.
“Noa,” I said into the comm.
Nothing.
“Noa, answer me.”
Static breathed once in my ear.
Then nothing.
Simmons’s voice carried behind me. “Documents provided to this publication show an extensive laundering operation moving money through The Warren Pediatric Care Foundation and into Valenti Consortium-linked development pipelines before disappearing into shell accounts.”
The room erupted.
I reached the corridor at a controlled walk and turned the corner with my hand inside my jacket.
Empty marble. Ladies’ room door ahead. Service door beyond it, not fully closed.
Noa’s red clutch lay on the floor near the baseboard. Its false bottom was exposed.
I drew my weapon and moved.
Landon’s voice hit my comm. “Dempsey?”
“She’s off comm. East service corridor.”
“We’re moving.”
I pushed through the service door.
The sound of the gala cut in half behind me. Concrete stairs. Utility lights. Cold air. A darker corridor waited below, part storage access and part staff passage, with a steel door propped open behind a rolling cart of folded linens. The corridor smelled of dust, floor polish, and old stone.
A man’s voice came from below.
“Give me the drive.”
Hughes.
I saw the gun barrel pressed to Noa’s back, and the last loose piece of the night locked into place.
I moved down three steps without sound.
Noa stood at the bottom landing, one hand against the wall, her body held too still.
Hughes stood behind her, tuxedo immaculate, face no longer civic or calm.
His right hand held the gun low and tight against her spine.
His left hand gripped her upper arm hard enough that I could see the pressure from ten feet away.
I had a shot.
Hughes had Noa in front of him.
“You have ten seconds,” Hughes said. “Give me the drive, and you might walk out of here.”
Noa’s voice came steady. Too steady. “You’re too late.”
The gun pressed harder into her back.
“You don’t understand the position you’re in.”
“I understand it perfectly.”
“This isn’t a negotiation.”
“No. You made that clear.”
Hughes’s face tightened. “Where is it?”
“With Simmons.”
Silence cut through the stairwell.
Hughes stared at her like the words had reached him in the wrong language.
“You’re lying.”
“I gave it to him before dinner. Everything on it is going public right now.”
“No.”
“He has it.”
“You stupid girl.”
Hughes shoved her forward one step, and the gun tracked with her. My finger settled against the trigger.
Noa saw me then.
Her eyes didn’t widen. She didn’t look relieved. She looked at me once and then looked away, giving me what she could: she knew I was there. She wouldn’t pull him into the shot. She wouldn’t make it harder.
From above, muffled by concrete and distance, Simmons’s amplified voice cut through the floor.
“The records include internal foundation documents, donor-controlled entities, shell transfers, and communications tied to missing executive assistant Maren Bell and murdered federal prosecutor Sawyer Price.”
Hughes’s face changed.
The public voice was gone. The judge was gone. The man left behind had a gun in his hand and nothing left to lose.
“You little bitch,” he said, voice shaking now. “You have no idea what you’ve done.”
Noa breathed through her nose. Her fingers shifted against the wall, inch by inch, toward the slit in her dress.
“I know exactly what I did.”
Hughes lifted the gun.
The barrel moved toward her ribs.
“You’re going to get what’s coming to you,” he said.
“He won’t get the chance,” I said.
Hughes jerked toward my voice.
I had the gun on him before his eyes found me.
“Drop the weapon,” I said. “Move another inch and you’re done.”
Behind me, the stairwell door opened. Feet hit the landing above. Landon’s people. Two federal agents. Clean badges. Weapons drawn.
Hughes’s gaze flicked up.
Noa moved.
She dropped hard, twisting toward the wall as her hand came out from under the red gown with the slim blade flashing in the utility light. Hughes’s gun swung with her, but the shift gave me the angle.
I fired.
The shot cracked through the stairwell.
Hughes screamed and staggered back, gun falling from his hand as blood bloomed at his shoulder. Noa kicked the weapon across the landing before it stopped sliding. One of Landon’s men came down fast and drove Hughes to the concrete.
“Federal agents,” a woman’s voice snapped. “Keep your hands where we can see them.”
Hughes fought for half a second. He didn’t have a chance, but men like him always believed the rules would remember who they were.
They didn’t.
They cuffed him facedown on the museum floor while Simmons’s voice continued above us and the gala roared itself apart.
I holstered my weapon and got to Noa.
My hands found her face first, then her shoulders, then her arms. Looking for blood. Looking for holes. Looking for any sign the shot I had seen in my head had become real.
“Noa.”
“I’m not hit.”
Her voice was calm.
Her hands weren’t.
They shook once before she curled them into fists.
I covered them with mine.
“I’m not hit,” she said again, harder this time.
“I heard you.”
“You look like you didn’t.”
“I saw the gun move.”
The color went out of her mouth for one breath before she forced her face still.
I pulled her against me. Not gently. Not politely. She came hard, her forehead pressing to my chest, both fists trapped between us.
Around us, agents hauled Hughes upright. His face had gone grey beneath the rage. Blood darkened his tux. One of the federal agents read him his rights while Hughes spat about warrants, jurisdiction, careers, and consequences that no longer belonged to him.
Noa lifted her head.
“Did Simmons publish?”
From the top of the stairs, Landon appeared, gun lowered but not holstered. “He published.”
Noa turned toward him. “All of it?”
“Enough to make killing you useless. The full archive is mirrored and in federal hands.”
She nodded once.
Then she looked at Hughes.
He was staring at her now with pure hatred.
Noa didn’t flinch.
“You were too late,” she said.
Hughes lunged against the agents’ grip. “You think this ends because a reporter hit publish? You think you know what kind of people you’ve touched?”