Chapter Six | TORIN #4
I stepped between them before the second agent finished tightening the cuffs.
“She knows exactly what kind of people,” I said. “That’s why she burned you in public.”
Hughes looked at me, breathing hard.
I smiled without any humor in it. “And if you look at her like that again, I’ll consider it a personal invitation.”
“Dempsey,” Landon said.
“I’m being diplomatic.”
Noa made a sound against my side that might have been a laugh if the stairwell hadn’t still smelled like gunpowder.
Landon’s mouth tightened once. “We need to move him through the public level. Pamela’s being detained.”
“Pamela’s moving?” Noa asked.
“She tried to leave through the west gallery when the story broke.”
Of course she had.
Noa picked up the red clutch from where one of Landon’s people had retrieved it. She looked down at the exposed false bottom, then snapped it closed.
For a moment, she didn’t move.
A tremor ran through her shoulders before she forced it down.
I put my hand at the back of her neck, under her hair, where the cameras wouldn’t see. “Breathe for me.”
Her throat moved.
She drew in one careful breath. Then another.
Then she looked toward the stairs. “Let’s finish it.”
The main hall of the Morrow Museum had changed in the time we had been below.
Donors stood in clusters with phones in their hands.
Press pushed at the edges. Uniformed officers and federal agents moved through tuxedos and gowns with controlled purpose.
The music had stopped. The silent auction tables gleamed under museum lights as if diamond bracelets and yacht weekends still mattered.
Simmons stood near the bandstand, phone in one hand, microphone in the other.
“The documents are now live through the Chronicle and mirrored with federal authorities,” he said.
“They include records tied to Sawyer Price, missing former foundation executive assistant Maren Bell, The Warren Pediatric Care Foundation, Valenti Consortium-linked entities, and protected financial channels inside Halo City’s legal establishment. ”
A woman near the champagne station gasped. A man at one of the sponsor tables shoved his chair back hard enough to scrape marble. Near the ballroom doors, someone whispered, “That’s Price’s case.”
Then the agents brought Hughes through the service corridor doors in handcuffs, blood dark on his tuxedo shoulder, and every camera in the room turned toward him.
Pamela Warren screamed.
She stood near the west gallery with two agents at her sides, one cuff already around her wrist, gold sequins flashing wildly as she twisted toward Hughes.
“You bastard!” she shrieked. “You said this was contained!”
Hughes went still.
Pamela’s husband stood ten feet away, face white with fury, one hand clenched around a phone. Whatever he had known before tonight, the public version had just arrived with teeth.
“Pamela,” Hughes snapped. “Be quiet.”
That was his mistake.
She heard the command. So did everyone else.
Pamela turned on him with the fury of a woman who had just realized the man she trusted to manage the consequences had arranged for her to carry them.
“Be quiet?” Her voice broke high and ugly. “You used me. You came after me because of my foundation, because of my access, because of Warren money and every donor list you wanted to touch.”
Hughes’s jaw hardened. “You need counsel.”
“I needed counsel before I let you into my bed.”
The room detonated in sound.
Pamela’s husband made a raw noise and stepped toward her. “You stupid, vain, grasping—”
She rounded on him too, diamond earrings swinging hard enough to catch the lights. “Don’t you dare stand there like a wounded saint. Everyone in this room knows about your little girls in Marina suites and your conference-week floozies.”
A donor whispered, “Oh my God.”
Noa stood beside me, pale under the makeup, shoulders too tight, eyes dark and fixed on the scene.
Pamela’s husband pointed at her with a hand that shook. “Find yourself a divorce attorney.”
She laughed once, sharp and broken. “Find yourself one who can explain why your development partners show up in my foundation records.”
That shut him up.
For a second.
Then three cameras swung toward him, and he looked at the sponsor boards as if one of them might rescue him.
An agent finished cuffing Pamela’s second wrist.
“You don’t understand,” Pamela said, voice rising again as she twisted toward the room, toward cameras, toward anyone who might still see her as something other than ruined.
“He drew me into it. Hughes knew the Valenti people. He knew the judges, the rulings, the pipelines. He told me the foundation could move money cleanly. He told me no one would ever look at children’s grants and hospital funds. ”
Hughes’s expression went flat.
I shifted closer to Noa.
Hughes saw it.
He saw her.
The hatred came back.
Noa’s fingers brushed mine once before she dropped her hand to her side.
Across the room, Pamela was still talking. Not because she wanted truth. Because she wanted distance between herself and the blast.
“He promised me there would be no trail,” she sobbed, makeup beginning to streak now. “He promised he would protect me. He said Price would never get the records. He said Maren wouldn’t be a problem. He said the courier would be handled.”
The room went silent in a new way.
Maren.
Price.
The courier.
Simmons lowered the microphone slowly.
One of the federal agents beside Pamela said, “Pamela Warren, you have the right to remain silent.”
“I’m trying to tell you he used me!”
“Anything you say can and will be used against you.”
“You should be arresting him!”
Hughes laughed, low and ugly. “They are.”
“And you still think you’re better than me,” Pamela spat.
Noa spoke quietly, only for us. “He thinks he’s smarter.”
I looked at Hughes. Bleeding shoulder. Cuffed wrists. Career dead on the floor. Name spreading through every phone in the room.
Not smart enough.
Landon came to my side. “Get her out.”
Noa looked up at him. “I can give a statement.”
“You will,” Landon said. “Not in the middle of this room.”
“She needs a medical check,” I said.
“I’m not hit.”
“You had a gun in your back and dropped on concrete while I fired over you. You’re getting checked.”
Noa’s eyes narrowed. “That was suspiciously close to an order.”
“It was a loving suggestion with legal authority standing nearby.”
Landon’s eyebrow moved.
Noa looked between us. “Neither of you is as funny as you think.”
“I’m exactly as funny as I think,” I said.
“That’s the problem.”
Good. If she could be annoyed with me, she was still standing. If she was still standing, the world could continue.
I guided her through the edge of the ballroom while the public ruin of Pamela Warren and Judge Malcolm Hughes tore itself open behind us.
Cameras. Cuffs. Rights read aloud. Donors pretending they had never liked either of them.
Press calling editors. Society women whispering behind manicured hands.
Men with money backing away from sponsor boards as if proximity had become contagious.
The Warren Pediatric Care Foundation’s gold lettering still shone near the entrance.
By morning, no one in Halo City would want to stand under it.
At the service doors, an EMT checked the scrape on Noa’s arm, made her follow a light with her eyes, and cleared her before she could talk me out of it.
Outside, the fog had thickened.
The press line had exploded beyond the valet area. More police lights washed red and blue over the museum columns. Rourke had the sedan waiting where he could, engine running, face grim through the windshield.
Noa stopped under the edge of the porte cochere and breathed in the cold bay air.
I kept my hand at her back.
She didn’t pull away.
For a moment, neither of us spoke.
Behind us, Halo City fed on the story.
Ahead of us, the black sedan waited with the heater running and the doors unlocked.
Noa looked at the fog. “Is it over?”
“The drive is public. Hughes is in custody. Pamela’s in cuffs. Simmons has mirrors of the files. Landon has vetted federal agents crawling all over the place.” I watched her profile. “The immediate threat is over.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
No. It wasn’t.
I looked at the red dress, the diamonds, the streak of dust on her arm from the stairwell wall, the small tremor she had locked down so hard most men would have missed it.
I looked at the woman who had walked into a murder plot, carried evidence through fire and blood and money, handed it off under every powerful eye in the room, and stood with a gun in her back without breaking.
“No,” I said. “It’s not over.”
Her eyes came to mine.
I stepped in front of her, blocking the cameras as much as I could, giving her the only privacy available under museum lights and a city’s worth of sirens.
“The assignment will end,” I said. “Landon will write reports. Claudia will threaten everyone in reach. Simmons will make enemies for a living. You’ll give statements, and some federal bastard in a bad suit will ask you the same question six ways because he thinks repetition counts as skill.”
Noa’s mouth twitched faintly. “That sounds likely.”
“And when all that’s done, you’ll decide the cleanest thing is to disappear back into your life before anyone can ask you to stay.”
Her face went still.
I touched her chin, not lifting it, just setting my fingers there because I needed contact and she let me have it.
“You can try,” I said. “I’m telling you now, Noa, I won’t be graceful about it.”
Her eyes searched mine. “You don’t do graceful.”
“No. I do useful. Persistent. Occasionally charming.”
“Occasionally is generous.”
“I’m wounded.”
“You were already in a bad mood.”
“I had a woman I’m very fond of held at gunpoint.”
“Fond,” she said.
The word came out dry enough to survive the fog.
I leaned closer. “Aye. Start there if the rest scares you.”
Her breath caught once.
Then her hand closed around my lapel, not soft, not asking. Holding.
“I don’t scare that easily.”
“No, sweetheart. You don’t.”
“I don’t know what to do with this.”
“Neither do I.”
“That’s your answer?”
“It’s honest. I only know what I’m not doing.”
“And what’s that?”
“I’m not watching you walk away because the job gave you an exit sign.”
Noa looked at me for a long moment while fog curled around the museum steps and the gala burned down behind us without flame.
Then she said, “That was almost a speech.”
“I cut it short for your sake.”
“Appreciated.”
Her hand slid from my lapel to the front of my shirt, fingers curling there, over my heart.
“I’m not promising easy,” she said.
“Sweetheart, if I wanted easy, I’d have picked a woman who didn’t bring a knife to a gala.”
“It was a tasteful knife.”
“It was.”
“And useful.”
“Very.”
Her mouth softened, not into sweetness. Never that. Into something sharper and more honest.
“I’m not disappearing tonight,” she said.
It wasn’t everything.
It was enough.
I bent and kissed her under the museum lights, with sirens cutting through the fog and cameras shouting from the curb and half of Halo City tearing itself apart behind us.
Noa kissed me back like she was angry about needing it.
Perfect woman.
When I lifted my head, her red lipstick was on my mouth, and her eyes had gone dark again.
“You’re a mess,” she said.
“I look excellent.”
“You look like you were kissed by someone with taste.”
“That too.”
Rourke opened the rear door as we reached the sedan.
Noa slid in first. I followed, keeping my body between her and the press until the door closed.
The noise muted.
For the first time all night, there was only the engine, the heater, the fogged edge of the window, and Noa beside me in red.
Rourke looked at me in the mirror. “Where to?”
I looked at Noa.
She looked back, exhausted, alive, furious, beautiful.
With me.
“Drive,” I said. “Landon can chase us when he needs signatures.”
Rourke pulled away from the curb.
Noa leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes. Her hand found mine in the dark between us, fingers sliding into my palm like she had meant to do it all along.
I held on.
Behind us, the Morrow Museum disappeared into fog, cameras, and consequences.
Ahead of us, Halo City opened cold and silver under the June night.
For once, I didn’t need to know the route.