Epilogue
Victor
“Whoa. Look at this place,” Lili exclaims as the SUV pulls through the Gothic wrought-iron gate. “Never would have looked at this and thought BDSM club.”
I chuckle and reach for her hand. “It was formerly home to an extremely conservative family according to the club owners. They apparently have some issues with what goes on here now, but they lost the legal battle to shut them down.”
“That’s just wild. Can’t wait to see the inside.”
Grace is oddly quiet as we get dropped off and a valet driver takes the keys from our security escort.
“Everything OK, butterfly?” I ask as I help her step out.
“I’m good, Master. Just tired.”
I frown. “You’ve been tired a lot lately. Am I wearing you out at night?”
She giggles and lays her head against my shoulder. “Just this deadline. I’ll be fine once I get the last book in the trilogy done. Then I’m taking a long break and just focusing on the book store.”
I kiss her temple. “Good girl. But you’re also taking a break tonight. I won’t forbid you from thinking about the book, but I would like you to put it aside for a bit.”
“I can try,” she promises.
Inside, the club is exactly the kind of gorgeous and unsettling I expected from a building that used to host Sunday dinners for people who would have called us an abomination.
Wrought iron chandeliers drip candlelight over a dance floor half full of bodies in various states of undress, and a bar carved from what looks like a genuine church pew runs the length of one wall.
Tyson finds us before we’ve made it twenty feet inside, grinning wide enough that I almost don’t notice the tired lines around his eyes from six months of running a kitchen that apparently never stops.
“You made it.” He pulls me into a back-slapping hug, then does the same to Lili and Grace in turn. “Sabrina’s going to be pissed she missed you. She’s got a shoot tonight.”
“Boudoir business booming?” Lili asks.
“Booming enough that I might have to hire her an assistant.” His jaw ticks, there and gone. “Speaking of business. You wanted an update on our friend.”
“Griffin,” I say.
“Still here. Still careful. He’s got three restaurants under different names now, all clean on paper, all funding God knows what underneath.” Tyson’s jaw tightens. “He hasn’t made a move in months. Doesn’t mean he isn’t planning one.”
“Keep watching him.”
“Always do.” Tyson’s smile comes back easier than the topic deserves. “Come on. Gage and Kenzie are here. You have to see this baby before she wakes up and ruins everyone’s night.”
We find them tucked into a booth near the back, Kenzie looking more rested than I’ve ever seen her, a bundle of blankets asleep against Gage’s massive shoulder like she weighs nothing at all.
“Look who finally made the trip.” Gage doesn’t get up, clearly unwilling to disturb the baby, but his grin is wide enough to make up for it. “Meet Zoe. Two months old and already smarter than her father, according to her mother.”
“Accurate,” Kenzie says.
Lili leans in for a look and makes a soft, helpless sound I’ve genuinely never heard out of her before. “She’s perfect.”
“She’s a menace at three in the morning, but sure, perfect works too.” Gage adjusts his hold without waking her. “Her uncle’s watching her tomorrow night for the first time. Kenzie’s more nervous about that than she was about the actual birth.”
“He’s forty-two, doesn’t have kids, and thinks ‘winging it’ is a parenting philosophy,” Kenzie says. “I have every right to be nervous.”
Grace laughs, leaning into my side, delighted and unbothered, the way she gets when a thing is just nice and doesn’t have to be anything else.
We stay for another two hours, drinking, dancing, watching Tyson work a floor that’s somehow become entirely his own in half a year.
By the time we leave, Grace is asleep against my shoulder in the car, and Lili’s tracing slow circles against her knee, both of them content, which took years and several near-catastrophes to earn.
Grace
The manuscript sits open on my laptop when Victor and Lili find me curled up in the corner booth of Tyson’s club two nights later, one glass of wine deep and crying at my own writing, which feels both pathetic and completely earned.
“That bad?” Lili slides in across from me, stealing my wine before I can stop her.
“That good, actually. I just finished it.” I close the laptop before either of them can read over my shoulder, not yet. “The whole thing. Three books, and I just wrote the last line of the last one.”
Victor’s eyebrows go up. “The trilogy that’s clearly about us.”
“Loosely inspired by,” I correct, though we both know that’s generous. “I changed the names. And the city. And several other identifying details that would probably get us all arrested.”
“Several,” Lili agrees, deadpan, and I throw a napkin at her.
I pull the manuscript back up and turn the laptop around so they can both see the dedication page, the one I’ve rewritten a dozen times trying to get right.
To V and L, who taught me that love was never meant to fit in a box built by someone else. This story exists because you two convinced me mine was worth telling.
Victor reads it twice and doesn’t say anything, which is how I know it landed. Lili doesn’t bother trying to hide that she’s crying.
“It’s going in the shop,” I tell them. “Framed, next to the register. So everyone who walks in knows exactly who inspired it.”
“Only if you’re comfortable with that,” Victor says, always careful with me even now.
“I’ve never been more comfortable with anything.” I mean it completely. “I spent years hiding the parts of myself I thought people would judge. I’m done doing that.”
My phone buzzes on the table, and when I check it, I have to read the email twice before it actually registers.
“Oh my god.”
“What?” Lili’s already leaning across the table trying to read upside down.
“I hit the list. The actual list. Book two debuted at number four.” My hands are shaking. “And there’s a morning show booking request in here too. They want to talk about indie authors crossing over into mainstream romance.”
Victor’s smile is the widest I’ve ever seen it, unguarded and completely unbothered by who might see it. “Look at you, butterfly.”
“I can’t believe this is my life,” I say, for probably the hundredth time since the bookstore opened.
“Get used to it.” Lili raises what’s left of my stolen wine in a toast. “This is just the beginning, lover.”
I clink my glass against it, because I want to remember every second of this one.
Lili
Six months ago, if you’d told me I’d spend my Tuesday afternoons knocking on doors for a mayoral campaign, I would have laughed you out of the room. And yet here I am, campaign flyers tucked under one arm and more opinions about municipal zoning than any reasonable person should have.
“You’re good at this,” Isabel tells me, catching up after I finish talking down a genuinely furious man about a pothole that apparently isn’t even in this district. “Scary good. Have you considered running yourself someday?”
“Hard pass.” I’ve thought about it more than I’ll admit out loud.
Hunter floated the idea once, half joking, and I shut it down before he finished the sentence.
Too many people already know exactly who I’m sleeping with, my ties to organized crime notwithstanding.
“I like being the person who gets things done without anyone learning my name. Suits me better.”
“Your loss. You’d have my vote.”
We finish the block before the sun goes down, and I find Garrett back at headquarters, sleeves rolled up, looking more like a man running on caffeine and stubbornness than a future mayor, which is probably exactly what Hunter liked about him in the first place.
“Numbers are good,” he tells me without looking up from his laptop. “Really good, actually. Whatever happened to Brandt’s old machine, it isn’t showing up to fight us.”
It isn’t. Miranda’s been quiet since her sentencing, and the parts of her operation that used to make elections here dangerous mostly went down with her. Small mercy, but I’ll take it.
Hunter finds me on my way out, Trinity on his arm looking healthier than I’ve seen her since the hospital, and pulls me into a hug that still catches me off guard every time, considering how our relationship started.
“Heard you’re a natural at this,” he says.
“Don’t let it go to your head. I’m doing it for Garrett, not you.”
“Sure you are.” He grins, and for a man who once threatened to bury Victor and everyone he loved, he’s disturbingly likeable these days. “Trinity’s been trying to get me to run something myself. I told her one Novak in politics is plenty.”
“He’d be terrible at it,” Trinity says. “No patience for people who disagree with him.”
“I have infinite patience. I just don’t waste it on people who are wrong.”
I leave them bickering happily and drive out to the address I’ve been avoiding for two weeks, the one belonging to a woman I haven’t spoken to since before I married Phineas.
My mother doesn’t recognize the car, and doesn’t recognize me at first either, standing on her porch in a dress that costs more than her monthly mortgage used to.
We don’t reconcile everything in one visit. We probably never will, not completely. But she lets me in, makes coffee with hands that shake slightly more than I remember, and asks if I’m happy, really happy, in a voice that sounds like she’s bracing for a lie.
“I am,” I tell her, and it isn’t a performance, which surprises us both.
It isn’t closure. But she asked me to come back next month, and for now that’s enough.
Samuel calls that night mostly so I can hear his son shrieking in the background, and he sounds like a man who hasn’t slept since spring. I promise to visit as soon as they’re up for company, and mean it.
Victor and Grace are waiting for me at the bar at the Sapphire when I finally get back, both of them looking at me with the patience they’ve perfected over the last year. They’ll wait as long as it takes, and they won’t push.
“Good day?” Grace asks.
“Complicated.” I sit down between them, and Victor’s arm settles around my shoulders without either of us making a thing of it. “Good, though. Complicated and good.”
“That’s most days, with us,” Victor says.
“Yeah.” I lean into him, watching Grace’s fingers find mine on the bar top, and think about how far all three of us have come from where we started.
A stalker’s bullet. A dead husband and a club hidden behind a sandwich shop between them.
None of it a fairy tale. We built this out of choices nobody handed us, and I’d take it over a fairy tale twice.
I’m never going to marry either of them. I meant that the day I said it, and I mean it just as much now. But I’m theirs completely anyway, and no piece of paper was ever going to make that truer.
“To complicated and good,” I say, raising my glass.
They both clink theirs against mine, and for the first time in years, I’m not waiting for the other shoe to drop. It already dropped. We survived it, and I stayed anyway.
Thank you so much for reading High Reward!