Chapter 23
TWENTY-THREE
DAEMON
I'd barely made it into the mobile office at the job site Friday morning, desperate for coffee, even instant, when Malakai joined me. His face was doing the thing it did when the news wouldn't be welcome.
I'd woken up knowing I wasn't the man I used to be. It should have been a good morning. Malakai had other ideas.
"Elevate filed formal complaints," he said, without so much as a good morning. "Health Department, Business Licensing Board. Two separate filings, both this week."
I stared at him. "Against Nadia."
"Against Coogan's Catering, yeah. Cole has a contact at the licensing board who flagged it yesterday. They're not frivolous complaints, either. Someone took their time with these."
The cold that settled in my gut wasn't new. I'd been feeling it since Sunday morning in a parking lot, watching her taillights disappear. This was a different version of the same thing.
"She knows?"
"Not yet." Malakai held my gaze. "Cole wanted to know if you were going to tell her or someone else."
Someone else. Because I'd lost the right to be the one she heard hard news from. Because I'd handed that back to her personally in my chintz-covered corner of Sofia's property, telling her this might have been a mistake.
I turned away, walked to the window, and looked out at the yard, seeing none of it. "Tell Cole to reach out through Kelly. She'll make sure Nadia has the information without having to hear it from me."
Malakai said nothing. I thought he was done, but then he mumbled, "There's more."
I turned back.
"I dug further into what Elevate's been doing since the complaints were filed. They're not only going after her licensing." He pulled out his phone and turned it toward me. "They're building a file on you."
I looked at the screen. Malakai's notes to himself, detailed and careful, with screenshots attached.
Elevate had hired someone to compile background research on the people connected to Coogan's Catering. My name was on the list. My record was in the file. Arrest, charges, conviction, sentence. Three years in county. All of it, laid out cleanly for whoever was going to use it.
"They're going to take it to her corporate clients," I said.
"That's my read. Conservative clients, the sort who'd run background checks if they thought to. Elevate plants the association, suggests they do their due diligence, and suddenly Nadia's losing contracts not because of anything she's done but because of who she knows."
Who she knows. Who she'd trusted. Who she'd let in.
The cold turned into something harder and more specific.
"When?"
"Soon. They'll want to move while the licensing complaints are still active, while she's already under pressure. Stack everything at once and see if she folds."
I handed the phone back.
Malakai pocketed it and looked at me with the sort of patience that meant he was waiting for me to catch up to something he'd already figured out.
"Say whatever you're thinking," I said.
"I'm thinking you've been useless all week and whatever happened between you and Nadia is eating you alive." He said it without judgment, only the facts. "And I'm thinking the reason you haven't gone to fix it is that you talked yourself into believing she's better off without you."
"She probably is."
"No. She's not." He crossed his arms. "You remember what I told you about Amelia and me? How close I came to losing her because I convinced myself I was protecting her by keeping my distance?"
"That's different."
"It's the same thing with a different excuse." He held my gaze. "You love her. I've watched you for months. I know what it looks like. And she's over there dealing with a corporation coming after her business, her reputation, and now your history, while you're here being a coward."
The word landed cleanly.
"I told her it might have been a mistake," I said. "She won't want to hear from me."
"Then you'd better figure out how to say something worth hearing." He uncrossed his arms. "Because they're going to use your record against her. You can either let that happen from a distance, or you can be there when it does."
I looked at him. Looked at the man who'd nearly thrown away the best thing in his life for reasons that probably sounded solid at the time.
"What did you do?" I asked. "With Amelia. When you'd already messed it up. What did you actually do?"
"I stopped trying to protect her from me," he said. "And started trying to deserve her."
He walked to the door of the mobile office. I stayed where I was, turning that over.
All this time I'd been telling myself I was the risk. That loving me was the gamble she shouldn't take, that eventually she'd realize it too, and the kindest thing I could do was make it easier for her to walk away.
I'd been so convinced I was protecting her.
And while I'd been busy doing that, Elevate had been building a file.
They were going to take my record and my name and use it to destroy something she'd spent years constructing.
And she was going to stand there dealing with it alone because I'd handed her back to alone and then driven forty minutes away to prove I didn't care.
I cared.
That was the entire problem and always had been.
I pulled out my phone. Put it away. Pulled it out again.
There was nothing I could say in a text that would cover any of this. Not what I'd done, not what Elevate was planning, not what I needed her to know.
But I had to do something. Say something that mattered, not to make myself feel better, but because she deserved to know what was coming. Because the formal complaints and the background file were things she needed to fight, and fighting them was harder alone.
I'd told her she wasn't alone.
Then I'd made her alone.
I put the phone in my pocket. Left the mobile office. Walked out into the yard where the crew were already moving and told myself that stopping being a coward wasn't the same as knowing what to say.
It was just where you had to start.
NADIA
The Selective's first standalone marketing event was supposed to be straightforward.
Kelly had set it up three weeks ago, back when my world had a different shape. A Friday evening at the church hall, a showcase. Local vendors, one long table per business, two hours to let the public put faces to names. My contribution: set out the sample trays, talk to people, hand out cards.
I could do this in my sleep.
I stood at my table and told myself that for the fourth time.
Kelly appeared at my elbow with two cups of coffee, her expression telling me she'd noticed something she wouldn't mention unless asked. She handed one over and looked at the room, which was filling.
"Cherie's got a good crowd," she said.
"She does." I looked toward the bridal salon display, where Cherie was showing fabric swatches to a woman who had the glow of the newly engaged. The room had that early-evening energy I usually liked, the hum of people and conversation, everything getting started.
I usually liked it.
"Daisy sold two custom pieces to the same couple," Kelly said. "Inside of twenty minutes."
"Good."
"How are your samples going?"
I looked at the trays. The mushroom arancini were almost gone. The bruschetta hadn't moved as fast, but that happened. I'd need to restock from the container in the car once this wave of visitors thinned.
It was all fine. Everything was fine. Except that somewhere between plating the samples at the commercial kitchen at four-thirty and loading them into the van an hour later, I'd reached for my phone out of habit to text someone. And then had not.
"Samples are good," I said.
Kelly was quiet in that way she had. Then: "You don't have to stay the whole two hours. I can cover your table if—"
"I'm fine, Kelly."
"I didn't say you weren't."
A couple approached the table. I smiled and launched into the introduction I'd given fifteen times that day, the one about Coogan's Catering and the collective and the type of corporate accounts I was building toward.
The words came out the right way in the right order, professional and warm, exactly as practiced.
The couple took cards and moved on.
Kelly drifted tactfully to Daisy's table. I stacked another tray and tried to remember when I'd last had a conversation that felt like something rather than a series of correct responses delivered on schedule.
Three weeks. I knew the number precisely because I'd been tracking it the way I tracked everything. A fact recorded and filed and not looked at too often, because looking at it helped nothing.
I was good at that. Ten years in the military had made me good at compartmentalizing the things that helped nothing. Right now, it had a hollow ring.
I'd put a name to what I felt for him weeks ago, out loud, in the dark of his apartment, asking for nothing back. The name hadn't expired when he left. That was the inconvenient part.
Across the room, Cherie laughed at something the engaged woman said, the sound lifting the mood.
I thought about the collective lunch at the church hall, the photo Kelly had taken at the kitchen doorway.
I'd thought about it the night I'd unpinned it.
I hadn't thought about what I'd done with it after that, and that was intentional.
I'd been wrong before. I'd trusted my read of a situation and come home from my last deployment to find the life I'd planned had quietly reorganized itself without me. I'd recovered from that.
I restocked the bruschetta and straightened a cardholder that didn't need straightening.
The door at the far end of the hall opened. A group came in, four or five people, but he wasn't with them.
I turned back to my table.
Kelly reappeared with a fresh cup of coffee and set it down without comment, which I appreciated more than I had words for.
"Thanks," I said.
"Mm." She looked at the tray. "Almost out of arancini."
"I know. I'll run to the van."
"I'll watch the table."