Chapter Five
Charlie
Iwoke up warm.
That was the first warning sign. My apartment ran cold in February -—drafty windows, ancient radiator, a place where you slept in socks and a hoodie and still woke up shivering.
But I wasn't shivering. I was tucked against Dominic's chest, my cheek pressed to his shirt, my fingers curled into the fabric at his ribs, one of his arms heavy around my shoulders.
His heartbeat was steady under my ear, and I'd slept better in the last six hours than I had in weeks.
I'd fallen asleep on him. After the car attack, the adrenaline crash, the moment I'd reached for him and he'd caught my wrists and held me instead -—I'd broken apart like a cheap lock and passed out against his shoulder like it was the safest place in the world.
And apparently, I hadn't moved all night.
Hadn't retreated to my own bed. Hadn't put a wall between us. I'd just... stayed.
Which was exactly the problem.
I extracted myself in stages. Careful. Quiet. Easing out from under his arm, sliding my legs off the cushions, holding my breath like a burglar in reverse. He didn't move. Didn't open his eyes. I padded to the bathroom on bare feet, closed the door, and leaned my back against it.
My reflection in the mirror looked wrecked. Not the fun kind. The kind that came from crying into a man's shoulder after he refused to have sex with you because your hands were shaking.
God. The worst part wasn't the crying. It wasn't even the reaching for him out of panic. It was that he'd turned me down and gathered me close, and I'd stayed. Until morning. Curled into him like my body had decided he was safe and my brain hadn't gotten the veto.
Fantastic. Really great decision-making, Charlie.
I brushed my teeth. Splashed cold water on my face. Pulled my hair into a knot that wouldn't scare small children.
Focus. Yesterday we'd pulled the cloud backup and built a timeline, narrowed the suspect list, flagged the connections.
But a thought kept scratching at the back of my brain.
The shredded photos hadn't been random — whoever picked them had studied my work.
Which meant the answer wasn't in the suspect list. It was in the photos themselves.
We needed the original files on the drives at Morty's office and a closer look at what I'd missed the first time around.
When I came out, Dominic was sitting up on the couch with his laptop open. Eyes clear. Already working.
He'd been awake the whole time. Of course he had.
"Morning," he said, not looking up. Giving me the out. Letting me pretend I hadn't spent the whole night using him as a pillow.
I loved him for that. Hated him for it, too.
"Coffee," I said, and went to make some.
We didn't talk about last night. Didn't talk about waking up tangled together, or what it meant, or what was happening.
He drank his coffee black and I drank mine with enough sugar to make a dentist weep, and we moved around my small kitchen like people who'd been doing it for longer than four days.
CUPID CONFIDENTIAL'S office smelled like cold pizza and stale weed, which meant Morty had been here late. His desk was buried under printouts, three monitors glowing with traffic analytics, an ashtray full of vape cartridges balanced on top of a stack of competitor sites he was hate-reading.
"Charlotte. And the beefcake." Morty barely glanced up. "Tully photos are gold. Traffic's through the roof. Senator's office already called demanding a retraction. I told them to sue me."
"Charming." I dropped into the chair across from his desk. "I need my backup drives."
"In the safe. Help yourself. Don't mess up my filing system."
Morty's filing system was three external drives rubber-banded together in a fireproof safe behind a poster of The Wolf of Wall Street. I grabbed them, set up at the spare desk, and went straight to the Walsh files.
Around eleven, Dominic's phone buzzed. He stepped away, voice low. When he came back, his jaw was tight.
"June traced the partial plate from the car that hit us. It's registered to a shell company. Pacific Ridge Holdings."
The itch I'd woken up with sharpened.
"I want to look at something," I said, and turned back to the screen.
I pulled up the Walsh files. Six months of photos from the kickback investigation. The party at the Riverside Club where I'd caught him taking the envelope from the real estate developer.
I'd gone through these files dozens of times when I was building the original story. I knew every frame. But I'd been looking for one thing then -—Walsh taking the envelope. I hadn't been looking at the background.
Now I was.
I scrolled slowly. Him arriving. Shaking hands.
Working the bar. Him on the terrace with the developer, envelope visible between them -—the shot that had earned me the Scarlett Sinclair byline and made Morty enough money to upgrade his monitors.
And then, three frames after the money shot, a photo I'd never given a second look.
And then — the corner of the terrace. Walsh talking to a man I didn't recognize. The man was partially blocked by a pillar, but the angle caught his profile: dark hair, sharp features, expensive suit. Walsh was handing him something. Not a handshake. A transfer.
I zoomed in. The image was clear enough to see Walsh's face but the other man was half-turned. I couldn't ID him from the photo alone.
"Dominic."
He leaned in. I watched his eyes move across the image, the same systematic sweep he used on rooms. Cataloging details.
"Who is that?" I asked.
"Don't know. But Walsh isn't shaking his hand. He's making a handoff." Dominic straightened and pulled out his phone. "I'll get this to June. If he's in any federal database, she'll find him."
I sat back and let him work while I stared at the screen.
Six months. That photo had been sitting in my archive all along. I'd had it. Whatever Walsh was handing that man, I'd captured it without knowing it mattered. And he might have known that. Might have been tearing my life apart because of a photo I'd never even noticed.
"Hey." Dominic's hand on my knee. Grounding. "June will call when she has a match."
"I know." I closed the laptop. "I just hate waiting."
"I've noticed."
JUNE DIDN'T CALL BACK that afternoon.
We left Morty's around two, drove back to my apartment, and I spent three hours pacing while Dominic did the eerily calm thing people did when they were waiting for intelligence.
He cleaned his gun. Reorganized his go-bag.
Made dinner from the meager contents of my refrigerator -—which turned out to be pasta with garlic and whatever vegetables hadn't gone bad yet.
It was annoyingly good.
"You cook," I said, twirling spaghetti around my fork.
"Marines learn to work with limited resources."
"This isn't limited resources. This is a miracle. I had wilted spinach and half an onion."
"And garlic. Garlic fixes everything."
I almost smiled. Almost let the evening feel normal. Two people eating dinner, the city dimming outside the windows, streetlights catching the rain on the glass.
But nothing was normal. Someone had tried to kill me yesterday. A stranger's photo was sitting in June's inbox. And the man across from me had wrapped himself around me while I fell apart, and I kept circling back to what that meant.
Not the threats. I'd been handling threats my whole career. What scared me was him. How fast this had happened. How much I'd let him in. Last night he'd stopped me instead of taking what I offered, and that had terrified me more than the car.
Because sex I could compartmentalize. Sex was bodies and friction and endorphins. What he'd done last night -—refusing me, holding me instead -—that was care. And care was the one thing I'd never learned to defend against.
I set down my fork.
"This is really inconvenient timing."
Dominic looked up from his plate. Waited.
"You. This." I gestured between us, frustrated, unable to find better words because there weren't better words for the feeling of falling off a cliff you'd walked toward voluntarily.
"Someone's trying to kill me. I have a federal conspiracy maybe sitting in my photo archive.
Valentine's week is my biggest money season.
And I'm sitting here eating your stupid delicious pasta and I can't stop thinking about the fact that you held me last night instead of—-" I stopped.
Swallowed. "I'm falling for you. Which is insane. And really, really bad timing."
He was quiet for a moment. Then he laughed. Quiet, real, the kind of laugh that crinkled the corners of his eyes and made him look ten years younger.
"The worst," he said. And just like that I was back in the Conservatory -—glass walls, orchids, his mouth on mine for the first time. Both of us knowing better. Neither of us stopping.
"I'm serious," I said.
"I know you are." He reached across the table and took my hand. His thumb ran across my knuckles. "You think I'm not?"
"I think you're a professional who's breaking every rule in his handbook."
"Seven rules. I stopped counting after the Conservatory." His grip tightened. "Charlie. I've been falling since you looked me in the eye and told me where to shove my protection detail."
"That was ten minutes after you walked in."
"Yeah." He brought my hand to his mouth. Pressed his lips to my knuckles. "It was."
I stared at him across my kitchen table, dirty plates between us, the dark pressing at the windows, and felt the ground tilt. Not a crash. Not an explosion. Something slower and impossible to take back.
I stood up. Walked around the table. Took his face in my hands and kissed him.
Slow. Deliberate. Not the desperate hunger or the panic from before. This was a choice. My choice. Made with open eyes and a full understanding of what this could cost me.