Chapter 6 #2
I watched him move—efficient, economical, completely at ease—and tried to read what was happening beneath that controlled surface.
His shoulders were tight, tension visible in the line of his jaw.
But his hands were steady, his expression carefully neutral.
Whatever he was feeling he was keeping it locked down tight.
Just like I was.
“Fine,” I muttered, stabbing my chopsticks into the lo mein. “Help yourself, I guess.”
“Already am.”
Jerk. We ate in tense silence for a few moments, the clink of our chopsticks against plates the only sound between us.
I was hyper-aware of every movement he made.
The way his forearms flexed when he reached for the soy sauce.
The way his throat moved when he swallowed.
The way his eyes kept drifting toward my bare shoulder before snapping back to his meal.
“I’ve arranged for Tate to come by,” Kane finally said, breaking the silence. “He’ll examine all your devices. Phone, laptop, anything connected to the internet.”
I swallowed my bite of food. “And my colleagues?”
“The firm will look into them. Discretely.” He met my eyes. “We know who your enemy is, and he’s powerful. We can’t afford to tip our hand.”
“The time for being discreet is over.” I set down my chopsticks, my appetite suddenly gone. “Ruth is dead. Murdered. And I’m next—we both know it. Anyone who’s ever talked to me about this investigation is probably on a hit list too.”
“Calloway can’t kill everyone without attracting attention. He’ll be surgical about it.” Kane’s voice was matter-of-fact, almost clinical. “That’s how men like him operate and get away with what they do. They don’t spray bullets—they use precision. A sniper, not a machine gun.”
“And you’d know all about that,” I muttered before I could stop myself.
The words hung in the air between us. Kane’s eyes narrowed, his jaw going tight. But when he spoke, his voice was carefully controlled.
“Look. We have to tread carefully. Not show our hand too soon. That’s what Calloway will be doing—watching, waiting, looking for the right moment. We need to be smarter.”
I exhaled a breath. “If he’s planning to kill me, I’d say he’s already shown his hand.”
“He is planning to kill you.”
Kane’s blunt statement was startling. No hedging, no softening the blow. Just cold, clinical fact.
But in a strange, macabre way, it was also reassuring.
Angelica had worried over me for days, wringing her hands and imagining the worst while trying to convince herself it wouldn’t happen.
I hadn’t told my editor how bad things had gotten.
I hadn’t wanted to hear empty reassurances that everything would be fine, or worse, implications that I couldn’t handle the situation.
Kane didn’t tell me I was wrong. Didn’t treat me like I was fragile or hysterical. He just laid out the reality like I was capable of handling it.
Then again, Kane knew what I could handle. He’d spent two memorable nights figuring out exactly that.
Stop it , I told myself sternly. What a person could take in a BDSM scene—ultimately consensual and in a safe, controlled environment—was completely different from what someone should have to endure when a sex trafficker wanted her dead.
But my thoughts kept straying there anyway. To the way Kane’s hands had felt on my skin and his voice had sounded in my ear, praising me, pushing me, telling me exactly what he wanted. How glorious I’d felt when I’d finally let go and surrendered completely.
I’d done so well these past two years, ignoring the personal and focusing on the professional. I couldn’t let that change now.
“I’m not changing my mind,” I said, forcing steel into my voice. “If Calloway wants to eliminate me, that makes it more important this story gets out. Not less.”
Kane studied me for a long moment before speaking again. “Your managing editor knows about the article. But does your boss above him know what you’re investigating? Will he actually publish the story?”
“The editor in chief knows I’m working on something significant, but not the full scope.
I was waiting until I had all the investigative reporting done and the article ready to go before my managing editor took everything to him, but I assume he’ll want to run it.
” I’d kept the details close to my chest, not wanting to risk the story leaking before I had everything locked down. “When he sees what I have—”
“Does he know it’s Calloway you’re taking down?”
I hesitated for a moment. “No.”
“Then maybe he won’t run it.” Kane set down his fork, his gaze intense. “If your evidence is solid— really solid —you should consider getting out of the city and taking it somewhere bigger. The New York Times. CNN. Somewhere with the resources and reputation to protect you.”
“They don’t know who I am.” The words tasted bitter. “I have credibility here because of... that article. From two years ago.”
Emotions flickered across Kane’s face—pain, quickly masked. He looked away, jaw tight, and I felt a twisting sensation in my chest that might have been guilt.
The article that made my career but had destroyed his.
“But outside Vegas, I’m nobody,” I continued, pushing past the uncomfortable feeling. “They’d want independent verification. More time. More waiting. And meanwhile, Calloway keeps hurting women, and I’m just supposed to sit around being a target?”
“And you believed Ruth?” Kane asked. “You believed everything she told you?”
Fury sparked in my chest. “You don’t?”
“I didn’t know her, but it would be highly unusual for her to lie, because no woman puts her own life on the line like that unless it’s real.
And I believe Calloway had her killed because of it.
” He braced his forearms on the table, his eyes glinting.
“But if you want to take down someone like him, you need more than witness testimony. You need hard evidence. Documents. Financial records. Something that can’t be explained away. ”
“I know how to build a story—”
“People will try to discredit Ruth despite her murder,” Kane pressed on, relentless.
“They’ll say she was a sex worker. That she was probably on drugs.
That she had every reason to lie—for attention, for money, for revenge.
And unless you have something concrete to back up her claims, Calloway’s lawyers will tear your story apart. ”
“I’m the journalist here, not you,” I said angrily. I shoved back from the table, my chair scraping against the floor as I stood up. “I know exactly how people will try to spin this.”
His eyes met and held mine. “Yeah, you’re good at spinning things, aren’t you?” The bitterness in his voice was sharp enough to cut stone.
The words hit like a slap. I stared at him, my heart pounding, and saw all the anger and hurt he’d been keeping locked down since our office meeting suddenly surging back to the surface.
“I didn’t spin anything ,” I said, defending myself.
“I reported exactly what I found. Your handwriting on those documents. Your name on those sign-out sheets. You’re just lucky the department wanted to handle things quietly and internally, or you would have faced a trial and seen exactly how damning the evidence was. ”
“Trust me.” Kane’s laugh was hollow, completely devoid of humor. “You don’t have to tell me how damning it was. I lived it. I lost fucking everything .”
He stood slowly, and suddenly the table between us felt like a very flimsy barrier. He was so tall. So broad. Taking up so much space in my small apartment.
“But you would have preferred I went to prison,” he continued, his voice dropping to something rough, almost wounded beneath the bitterness. “Wouldn’t you? It would have made for a better story.”
“You and everyone else who stole that money and those drugs should have faced consequences.” I lifted my chin, refusing to back down even as my pulse raced. “It’s not my fault the police preferred to sweep their mess under the rug.”
“I would have loved nothing more than to see the men responsible go to prison.” He moved around the table toward me, each step deliberate. “But I wasn’t one of them.”
“So you claim.”
“I maintain the truth .” He stopped just a few feet away, close enough that I could feel the heat radiating off his body, the anger and something darker and more dangerous threaded beneath it.
“Which you weren’t interested in hearing.
You couldn’t even be bothered to get my side of the story.
Funny, isn’t it? You’ll take Ruth’s word on everything—build your entire career-making exposé around her testimony—but you wouldn’t even try to talk to me. ”
I held my ground, even as every nerve in my body lit up from his proximity. I refused to give him an inch. “Ruth had evidence to back up what she said.”
“Enough to get Calloway convicted? Because let me tell you something, sweetheart —” The word dripped with acid.
“Unless you have this locked down tight, you are going to die for nothing. You’ll write your inflammatory article, some people will believe it, some won’t, and Calloway will walk away untouched because he has money and power and cops and politicians in his pocket. ”
His jaw clenched, a muscle ticking hard enough I could see it, along with the flecks of gold in his angry eyes. I could feel his barely contained fury simmering beneath the surface. I had to fight the instinct to move back. The air between us went tight, charged, like a storm about to break.
“You got lucky with me,” he continued, his voice dropping lower.
“The department was eager to throw us under the bus. None of us had the resources to fight back. But Calloway? He has armies of lawyers. He has judges and politicians and possibly the police chief on his payroll. You publish a story without airtight evidence, and he will fucking bury you.”
“So I should just run away?” I scoffed. “Give up?”
“I’m saying that unless you have a smoking gun you haven’t told Sutton about, this crusade isn’t worth your life.”
“Are you saying it’s not worth the lives of the women he’s trafficking either?” I shot back. “All those women living in hell because no one is willing to do anything?”
“You can’t save them.” His voice was harsh. “Not with what you have now. All you’re going do is get yourself killed and let Calloway keep operating with even less scrutiny.”
I straightened my shoulders, refusing to believe that I couldn’t save more women from Ruth’s fate with what I knew about Calloway. “ Watch me .”
I tried to move around him, to escape to somewhere I could breathe without inhaling his scent and feeling my body respond against my will. “If you can’t protect me while I finish this story—”
Kane’s hand shot out, catching my arm as I passed by. He spun me around to face him, his grip firm but not painful. “You are not going to take unnecessary risks, do you hear me—”
“Don’t you dare fucking patronize me!”
I lost my temper. In my defense, it had been a hellish week.
Finding Ruth’s body three days ago—or what was left of it.
Realizing I was next. Being forced to accept protection from the man I’d spent two years trying to forget.
Having him stand in my apartment, giving me orders, looking at me with those eyes that made me remember things I had no business remembering.
I swung at him. It was a clumsy, uncoordinated attempt. I’d never been trained in self-defense. I’d always relied on my words as weapons instead of my fists.
Kane caught my wrist easily, his reflexes lightning-fast. Then his fingers wrapped around my arms like two steel bands, and he yanked me toward him—probably on instinct, to subdue me or to shake some sense into me—but it meant I stumbled forward and crashed into his chest.
My body was pressed against his, every hard plane of muscle burning through the thin cotton of my shirt. I could feel his heart pounding—as fast as mine, I realized. Could feel his chest rising and falling with ragged breaths.
We both went completely still.
The anger was still there, crackling between us like electricity. But it had transformed into something else that made my skin feel too tight and my blood sing in my veins.
I glared up at him. He glared down at me. And it felt like time had come to a stop, like hours could pass and I wouldn’t notice, like the entire world had narrowed down to this single charged moment.
His eyes dropped to my mouth.
I didn’t know who moved first. Maybe it was him, his control finally snapping after years of buried resentment and everything else between us.
Maybe it was me, channeling all my confusion and grief and fury into the only outlet that made sense.
Maybe we both moved together, drawn by the same inexorable force, unable to resist the gravitational pull that had always been there from the first moment we’d locked eyes at The Players Club.
All I knew was that one moment we were frozen, caught in a standoff that had been two years in the making. And the next, his mouth was on mine.
The kiss was nothing like the ones we’d shared at the club. Those had been controlled, deliberate—Kane leading, me following, every touch precisely calibrated to build pleasure.
This was a wildfire.
His hands released my arms to tangle in my hair, tilting my head back so he could deepen the kiss. I grabbed fistfuls of his shirt, pulling him closer, needing more contact, more pressure, more of whatever this was that was consuming me from the inside out.
He kissed me like he was furious. Like he wanted to punish me and devour me in equal measure. His teeth caught my lower lip, not gently, and the sharp sting of pain sent a bolt of heat straight to my core.
I kissed him back just as fiercely, pouring all my frustration and fear and traitorous desire into it. I let him feel exactly what he did to me, even now, even after everything.
This was a terrible idea. We both knew it. We were supposed to be professional. We were supposed to hate each other. But his hands were sliding down my body, gripping my hips, and I couldn’t remember why any of that mattered.