25. Violence Isnt the Only Weapon
Chapter twenty-five
Violence Isn't the Only Weapon
Atticus POV
Her phone goes to voicemail the first time and I tell myself it's nothing.
The second time, I'm already moving.
The third call drops before it rings twice and I stop telling myself anything. I pull Sienna's location from the team security app, something I asked her to enable weeks ago and she argued about for ten minutes, and the pin drops on the east parking structure.
I'm already in the building. It takes me ninety seconds to get there.
I don't remember the corridor between the facility and the structure. I take the stairs. I stop thinking in words. That's how I know.
The structure is half-empty at this hour. I come through the stairwell door and find Sienna ten feet ahead of me, walking away from her father's car. Her shoulders are set. Her chin is up. She's already done with him.
Calvin is not done with her.
He pushes off the hood and takes two steps in her direction. Unhurried. The move of a man who knows his daughter well enough to know exactly how far she'll let him get before she stops.
Sienna's eyes find me over her shoulder.
Something shifts in her face. Not relief, not quite. The look of someone who just had the odds change in their favor and hasn't decided how to feel about it yet.
Her father clocks me a half-second later. He stops walking. Something moves through his expression, recalculation dressed up as calm, and then he smiles.
I cross the distance between us.
I step between them.
Her father doesn't move. He's two inches shorter than me and he knows it and he's decided it doesn't apply to him. That's fine. Men like him make that call every time. It's never about size.
"Take your hand off her."
My voice comes out quiet. Entirely without warmth. The kind of quiet that isn't calm, exactly, but is something that has learned to use calm as a tool.
He releases her arm. Not because he wants to. Because the alternative is a record of him not doing it.
"Say the next thing you plan to say." I raise my phone. The record button is already running. The red dot in the corner is small and steady and I make sure he can see it. "I'll make sure a judge hears it."
Calvin Hart looks at me for a long moment.
Then he smiles. Small and practiced and absolutely certain of himself.
"You don't scare me, Knox."
"That's fine." I hold the phone level. "Keep talking."
He doesn't. He's too smart for that. He's done this before, run the math, adjusted the angle. He knows a recording can go both ways. He knows I know it too.
I take Sienna's hand.
She lets me. No hesitation, no recalibration. Her fingers close around mine and there's something in that, in the immediacy of it, that goes straight through me like a key in a lock.
I pull her away from the car. From him.
We're six feet away when he laughs.
It's the kind of laugh I've heard from men like him my whole life. The laugh of someone who believes he still holds the cards. Who's been holding them so long he's forgotten they were ever dealt.
"You think you're protecting her?" His voice carries in the empty structure. Easy. Unbothered. "You don't even know what you're protecting her from."
I don't stop walking.
"You think this is over?" He's louder now. Not angry but performative. He wants me to turn around. Wants to see if I will. "You have no idea what I'm holding."
I know exactly what he's holding. I've known since the night in the elevator when Sienna couldn't finish her sentence. Since the video on my phone in the dark at the cabin. Since Sienna's voice in the morning light, steady and quiet, telling me about being eighteen and scared and out of options.
I know what he's holding.
I keep walking.
Then I hear it.
A soft thud. Paper on metal.
I stop.
Sienna's hand tightens in mine. One sharp contraction. She felt it too — the sound of something landing that wasn't supposed to.
I turn around.
Her father is standing at the hood of his car with his arms loose at his sides and that smile still in place.
A manila folder sits on the hood.
He didn't throw it. Placed it. Slowly. The way you set something down when the whole point is being watched doing it.
I let go of Sienna's hand.
She doesn't try to stop me. She knows me well enough now to know I'm not going to do something stupid. Or maybe she's beyond stopping me. Either way, she stays where she is.
I cross back to the car and I open the folder and I look at what's inside.
Scanned documents. Copies. A sworn statement with formal headers and witness signatures. The kind that looks like procedure and reads like a weapon.
Her handwriting. Young, the letters a little looser, less certain than the handwriting I've seen on notes she leaves on coffee cups and PR briefs.
Her signature.
I look at the date. She would have been eighteen. Maybe just. The statute ran out years ago. That's what makes this clean for him — using it costs him nothing.
"I've been patient," her father says. His voice is pleasant.
The voice of a man who has never once in his life believed anyone would actually stand against him.
"I have been extraordinarily patient. But patience has a number attached to it.
" He tilts his head. "Pay me, or watch what I do with that. "
The folder is in my hand.
He's watching my face with the interest of someone who thinks the performance is almost over.
I close the folder.
I look at him for a long moment. At the suit, the practiced ease. Men like him stand the same way. I grew up watching it.
"You want to know what happens when you give that to a reporter?
" My voice is the same. Still quiet. Still level.
"I spend an afternoon with our legal team and a timeline.
We put the fraud next to the statement. We explain what an eighteen-year-old does when her father backs her into a corner.
" I hold his eye. "You want to bet on how that story reads? "
He keeps smiling. But it's thinner now.
"You'll do anything to protect your investment," he says.
"Yes," I say. "I will."
I take the folder. He lets me. We both know he has copies. That's not what this was about.
I walk back to Sienna.
She's standing where I left her with her arms crossed low across her body. Her chin is up. Her eyes are bright.
Not crying. I don't say that. I say: "What do you need right now."
Not a question. A question would let her deflect. This way she has to think about the actual answer.
She thinks about it.
"I need—" She stops. Starts again. "I need to not be in this parking structure."
"Okay."
"And I need you to not—" She stops again. Her eyes drop to the folder in my hand and then come back up. "I need you to not look at me like I'm something you have to fix."
"I don't think you need fixing."
"Then don't look at me like that."
I'm not sure what look she means. I'm not sure I have the ability to control it right now.
I take a step toward her anyway and she holds her ground and the air between us does what it does.
That tightening I have been navigating since a press conference and a hotel suite and a night in a cabin where we stopped navigating anything at all.
Her chin tilts up.
"Don't," she says. Not a command. Almost a question.
"I'm not doing anything."
"You're doing something." Her voice is low. "You always are."
I'm close enough that I can see the way she's holding her breath. The rise of it, controlled, the way she gets when she's decided to feel something and hasn't finished deciding if that's allowed.
I take the last step.
I put my hand against her jaw, light, the way I do things when I want her to know she can move, and I wait.
She doesn't move.
"He doesn't get to define this," I say. "What you did at eighteen. Who you are now. He doesn't get that."
Her eyes close. Just for a second. When they open again they're still too bright but they're steady.
"Okay," she says.
"Okay?"
A breath. Almost a laugh. "Don't make me say it twice."
I press my mouth to her forehead and stand there for a moment with my eyes closed and the folder in my other hand and the city going about its business six levels below us.
Her hand comes up. Settles against my chest. Not pulling me in, not pushing me back. Just there.
Grounding.
I don't move until she does.
We take the stairwell back into the building. Her shoulder bumps mine on the second landing and neither of us adjusts.
"You were heading to PR," I say.
"I was."
"Still need to go?"
She thinks about it for a second. "It can wait until tomorrow. Legal team first."
"Legal team first," I agree.
We stop at the corridor junction where the stairwell splits toward the facility exit and the PR offices. Neither of us moves toward either.
The documents sit under my arm. She doesn't look at them. I don't either.
"Atticus."
I look over.
She's watching me with that expression she gets when she's decided to say the honest version of something and is still working out the phrasing.
"Thank you," she says. "For not hitting him."
A beat.
"It was a near thing," I say.
Something breaks open in her face. The almost-laugh she gives when something lands and she won't let me have it. She looks away, pressing her lips together, and I can see her fighting it.
I think about a man standing at a car hood with a manila folder and a smile and absolutely no idea what he's holding onto.
He thinks he has leverage.
He does. That part's true.
What he doesn't have is any idea how far I'll go to make sure it doesn't matter.
"When this is over," I say.
She looks over.
"When this is all handled." I keep my eyes on the corridor ahead. "I want to take you somewhere that isn't a press event or a PR assignment or a parking structure."
Silence.
She looks straight ahead. But the corner of her mouth is doing something. Small and real and entirely hers.
We walk.