27. Epilogue One Year Later #2
The woman at the corner table who walked into this bar fourteen months ago and has been, in every meaningful sense of the word, here ever since.
“Go finish the piece,” I say.
She smiles — the real version, the one that arrives in the specific, unmanaged way of something that doesn’t need to perform itself.
“Already finishing,” she says.
I go back behind the bar.
She goes back to the laptop.
And the bar does what bars do on — it holds the people who come to it, in the amber light, in the town that is finally, after everything, simply itself.
THE END
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SNEEK PEEK to my upcoming release in September, 2026:
Thompson's Risk
I don't need saving. I've spent my entire life proving it.
Alex Thompson is six feet of muscle, bad decisions, and overprotective instincts.
He's controlling and infuriating. Also, my brother's best friend.
He's convinced I'm one bad decision away from becoming a victim.
Unfortunately, he might be right.
I teach debate at a prestigious Seattle private school. I uncover some financial records that don't add up. Strange warnings begin to appear. Then someone breaks into my apartment and steals my laptop. They make it clear they're willing to do far worse to keep their secrets hidden.
Alex wants me somewhere safe.
I want answers.
As the threats escalate, we're forced into close quarters. The line between protecting me and wanting me becomes dangerously blurred. The deeper we dig, the more obvious it becomes that powerful people will do anything to silence me.
Now I'm caught between a conspiracy that wants me gone and the one man determined to keep me alive.
The problem?
Falling for Alex Thompson may be the most dangerous risk of all
LINK
Chapter 1 – Marcy
There are exactly four ways out of this tent, and the man with his thumb pressed into the inside of my wrist is standing between me and three of them.
I clocked the exits the second I walked in—old habit, the kind you don't unlearn—so I know the fourth one is forty feet behind me, past the chafing dishes and the ice sculpture of the school crest that's already weeping into its own base.
I could make it. I'm fast. But that would require turning my back on Gerald Whitlock III, and men like Gerald don't react well to backs.
"You're new," he says, like it's a compliment. His breath is forty percent Macallan and sixty percent the kind of confidence that's never once been told no. "Coach, was it? The debate program."
"Marcy Lin." I do not offer my hand, mostly because he already has one of them. "And you're cutting off circulation to my radial artery, which—fun fact—has a faster bleed-out time than people assume."
He laughs. Of course he laughs. To Gerald, a woman saying something unsettling is just a woman being spirited. The thumb doesn't move.
I should explain something about myself, because in about four seconds it's going to become relevant: I am very good at words and very bad at people.
I can dismantle a seventeen-year-old's debate case in under a minute and leave them grateful for the experience.
I cannot, for the life of me, perform the soft little social rituals that would make a man like this let go of my arm without incident.
I don't simper. I don't giggle. I go precise, and precision, on a woman, reads as either arrogance or invitation, and Gerald has clearly decided which.
Rain ticks against the canvas overhead. The gala doesn't even start for two hours; this is the prep, the soft-launch where the donors who matter most get to mill around feeling important while the catering staff sprint past with trays and the event coordinator has the wide, glassy stare of someone running on espresso and prayer.
I came back here for one reason—to avoid the main floor, where I am expected to mingle—and instead I have backed myself into a corner with a benefactor whose family name is on the east wing.
"Spirited little thing." He leans in. The thumb presses harder. "I like that. The board could use—"
"Mr. Whitlock." I keep my voice level. I keep my face level.
Inside, the anger is a clean, cold thing, and I lean into it, because anger I can use.
Fear just sits in your chest and takes up space.
"You're going to want to let go of my arm before someone gets the wrong idea about your contribution to this institution. "
"And who," he says, smiling, "is going to get an idea?"
"I am."
The voice comes from behind me. Low. Unhurried. The kind of voice that doesn't raise itself because it has never, not once, needed to.
I don't see him arrive. That's the part that stays with me later—I'm watching the entire room, I clocked all four exits, and somehow this man is just there, at my shoulder, close enough that I can feel the heat coming off him, and I didn't hear a single step.
He reaches past me. Two fingers, almost gentle, settle on the back of Gerald's hand.
There's no jerk, no drama. He just—applies something.
Pressure, leverage, some quiet arithmetic of bone and tendon I don't have a name for.
Gerald's hand comes off my wrist like it was never glued there at all, and Gerald makes a small sound, the kind a man makes when he has just discovered, privately and to his great surprise, that he is not the most dangerous thing in the room.
"There's a bar at the front," the man says to him. Pleasant. Almost kind. "Top shelf. You'll want to be near it when Headmaster Ketter does her rounds."
Gerald goes. He doesn't bluster, doesn't posture. He just evaporates, the way the powerful do the instant they're reminded power is relative, and then it's the two of us and the dripping ice sculpture and a busboy pretending very hard to restock napkins.
I turn around.
The first thing I notice is the suit—charcoal, no tie, cut so precisely it has to be made for him, because no rack in the world produces shoulders like that.
The second thing I notice is that the suit is a lie.
Or not a lie, exactly. A frame. The way a holster is a frame.
Underneath it the man is built like a closed fist: economy of motion, nothing wasted, weight balanced on the balls of his feet like the floor might need fighting at any moment.
His knuckles are scarred. Both hands. Old scars, white and ridged, the kind you earn one at a time over years.
And he's looking at me. Not the way Gerald looked at me. The way I look at exits. Cataloguing. Assessing. Filing me under some heading I can't read.
"You're welcome," he says.
"For what?"