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Really, it wouldn’t even take any spinning.
“I will be there first thing tomorrow morning. We will do damage control. Put out statements. Get you another interview, claim you were shaken up after the news of the shooting, and weren’t being as eloquent as usual.”
All the old standbys.
“You better fix this,” he warned.
The or else was silent.
But the threat of it wasn’t as upsetting as it would have been just a day or two ago.
It was hard to be worried about your professional future when your actual future existence was kind of hanging in the balance.
“I will get us back on message,” I said instead of claiming I would fix this. Especially when I didn’t know what he’d said, or how he’d said it.
“I won’t forget you leaving me when I needed you most,” he said before ending the call.
Politicians, especially spoiled ones who’d been in office, objectively, a little too long, all tended to be a little, well, childish. They blamed everyone else for their wrongdoings. Threw tantrums. I almost expected them to hold their breath until they went blue to get their way.
I stuck my new phone on the charger as I walked into my study to bring up the news conference, wincing my way through it, and jotting down notes on how we could fix it before sending out emails to the team.
It was easy to fall back into work, to let the rest of the world, and all my worries, fall to the background. Maybe it wasn’t a healthy coping mechanism, especially when I wanted to get my boss out of the race and in prison for his connections with human traffickers. But it helped me not to feel so overwhelmed.
If I stopped working for even ten minutes put together, the fear became a scarf around my throat, tightening and strangling with each passing second.
It was easier just to keep going, keep grinding, until my eyes were so heavy that it was impossible to keep going.
Done for the day, I took a comically short shower, jumping at every random sound from my neighbors or Kevin as he wandered around the apartment, wondering why we hadn’t gone to bed yet.
When I finally did climb into my bed, though, sleep was evasive. I lay there staring at the ceiling, wondering if maybe I should have grabbed one of the big chef’s knives in my kitchen, slipped it under my pillow, or grabbed a bat to keep beside me.
I tried to remind myself that I was as safe as I could possibly be in my apartment.
There was no other choice anyway. Even if I’d gone to the police and told them that I’d been involved in the shooting, that I was the one being targeted, what were they going to do? Wasn’t it always a running theme in movies that women who went to the police got, at most, a cruiser that went around their neighborhood or parked out front of their home? As if someone couldn’t come in between shifts or slip in through the back.
Aside from hiring a bulky bodyguard or something like that, I was on my own.
Eventually, I worried myself to a fitful night of sleep, waking up constantly because I’d turned onto my side and rubbed against my stitches.
When I woke up, I was groggy and paranoid, gaze constantly going to my door and the windows with the drapes pulled closed, a moody Kevin swatting at the material, mad that he couldn’t sun in the morning rays like he always did.
“Sorry, buddy. It’s just for a couple of days,” I told him, even if I had no actual idea how long this might go on for.
I ordered my ride-share, and didn’t go downstairs until I knew he was out front.
I tucked my obvious blonde hair up into a baseball cap, then I ran out the door and into the car, praying that no one could pick me off through the window like they did in movies.
In the end, though, I made it into work, where I kept myself safely surrounded by as many people as possible as we worked on the messaging we had to put out.
Then, around noon—because he didn’t have any actual assassination attempt to worry him—the senator strolled in.
It was time to try to get some information.
CHAPTER SIX
Elian
“I don’t like it,” Renzo said as we stood in the back room of the butcher shop that was now Rico’s legitimate business.