Page 225 of Fractured Loyalties

My jaw aches from clenching. I can already see Mara’s face if she hears it. Her trust cracking, shattering. I can see Kinley, wide-eyed, too loyal, too lost, and wonder if it was betrayal or weakness.

But weakness is just betrayal that didn’t plan ahead.

I turn without another word. The door slams behind me, the sound echoing through the corridor like judgment.

This city stinks of blood and lies, and right now, both are clinging to my hands.

Kinley’s name burns against my palm, the paper damp with sweat.

By the time I hit the SUV, my course is already set.

He either talks to me tonight, or he doesn’t talk again.

Chapter 39 – Mara - Caught in the Net

The door closes, and the sound stays in the room like a hand on my throat. I don’t move at first. The towel is tight under my arms. My skin smells like soap and him. The mirror above the dresser sits crooked from where he pushed me into it. One of the drawers is still open, and a corner occupies a scrap of lace from my bra, torn like proof of what he just did to me.

I breathe through the ache between my ribs until the floor steadies. My legs feel unsure, a little rubbery in the knees, but I make myself stand straight. He said to stay put. Of course he did. Elias speaks like gravity and expects the world to fall in line.

The hallway outside the bedroom is white and spare, a spine of light down the center. The apartment hums with expensive systems that keep the outside where it belongs. Out. I follow the thin rug to the living room.

Lydia is there. She’s perched on the edge of the couch with one boot braced on the table leg. Her jacket is folded beside her. A black bag sits at her feet with the zipper partway open, just enough to see coiled wires and a squat camera lens. She looks up once, reads me in one pass, then returns to the tablet in her hands.

“How’s the water pressure?” she asks, like we share a kitchen and not a target.

“Fine.”

“You look like you could use sugar.” She nods at the counter. “I brought pastries from the place two streets over. The ones with the almond filling. Your clinic people buy them on Fridays.”

The casual detail lands oddly. “You’ve watched me that long?”

“I watch everything that might keep you breathing.” Her tone is dry, not apologetic, not proud. A fact. “Sit. Your legs are still shaking.”

I sit because she’s right. The towel tugs across my chest. My hair leaves damp marks on my shoulders. I’m very aware of how little I’m wearing. Lydia is not. She treats me like a client on a checklist: pulse, posture, threat vector.

Her thumbs move across the tablet. A square of street appears on the screen. Another angle loads beside it. Two more follow, stitched together in a neat grid. The clinic’s block. The alley behind my building. The intersection where the streetlight stutters and makes everything look haunted.

“Cameras?” I ask.

“City feeds. Private lots. A couple of storefronts that don’t know how to password a thing.” She flicks through time stamps. “I flagged your routes. Morning. Evening. Coffee runs. Your habit of pausing at the crosswalk even when you have green. You do that too often.”

“It’s safer.”

“It’s a tell.” She stops on a frame where a dark sedan idles one car length back from the curb. “There. That one.”

The image is grainy, but the shape is familiar. The roofline. The tint. The way it sits, like it has nowhere to be except here. My throat tightens.

“That was yesterday,” she says. “Same car shows up on three other cameras within eight blocks. Never close enough to touch you. Always close enough to keep you in frame.”

“So he’s still watching.” I want it to be Caleb. If it’s Caleb, the monster has a face I already hate, and I know how to fear him. If it’s not Caleb, the fear has new teeth.

Lydia’s mouth flattens. “He and others.”

I fix my eyes on the screen. “Others who?”

“Working it.” She pinches the display to zoom. “Look at the driver’s mirror.”

A glint of a cap brim. A smear where a face should be. Nothing that helps.