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“Same,” Rio said on a sigh, then he moved to the window. “I look at Enzo and Robbie, and they just…”

“Belong together.”

“Yeah. And maybe we’re allowed to want good things, Jamie. Even if they don’t come packaged the way we thought they would.”

I stared at the ceiling, eyes burning. “Do we deserve them?” The words tasted like ash.

Why had every good thing I’d ever touched always ended the same way—ruined, scorched, broken in my hands?

I’d learned to survive the aftermath, but I’d never once been taught to believe in something better. Not for me.

He looked at me, steady and unflinching. “Yes. But we’re gonna have to fight like hell to believe it.”

We took our coffees to the sofas, and sat quietly for the longest time, me lost in thought, and Rio clearly having something to say and not knowing where to start.

“We should talk about Stockton,” he murmured. “Before you… y’know, with Killian.”

Stockton. An old motel. Empty. Abandoned.

Boarded up. Rio and I had been out there picking up a 1969 Dodge Charger R/T—cherry red, with a 440 Magnum engine and rear quarter panels that looked like they’d seen one too many winters—and we’d slept overnight in Rio’s truck because the owners wanted one more night to consider the sale.

I remember being hot, irritable, keyed up with nowhere to put it—the pressure building under my skin until it felt like fire was the only answer.

I didn’t observe. Didn’t look for patterns of habitation aside from the obvious, didn’t think of the people in there who’d want to stay hidden from ICE.

Didn’t have any reason to burn the place other than my selfishness.

I didn’t see any signs that anyone was living there.

I needed to burn, and that desperate want overrode everything else.

I lit the fire as if it were a ritual, something sacred, but I didn’t know anyone was inside until I heard the screaming.

Two families. Undocumented and scared. A toddler. Three other kids. Parents trying to survive on the margins. My fire took every possession from them and nearly took their lives.

I got them out. Every single one. They were so fucking grateful—thanking me with tearful eyes and shaking hands while smoke still clung to their clothes. And I stood there, ash-streaked and hollow, trying to reconcile the truth—I’d almost killed innocents.

Rio was the one who had yanked me back, physically and emotionally, as I broke down in the dirt outside. I cried not for what had happened, but for what almost did. For how close I’d come to destroying something that didn’t belong to me.

Grief tore through me then, sharp and unrelenting. Not just guilt, but regret so deep it felt as if it would eat me alive. I never wanted to feel that again. But even now, it still lived in my chest, quiet and waiting.

“It won’t happen again,” I reassured him.

“What if Killian doesn’t care like I do?”

“Jesus, Rio, he walked into a fire to save me.”

“He didn’t stop you setting it in the first place,” Rio reminded me.

I scrubbed my eyes. “No one can stop me apart from me ,” I said, tired and sore.

“You should tell him what happened. He needs to know if he’s your anchor.”

“Okay, Mom,” I said, teasing, but the truth of it was that Killian did need to know. “If this gets serious, I’ll tell him.”

“ Gets serious?” Rio scoffed. “Wasn’t it you who just said he walked into a fire for you? I think that’s plenty serious.”

Love? My anchor? None of it seemed real.

I couldn’t sleep; Rio’s warning and the mention of love were messing with my head, so I dragged my laptop over and continued digging into the files concerning Lassiter.

I sat cross-legged on the sofa, the overhead light off, the only glow coming from my laptop screen and the string of LED lights around the window.

The room was quiet except for the whirr of the fan and the erratic clicking of my mouse.

I was now fully immersed in it, deep in the obsession I had told myself was curiosity.

But it wasn’t. It was something else. A compulsion.

A need to find something—anything—on Lassiter.

Something Killian’s team might miss. Something that might matter.

I reviewed public records, corporate filings, charity donations, and real estate transactions related to everything we’d downloaded from Mitchell’s place, as well as what I’d learned through my old dark web contacts.

I compared company directorships and financial disclosures with the growing horror that only came when something started making too much sense.

The deeper I went, the more knots I found in the web.

One LLC led to another. Shell corporations were layered like Russian dolls.

Every once in a while, a whisper of Lassiter’s name in a charity he’d consulted for, or a case Lassiter had prosecuted, which had died before it reached a jury.

And then I found it.

It wasn’t listed as anything meaningful.

Just a ZIP file in a defunct law firm’s document repository, buried behind bad indexing and half-broken links.

The folder was labeled Legacy Holdings – CLOSED CASES .

I opened the set of archived legal documents, heavily compressed.

I extracted them all. Most were dry dismissals, mergers, and settlements. But one was different.

A deposition.

I blinked. The metadata had been cleaned—someone had taken the time to wipe it thoroughly—but the language in the document made me pause.

Something about it felt… off. Coded. The tone was stiff, the structure clinical.

There were black bars over names, redactions over company identifiers.

But the questions—they circled power dynamics, corporate accountability, and an unnamed party who’d authorized hush money in a murder trial.

I scrolled, reading between the lines. An intermediary. A high-profile murder case that had been quietly buried before it reached trial. The words danced close to what I knew about Lassiter’s favorite tactics—redirect, conceal, neutralize .

One line made my breath catch: Did you inform Mr. Lassiter of the potential legal fallout from the murder investigation?

The answer was redacted, but the following line wasn’t:

For the record, the authorization from the Lassiter Foundation to settle the matter came directly through the intermediary.

Okay, a new level then for us to explore, an intermediary. My fingers hovered over the trackpad. I copied the bar number of the deponent, just out of habit, and opened a new tab to check it. It may have been someone high-profile and could lead to something useful.

The search loaded.

Killian McKendrick.

My breath whooshed out of me all at once, as if I’d taken a punch to the chest. I stared at the name on the screen, willing it to be wrong, to be someone else. But it wasn’t. I clicked back to the deposition and scrolled again, looking at it with new eyes.

Killian had been in the middle of a Lassiter deal. Not on the edges. Not a bystander. This wasn’t a favor or a passing connection. This was central. Killian had helped Lassiter bury a murder.

My heart thudded. The laptop screen felt too bright, burning my eyes. I leaned into the wall, vision tunneling. I’d almost thought I could trust him—but what the hell had I found?

“What the fuck, Killian,” I whispered.

I shut the laptop, pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes, then scrubbed them over my face. The walls felt like they were closing in on me. I needed air. I needed to know why.

But more than that, I needed to understand why Killian was lying to us all.

So, I sent a message, grabbed what I needed, and left.