Page 18 of The Hacker (Dominion Hall #5)

VIVIENNE

T he text came just as the cab turned off King Street, my phone buzzing with Jessa’s name.

Meet at your place. Easier for everyone.

Everyone?

I stared at the message, brow furrowing. She didn’t elaborate, didn’t offer the usual soft emoji or nervous follow-up. Just those four words, flat and final.

But honestly? That worked for me.

Fine. Need to grab a bigger bag anyway.

I slipped the phone into my back pocket and leaned forward to tap the driver’s shoulder. “East Bay and Vendue,” I said. “Just past the bar called Liquid Courage.”

The driver nodded, and the rest of the ride passed in silence, the kind that felt too still, too expectant. Like a held breath before a storm.

When we pulled up, I saw them.

Reporters.

Three, maybe four of them, clustered near the bar’s front entrance like vultures in overpriced shoes, holding out their phones like microphones, cameras already lifted.

My stomach twisted.

They’d found me.

I stepped out of the cab slowly, sunglasses low on my nose, chin high as if I hadn’t just been suspended for “conduct unbecoming.” As if I hadn’t straddled a hacker in a mansion like he was both weapon and salvation.

One of them clocked me. “Miss Laveau! Vivienne! Is it true the board asked you to resign?”

Another chimed in, already filming. “Were you under the influence when you climbed the bridge? Is this your way of crying for help?”

Jesus.

I was halfway to growling something unprintable when the door to Liquid Courage swung open and a familiar voice shouted, “Back off. She’s with us.”

It was Reggie, one of the bartenders I’d known for years. Tattooed, six-foot-five, and meaner than a rattlesnake on tequila. Behind him, Cami popped her gum and crossed her arms, glaring daggers at the reporters.

“She’s family,” Cami said. “You want a quote? How about ‘get the fuck off our stoop?’”

I slipped past them with a grateful nod, the reporters still shouting questions behind me as the door slammed shut.

I hadn’t done the stunt for them.

God, no.

I wasn’t chasing internet fame. I wasn’t trying to go viral. I wasn’t looking to be the next glittery cautionary tale dissected on a podcast by strangers in hoodies sipping oat milk lattes.

Yes, maybe I’d done it for attention.

But not their attention.

Not for the vultures with ring lights and deadlines. Not for the think pieces about “unraveling artists” or the anonymous comments calling me a narcissist in a leotard.

I’d done it for the silence that came before the fall.

For the brief, perfect moment where I could breathe above the noise.

For the part of me that had always wondered if the world would catch me—or if I’d just disappear into it.

And I’d done it to see if he’d come. If Elias Dane, with all his control and composure, would step out of the shadows for me. If he’d see the chaos I carried and still decide I was worth reaching for.

Inside the building, the air smelled like tequila and sugar-sweat from last night’s crowd. Music played low—Fleetwood Mac—and the lights were dim, familiar. Comforting.

Reggie jerked his head toward the back stairs. “Go on, Vivi. They’re not getting past us. I promise. Your people are up there.”

I mouthed thank you and took the stairs two at a time, heart pounding harder with every step. Not just from the scene downstairs, but from Jessa’s message.

Easier for everyone.

Who the hell was everyone?

I reached the third floor landing, kicked off my shoes, and pushed open my apartment door.

And froze.

There they were.

All of them.

Jessa stood just inside, arms folded, jaw tight.

To her left, Marisol, wide-eyed and visibly anxious, arms crossed like she was preparing for an ambush.

Lena, looking more “resting bitch face” than ride-or-die at the moment.

Teresa, shifting her weight and glancing at the floor sheepishly.

Madame Odette, matriarch of the Charleston Crescent Ballet, resplendent in her signature black. Her cane stood sentinel by her side, but it was the glare that threatened to take me down.

Emmaline, my sister, in a modest wrap dress that screamed Texas and judgment.

And next to her?

A middle-aged woman in tortoiseshell glasses, hair in a bun, holding a clipboard like a shield. The kind of calm only years of therapy—or wine—could teach.

No one spoke.

Not at first.

Glasses and Bun cleared her throat. “Vivienne?—”

I held up a hand. “Stop.”

I scanned the room again, the arrangement suddenly too tidy, too deliberate. My favorite throw pillows placed just so. Candles lit. Bottled water on the table.

“Oh, my God,” I said, a dry laugh escaping. “This is an intervention.”

“Vivi—” Jessa started.

“No. Don’t you Vivi me right now.” I pointed at her, then at Emmaline. “And you? You live a thousand miles away and never call. What the fuck are you doing in my apartment?”

“We’re here because we love you,” Emmaline said smoothly, already on script. “And we’re concerned.”

“Concerned?” I barked. “About what?”

Glasses and Bun spoke up, her tone calm but clinical, like she was trying not to startle a wild animal. That’s when it clicked.

Of course. A therapist.

“This is about destructive behaviors,” she said evenly. “About patterns. Risk. Isolation.”

“Isolation?” I spun around to face them. “I’ve had more people in this apartment in the last ten minutes than in the last six months. You want to talk about isolation? Try growing up in a house where silence was a weapon.”

No one spoke.

Good.

Because I wasn’t done.

“You think I’m an addict?” My voice cracked, the laugh that followed brittle and cold. “You think this is about drugs?”

“You push people away,” Jessa said quietly. “Your behavior is becoming riskier. You climbed a fucking bridge with no ropes and laughed about it.”

“It wasn’t about the bridge,” Lena whispered.

I turned to her, eyes narrow. “No? Then what was it about?”

“Maybe about control,” she said. “About needing to feel something to distract from what’s happening in your life.”

“And how would you know?”

Lena flinched, but didn’t look away. “Because I’ve done it, too,” she said. “Different methods, same goal.”

“I’m not you,” I snapped.

“No,” she agreed softly. “But maybe you’re closer than you think.”

And there it was—that quiet, awful truth, hanging between us. Lena knew the edge. Had danced on it for years.

She’d been the golden girl once, too. The darling of Crescent’s winter season, the one critics called “effortless,” even when her eyes were glassy and her hands trembled behind the curtain.

It wasn’t until she collapsed during rehearsal—right there on the Marley floor, bones sharp under her leotard and pupils like pinpricks—that anyone knew the truth.

Prescription meds. Painkillers, mostly. But also benzos. Whatever she could get her hands on to make the noise stop.

It had taken a stint in rehab and a year away from dance before she clawed her way back. Clean now. For years, in fact. But I still caught her checking her own hands sometimes, like she was waiting for the tremor to return.

She spoke gently, without judgment. “You’re hurting. I can see it. And I know how easy it is to pretend the fall doesn’t matter if the drop feels like flying.”

The room went thick again, air heavy with unsaid things. I looked at each of them, their eyes swimming with pity, concern, accusation. The therapist scribbled something on her notepad like she had me figured out already—boxed and labeled and pathologized.

“This is fucking insane,” I muttered. “I’m not strung out. I’m not shooting up in alleyways. I haven’t even smoked weed since New Year’s Eve 2019. You know why? Because it makes me paranoid, and I don’t need help with that.”

Teresa tried to chime in—God knows why—but I shot her a glare that made her mouth snap shut again.

“You all want to pretend this is about some bridge stunt,” I said, pacing now, blood pounding in my ears. “Like I’ve gone off the rails. But where the hell were you when things were actually falling apart? When I was trying to hold everything together?”

Marisol looked away. Jessa’s lip trembled.

But Emmaline?

She stood there like granite, arms folded tight, mouth pressed into a line.

“Don’t do this,” I told her. “Don’t you dare.”

She didn’t blink.

“You said we wouldn’t?—”

“I changed my mind,” she said. Her voice wasn’t angry. It wasn’t calm. It was something deeper. Something cracked.

“I’m sorry,” she added. “But they deserve to know.”

The silence after that wasn’t a silence at all. It was a scream with no sound, vibrating beneath my skin, threatening to split me down the middle.

“No,” I whispered. “Don’t.”

She stepped forward.

“Emmaline, I swear to God?—”

“I’m doing this for you.”

“No. You’re doing it to me.”

My voice broke. I felt it snap in half right there in the center of the room. Every wall I’d built. Every mask I’d glued into place. The fortress I’d kept people out of for years.

“Vivi,” she said softly, stepping around the therapist like the woman was just a piece of furniture. “You should tell them. They need to understand. You can’t keep burying it.”

I shook my head, fists clenched. “They don’t need to understand anything.”

“Vivi—”

“I said no!”

And just like that, I saw it in her eyes—pity, yes. But also fear. And heartbreak. And a lifetime of shared silence finally reaching its expiration date.

“You think I’m self-destructing?” I said, laughing bitterly through the burn in my throat. “You’re wrong. I’m already gone. That’s the part none of you seem to get. I’m not spiraling. I’ve already hit the ground.”

Madame Odette took a step forward then, her cane tapping sharply against the floor.

“You have not,” she said. Her voice cut like glass. “But you will, if you keep running from what’s chasing you.”

I turned to her slowly, trembling with rage—or grief. Maybe both. “And what, pray tell, is that?”

No one answered.

But I saw it.

I saw it in their eyes.

They knew.

Whether Emmaline had said it out loud or just let enough slip, I couldn’t be sure, but the damage was done. She’d unearthed just enough of my secret for them to smell the rot.

She didn’t say the words. Not exactly. She didn’t have to.

She dangled the truth in front of them—like a cracked door in a burning house—and let them draw their own conclusions.

And they had.

I could see it in every tilted head, every shift in posture, every look they tried not to give each other.

They didn’t know the details. But now they knew there were details to be known. And that? That was betrayal enough.

I backed up toward the door, needing air, needing space, needing anything but this.

“You think this is help?” I said, voice hoarse. “You think cornering me in my own apartment and ambushing me with a goddamn therapist is love?”

“Vivi—”

“No,” I cut in, my gaze sweeping the circle. “This was never about love. This was about making yourselves feel better. About turning me into a project you can fix.”

Jessa took a step forward. “We just don’t want to lose you.”

“Maybe it’s too late,” I said. And then I opened the door and walked out.

I didn’t wait for them to follow.

I didn’t care if they did.

I stomped down the stairs like the building was on fire, breath tight, pulse thunderous in my ears. Every floor I descended peeled another layer off me—anger, humiliation, grief—until I hit the bar again, hollowed out and shaking.

Cami took one look at my face and wisely said nothing. Just handed me a bottle of water and a set of car keys from behind the register. “Figured you’d need these.”

I blinked. “How did you?—?”

She smirked. “Love, I know a woman fleeing a crime scene when I see one.”

The joke didn’t land. Not with the way my chest ached. Not with the lump burning the back of my throat.

I took the keys, murmured something like thanks, and walked out into the evening. My SUV was parked a block down—silver, sun-warmed, and mercifully out of sight of the reporters still sniffing around the front.

I slid into the driver’s seat, shut the door, and let the silence wrap around me.

And then I pulled out my phone.

On my way back.

Everything okay?

I stared at his name—Cipher—just that one word, that alias, that armor—and felt something splinter in me all over again.

Define “okay.”

Did you pack to stay awhile?

I gripped the steering wheel, knuckles white.

No.

Understood.

That was all he said.

No questions. No pressure.

He knew. Somehow, he knew.

I dropped the phone in the passenger seat, started the engine, and pulled away from the curb.

Whatever that had been upstairs—ambush, betrayal, well-meaning nightmare—I was done with it.

For now, at least.

Let them keep their secrets. Their pity. Their carefully prepared monologues.

I was going back to the one person who didn’t try to fix me. The one who saw the fire and didn’t flinch.

And if the world wanted to burn around me?

He’d stand in the smoke. With me.