Page 95 of What You left in Me

I sit up, flinching at the ache in my body. His face is shuttered and angry. He won’t meet my eyes.

A dagger of rejection pierces me. His seed trickles down my thigh, darkening the sheets. Tears prick.Did I fail him somehow?

I slide off the bed and crawl to him. He never demanded anything but humanness, yet here I am, crawling.

I clutch his towel, search those gray eyes. He doesn’t look like a man after sex. He looks like a man at war with himself.

My throat closes. “I’m sorry. I can do better. Please… give me another chance.”

The old me recoils. I’m begging my stepbrother. What the hell is wrong with me?

“You look beautiful like this.” His voice is quiet. “You were a good girl today. But I have to go… there are things I need to handle.”

The words sting and soothe at once. Pride and rejection in the same breath. I nod, unable to speak.

He bends, kisses me once on the mouth, soft and almost absent, and straightens. “We’ll talk later.”

Then he turns, towel at his hips, and walks out, leaving the room heavy with the scent of us, and me trembling on the floor, still caught between shame and wanting.

Chapter 29 – Finn – The Truth I Paid For

I run because she taught me to. Because before the boardrooms and the knives, before the suits and the signatures, there was a woman who shook me out of bed at dawn and said,Come on, Finn. The ground owes you a debt—go collect it.I run the way she did: long strides, steady breath, the kind of pace that turns thoughts into something I can actually hold without breaking. Asphalt thuds under me in a rhythm that used to mean freedom.

Now it just means ghosts.

I see her every time my shoes hit the road. Hair in a crooked ponytail, cheeks flushed, laughing like the world didn’t have fangs. Then it flickers, the film burns, and I see the other face. The still one. The morgue one. The blue I can’t scrub out of my memory. I still hear the doctor’s voice, clinical and apologetic:Toxicology showed benzodiazepines. Combined with alcohol.A shrug in his tone, like tragedy is a scheduling conflict. My mother didn’t “accidentally” swallow shit she didn’t take. She didn’t “tragically” mix pills and gin because she felt whimsical that night. She ran five miles with me that morning, took the hills without complaint, kissed my forehead at the door. You don’t go from that to still and cold unless someone helps you along. She was already getting sick. The fucking doctors just couldn’t tell what the reason was.

I could have stayed after we had sex outside the hospital. After Ariane clawed truth out of me with her hands and her mouth and the sound I’ll be hearing in the damnedest places until I die. I could have stayed and pretended the storm in me could be chained to a bed and fed excuses. But if I stayed, I’dhave ripped the whole lie open without proof. And I don’t do tantrums. I do endings.

So, I left. Not because I regretted her. Because I needed my hands on the neck of the thing that took my mother, and I couldn’t do that in a house full of sleepers and polite lies.

If I was going to bury Eleanor, I needed more than suspicion. I needed receipts and blood.

I pounded out two more miles, turned back, cut through the moneyed dark of Willowridge, and by the time I hit the driveway I had the order of operations in my head: Waren first. Then, Rhode Island. And then, the ledger that would make Eleanor choke on her pearls.

Inside, I didn’t shower. I didn’t pour bourbon. I sat on the edge of the bed like a loaded gun and texted Eric:Pull up the number I sent you last month. I want him mapped every ten minutes.He sent back a thumbs-up andJim’s going to crybecause of course he was. Jim was a genius and a coward, which was starting to become of my favorite combinations.

The phone rang a second later.Jim. “You know this is illegal, right?” he said by way of greeting. Keys clattered in the background, the sound of his brain sprinting ahead of his mouth.

“So’s half my portfolio,” I said. “Track him.”

“I’m not a fucking wizard. You sent me a phone number and a name four weeks ago and I said, ‘Hmm, interesting,’ because you were paying me, and now you want a live trace like I’ve got a Stingray in my sock drawer.”

“You do have a Stingray,” I said. “And if you don’t, buy one. Use tower dumps. Buy data from whatever sleazy brokerstill owes you. I don’t want romance, Jim. I want dots on a map.”

He sighed, long and theatrical like I’d asked him to solve poverty. But it the sound of a man who enjoyed being bullied almost as much as he enjoyed complaining. “Fine. Give me… thirty.”

“Ten.”

“Fifteen, and you never make me talk to airport security on your behalf again.”

“Deal.” I hung up. Rewarding bad behavior just encourages more of it.

While he whined his way through breaking federal law, I pulled up what I already had on Waren: old mugshots, a probation officer he practiced lying to, a habit of cashing money orders at the same liquor store because addicts are loyal to their ruts. He was the kind of man who thought he was invisible because everyone looked away. I didn’t look away.

Fifteen minutes later, Jim pinged my screen with a little cartoon siren because he’s insufferable:Your sludge is at Milo’s. Off Highway 9. Private cell pings match the number you gave me. He also carries a second prepaid. Same tower. Same sweet stink. Want me to geofence him?

Drop me a breadcrumb trail.I replied.