Chapter 6: Morning Calculations
The first grey light of dawn seeped through the single loft window, painting the cramped space in shades of charcoal and ash. Lo woke as she always did in his presence—instantly, completely, her body rigid with awareness before her mind had fully surfaced. She lay perfectly still, feeling the crushing weight of his arm across her waist, his hand splayed possessively over her hipbone. His breath was a slow, hot rhythm against the back of her neck.
The frozen, crystalline rage from the small hours had thawed. It hadn’t melted away, but had liquefied into something more dangerous: a mercury-quick, sharp clarity. It moved through her veins with a purpose.
Without moving her head, her eyes scanned the room. She catalogued everything. The rough-hewn pine walls. The braided rope ladder leading down. The faint, chill scent of last night’s dead fire. The shape of his jeans, discarded over the foot of the bed. And there, nestled in the denim pocket, the worn leather of his shoulder holster, the butt of his Glock 19 protruding just so.
She knew his patterns. He slept deep, but he slept in cycles. After the first natural stir—a shift, a sigh—he would sink back into a sleep so profound it was almost a coma for exactly forty-five minutes. It was a relic of a life spent on guard, a biological reset. It was a window. She’d used it twice before. Once to steal his keys. Once to simply watch him, unobserved, tracing the lines of his face without his piercing blue eyes dissecting her.
Her heart was a frantic bird in her chest, but her breathing remained slow, measured. A yogi’s control. A predator’s patience. She counted the seconds after he let out a soft, grumbling sigh and rolled slightly onto his back, his arm loosening its grip. The clock in her head started.
When the count hit two thousand seven hundred, she moved.
It was silent, fluid. She slipped from under his arm like a shadow, her bare feet touching the cold wooden floor without a sound. She didn’t look at him. She went straight for the jeans. Her fingers, cold and steady, closed around the textured grip of the gun. It was heavier than she remembered. Cold steel. Familiar weight. She pulled it free, the holster offering a soft sigh of resistance.
She turned. He stirred again, a deeper furrow forming between his brows. No time for hesitation.
She moved quickly, swinging a leg over him, settling her weight on his hips, straddling him. The worn cotton of his t-shirt she wore rode up. The muzzle of the Glock found the center of his chest, pressed against the dark tattoo ink over his sternum.
His eyes opened. Not startled. Not wide. They opened slowly, blearily, as if he’d merely reached the end of a pleasant dream. He blinked up at her, at the gun, at her furious face outlined by the dull dawn light. A slow, sleep-creased smile touched his lips. He yawned, jaw cracking, and brought his hands up to rest behind his head on the pillow, making no move to dislodge her or the weapon.
“Mornin’, baby,” he yawned, his voice gravelly with sleep.
“I hate you,” she hissed. The words were venomous, sharpened by the silent night’s planning.
“I can see that,” he replied amiably, his eyes drifting closed for a second as if he might go back to sleep. He opened them again, his gaze utterly relaxed. “Comfortable up there?”
“I’m leaving,” she stated, her voice low and shaking with intensity. “Today. Now. You’re gonna let me walk out that door, get in your truck, and drive away. And you’re gonna leave me alone. You, and Skeeter, and Moose, and all those other arseholes back home. You’re gonna erase my number. You’re gonna forget my face. This ends. Now.”
He considered this, his head tilting slightly on the pillow. The gun barrel dug into his skin. “Or?” he prompted, his tone one of genuine curiosity.
Lo scrunched her face, her nostrils flaring. She nodded sharply down at the gun in her hands.
Bill’s smile widened. He didn’t look at the gun. He looked at her eyes, at the desperate conviction burning there. “You got the safety on, baby,” he said gently, as if pointing out she had spinach in her teeth.
Her gaze flickered down. Her thumb felt the lever. A jolt of panic. “No, I don’t,” she snapped back, but the certainty had drained from her voice. She stared at the small switch, trying to remember.
Bill sat up, smoothly, forcing her to adjust her seat on his lap. The venomous argument was apparently on hold for a technical review. He reached up, his movements slow and non-threatening, and wrapped his large hand around hers on the grip. His skin was furnace-hot. He guided her thumb. “Yeah, you do. See here? That’s ‘safe’. You want that little red dot to be showing. That’s when you can really hurt my feelings.”
He clicked it off with her thumb under his. The sound was a tiny, definitive snick in the quiet loft.
Lo stared at it. The red dot was now visible. She nodded, a quick, jerky movement. “Oh. Ok. Thanks.” She then pointed it back at his chest, her arm stiff.
“And it’s loaded, right?” Bill asked, his hands now settling on her hips, his thumbs rubbing idle circles on the bare skin just above the waistband of the boxers. His touch was distractingly familiar.
Lo’s focus fractured. She noticed how light the gun suddenly felt. The heavy, promising weight was gone. She gave the weapon a little shake near her ear. Nothing rattled. Her shoulders slumped a fraction. She huffed. “I don’t think so.”
“You didn’t check?” Bill asked, rolling his eyes skyward as if pleading with the universe for patience. “You go through all the drama of pointing a loaded firearm at a man’s heart—a man who, I’ll remind you, knows fifteen ways to disarm you with his pinky—and you didn’t check the goddamn chamber?”
She shook her head, a petulant, defeated gesture. The grand stand was crumbling into farce. “Can still hit you with it,” she mumbled, sounding about six years old.
The laugh that boomed out of him was pure, unadulterated joy. It shook his chest under the muzzle and vibrated through her own body. He squeezed her hips. “How’s about we have coffee first?” he suggested, as if proposing a trip to the cinema. “Then you can try to pistol-whip me. I’ll even give you a running start.”
Before she could protest, his hands slid under her thighs. In one effortless motion, he stood up from the bed, taking her with him. She let out a yelp, her legs instinctively wrapping around his waist as he carried her, his arms hooked under her ass, the gun still dangling uselessly in her hand. He descended the rope ladder with her clinging to him, the ladder swaying under their combined weight.
He carried her straight to the kitchenette and deposited her on the cold countertop as if she were a bag of groceries. She sat there, the gun now held limply in her lap, frowning at it as if it had personally betrayed her.
Bill, utterly unfazed, turned his back to her. He filled the ancient percolator with water from the sink tap, the sound thunderously normal. He scooped coarse ground coffee from a tin, his broad shoulders blocking the weak light from the window.
“You’re a fucking menace, you know that?” he said conversationally over his shoulder. “A hazard to yourself and others. What was the plan, Lo? You’d what, scare me? You think I haven’t had loaded guns pointed at me by professionals? You think a shaky-handed herbalist with the safety on is gonna make me piss my pants?”
“The thought had crossed my mind,” she muttered, thumbing the safety back on with a resentful click.
“Cute.” He lit the gas ring with a match. The blue flame hissed to life. He leaned against the counter opposite her, crossing his arms. He was wearing only his sweatpants, the intricate tapestry of his tattoos on full display, a history of violence inked into his skin. He studied her—the messy dark hair, the furious green eyes, the way she sat hunched over the worthless weapon. “The gun thing is new, I’ll give you that. Usually you just take my wheels and my credit card. This is more… direct. I’m almost proud.”
“Don’t be,” she spat. “It was a logistical error.”
“It was a fundamental error,” he corrected, his voice dropping into a teacher’s tone. “You went for the symbol of power without understanding the mechanics of power. That’s always been your problem, kid. You see the jacket, not the man who earned it. You see the gun, not the finger on the trigger. You ran to a community center looking for… what? Clean, safe, orderly love? While your blood calls for something else entirely.”
His words, spoken so calmly amidst the mundane ritual of coffee-making, lanced deeper than any taunt about the club’s betting pool. They spoke to the chasm within her she could never bridge. The simmering pot began to rattle on the stove, the rich, bitter scent of coffee blooming in the cabin’s chill.
“My blood doesn’t call for anything,” she lied, her voice hollow.
“Bullshit.” He pushed off the counter and came to stand between her knees on the counter. He didn’t touch her. He just loomed, his presence absorbing all the light and air. “It calls for me. It screams for me. Even when you’re pointing my empty gun at me, you’re straddling my lap. You’re in my bed, in my clothes. You made a fucking beeline for my weapon the second you thought you could. That’s not someone running away. That’s someone trying to possess a piece of what holds them. It’s a fucked-up mating ritual.”
She looked away, heat flooding her cheeks. The truth of it was a physical burn. He leaned in closer, his voice a low rumble. “You wanna leave? Truly? Not as a stunt, not as a tantrum, but for good? I’ll open the door right now. You can walk out in my shirt and your sore ass and see how far you get before the world eats you alive. Because it will. It’ll see that beautiful, fierce, stupid light in you and it’ll either try to snuff it out or turn it into something cheap. And you know it.”
Tears pricked her eyes, hot and humiliating. She willed them away. The percolator started its frantic, choking gurgle.
“Or,” he continued, one hand coming up to cup her jaw, forcing her to look at him. His thumb stroked her cheekbone. “You can drink your coffee. You can accept that you are, in fact, a bad, disobedient baby girl who needs her daddy to teach her how the world works. You can accept that the safety is always on in your hands, because you don’t really want to kill anything. You just want to be seen. And I see you, Olivia. I see the whole fucking mess of you. The London, the Chicago, the herbs, the fire. The loyalty. The fear. The rabbit heart that beats so fast it’s gonna explode.”
He leaned in, his breath mingling with hers. “The bets? They’re right. It is funny. It’s hilarious. Because from where I’m standing, watching you try to outrun your own shadow is the best show on earth. And I’ve got a front-row seat for life.”
He kissed her then. It wasn’t gentle. It was a claiming, a punctuation mark on his speech. It was rough and deep and tasted of sleep and him. She didn’t respond at first, sitting rigid on the counter. Then, with a sound that was half-sob, half-surrender, she melted into it. The gun slipped from her fingers and clattered onto the countertop.
He broke the kiss, resting his forehead against hers. “Coffee’s ready.”
He turned, pulling two chipped enamel mugs from a shelf. He poured the black, steaming liquid, handed one to her, and took his own. He walked to the front door, unlocked it, and pushed it open. A wash of cold, pine-scented morning air flooded in, making her shiver on the counter.
He stood in the open doorway, sipping his coffee, looking out at the mist-wrapped woods. He didn’t look back. The invitation was clear. The door was open. The world was there.
Lo looked from his broad, tattooed back to the dark trees, to the gun on the counter beside her thigh. She slid off the counter, the ache in her muscles and the deeper, throbbing pain in her backside a constant, grounding reminder. She picked up her mug, the heat seeping into her cold hands. She walked to the doorway and stood beside him, not looking at him, looking out.
The silence stretched, filled only with the morning calls of distant birds and the sip of hot coffee.
“It’s going to rain later,” she said finally, her voice quiet.
“Yep,” he agreed.
“I’m not saying I’m staying,” she murmured into her mug.
“Didn’t ask you to, Rabbit.”
“I’m just having coffee.”
“I can see that.”
They stood there, side by side, in a fragile, momentary truce built on the ruins of her failed rebellion and his absolute, unshakeable confidence. The open door was no longer an exit. It was just a view. And she was, for now, choosing to view it from right beside him.
Inside, the gun lay on the counter, a cold, silent testament to a lesson learned. The safety was on. The chamber was empty. But the man was not. And as the first drops of rain began to patter on the cabin’s tin roof, she knew, with a certainty that settled deep in her bones, that the next move would have to be different. It couldn’t be about his symbols of power. It would have to be about his weaknesses. And to find those, she would have to get closer, not farther away. She would have to be smarter. She would have to be exactly what he wanted to see, until he stopped looking so closely.
She took a long, slow sip of coffee, the bitter liquid mirroring the resolve solidifying within her. The performance was entering a new, more dangerous act.
The performance was entering a new, more dangerous act. She finished her coffee in silence, the bitter dregs a final anchor to the moment. The open door still framed the damp, grey woods. Bill leaned against the jamb, watching a squirrel scrabble up a pine, his body a study in casual ownership. He believed the scene had played out. Gun disarmed, point made, lesson absorbed. He saw her slump of resignation as surrender.
He was wrong. What he saw as capitulation was calibration.
“I’m going to shower,” she announced, her voice flat. She placed the empty mug on the small table by the door with a soft click.
“Don’t use all the hot water,” he replied without looking, taking her mug and his to the sink. “And put some of that aloe shit on. The stuff in the blue jar.”
She didn’t answer. She climbed the ladder, her body moving with a slow, careful grace that spoke of soreness rather than defeat. In the chill of the loft, she went not to the bed, but to her small duffel bag, still packed from her flight. She unzipped it with deliberate quiet. Beneath folded yoga pants and sweaters, wrapped in a silk scarf, was the hard plastic shape of her Vipertek VTS-989. It was a civilian model, compact, with a wicked spark. She’d bought it after a scare in a London car park years ago. Bill had laughed at it, calling it a “buzzing toy,” but had let her keep it. Another oversight. Another symbol he’d dismissed.
She palmed it now, its weight comforting and specific. This wasn’t a symbol. It was a tool. She slipped it into the pocket of the borrowed boxers, the outline hidden by the long hem of his t-shirt. Then she went to the rustic bathroom.
The shower was a narrow stall of mossy tile. She let the water run, steaming up the small room, but didn’t get in. Instead, she stood before the fogging mirror, rehearsing stillness. She regulated her breath. In for four, hold for seven, out for eight. A somatic technique to soothe the nervous system. She was not soothing. She was preparing. The face in the mirror was a stranger’s—pale, determined, the green eyes holding a frozen lake where fire usually lived.
She heard him moving below. The clatter of pans. He was making breakfast, a smug, victorious ritual. The scent of frying eggs and bacon soon wove through the steam. Her stomach clenched, but not with hunger. With purpose.
When she emerged, her hair damp, skin flushed from the steam, she found him at the small table. Two plates heaped with food. Two forks. A gesture of domestic normalcy that felt like the most aggressive act of the morning. She sat, the taser a cold brand against her thigh.
“Eat,” he said, shoving a plate toward her. “You need protein after a performance like that.”
She picked up a fork, pushed the eggs around. She took a single bite, the food like ash. He ate heartily, watching her, a satisfied glint in his eye. He was narrating the story already, she knew. The one he’d tell the boys. So she pulls my piece, right? Safety on, chamber empty. The look on her face…
“What?” he asked around a mouthful of bacon, catching her stare.
“Nothing.” She looked down. “Just thinking.”
“Dangerous pastime.”
He finished, pushed his plate away, and leaned back, stretching his arms behind his head. The movement pulled his sweatpants low on his hips, exposed the trail of ink disappearing into fabric. He was utterly relaxed, satiated, in control. This was his blind spot. Not after violence, but after what he perceived as victory. When his guard was down not because of sleep, but because of certainty.
She stood, taking her nearly full plate to the sink. She ran the water, her back to him. The taser was in her hand now, hidden by the curve of the porcelain sink. Her thumb found the safety. Off.
“I was never much good with guns,” Lo mumbled, her voice soft, almost lost in the splash of water.
Bill chuckled from the table, a rich, easy sound. “Thank fuck for that.”
She turned slowly, leaning back against the sink, her hands behind her. She met his gaze, allowed a faint, rueful smile to touch her lips. A concession. He mirrored it, victorious.
Lo hummed, a low, considering sound. “Still pretty good with a taser though.”
His smile faltered for a nanosecond, confusion flickering in his blue eyes. It was all the time she needed.
Before Bill could react, his body jolted. A violent, unnatural spasm ripped through him. The air crackled with the sound of fifty thousand volts finding a home. She had closed the distance in two quick steps, driving the twin metal probes right into the bare skin of his lower abdomen, where his sweatpants had gaped. His arms, previously relaxed behind his head, flew forward as if pulled by wires. His chair rocked back, then crashed forward.
He made a sound—a guttural, punched-out grunt—as his nervous system overrode all conscious command. He fell, a massive tree cut at the roots, collapsing sideways onto the rough wooden floor. The impact shook the cabin.
Lo moved with him, guided his fall as much as her strength allowed. It was an awkward, graceless catch that nearly took her down with him. His dead weight was astonishing, a solid mass of muscle and bone. He landed half on his side, twitching, muscles seizing.
“Jesus, Bove, do some cardio, you’re so heavy!” she wheezed, adrenaline lending her just enough strength to pull herself out from under his arm before it pinned her.
She scrambled back, heart hammering against her ribs. He was down, but not out. His body shuddered, a continuous tremor running through his limbs. His eyes were open, unseeing, pupils dilated. A line of saliva traced from the corner of his mouth to the floor.
She didn’t freeze. Training took over. First, secure the weapon. She yanked the probes from his skin, the tiny barbed ends leaving pinpricks of blood. She wiped the taser on her shirt and shoved it back in her pocket. Then, first aid. She rolled him fully onto his side, into the recovery position, bending his top knee to stabilize him. His skin was clammy, his breathing ragged but steady.
She fetched the wool blanket from the couch and draped it over him. At the sink, she filled a glass with water and grabbed the bottle of strong prescription painkillers from the cupboard—leftover from a bike injury he’d had last fall. She placed them carefully on the floor by his head, within reach if he could reach.
Her movements were swift, efficient, devoid of panic. This was the plan, executed.
Then, she looted.
His wallet was on the counter. She took all the cash, every credit card. His keys hung by the door. She snatched them, the heavy fob for his black Silverado cold in her hand. His gun, still on the counter, went into the waistband of the boxers at her back, a familiar and now loaded weight. She found his phone, a rugged model, next to the bed upstairs.
She brought it down, placed it on the floor before his slowly focusing eyes. He was blinking, awareness creeping back in with a wave of pain and disorientation. A low groan escaped him.
“You…” he slurred, the word thick and mangled.
“Me,” she agreed calmly.
She lifted her boot, a heavy leather hiking boot she’d pulled on after her shower, and brought the heel down on the phone’s screen with a satisfying crunch. She ground it down, twisting her foot, ensuring the circuitry was destroyed.
From a notepad by the phone shelf, she tore a sheet. She uncapped a pen and wrote, her handwriting sharp and clear.
Have fun with your bets, jackass.
She paused, then added, her clinical training warring with her fury, winning for a moment:
P.S. Keep the wound clean, apply ice for only 20mins at a time, and don’t drink booze with these painkillers they’re strong. Lo.
She dropped the note onto his chest, where it rested on the blanket, a white flag of a different kind.
He was trying to push himself up, his arms trembling violently, failing him. His blue eyes blazed with a pure, undiluted rage she had never seen before. It wasn’t the playful anger of a spanking. It was a foundational fury. She had humiliated the Sergeant-at-Arms at his most vulnerable. In his own home. After he’d shown mercy.
“I’ll find you,” he gritted out, each word a stone dropped from a ruined mouth. “I will fucking find you.”
“I’m counting on it,” she said, and her voice was steady, cold, and true.
Then she took his truck and left.
The engine roared to life, a deep, powerful growl that echoed in the quiet clearing. She reversed, tires spitting gravel, then swung onto the narrow forest track. In the rearview mirror, the cabin shrank, a grey smudge against the green. The open door was a dark mouth. She didn’t look back again.
For twenty miles, she drove on autopilot, following the winding road out of the National Forest. Her hands were locked on the steering wheel at ten and two, knuckles white. The adrenaline began to recede, leaving a hollow, shaking cold in its wake. She had done it. She had actually done it. She had tasered William Bove and left him twitching on his own floor.
A laugh bubbled up, harsh and broken. It turned into a sob. She choked it back, biting the inside of her cheek until she tasted blood. No. Not now. This wasn’t the time for the storm of feelings. That would come later, in a locked room somewhere. Now was for logistics.
She pulled into the dusty lot of a closed-up bait shop at a crossroads. The only sound was the tick of the truck’s cooling engine and the distant cry of a hawk. She grabbed his wallet.
Five hundred and twenty dollars in cash. Three credit cards. A debit card. She took it all. The cards were a danger. He could cancel them, or worse, use them to track her. She needed to use them fast and then lose them.
The gun. She lifted it, a Glock 19 Gen 5. She ejected the magazine. Full. Fifteen rounds. She slammed it back home, chambered a round with a smooth, practiced pull of the slide she’d seen him do a thousand times. The sound was final. She engaged the safety. This time, she knew it was on. This time, she knew it was loaded.
She stashed it under the driver’s seat, within easy reach but out of sight.
Then, she assessed herself. She was wearing his t-shirt, the stolen boxers, her hiking boots. Her own clothes were in her duffel in the back. She needed to change, to shed this skin. She climbed into the rear seat, a difficult maneuver in the cab, and ripped open her bag.
Off came the t-shirt, infused with his smell—whiskey, leather, him. She balled it up and threw it into a corner. The boxers followed. For a moment, she sat in the cold cab, naked, shivering. The marks on her backside were a lurid, complicated map in the daylight—the darker welts from the belt overlaid with the broad, hot blush from his hand. She touched the skin. It was tender, a persistent, throbbing echo. A receipt.
She dressed quickly in her own clothes: black leggings, a dark grey long-sleeved tech shirt, a soft charcoal hoodie. She felt more herself, a layer of armor. She bundled his clothes up, opened the truck door, and shoved them deep into a roadside trash barrel filled with wet leaves and rotting fast-food wrappers. Let the raccoons have them.
Back in the driver’s seat, she plotted. She couldn’t go west. That was club territory, his territory. North was more wilderness, dead ends. South led back toward Chicago, a spiderweb he controlled. East was the lake, then Michigan. A needle in a slightly smaller haystack.
She started the truck and went east.
An hour later, she hit a sizable town. A big-box store sprawled off the highway. She parked at the far end of the lot, under the glare of a flickering light pole. Using his credit card, she bought a cheap pre-paid smartphone, a charger, a burner number, and a large coffee. She bought a baseball cap and a pair of non-prescription glasses with plain lenses. She bought a new duffel bag, a different color. She used the card again at a gas station, filling the Silverado’s tank and buying two protein bars and bottled water.
Each transaction was a breadcrumb. She was counting on his pride. He would be incapacitated, seething, for hours. He’d have to find a way to contact someone without his phone, get a ride, start the hunt. He’d cancel the cards the second he could. But first, he’d pull the transactions. He’d see the path. She wanted him to see it.
Her final stop was a branch of his bank. She parked blocks away, walked in wearing the cap and glasses. She used his debit card and PIN—his birth year, a stupid, predictable thing she’d observed once—at the ATM. She withdrew the maximum daily limit: eight hundred dollars. The machine whirred, spitting out crisp bills. She stuffed them into her new bag, her pulse calm.
She walked back to the truck, a different woman from the one who’d entered the town. She had cash, a untraceable phone, a vehicle, a weapon. And she had a head start.
As she merged back onto the highway, heading now southeast, the first wave of real feeling hit. It wasn’t fear. It was a profound, echoing loneliness. The cabin, for all its punishment and confinement, had been a point of gravity. Bill, for all his torment, was a constant. Now there was only open road and silence. The vastness of it was terrifying.
Her new phone buzzed in the cup holder. A notification. She had emailed herself from the store, transferring the notes she’d made in the cabin loft in the dead of night. Plans. Ideas. Names. Not of people, but of places. Safe houses? No. Vulnerable points. Businesses with shaky ledgers. Properties with unclear ownership. Weaknesses in the ecosystem of the club, things she’d heard, seen, filed away over years of being the Sergeant-at-Arms’ worst kept secret.
She wasn’t just running. She was researching. She was targeting.
The light began to fade, purple dusk bleeding into the sky ahead. She needed to get off the road. The truck was too noticeable, too him. She took an exit for a fading industrial town, its main street lined with shuttered factories and tired-looking bars. She found a motel called The Star Lite, a single-story U of doors facing a cracked parking lot. It took cash. No cameras that she could see.
She parked the Silverado around back, behind a dumpster, where it was less visible from the road. The room was what she expected: thin floral blankets, the smell of bleach and mildew, a buzzing fluorescent light. She locked the door, chained it, shoved a chair under the knob.
Only then, in the sterile, lonely quiet, did she allow herself to feel the full weight of the day. Her body ached, a deep bone-ache of fatigue and residual trauma. The skin on her backside was tight, hot. She went into the bathroom, avoided looking in the mirror, and ran a cool cloth over the wounded flesh. The aloe was in her bag, the blue jar he’d told her to use. She almost didn’t. Using it felt like obeying. But pain was pain. She applied it, the gel cool and slick, her own hands performing the care his had the night before.
She sat on the edge of the hard bed, the gun on the nightstand, the taser next to it. The silence pressed in. It was different from the cabin’s silence. This silence was empty. His silence had been full—full of his presence, his breathing, his latent energy. This was a vacuum.
She lay back, staring at the water-stained ceiling. She thought of him on the floor, twitching, the note on his chest. Have fun with your bets, jackass. A smile, brittle and real, touched her lips. Let them laugh about the empty gun. Let him tell that story. The taser story was hers. And only he would know it.
The humor faded. What came after the fury for a man like Bill? Calculation. Vast, implacable calculation. He would be moving already. Calling in favors. His pride wouldn’t let him broadcast the full story, but the boys would know she’d gotten the drop on him. That would make it worse. This was now a matter of club honor, not just personal possession.
Her new phone was dark, a blank slate. She had a number for a contact in Toronto, a woman from her London days who asked