Chapter 5 Chapter 5

MENDEZ'S POV

Marcus's footsteps hadn't even faded from the hallway before I finished my drink.

I never saw Diva as my daughter. The words sat heavy in my chest, not because I regretted saying them, but because I could still see the exact moment they landed on Marcus's face. He looked at me like a stranger.

Twenty years of friendship, and one sentence had cracked it clean in half.

He would never understand. I wasn't sure I fully understood it myself , how a man could watch a girl grow up in front of him, tell himself for years it was nothing, and then one stormy night let it become everything.

But I wasn't going to explain that to Marcus. Some things a man keeps buried even when they're already showing on his face.

I walked him to the door myself. He turned back once, hand on the frame.

"You'll destroy her, Mendez. You know that, right?"

"My next move," I said quietly, "will save Diva."

He didn't answer. He just left, and I stood there a long time after his car pulled off, turning the words over in my head as they belonged to someone else. Save her. I wasn't sure yet exactly how. But I knew Bennett was about to hand me everything I needed on live television, and I wasn't going to waste it.

I picked up my phone and called my head of security.

"Have the cars ready by morning," I said. "We're going to get my wife."

DIVA'S POV

I hadn't really slept. Every time I closed my eyes, the motel ceiling turned into that hotel room, into Bennett's face, into Lira's laugh, into Mendez's hands in the dark.

I gave up around five and just lay there watching the light change through the thin curtains.

By seven, someone was banging on my door.

It was the motel owner, an older man with tired eyes who'd been kind enough not to ask questions when I checked in.

He wasn't kind now. He looked past me at the parking lot, where two vans with cameras mounted on their roofs were already pulling in.

"Ma'am, I need you to check out," he said, not quite meeting my eyes.

"I've got reporters outside asking for you by name.

I run a quiet place. I can't have this."

"Please," I said. "Just give me an hour…."

"I'm sorry." And he really did look sorry, which somehow made it worse.

"I'll refund what's left on the night."

I packed the one suitcase I owned in eleven minutes.

I know because I watched the clock the entire time, my hands shaking too hard to fold anything properly.

When I stepped outside, a reporter I didn't recognize shoved a phone toward my face.

"Diva! Any comment on the divorce filing? Is it true you're pregnant?"

I said nothing. I put my sunglasses on with a bruised cheek still half-hidden under concealer and walked to my car like the ground might open up and swallow me if I was lucky.It didn't.

That afternoon, I sat in the car outside a gas station because I genuinely did not know where else to go, and I watched Bennett's face fill the small screen mounted above the register.

He looked good. Rested. Wearing the blue shirt I'd bought him for his birthday two years ago, which felt like its own small cruelty.

"I loved my wife," he was saying, his voice doing that practiced, wounded thing I used to fall for. "I gave her everything.

A home, security, my whole heart. And she went and did this ;with a man old enough to be her father ,behind my back."

The interviewer, sympathetic and nodding, asked him something I couldn't hear over the noise of the gas pumps.

"I've filed for divorce," Bennett said. "I have to protect what's left of my life. She wanted his money. That's all this ever was for her."

The clerk behind the counter clicked her tongue and shook her head at the screen.

"Poor guy," she muttered, not realizing I was standing three feet away.

I got back in my car before I could hear the rest. My phone, when I finally looked at it, was a wall of red notification bubbles.

I turned it face-down on the passenger seat and drove until I found the cheapest, most forgettable motel I could, on the far edge of town where I thought no one would think to look.

I was wrong by about six hours.

The knock that evening wasn't a reporter's knock. It was too calm, too unhurried. I looked through the peephole, and my stomach dropped straight through the floor.

Black SUVs. Four of them, lined up along the curb like something out of a movie, engines still running. Men in dark suits stood near the doors. And already, impossibly, two vans with press logos were screeching in behind them, someone shouting into a phone about a location tip.

I opened the door two inches, heart slamming.

Mendez stood there in a charcoal coat, hands in his pockets, looking like he belonged nowhere near a motel like this and somehow owned it anyway. He didn't say anything at first. His eyes went straight to my cheek, to the bruise I hadn't quite managed to cover.

Something in his face changed. Went very still. Very cold.

"How dare you show up here," I said, low, so the reporters gathering at the edge of the lot wouldn't hear. "Haven't you done enough?"

"I'm not here to explain myself to you right now," he said. "I'm here to get you out of this."

A reporter had already broken past the loose line his security tried to hold, camera raised, shouting my name. Mendez turned toward her, unbothered, almost bored.

"You want a story?" he said, loud enough to carry, loud enough that every camera on the lot swung toward him instead of me.

"Then ask the right question. Nobody in your headlines today has asked who put that bruise on her face."

Silence. Then the scrape of a dozen people repositioning their lenses at once.

"Ask Bennett Thompson," Mendez went on, calm as anything, "why his wife has been hiding behind sunglasses for two days. Ask him where he was the night before she came to me. Ask yourselves why the story you've been printing only has room for one villain."

Nobody moved for a second. Then phones started typing. A reporter near the front lowered her camera slightly, frowning like she was recalculating something in real time.

I stood frozen in the doorway, the bruise suddenly feeling like the only true thing anyone had looked at in days.

"I'm not going anywhere with you," I told him quietly, once the noise around us had thinned into murmurs and typing. "You lied to me about that night. You're the reason my whole life burned down."

He stepped closer, voice dropping so only I could hear it.

"You have nowhere to fight this battle alone, Diva. Not tonight. Whatever you think of me and you have every right to think it — you cannot do this from a motel parking lot with cameras at the door."

I looked past him at the vans, the flashing lights, the version of my life currently trending under someone else's hashtag. I thought about the empty apartment I didn't have, the father who wouldn't answer, the husband on every screen in America calling me a whore in a blue shirt I'd bought him.

I got in the car.

BENNETT'S POV

I watched the broadcast from my living room, whiskey in hand, feeling good about myself for the first time in days, right up until the footage cut to some motel parking lot and Mendez's voice came out of my television asking why nobody was asking who hit her.

The glass left my hand before I even decided to throw it. It hit the wall and came apart in a hundred small, satisfying pieces.

My phone was already buzzing. Publicist. Lawyer. A number I didn't recognize that was probably another reporter smelling blood in a different direction now.

I stared at the wreckage on the floor, at Mendez's calm, punchable face s

till frozen mid-sentence on the screen behind it.

"If Mendez wants a war," I said to no one, "I'll give him one.”