Chapter 8
Chole's POV
I got into the car.
I don't know why I did it—or maybe I do, and that's the part I can't stand.
Marcus held the door open with that professionally blank expression of his, rain starting to pick up around us, and I just got in. No argument. No pointed remark about not needing a ride.
I pulled the door shut behind me, sank into the leather seat and stared straight ahead at the partition. The car pulled away from the curb like the decision had already been made for me.
You're tired, I told myself. That's all this is.
But it wasn't just tired. It was the particular kind of exhaustion that settles into your bones after you've spent an entire day performing—performing calm for Richard, performing compliance for Susan, performing composure for Derek Harvey while his hand was on my arm.
I was smiling and breathing and thinking about how long the recording had been running.
By the time Marcus had appeared at the curb, I had nothing left.
Whatever armor I'd been wearing all day had gone thin and brittle, and the thought of standing on a wet sidewalk waiting for a rideshare while the rain came down harder felt like more than I could do.
So I got in the car.
Marcus didn't say anything. He never did, which was one of the few things I'd always appreciated about him.
He navigated through the evening traffic while I sat in the back and watched the city slide past the rain-streaked window, and I let myself go somewhere I hadn't allowed all day.
I thought about Arthur.
Not strategically—not the way I thought about him when I was working out angles, calculating what he knew and what he didn't, deciding how much of myself to give away.
I just thought about him the way you think about a bruise you keep pressing: the particular set of his jaw when he'd looked at me in that room at the Apex Club, the way his hand had come up toward my face and then stopped, the two inches of air between his fingers and my cheek that had somehow been louder than anything he'd said.
He'd sent the car.
He hadn't called. Hadn't texted. He'd just sent Marcus to stand at the curb like he'd known exactly where I'd be and exactly when I'd need a way out, and the fact that he was right about both things made something in my chest pull tight in a way I didn't want to examine.
I pressed my thumb against my bare ring finger and held it there.
The hotel came into view through the rain, and I made myself sit up straighter, pull my coat together, reassemble the version of myself that could walk through a lobby without looking like she was holding herself in one piece.
Seven days, I thought. Keep moving.
The storm hit at just past eleven.
I was in bed with my laptop open, working through the language Emily had forwarded from the IP attorney, when the first real crack of thunder split the night.
Not the low rumble that had been building for the past hour—this was a direct hit, the kind that compresses the air in the room and leaves your ears ringing in the half-second afterward, and every light in the hotel flickered.
I closed the laptop.
It's fine. I pressed my back against the headboard and pulled my knees up to my chest. You're twenty-two years old. You're in a hotel room. You're safe.
Another crack. Closer this time.
The rain had gone from heavy to something that sounded structural, like the sky was trying to take the building apart from the outside, and the lights flickered again and this time they didn't come back.
The room dropped into darkness except for the lightning that strobed through the gap in the curtains in white-blue pulses, and I—
I couldn't breathe.
It always happened this way. No warning, no ramp-up—just the darkness and the sound and then I was eight years old again, wedged between the crumpled door and the passenger seat, and the rain was so loud I couldn't hear myself screaming, and my father wasn't moving, and every time lightning flashed it showed me things I had spent fourteen years trying to forget.
Count. Four in. Hold. Four out.
My hands were shaking. I could feel it in my palms, in the tips of my fingers where I'd pressed them against my knees.
The thunder came again, and I heard myself make a sound that I would have been ashamed of if anyone else could hear it—small and involuntary, scraped out of somewhere I didn't usually let anyone near.
I reached for my phone. My thumb found Arthur's name in my contacts before I'd made any conscious decision to put it there, and I sat with his number on the screen and the room strobing white around me and my heart slamming against my ribs, and I almost—
I almost called him.
I put the phone face-down on the mattress instead. Pressed both hands flat against the bedding and focused on the texture of it, the thread count, the physical fact of the surface beneath me.
You don't need him. I'd said it two years ago when I'd walked out of the Hudson Penthouse with one carry-on and his family's ring left on the kitchen counter. You don't need him.
Three knocks at the door.
I went completely still.
The thunder rolled again, long and low this time, and the lightning pulsed, and I stared at the door from across the dark room and didn't move.
It could be hotel staff. It could be housekeeping with the turndown service I'd declined. It could be anyone.
Three more knocks. Patient. Unhurried. Like whoever was on the other side had decided to wait as long as it took.
My heart was already at the back of my throat.
I pulled myself off the bed, crossed the room on unsteady legs, and put my hand on the door without opening it.
"Who is it?"
