His hands flexed in his lap. “Now we run damage control. Get this to someone who can make it loud. And make sure they don’t find you.”
I frowned. “Us. You mean us.”
But he didn’t correct me.
I looked at him, really looked. The cut on his cheek had crusted, his knuckles were still swollen, and the muscles in his shoulders were wound like a fist he hadn’t unclenched since Toronto.
I wanted him to say something, anything. I wanted to hear the plan, the step-by-step for surviving the next twenty-four hours. But instead he was just there, the air around him saturated with grief and something harder, like regret ironed into every crease of his body.
I laid my head on his shoulder, still damp, and waited for the world to crack open.
"We don't have to," I started, but he cut me off.
"Jade," he said, and his voice had all the gravity of a man who’d been waiting his whole life to say something he already hated. "I need you to listen. If they come after us again, it’s not going to be like last time. They'll skip the pretense and come straight for you. For the kid."
I flinched, but I didn’t look away. "That's why we go public. That's why the files matter. They can't kill us if everyone’s watching."
“I can’t go public. This has to be anonymous. I’m a mobster, Jade. Don’t you get that?”
He looked at me for a long moment, like he was trying to inventory everything I’d ever been. “If the files go viral, maybe it buys us a week. But Jade—this won’t just hurt the company. It’ll put a price on your head. On the baby’s, too. We’re not dealing with the FDA or board hearings. The people who lost today are the kind who’d take it personal.”
“I know,” I said. “But I have you. I’m not scared.”
“You should be,” he replied.
“Are you?” He didn’t answer, just scraped a hand down his face like he was trying to wipe the question off his skin. I could see the exhaustion in the slump of his spine. He looked like he was bracing for the next punch, or maybe the moment when I told him he could stop fighting on my account. I reached for his hand, traced the battered knuckles. “I’m not going to leave you,” I said.
He snorted, but it was just air. “You should. You should take the money, the files, and disappear into a country where nobody can pronounce our last name.”
He squeezed my hand, hard enough to hurt. “But you won’t.”
“No,” I said. “I won’t.”
He turned, finally, looking at me the way he used to—like I was the only real thing in the room. “You know what happens next, don’t you?” I nodded. “We make it loud. We let them burn, and then we run.” He smiled, just a flicker. “That’s my girl.”
I pressed my face to his shoulder and closed my eyes. For a minute I let myself believe it would work. That we’d hit send, the story would explode, and the world would be too busy chasing the next outrage to bother hunting us down.
That the baby would be born in a place with windows and real sunlight, and that maybe, for a little while, I could be something other than a problem worth solving. But even then, the old fear was coiled in my chest, a knot of dread that said nothing ever ended so neatly. If there was one thing I’d learned from the Morettis, it was that no enemy ever forgot a debt.
I stared at the thumb drive in my palm, the last few hours of my life reduced to a plastic stub that could get us all killed. It felt lighter than it should.
We spent the day in the warehouse, alternating between rounds of caffeine, the bleak, sour soup Marco found in a vending machine, and confirming that yes—someone was still following our bank cards, still pinging the cell towers, still hunting like a dog with a nose for blood. Dante and Marco worked the phones, their voices hushed and quick, spinning up a web of fake leads and dead drops. I kept to my laptop, building a firewall around the data and prepping for the drop.
“So are we going back to your penthouse?” I asked Dante.
He shook his head. “No. We would be sitting ducks there.”
I blinked at him, then at Marco, then back to the stained concrete floor. I should have felt relief, but mostly I felt empty—like the thing that had kept me moving for so long was suddenly just…gone.
“So what now?” I said. “We hole up here and wait for the world to implode?”
Dante shook his head.
“We move. Enzo’s guy in Chicago has a safe house. We keep changing cities, keep the story alive, and—eventually—they’ll get tired. Or someone else will have bigger news.” It sounded plausible, but I knew it was bullshit. Nobody ever got tired. Not the internet, not the biotech sharks, not the ghosts of our own mistakes.
All it took was one algorithm, one bad actor, and we’d be right back where we started.
“So you want to call Dad?” Marco asked.
