LOGINChapter 73: OLIVE's POV
"What happens now?" I asked, changing the subject because I wasn't ready to dive into the ethics of protecting family members who didn't deserve it.
"Now," Zane said, his voice dropping lower, taking on that dangerous edge that made my stomach flip, "you go back to work. Act like nothing happened. The story is dead. The partnership is moving forward. And tonight—
Chapter 262: Zane’s POVAlonso’s grip tightened on my wrist, what little strength he had left going into it like it was the last thing his body had decided was still worth spending on.“I liked her,” he said. “The first time I met her. At that party.”Olive’s hands didn’t stop pressing down on the wound, but I saw her flinch, just slightly.“I liked her, Zane. Genuinely. And then I spent months hating myself for it. Because liking her felt like the one true thing I had left in twelve years of nothing being true, and everything around it was built on lies someone else handed me.”“You don’t have to do this,” I said.“I do.” His voice cracked. “I need you to know I wasn’t lying about that part. Whatever else I was, whatever I let him turn me into, that part was real. She was the first real thing I’d felt in over a decade.”“Alonso—”“Let me finish.”I went quiet.“I hate myself,” he said. “For all of it. For Klaus. For believing what I wanted to believe instead of asking why. For years o
Chapter 261: Zane’s POVI wasn’t going to make it.I knew that in the half-second it took my own legs to react, knew it with a kind of cold, useless certainty, the distance between us simply too far, the angle simply too clean, and every single thing I’d survived in the last hours collapsed down into that one impossible second where I understood I was about to watch it happen anyway.And the shot happened.The weight of the bang crashed through the room, surpassing every other gunfire I had ever heard in my entire life.It wasn’t loud the way the earlier shots had been loud.It was loud the way the worst sound of your life is loud, the kind that doesn’t fade out of your ears for hours afterward, the kind that keeps happening somewhere behind your eyes long after the room itself has gone quiet.The next thing I saw was the fall of a body, which dropped with a sound that hit the concrete floor harder than it should have, and every part of me went still.Blood. So much red, all at once,
Chapter 260: Zane’s POVThe loading office was small. Square. One bulb hanging from a cord in the ceiling, swinging just slightly from some draft above us.And standing in the middle of the low effort lightening room was Simon.He wasn’t pacing. Nor hiding behind anything. Just standing there, hands loose at his sides, like he’d been waiting in that exact spot for an hour, like he’d already decided how this conversation was going to end before any of us had even opened the door.He looked at Alonso first.Studied him. The bruising. The way he was standing half a step behind me instead of beside hin, made something to cross on his face which looked quite familiar.“So that’s how it is,” Simon said. No anger in it yet. Just a kind of tired, almost amused recognition.“Yeah,” Alonso said. “That’s how it is.”“After everything I did for you.”“You didn’t do anything for me,” Alonso said, the restrain in his voice slipping. “You did things to me. You fucking lied to me… All these years… I
Chapter 259: Olive’s POVThe corridor outside the room was darker than I expected, lit only by the emergency strips along the floor, and somewhere ahead of us, the sound of gunshot cracked twice, then again, faster this time and suddenly stopped.“Stay behind me,” Zane said again, like the first six times hadn’t landed.“I heard you.”“I mean it, Muffin.” Heat sparked between my thighs, ‘god I was so fucked up’“I know you mean it. I’m still walking next to you, not behind you.”He didn’t have the energy left to fight me on it properly. I could see that in the way his shoulders dropped half an inch, in the way his jaw worked instead of arguing, and we kept moving together through a corridor that smelled like gun smoke and concrete dust, toward wherever Simon had run to hide.A figure stepped out from a side passage ahead of us.Zane’s gun came up before I’d even registered the movement.“Don’t,” the figure said, both hands already raised, palms out. “I’m not here to fight.”The figure
Chapter 258: Zane’s POVThe second the explosion hit, every head in that room turned toward the sound.Every head except mine.I’d been waiting for exactly that. One second. One half-second of distraction was all I’d ever needed, and the man closest to Olive’s chair had it stolen from him before he even registered what was happening.I closed the distance in two strides.My knife found his gun hand before he could bring it back around, and the blade went in just deep enough to make him drop the weapon and not deep enough to be the thing that killed him, because there wasn’t time for either of us to find out what would have happened if I’d gone deeper.He screamed.I didn’t care. I had his gun in my hand before it finished clattering to the floor and put a round into the man behind him before that one even finished turning.Two down.“Zane—” Olive started.“Stay down.”I didn’t have time to explain it better than that. The other three men were already moving, fanning out the way men d
Chapter 257: Olive’s POVIt was him.For a second I couldn’t make my body do anything with that information.I couldn’t stand, couldn’t speak, couldn’t even finish the breath I’d started, because the man standing in that doorway didn’t look like Zane. Not the Zane I knew. Not the one who showed up in my apartment in gray pant and white shirt, or sat across from me at dinner asking about my day like the rest of the world wasn’t on fire around us.This was someone else wearing his face and it was wildly uncanny to think I considered him hot and tempting in this situation, but I couldn’t help it.Blood down one side of his jaw, dried dark, not his color at all.His shirt torn at the shoulder where something dark and wet had soaked through the fabric and kept soaking, slow, steady, like he hadn’t had a second to deal with it yet and didn’t plan on finding one anytime soon. A gun in one hand. A knife in the other, blade still wet.He was breathing hard. Each breath audible across the who
Chapter 89: Olive's POVThe club was massive, with a tall glass building and lights and bodies pressed together at every corner, and Brenda was losing her mind the second we stepped out of the garage."This is insane," she said, practically bouncing on her heels as she stared at my new car. "This i
CHAPTER 28: OLIVE’S POVMy heart was trying to break out of my chest. The room was spinning. And Zane was looking at me like I was the only thing that mattered in the entire goddamn world."I'm yours," I said, louder this time.The corner of his mouth twitched. Almost a smile. "Good girl."And then
CHAPTER 26: OLIVE’S POVMy father's wife.I shouldn't have clicked on them. I knew better. But my thumb moved on its own, opening the app and navigating to the burner account I'd created six months ago just to keep tabs on them. On the life my father had built without me.The first photo was of my
Chapter 25: OLIVE’s POVMy phone screen was dark. Still dark. Had been dark for three days straight except for the notifications I actually didn't want.I pressed the power button again just to make sure, watching the time flash: 6:47 PM. The battery icon mocked me at ninety-three percent. Fully ch







