Page 65 of Final Drive

Reese takes a breath, then another, and comes to the table. The empty chair is between Bo and Eli. Both shift to give her room instead of closing it, and she sits.

“I want to see all of it,” she says. “The screenshots, the emails, everything. Then I want to know exactly what filing means. Who I talk to, what I have to say, whether my designation comes out.”

“It might,” I tell her. “I can’t promise you it won’t.”

“Then I need to think about that.” She looks around the table, taking her time with every one of us. “I know you want to fix it. I know you want to protect me. This is my name and my life, so I need you to let me be the one who decides.”

Bo reaches over and takes her hand. She lets him.

“Whatever you decide,” he says, “we’re with you.”

“All of us,” Zane says. “Even if you decide not to file. Even if you want to handle it some other way. Nobody’s going anywhere.”

Reese squeezes Bo’s hand, then looks at me.

“Okay. Show me everything.”

I turn the laptop toward her and start again from the first message. This time, I don’t build the argument for her.

I just give her the facts.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Reese

Ispend three hours reading everything Tyler found.

The screenshots start to blur. Kinsley’s casual cruelty. Quinton’s patience. The line where she asks whether he’s going to fall for me and he says I’m useful, and the way neither of them treats that as a strange thing to type.

It’s Sophia’s emails that stay with me.

She wrote about months of it. The slow work of making her doubt what she knew about Gray, about herself, about what had actually happened in a room. How she still wakes at three in the morning remembering the weight of a hand across her mouth.

I could have been her. A few more weeks and a few more well-placed lies and I might have believed all of it. I might have let him separate me from the pack completely. I might have ended up in a room with him with nobody opening the door.

By the time I close Tyler’s laptop, the house has gone quiet. Rain is coming down in sheets, the kind that turned today’s water session into two hours on the ergs while I called splits off the monitor. The work was hard enough to keep my head empty. Now it isn’t.

A knock sounds against the doorframe, and Eli is there with his hair still damp, changed out of practice kit into a faded department shirt and sweats.

“Hey. Can I come in?”

“You showered fast.”

“Ergs don’t take as long to recover from when there’s no crosswind.” He crosses to the leather chair and sits, folding one ankle over his knee. “How are you doing?”

“I don’t know.” It’s the most honest thing I have. “I keep reading her emails and thinking about how close I got.”

“Close isn’t the same as there.”

“That’s easy to say when you’re not the one realizing you followed the same path she did for weeks.” I pull my knees up. “I believed him, Eli. Not all of it, but enough. When he said the pack was smothering me, part of me thought he might be right.”

“He’s good at making people doubt what they already know.”

“That doesn’t help.”

“It wasn’t meant to.” He’s quiet a moment. “Can I tell you something?”

“Sure.”