Chapter 31: UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTHS
Chapter 31: UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTHS
I didn’t knock. Didn’t text ahead. Didn’t wait for one of Steve’s glassy-eyed doormen to buzz me in with their hushed politeness that made me feel like I was walking into a crime scene.
I just rode the elevator up to the penthouse, straight through the silent air like the floor numbers had given up trying to impress me, and when the doors opened, I walked in.
Steve was behind his desk. Not leaning. Not lounging. Just… there.
That kind of stillness people mistake for calm but is actually the opposite.
I dropped Mark’s phone onto his desk like it was Exhibit A in a trial I was about to win.
He didn’t pick it up. Just glanced at the screen where I’d already queued up the grainy black-and-white footage.
There he was.... Steve Freeman, a year younger, a little less tired around the eyes, shaking hands with a man who now had a toe tag and a permanent excuse to miss appointments.
I didn’t wait. “You knew him.”
Steve’s gaze didn’t flicker. “Yes.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
I took a step forward, hands on the desk. “He sold listening devices, Steve. The same kind someone planted in my apartment and, oh right, in my coat pocket. He’s dead. And you’re sitting there acting like you just found out the deli stopped carrying your favorite mustard.”
His eyes lifted to mine, slow. “Laura.”
I hated how my name sounded when he said it. Like it was a lever he could pull to shut me down. “Don’t ‘Laura’ me.”
“It’s unrelated.”
I laughed, sharp, humorless. “You and I both know ‘unrelated’ is the word people use right before you find out your babysitter was actually an assassin.”
His mouth twitched, not into a smile exactly, more like he’d almost smiled but thought better of it. “I knew him. I didn’t have him killed. And the work we did together had nothing to do with you.”
“Then tell me what it did have to do with.”
“No.”
I stared at him, waiting for the explanation that didn’t come. “You’re asking me to just… take that on faith?”
“I’m telling you…” He leaned forward slightly, voice not louder but heavier. “…if you want to stay, you don’t get to doubt me.”
The words hit me like the click of a lock on the wrong side of the door.
I straightened, crossing my arms. “Wow. Okay. Great. Total trust, zero questions. That’s not suspicious at all.”
“This is not about suspicion. It’s about survival.”
There was a part of me... the smart, self-preserving part... that wanted to keep pushing. To dig until I got something real, even if it was ugly. But the way he was looking at me…
It wasn’t anger. Not exactly.
It was charged, like the air right before a thunderstorm. You can feel the pressure in your teeth, the heaviness in your chest. The kind of moment where you don’t know if someone’s about to tell you the truth, kiss you, or burn your entire world down.
And I hated that I noticed.
And worse, he knew I noticed.
The silence stretched, snapping taut in the middle.
That’s when Dante appeared in the doorway, quiet as a knife sliding from its sheath. His gaze flicked between us, taking in the angles, the distance, whatever unspoken thing hung between me and Steve.
“We have a delivery,” he said.
Steve didn’t move his eyes off me right away. One beat. Two. Then he looked away, the moment breaking like glass. “Bring it in.”
Dante crossed the room and set a plain white envelope on the desk. No postage. No return address. No smudge of human handling... just pristine and somehow… deliberate.
The kind of thing you could walk past a hundred times in an office and never think about until you realized it was a bomb.
Steve didn’t hesitate. Tore the flap open like it was just another piece of corporate mail.
A single card slid out, landing face up on the desk.
The Joker.
Painted grin. Bright colors. And across that grinning face ...a streak of dark red, smeared like a careless fingerprint.
Not ink. Not paint.
Blood.
Still tacky enough to glisten under the light.