The setup.
The lie.
My whole body shook, breath shallow, nails digging into my palms until they hurt.
Kane was right.
She didn’t just want to ruin our work.
She wanted to burn down everything we loved along the way.
And she almost did.
But now?
Now we had proof.
And I had fire in my chest again.
CHAPTER 53
AVA - OFF LIMITS
I should have been exhilarated.
Jack was.
He paced my apartment like he was already halfway through his victory speech, practically vibrating with adrenaline and ambition. Kane had sent more video after he left, missing video from the clinic and the precinct. I’d handed Jack the footage Kane sent me, like it was a live grenade, my hands still trembling, my throat tight, and he’d watched it like a man who’d just discovered fire.
“This is it,” he said, jabbing a finger toward the laptop screen. “This isn’t just enough to sink Erin; this could get us the whole damn precinct. Do you realize what this could mean, Ava?”
“Yeah,” I murmured, staring into the mug of coffee I’d reheated twice and still hadn’t touched. “I do.”
But he didn’t notice my tone. Didn’t notice me at all.
He was already in motion, calling people one after another, DA friends, old journalist contacts, maybe the Pope for all I knew. His voice filled the apartment, loud and charged, bouncing off the walls like static electricity.
I stayed on the couch, unmoving, the knot in my stomach turning tighter with every sentence out of his mouth.
Jack was a good man. A loyal man. But I’d known him long enough to recognize the shift, the way his shoulders squared, his voice sharpened, the way he started talking about headlines instead of justice.
It wasn’t that he didn’t care. He did. But right now, his ambition was pulling him hard and fast.
“Jack,” I said quietly, but he didn’t hear me.
He was muttering something about optics, about the narrative, about maybe making a public statement by tonight.
“Jack.”
He stopped mid-sentence, finally looking at me like I’d snapped my fingers.
“I don’t know if we should release this,” I said. “Not yet.”
He blinked. “What?”
“The videos,” I said, gesturing to the laptop. “If we drop this into the media right now, it could spiral out of control. Erin’s going to go nuclear, and if Harlan is working behind the scenes trying to bring her down from the inside, this could blow up everything. People could get hurt.”
His brow furrowed. “Since when do you care about protecting the police?”
