“I couldn’t risk it,” she says quietly. “Not with him still out there, not with everything he had set in motion. If anyone knew—if you knew—it would’ve put you in danger. I thought keeping you out of it was the only way to protect you.”
A hollow laugh escapes me, brittle and thin. “Nothing has ever come between us,” I say, more to myself than to her. “Nothing until now.”
Her expression tightens. “I know. And I hate that this is the thing that did it.” Her voice softens, but there’s something underneath it that feels unresolved, unfinished. “I thought he loved me. I thought I understood what I was building with him. But in the end, it was never about me. It was always about the money.”
The words hang there, heavy and bitter.
I turn toward Maverick, the pieces beginning to shift into place in a way I don’t like.
“What does he have to do with this?” I ask.
Maverick steps closer, and for the first time since I arrived, I see something like regret move across his face.
“She called me after the explosion,” he says. “Once she wasclear. She needed help—supplies, information, a way to stay off anyone’s radar. She wanted to know how you were, if you were safe.” His jaw tightens slightly. “I wasn’t going to leave her out there alone.”
Whitney reaches for him without thinking, her hand settling against his side in a way that is far too familiar to miss. “He kept me alive out there,” she says quietly. “I wouldn’t have made it through without him.”
The gesture lands harder than anything else has so far.
I look between them, the proximity, the quiet understanding, the ease that doesn’t need explanation. It all clicks into place at once, and the realization moves through me slowly, deliberately, like something choosing where to cut deepest.
“You were seeing her,” I say, my voice quieter now. “All this time.”
Maverick doesn’t deny it. “I didn’t have a choice about keeping it from you,” he says. “It wasn’t my truth to tell.”
Something in my chest tightens, but it isn’t clean anger. It’s more complicated than that, layered with the strange, reluctant gratitude that sits beside it.
“You should have told me,” I say, though even as I say it I know why he didn’t.
“I couldn’t,” he answers simply.
The silence that follows is different. Not empty, but full of everything that’s changed.
I wipe at my face, forcing myself to breathe through the weight of it, through the way the ground keeps shifting beneath me every time I think I’ve found something steady.
Whitney looks at me again, something tentative flickering in her expression now, something almost like hope.
“We’re past the point of being able to do this alone,” she says. “All of us.”
The words settle in slowly, rearranging the space between us into something new and unfamiliar.
Everything I thought I understood—about Whitney, about Maverick, about the clean lines between loyalty and betrayal—has blurred into something far more dangerous.
I swallow, my voice unsteady but quieter now, more controlled.
“But what about Phillip?”
Chapter Forty-Seven
Istand there, unable to move, the question I’ve just asked hanging between us like something heavy and irreversible. It presses against my chest until it’s difficult to breathe, until the edges of the room begin to blur in that disorienting way that makes everything feel slightly unreal. Whitney is in front of me—alive, impossibly alive—and instead of grounding me, her presence fractures what little certainty I have left.
“Is anything real?” The words leave me unsteady, barely formed. “I don’t even know what I’m supposed to believe anymore.”
She closes the distance between us without hesitation and pulls me into her, wrapping her arms around me with a familiarity that almost undoes me. The scent of her—something soft and floral I used to associate with safety—surrounds me, and for a moment I let myself sink into it, into the illusion that this is something simple, something explainable. My hands clutch at her back as though I can anchor myself there, as though if I hold on tightly enough the world will stop shifting beneath my feet.
“It’s okay,” she murmurs against my hair, her voice low andsteady in a way that feels practiced. “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”
I pull back just enough to look at her, to study her face for cracks, for proof that this is still some kind of trick my mind is playing on me. There’s exhaustion there, and something like grief, but there’s also a hardness I don’t recognize, something sharpened by the months she’s been living without me.
