Page 81 of Making It Live!

"Bruce," I allowed a slow smile to spread across my face.

"What?"he muttered.

"Thank you."

I didn't wait for him to ask why.I led Jimmy out.

* * *

I’d walked through the newsroom of the Beacon Broadcasting Company at every hour of every day of my adult life.I knew the route the way you know the route through your own kitchen at three in the morning.

I'd never walked through it with my arm around another man and two security guards behind me.

The buzz of conversation stopped.It stopped in patches, the way a room stops breathing when a fight breaks out.By the time we were halfway across the floor, the newsroom had gone the particular kind of quiet that only happens in the first three seconds of breaking news, before the producers remember to start running.

Jimmy was still under my arm — chin up, jaw tight.Anger held him upright.I held him tighter, feeling the tremor in his ribs.

Marla St.John was standing at the rundown board.She lifted her coffee in a small, formal salute.

"Mackenzie," she said.

"St.John."

She didn't say anything else.She didn't have to.I saw the tally being done in her head — the phone calls she was already planning, the sources she'd start working before the elevator doors closed behind us.Marla was going to be very useful to me.

No.To us.

* * *

The cab crawled up Tenth Avenue at twenty miles an hour.Jimmy's hand was in mine the moment the car door shut behind us.He drew breath to speak, and I lifted my free hand, laying a fingertip against his lips.

I shook my head, once.Three mirrors.The radio.An open ear in the front seat.

He nodded against my fingertip and squeezed my hand instead.

* * *

The door to my apartment closed, and the rest of the world finally went away.

Jimmy made a sound — a jagged, broken exhale — and turned, putting his hands flat on my chest.Green eyes full of tears.Shaking.

"Nelson—"

"I know."

"How could you?You spent your whole career building that desk, and you just let him—"

"I didn't walk away from anything, Jimmy.I walked toward something."I took his wrists."Sit down."

"No."

"Sit down anyway."

I led him to the sofa.Then I got on my knees in front of him, a position I would not, three months ago, have been physically capable of holding.I’d built a career on never being below anyone's eye line.

"I made a phone call last night to Everett Royce," I stated.

He went still.The name hit home — the former editor of the New York Ledger.The man who'd resigned because of the billionaire owner who killed unflattering stories about the wealthy one percent.Royce had spent years sending me three-line emails: I have the capital.You have the audience.Whatever you build in the middle is yours.