Chapter 2
Part 2
“Yes,” I said, even though my voice was shaking so badly I barely recognized it. “I’m sure.” Victor Callaway looked at me for one long second, and in that second, every man in the foyer seemed to stop breathing. I expected him to laugh. I expected him to call me dramatic, confused, expendable. Instead, he turned to one of his guards and said, “Nobody touches that car. Nobody touches her.”
That was the first time anyone in that house had protected me out loud. Victor ordered every camera pulled, every garage exit locked, and every person on the morning security team separated. Marcus Reed arrived ten minutes later pretending to be confused, his tie perfect, his expression offended. But when Victor asked him why the basement fire door had been open before dawn, Marcus looked at me for half a second too long.
That look told me I was already marked. I had seen men look at stains on marble with more concern than Marcus showed human beings. Victor noticed too, because his entire face changed. He did not shout. He did not threaten. He simply stepped closer and said, “Marcus, if she is lying, you live. If she is telling the truth, you should have run before breakfast.”
The bomb squad confirmed it at 9:41. I knew because Victor’s lawyer repeated the time three times later, like numbers could make terror sound official. The device was real. The ignition trigger was real. The plan was real. Marcus Reed was gone before anyone reached his office. His desk was empty, his phone destroyed, and the safe behind his portrait had been cleaned out.
Victor sent me home with two men outside my apartment, but fear followed me through the door anyway. My mother was asleep in her chair, one hand resting on her bad hip, the television glowing blue against her face. My brother’s textbooks were stacked beside the kitchen sink. They had no idea that I had dragged a war to our third-floor apartment.
At midnight, I heard the stairwell creak. The two guards outside did not knock. They did not shout. They went quiet too fast. I grabbed my mother’s old rolling pin because poor people always fight with whatever the kitchen gives them. Before I reached the hallway, my phone lit up with a message from an unknown number: You should have stayed invisible.
I ran toward the back door, but the fire escape window shattered before I reached it. Smoke filled the kitchen. My mother screamed my name. I remember pushing her toward my brother’s room, remember calling Victor with fingers that barely worked, remember saying only one thing when he answered: “Marcus found me.” Then something struck the wall beside me, and the apartment disappeared into noise.
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When I opened my eyes again, everything was white. White ceiling. White lights. White blanket. A machine beeped beside me like it was counting how many chances I had left. My throat hurt too much to speak. My arm was wrapped. My ribs burned when I breathed. Through the glass wall of the ICU, I saw Victor Callaway standing outside, soaked from the rain, looking less like a boss than a man who had arrived too late.
A nurse told him he could not enter. Victor did not move. He only looked through the glass at me, and for the first time since I had met him, his power looked useless. Behind him stood lawyers, detectives, and men I recognized from his house. But Victor’s eyes were not on them. They were on me, the maid he had walked past for three years without knowing I had been saving his life long before the bomb.
