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Chapter 718:
June dressed in the dark. Jeans, boots, a sweater thick enough for October in the Hudson Valley. She grabbed her keys, her phone, the small go-bag she kept packed for emergencies she refused to name.
The garage was empty at this hour, her footsteps echoing off concrete pillars. She found her car—a practical BMW, nothing like the Aston Martin, nothing that would attract attention—and backed out, the tires squealing once before she forced herself to slow, to breathe, to drive like a normal person going somewhere normal.
She wasn’t normal. Hadn’t been for years. But she could pretend, for the highway, for the toll booths, for the empty miles of darkness that swallowed her headlights and gave nothing back.
The retreat center was two hours north, in the Hudson Valley, on land that had been sacred to someone before the Episcopalians built their stone chapel and their meditation paths. June had found it in her second year of graduate school, during the worst of the depression, when she had needed somewhere to be that wasn’t her own head.
She had never told anyone. Not Caleb, not Cole, not Easton. It was hers, this place. The one secret she had kept that didn’t hurt anyone.
The parking lot was empty when she arrived, dawn still an hour away. She left her phone in the car—deliberate, necessary, the particular freedom of being unreachable—and started up the path behind the chapel, into the woods, toward the ridge where the valley opened below like a promise.
The trail was steeper than she remembered. Or she was weaker. The months of stress, of survival, of building walls and tearing them down, had taken something from her body—some reserve of strength she had always assumed was infinite.
She climbed anyway. One foot, then the other. The rhythm of ascent, the meditation of physical effort.
The fog was thick here, a river of white that filled the hollows between trees, that made the world small, intimate, manageable. June walked through it, feeling the moisture on her face, in her hair, the particular cold of autumn mornings that promised winter.
𝖱𝖾𝖺𝖽 𝖿𝗋𝗈𝗆 𝗒𝗈𝗎𝗋 𝗉𝗁𝗈𝗇𝖾 𝗈𝗇
She was thinking about the shell companies. About Easton’s plan, the elegance of it, the way it would let her take back what was hers without ever touching Richard’s bloodied hands. She was thinking about the look on his face when he had described the mac and cheese, the private smile, the absolute—
Her foot came down on something that moved.
Not something. A root, slick with dew, hidden by fallen leaves. Her ankle twisted, the joint protesting, and she was falling—arms windmilling, body tilting toward the steep drop-off to her right.
She saw it. The edge. The emptiness. The thirty feet of air and rock that would end with her broken at the bottom.
A hand closed around her waist.
Hard. Impossible. A grip like iron that stopped her momentum, pulled her back from the edge and into a body that was solid, warm, absolutely familiar in its wrongness.
“Got you p>
The voice was in her ear—breathless, amused, absolutely terrifying in its proximity.