Page 71 of His Orders

In the hours I’m not sleeping or standing too long in doorways watching her breathe, I’m on calls with Mason.

We are building something dangerous—carefully, precisely, relentlessly. Mason doesn’t ask questions he doesn’t need answers to. He’s all edges and dead focus, his voice clipped but sharp, cutting through the threads of Daniel Holt’s life with surgical precision. We piece together a network that’s bloated with corruption and tied together with unregistered donations, fake wellness grants, and medical shell corporations with more secrets than staff. What began as a private trial cover-up now blooms into something deeper, uglier. There’s evidenceof falsified prescriptions pushed through small-town clinics, facilities shut down after patient complaints, payments rerouted through charitable arms that no longer exist.

Mason tracks everything. I follow his lead where it counts. But when it comes to motive, when it comes to why this matters, that part’s mine.

Daniel Holt might have started as a man I hated for what he did to Ivy. But now? Now I want him buried under the weight of everything he built.

And still, through all of it, I come home to her.

I catch her staring out the window once, the curve of her hand brushing against her stomach like it’s second nature now, like the motion belongs to something primal and quiet. I watch her from the doorway, pretending I’m just passing through, but I see how her shoulders rise and fall slowly, how her head tips like she’s trying to listen for something only she can hear.

I want to go to her. I want to tell her I remember what she said about it being a girl. That I can already see that child’s future in her—the strength, the softness, the fire.

But I don’t. Because the memory of her silence is louder than anything she could say.

And yet it doesn’t stop me.

It doesn’t stop me from folding blankets neatly outside her door. From pausing outside the bathroom when I hear her throw up again. From Googling prenatal massage therapists at midnight just to see what’s nearby in case she ever mentions her back is sore. It doesn’t stop me from feeling something raw and dangerous when I see her yawn and realize she hasn’t slept, orfrom brushing my hand across the thermostat just to make sure it’s warm enough for her when I leave before dawn.

What it does, though, is hurt. It hurts in the silent spaces between what we were and what we are now. It hurts in the way I want her and cannot reach for her. And it hurts every time I wonder how many moments like this I missed before she told me the truth.

The lights in the apartment dim as evening bleeds toward night. She’s still working, her fingers dancing across the keys, her hair pulled up and slightly askew. I stare at her too long, then force myself to move, to breathe, to walk down the hall and leave her alone before I do something reckless like fall at her feet and ask her to lie to me again just to make this ache stop.

I leave her be and go to my room instead, dark now except for the thin spill of city light that filters in through the windows, casting silver streaks across the walls like scratches on a mirror. I lie flat on my back, one arm slung over my eyes, breaths shallow and uneven, trying to quiet the storm still grinding against my ribs. The room is too warm, the sheets too tangled, the thoughts in my head too sharp to dull. I keep waiting for the anger to fade, for the hurt to harden into something useful, but all I can feel is this slow, dragging ache that pulls at everything I touch.

The phone buzzes once against the side table.

Unknown number.

I stare at it for a second, considering letting it ring out. Then, without thinking, I swipe to answer, holding the phone to my ear like it might bite.

“Hello.”

There’s a pause, and then a voice I don’t expect. Familiar. Female. Not Ivy.

“You’re really going to screw this up, huh?”

I sit up fast, swing my legs over the edge of the bed, my voice coming out rough. “Cassie?”

“I figured that tone meant you weren’t too drunk to listen,” she says, dry and direct, like she hasn’t just called me out of nowhere in the middle of the night. “Good. Because I don’t feel like repeating myself.”

I press the heel of my hand against my temple, eyes closed. “What is this, exactly?”

“This is me calling because Ivy is miserable,” she says, voice flattening now, losing the sarcasm. “And I don’t mean teary or dramatic or curled-in-a-ball sad. I mean broken. Hollowed out. Like she’s trying to carry something she doesn’t know how to name anymore.”

Something inside me twists, tight and guilty.

“She lied,” I mutter, too quiet for the edge I wanted behind the words. “She let me believe?—”

“She let you believe because she was terrified,” Cassie snaps. “You ever stop to think about that? She didn’t lie because it was easy. She lied because trauma doesn’t let you think in straight lines. Because sometimes, telling the truth feels like more of a risk than staying quiet.”

“I’m not Daniel,” I say, sharper now.

“No, you’re not,” she agrees. “But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t afraid of losing you. Of ruining the only thing that felt safeafter being with someone who made her question everything she thought she knew about love.”

The silence stretches between us.

“How long have you known?” I ask.

---