Page 101 of You Owe Me

She looks heartbreakingly beautiful.

Like a girl with too many secrets and nowhere safe to keep them.

I open my mouth to speak, but she just shakes her head, and the movement sends a strand of hair across her cheek.

She crawls up onto the couch beside me, and her body is warm where it presses against mine. Her movements are careful, deliberate, like she’s afraid I might disappear if she’s not gentle enough. She curls into my side like she’s folding in on herself—small, exhausted, and trembling under the weight of things she won’t say.

I can feel her pulse against my ribs where she’s pressed close. It’s still fast, erratic, matching the rhythm of my own heartbeat that’s finally starting to settle back into something resembling normal.

I wrap my arms around her anyway.

Pull her into my chest and hold her like it’s the only truth we have left.

Her cheek rests over my heart, right where the fresh tattoo is still tender under my shirt. Her hair tickles my collarbone, and I can feel the slight dampness where tears have escaped despite her best efforts to hold them back.

My watch sits silent against my wrist. No buzzing, no warnings. For the first time in days, my heart rate is exactly where it should be.

We’re quiet again. But this silence is different. Not sharp. Not loaded with all the things we’re not saying. Just… temporary. A truce wrapped in warm skin and shared breath and the kind of exhaustion that comes from fighting wars no one else can see.

The apartment settles around us—the soft hum of the refrigerator, the distant sound of traffic, the barely audible tick of the clock on the wall, marking time we don’t have.

“I don’t want to lie to you,” I say eventually, my voice low and rough. The words scrape against my throat like sandpaper. “I just don’t know how to tell you everything yet.”

She doesn’t respond at first, but I feel her breathing change against my chest. Deeper. More controlled. Like she’s trying to hold herself together.

Then, softly—so softly it almost breaks me…

“I know.”

Two words that carry the weight of everything we’re not saying. I know you’re lying. I know you’re protecting me. I know we’re both drowning in secrets that started as love and turned into something else entirely.

I know, and I’m doing it, too.

And I do the one thing I haven’t let myself do in days.

I press a kiss to her temple, taste the salt of tears she won’t let fall, breathe in the vanilla and desperation that clings to her skin, and let myself pretend—for one long, perfect second—that everything’s going to be okay.

Even if it’s not.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Rumor has it, she found a smoking gun.

Ainsley

The computer lab at 6:00 a.m. is a wasteland of energy drink cans. Most normal people are still asleep, but Jin Chen apparently doesn’t qualify as normal people. I find him exactly where I expected—hunched over three monitors like some kind of caffeine-powered oracle, typing with the manic intensity of someone who hasn’t seen sunlight in approximately seventy-two hours.

“Jin,” I say softly, not wanting to startle him into accidentally launching a cyber attack on the Pentagon or something equally dramatic.

His fingers freeze over the keyboard. He doesn’t turn around immediately, just sits there, like maybe if he ignores me, I’ll disappear into the ether, where normal girlfriend problems belong.

“You came back.” He’s still facing his screens. “I was hoping you wouldn’t.”

“Sorry to disappoint.” I pull up a chair beside him, noting the impressive collection of Red Bull cans that have accumulated since my last visit. “You find something or not?”

“I found something.” His voice is flat, exhausted. “The question is whether you want to know what it is.”

My stomach does that thing where it feels like it’s trying to escape through my throat. “That bad?”

---