Page 104 of You Owe Me

“Yeah?”

“Thank you. For all of this. I know it was risky.”

He shrugs without looking away from his screen.

Ok, then. Guess that means I’m dismissed.

I’m halfway to the door when he calls my name again.

“Ainsley?”

I turn back.

“Whatever Carter threatened you with—the IRS stuff, the family business—it’s all real. The investigation is happening, and it’s going to be thorough.” His expression is grave. “This might stop him from making it worse, but it won’t make the existing problems go away.”

The temporary relief I was feeling evaporates instantly. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying you should probably warn Maverick about what’s coming. Because even if we destroy Carter’s credibility, those federal investigators are already asking questions.”

My stomach drops back into that familiar knot of terror. “How long do we have?”

“Hard to say. Federal investigations move on their own timeline. Could be weeks, could be months.” Jin’s fingers are already flying across the keyboard again, probably covering our digital tracks. “But Ainsley? If there’s anything in that family business that wouldn’t survive scrutiny—anything at all—now would be a good time to figure out how to fix it.”

I nod, even though he’s not looking at me anymore, and push through the door into the hallway. The morning light streaming through the windows feels too bright, too optimistic for the conversation I’m going to have to have with Maverick.

Because Jin’s right. Even if we destroy Carter, the damage is already done. The IRS investigation is real, and it’s going to uncover everything—every shortcut Maverick’s taken, every gray area he’s operated in, every secret he’s kept to protect the people he loves.

I pull out my phone to text him, then stop.

How do you tell someone that the life they’ve built is about to be examined under a federal microscope? How do you explain that their family’s financial future depends on whether their business practices can survive the kind of scrutiny that destroys people?

How do you tell the person you love most in the world that you might have just saved them from one enemy only to expose them to something much, much worse?

CHAPTER THIRTY

Rumor has it, his heart stopped.

Maverick

The hospital gown is scratchy against my skin, and the IV line in my arm feels like a tether to something I can’t control.

6:47 a.m.

Thirteen minutes until they wheel me into the OR to burn away a part of my heart.

And I’m alone.

Just like I planned. Just like I orchestrated with surgical precision—cover stories, hotel reservations, lies stacked on lies to keep everyone I care about from knowing that their bulletproof bastard is about to be unconscious and vulnerable for the next four hours.

My watch sits silent on the bedside table, disconnected and powerless. No more heart rate monitoring. No more warnings. Just the steady beep of the machines they’ve hooked me up to, marking time until I either come out of this fixed or I don’t come out at all.

Dr. Patel will be here soon to go over the procedure one more time, and I’ll nod and pretend I haven’t memorized every detail from the medical journals I’ve been reading obsessively for the past week. Catheter ablation. Radiofrequency energy. Targeteddestruction of the electrical pathways that have been misfiring since I was nineteen and my world first imploded.

Controlled burning to fix uncontrolled chaos.

The irony isn’t lost on me.

But right now, staring at the acoustic tiles on the ceiling and listening to machines monitor functions my body should handle automatically, all I can think about is last night.

---