Page 18 of Twisted Shot
Theo shifts uncomfortably. “It’s not that posh.”
“You say that,” Natalie mutters, eyeing the espresso machine. “But the heated floors say otherwise.”
Jake chuckles. “Jesse’s lucky. Not every rookie gets a teammate willing to play babysitter, let alonetwo years in a row.”
Theo shrugs, heat crawling up his neck. “He’s not every rookie.”
Jesse grins and throws an arm around his shoulders. “See? He loves me. He just doesn’t know how to show it.”
Theo grunts. Doesn’t pull away.
“So,” Mila says, rising from her stool. “Crisis mostly averted. Jesse’s still breathing. Team’s still intact. Can we celebrate with real food? Because I’m running on caffeine and adrenaline.”
“Kitchen’s stocked,” Theo says, motioning toward the fridge.
“Do you have pizza pockets?” Jesse asks, already opening the freezer drawer.
“There’s a chest freezer in the basement,” Theo sighs. “Help yourself.”
They all drift into the living room, talking over each other, moving like they’ve always belonged in this house. Theo stays a beat behind, still against the counter, still trying to parse the ache in his chest.
It’s not uncomfortable.
Just unfamiliar.
And when Mila brushes past him, her hand grazing his arm as she goes, he doesn’t flinch.
He watches her move, lets the noise build around him, and thinks—maybe he doesn’t mind the mess.
CHAPTER 6
MILA
The hum of the office on Monday morning grates on Mila, a rude reminder that she’s been dragged back to the land of overpriced lattes, painfully polite small talk, and passive-aggressive Slack messages.
Her inbox is a five-alarm fire. Her coffee’s already cold. And someone—probably Todd from finance—has once again stolen her ergonomic chair. This one keeps listing left like it’s trying to abandon ship.
“God, I wish you were there,” Naomi says, leaning against the doorway to Mila’s glass-walled office, mischievous smirk playing across her crimson lips. “He got halfway through the deck and froze. Like, actual glitch-in-the-Matrix blank stare. Every slide was wrong. Stats from 2022. Budget numbers completely off. And nobody told him. Nobody.”
Mila feigns a wince, lips twitching around the rim of her mug. “That’s awful,” she says, tone appropriately neutral. “I had no idea.”
“Mmhmm,” Naomi hums. She grins like a shark. Her work best friend—and occasional partner in petty office crime—has a sixth sense for drama.
“Come on. You vanish for a long weekend, convenientlyskip the deck QA, and suddenly Richard looks like an intern who wandered into a shareholder meeting?”
“I was off-grid,” Mila replies coolly, tapping her temple with a manicured nail. “Mind, body, and Outlook.”
Naomi narrows her eyes, not buying a single syllable. “Well. However it happened, Jaryd was unimpressed. Richard looked ready to spit fire. It was fun to watch.”
If Richard suspects anything, he hasn’t said a word.
After Mila’s ruthlessly polite two-line text that ended their relationship with the efficiency of an out-of-office reply, he spent the entire weekend blowing up her phone—accusing her of being dramatic, begging for “context,” looping through the same exhausting cycle.
Not once did he mention the presentation. Not a whisper about the butchered deck, no reference to the red-faced disaster he fumbled his way through. She doesn’t know if he’s figured out it was sabotage, but a tiny, reckless part of her hopes he has. Hopes he lies awake at night, staring at the ceiling, wondering whether the woman he screwed might have returned the favor.
She’d come in early this morning, ducking through side hallways like a fugitive to avoid seeing his smug face. If she ignored him long enough, maybe the universe would take the hint and delete him from her timeline.
Naomi’s still in the middle of gleefully recounting Richard’s implosion when the man himself darkens her doorway, blotting out the light like a storm cloud dragging in thunder.
