Fire Chief Page had been sweating for forty minutes.The Public Safety Committee had called him in at nine sharp and hadn't let up since. Three members, one long table, and a stack of documents that represented every maintenance log, equipment report, and budget decision Page had signed off on in the past three years. The questions came in rotation, calm and precise, the kind of questions that already knew the answers.Why had SCBA unit maintenance been deferred across two consecutive fiscal cycles? Why had the proposed closure of Station 17 not been disclosed in the public safety report submitted to the municipal council last quarter? How had the wildfire in Los Vangees managed to expose gaps in protective gear that department records claimed had been addressed?Page shifted his weight and kept his voice level. Sponsors were being finalized. The funding gap was temporary. These things took time.He knew exactly how much time he had left. If the five million dollars in matching funds

Brett had spent years learning when to stay quiet.He'd stayed quiet when Christian rearranged deployment rosters to protect his allies. He'd stayed quiet when equipment reports disappeared into administrative silence. He'd stayed quiet because picking battles with someone like Christian someone with money behind his position and no conscience restraining his methods — required choosing the right moment carefully.Christian had just chosen the moment for him.Brett stepped forward."I'll speak," he said. "On the record."The room settled into a different kind of quiet, the kind that happens when people understand that what comes next will matter.Brett looked at the committee chair and spoke without raising his voice.Before Derek entered that villa, Brett said, thermal imaging had confirmed signs of life on the second floor. Derek reported it immediately and requested authorization to proceed. Brett had intended to approve it. But Christian had been on the command channel during the

Derek's side of the bed hadn't been slept in for four days.Erin knew because she'd walked past it every morning without meaning to look and looked anyway. The pillow was still dented from the last time he'd been there, before the hotel fire, before everything and she hadn't touched it. She wasn't sure why.Her phone showed nineteen missed calls outgoing. All to the same number. All unanswered.She sat at the kitchen table and stared at it, and her mind kept returning to the same three words Page had said on the phone.Son of a billionaire.She turned it over and over like something she'd found and couldn't identify. Derek Moss. The man she'd described to her board as her grounded, blue-collar anchor. The man she'd assigned chores to and controlled and kept carefully in his lane for three years. The man she'd watched walk out her front door with one small suitcase and assumed would come crawling back within a week.Jacob West's son.The number didn't make sense. She'd seen Derek's ban

Erin had never lost a negotiation she'd prepared for properly.The problem with Derek, she decided, was that she had never prepared for him. She'd underestimated him from the beginning, first as a prop, then as an inconvenience, and now, apparently, as someone with the resources and the resolve to actually walk away from her. That had been her mistake. She understood it now.She wouldn't make it again.She knew Derek. Three years of living with someone gave you the architecture of them, the things that moved them, the things they couldn't ignore. Derek was a protector. It was the organizing principle of everything he'd ever done. He'd walked into burning buildings because he couldn't help it. He'd shielded her in a stairwell on instinct, taking a beam across the leg without hesitating. Even when she'd given him every reason to leave her there.He would come for her. She just had to give him a reason.She chose the outfit carefully. A very revealing clothing, her big boobs barely cover

The corridor was narrow and poorly lit, the kind of deliberate design choice that made things easier to deny afterward.Two men had Erin by the arms, moving her with the unhurried efficiency of people who believed they had time. She was barely conscious — her feet dragging, her head dropping forward, the rhythm of her breathing slow and uneven. The music from the main floor was still audible behind them, muffled now, a dull pulse through the walls.Kitty ran after them and was stopped at the entrance to the corridor by a third man who put himself in her path and didn't move. She tried to get around him. He caught her arm and held it, not violently, just immovably, with the casual certainty of someone who didn't expect to be challenged seriously.Kitty stopped fighting him and looked at her phone.Derek had replied.Two words: *On my way.*She looked up at the man blocking her path and then past him at the corridor where Erin had disappeared."Derek is coming," she said. Her voice was