Chapter 7

At two in the morning, Aretha woke up. Her throat felt like it was lined with sandpaper-a brutal side effect of the heavy painkillers she had taken earlier.

She slipped out from under the quilt, grabbed an old cardigan, and opened the bedroom door as quietly as possible, intending to get a glass of water from the kitchen.

The hallway was pitch black, except for a sliver of pale, bluish light spilling from a cracked door at the far end.

It was Kian Finch's room. Her adoptive brother.

As Aretha stepped closer to the staircase, she heard the low, suppressed sound of Kian's voice. He was arguing with someone-likely his parents down the hall.

"She ignored us for six years!" Kian's voice was tight with frustration and anxiety. "And now, the second she gets kicked out by the billionaires, she comes running back? She's bringing trouble."

Aretha froze in the shadows.

"Do you have any idea what the Bartletts and the Hines can do?" Kian hissed, pacing his room. "They will crush us. We are a normal family. We can't survive the kind of crossfire she brings. She's a walking disaster for us."

Aretha's hand hovered inches from the kitchen doorframe. Her fingers slowly curled into a loose fist.

She didn't feel angry. She just felt an overwhelming, crushing wave of sorrow.

Kian was right. She was a dying woman. She had no right to drag this innocent family down with her when the Caldwells inevitably came looking for blood.

Aretha lowered her hand. She didn't go to the kitchen. She turned around and drifted back into her room like a ghost.

She didn't turn on the light. Using only the moonlight filtering through the blinds, she began to pack her small duffel bag.

She reached into the inner lining of her trench coat and pulled out a thick, waterproof envelope.

Inside was a sleek, black titanium bank card holding the entirety of her pre-marital savings and her late grandmother's secret trust-assets the Bartlett family never knew existed. She had planned to use it for medical care or just to survive her last days.

Now, she was leaving it here, along with a handwritten note containing the PIN. It was the only compensation she could offer the Finch family.

Aretha placed the thick envelope squarely on the nightstand, resting her empty water glass on top of it as a paperweight.

Before the sun even began to rise, she picked up her bag, took one last look at the warm room, and slipped out the front door into the freezing dawn.

At seven in the morning, sunlight broke over Brooklyn. Kian walked out of his room, rubbing his tired eyes, planning to wake Aretha up for breakfast.

He pushed open the guest room door.

The bed was empty. The quilt was folded perfectly, as if no one had ever slept there.

Kian's heart slammed against his ribs. He rushed into the room and immediately saw the waterproof envelope under the glass.

He ripped it open. When he saw the black titanium card and read the staggering account balance written on the note inside, his pupils dilated. His lungs stopped working.

The realization hit him like a freight train. The shadow in the hallway last night. She had heard him. A toxic, suffocating wave of guilt bit into his chest. His defensive, tough-guy act had driven her away into the cold. He remembered how she used to shield him from neighborhood bullies when they were kids, taking the hits so he wouldn't have to. 'Family doesn't abandon family,' his father's rough voice echoed in his mind from their argument last night. Kian bolted out of the room, yelling for his parents. When they confirmed she was gone, he punched the hallway wall so hard his knuckles bled.

He sprinted back to his room and threw himself into his desk chair. His fingers flew across his high-end, multi-monitor setup.

As a top-tier independent hacker and data analyst, Kian bypassed the city's traffic grid firewalls in seconds. Ten minutes of frantic coding later, he locked onto her face on a terminal security camera. She had boarded a long-distance Greyhound bus. He immediately hacked into the Greyhound ticketing database, cross-referencing her alias with the bus's onboard GPS telemetry.

Kian grabbed his keys, didn't even bother grabbing a jacket, and sprinted down the stairs. He threw himself into his heavily modified off-road Jeep.

The engine roared to life like an angry beast. Kian slammed his foot on the gas, tearing out of Brooklyn.

He merged onto the highway, his eyes locked on the GPS tracker on his phone. His jaw was clenched so tight it ached.

The red dot representing the bus's transponder on his screen was moving steadily west, finally stopping at a remote coordinate in the mountains of San Diego-an ancient, isolated monastery.