Page 101 of Sexting My Ex’s Dad

For the first time, real fear crosses his face. Then a van engine revs outside.

Everything happens at once after that.

Nate spins toward the sound. A side door bangs open somewhere behind stacked pallets. Men move, but they’re not police. They’re too fast and too quiet for that. Hired muscle. Cindy’s answer to panic.

I step back exactly the way Morales told me to.

“Down!” a voice shouts.

The warehouse explodes into movement. Plainclothes officers come out of nowhere, hard and fast, weapons drawn, voices sharp enough to cut metal. Nate freezes, stunned stupid for one catastrophic second, and then bolts left.

He makes it three strides.

Morales takes him down shoulder first into a stack of wrapped cartons, and the whole thing crashes sideways with a thunder of wood and fabric and swearing. One of Cindy’s men reaches inside his jacket and gets flattened to the concrete before he can finish the motion.

Outside, brakes scream.

Then Sweeney’s voice cuts through the noise like a blade. “Driver out of the vehicle! Hands where I can see them!”

I move farther back until my spine hits corrugated steel, my pulse crashing in my ears, and an officer’s arm bars lightly in front of me to hold my position.

Nate is on the ground, cursing, one cheek pressed to dirty concrete while Morales pins his wrists. “Get off me!” he shouts. “This was her! This whole thing was her idea! My mother said scare him, not kill him!”

The warehouse seems to inhale.

Sweeney appears at the side entrance with Cindy in front of him, wrists cuffed, face pale under perfect makeup. She’s still trying to look composed, which would be more impressive if her lips weren’t shaking.

“Nathan Clarke was ruining everything,” Nate is shouting now, wild and desperate, words tumbling faster than he can manage them. “She said if he kept seeing Athena, he’d blow up all the work, he’d dig into Meredith, he’d drag the whole thing out. I did what she told me to do!”

“Shut up,” Cindy snaps, turning on him with naked fury. “For once in your life, shut up.”

It is almost funny, if I remove the attempted murder and the years of damage.

Morales hauls Nate to his feet. He’s sweating, frantic, all that polished arrogance burned off him in under a minute. He looks smaller than I remember.

He looks exactly right.

Sweeney reads Cindy her rights while she stares straight at me with eyes flat as broken glass. “You think you’ve won,” she says, voice high and vicious.

I look back at her without blinking. “I think you made a habit of building women into weapons,” I say. “Looks like one finally turned around.”

Something flickers in her face then. Rage. Recognition. Fear. Hard to tell which wins.

A second set of officers move through the warehouse, checking doors, collecting phones, bagging evidence. One of them approaches Sweeney and murmurs something about Meredith being picked up at her apartment twenty minutes ago with the flash drive copies still in her desk and enough falsified paperwork to keep financial crimes entertained for months.

Good.

That closes one door.

Nate sags the second he hears Meredith’s name, as if that somehow makes this more real than handcuffs already should have. He looks at me with naked hate and something weaker beneath it. “You ruined everything.”

I tip my head. “No. You were doing a great job on your own.”

He lunges verbally now that his body can’t manage it. “He’ll never choose you over himself.”

Maybe a month ago his words would have that sentence would have stung. Tonight it just sounds tired. I step closer, enough that he has to see my face properly. “You still think this was about being chosen,” I say quietly. “That’s your problem.”

His mouth works, yet nothing useful comes out.