Mine To Watch

Chapter Five:What The Money Bought

"Say that again." Nora's voice had gone very quiet, which was worse than if she'd screamed. "Slower."

"Voight Holdings," Theo said again, and she could hear him pacing on the other end, the creak of his apartment floor.

"That's the name on the card. Nora, who are these people? Are you in trouble? Is this about you?"

She looked at Julian. He hadn't moved, hadn't so much as breathed differently, standing on the sidewalk with his hands loose at his sides like a man bracing for a verdict.

"Theo, I need you to sit tight. Don't call the number back. Don't go anywhere with anyone. I'll call you in ten minutes."

"Nora—"

"Ten minutes." She hung up before he could argue, and turned on Julian with something in her chest that had gone past fear straight into a cold, clean fury. "Your family paid off my brother's debt."

"I didn't know until just now. I swear to you—"

"Don't." The word came out sharp enough to cut.

"Don't you dare tell me what you swear. You've sworn things to me all week and every single one of them turned out to be missing a paragraph."

"Nora." He stepped closer, and for once she didn't step back, just stood there letting him see exactly how angry she was, daring him to try something careful and practiced on her right now.

"I didn't do this. I would never touch your family to get to you."

"Then who did?"

"Marcus." He said the name like it tasted bad. "He does this. It's not generosity, Nora, it's a leash. He finds the soft spot in a person's life and he buys it, quietly, so it's there to pull on whenever he needs it."

His jaw worked.

"He's using your brother to get to me. To remind me what happens if I don't fall back in line."

"So my little brother is a chess piece in whatever game you two are playing."

"Yes." No hedge, no softening. "And I am so sorry, and being sorry does not fix a single part of it."

She almost hated him more for the honesty than she would have for another lie. At least the lies had given her somewhere to put her anger that wasn't this — this raw, unbearable want to believe him even now, standing three feet away with her brother's debt sitting in his family's ledger like a receipt.

"I need to call him back."

"I'll come with you."

"No." She held up a hand before he could argue.

"You have done enough coming with me for one lifetime, Julian. I don't need a security consultant walking me through my own family crisis. I need to know what I'm actually dealing with, and you clearly can't tell me that without leaving something out."

Something flickered across his face — not anger, something closer to grief.

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"I'm not going to fight you on it tonight." He shoved his hands into his pockets like it was the only way to keep them still. "But Nora — whatever Marcus wants from Theo, it's not money. He doesn't need it. He wants leverage, and leverage means he's not done."

She called Theo back from her own apartment, door locked, chain on, Julian's building suddenly feeling less like sanctuary and more like a cage with better lighting.

"Okay," she said, once Theo had calmed down enough to talk in full sentences.

"Tell me everything. From the start. How much did you owe, and to who."

"It started with a card game. Guys from my dorm building, guys who knew guys." His voice was small in a way that made her want to reach through the phone and pull him out bodily.

"It got bigger than I meant it to. I kept thinking I could win it back. I didn't want to tell you because you'd — I don't know, look at me different."

"Theo, I would never—"

"You already do."

"You've got this look you get. Like you're doing math on whether I can handle things."

That landed harder than she expected, mostly because it was true, and she didn't have the bandwidth to examine it right now. "How much?"

He told her. It wasn't nothing. It wasn't life-ruining either, not for most people, but for a college student with no safety net it was exactly the kind of number that turned into exactly the kind of trouble he'd walked into.

"And it's just — gone? Paid?"

"That's what they said. Card guy said it's 'handled' and then said I 'owe somebody else now.' Nora, what does that even mean? Do I owe this Voight person money instead?"

"No," she said, and hated how sure she sounded, hated that she already understood the rules of a game she hadn't agreed to play.

"You don't owe them money. You owe them a favor. And they'll collect it whenever they want, for whatever they want, and you won't get a say in what that is."

There was silence on the line. "How do you know that?"

She looked at her own front door, at the deadbolt she'd triple-checked twice already, at the wall behind which Julian was presumably standing in his own apartment not sleeping either.

"Because I just started dating the family that runs it," she said quietly, and the words felt like swallowing glass on the way out.

She didn't sleep that night.

She sat at her kitchen table with her laptop open, the cursor blinking in an empty search bar, hands hovering over the keys, half-formed searches dying before she typed them. Voight Holdings. Marcus Voight. Julian Voight.

She typed the last one and stopped, backspaced it, then typed it again.

The first few results were nothing — a firm's registry page, a charity gala photo from three years back where Marcus stood in a tux with a smile that didn't reach his eyes. She almost closed the laptop.

Then, four pages deep, buried under a dozen unrelated results, she found a headline that made her blood go still in her veins.

Vehicle Fire on Route 9 Service Road — One Survivor, Identity Withheld at Family's Request.

Eight months old. A date she recognized without wanting to, because it was the same night, the same stretch of dark road, the same low guardrail she'd pulled herself over with her hands shaking and a stranger's blood on her palms.

She clicked it before she could talk herself out of it, and the article loaded slow, painfully slow, while somewhere across the hall a light clicked on under a door that had never once, in three weeks, forgotten to notice when she was awake