(Liam Romano POV)
I left the club and slid into the back of the SUV. The city at night rolled past in indifferent streaks of neon and sodium light, a painted blur that didn't care what happened inside a single car. I told the driver to go anywhere — nowhere with a name — because aimless motion buys thinking time. The saxophone ballad was still in my ears, that ridiculous hymn about love and loss that felt obscene
against the cold geometry of the order Marcus had laid out.
I couldn't kill Hailey. The thought slammed into the hard facts with the force of freight: it wasn't soft-heartedness, it was strategy. Her unpredictability made her dangerous, yes — but she was leverage, a living fulcrum I could use to bend Parker's attention away from real vectors. Kill her and you hand Parker a cru
