CHAPTER 16 – RETROACTIVE
917 Words
LAYLA'S POV
I've listened to the second recording twice since I made it, and my voice sounds like someone I'm still becoming. I'm also getting better at reading the lie-sensing feeling I’ve been getting more frequently lately.
I noticed it isn’t actually as random as I thought it was – it has texture. A cold chill down my spine for deliberate lies. A metallic taste for emotional falsehood. And something newer: a warm flush when someone tells me a deep truth.
I test it on Colt at breakfast.
"Do you regret the garage?"
He looks up from his coffee with that grin – the one that either precedes something that makes me laugh or something that makes me want to throw my mug at his head. I genuinely can't tell which is which anymore.
"Not even a little bit, Rowan." He holds my gaze. "Do you?"
I don’t sense anything. No chill. No taste. Complete silence.
"No," I say, and the warmth that flushes through me isn't the lie-sensing. It's just him.
His grin widens. "Good. Because I've been thinking about round two and I have some ideas that involve the kitchen counter–"
"Goodbye, Colt."
"You're blushing again."
"It's the coffee."
"You haven't taken a sip yet."
I leave the kitchen before he can see how much I want that too.
I find Eli in the common room with his sketchbook and set a glass of water with a lemon slice on the table beside him. He looks at it. Then at me.
"You're mocking me," he says, but there's something almost warm in his expression.
"I'm returning the favour."
"You didn't add enough lemon."
"How do you know?"
"Because you always make it stronger than most people would. You mentioned that too." He goes back to his sketchbook, and the warmth that runs through me this time is definitely not the lie-sensing.
I watch his hands move across the page – the same hands that were shaking against the wall yesterday, the same fingers that were in my hair – and I have to physically walk away before my body makes another decision my brain hasn't approved.
Gears finds me in the garage that afternoon with a folder.
"First round of documentation." He spreads it across the workbench. "Contracts rerouted to companies with no prior Iron Howl relationship. Payments in amounts designed to stay below auditing thresholds."
I look at the papers intently.
"The thirty percent number holds," he says quietly. "Eighteen months of bleeding."
I photograph every document for safekeep but decide not to tell the triplets or Brandon just yet – at least, until I’m sure.
***
Garrett is in the clubhouse again that evening. Performing. Heartbroken husband. Concerned father-to-be. He sits with Nina and tells her how hard it is when the woman you love won't let you in, and his voice carries across the room in that perfectly calibrated way.
He brings coffee for Megan and the image of him carrying a cup for a woman hits different now that I know what he put in mine.
The metallic taste doesn't leave my tongue for an hour.
I smile when he catches my eye. I keep my face neutral. I play the part, and the fact that I'm good at it now terrifies me a little.
Later, Rafe finds me on the back steps. He stands with his arms crossed, looking out at the lot like he's keeping watch over something only he can see.
"You've been quiet today."
"I'm always quiet."
"You're quiet differently." He glances down at me. "The kind of quiet that means you're carrying something heavy and you're deciding whether anyone's earned the right to help you hold it."
I look up at him. His grey eyes are steady. His sleeve is pulled down to his knuckles, covering the mark that's spreading because of me.
"I'm fine, Rafe."
The warmth flushes through me – the lie-sensing registering my own lie, which is a new and annoying development. Apparently my body calls me out too.
He doesn't push. He just shifts his weight and sits down beside me on the step, close enough that his arm presses against mine and I can feel the heat of him through his jacket. He doesn't look at me, but his hand finds mine on the concrete between us, and his fingers lace through mine, and he holds on like it's the most natural thing in the world.
We sit like that for a while. Not talking. Just breathing.
"You don't have to tell me tonight," he says eventually. His thumb traces a slow line across my knuckle. "But when you're ready, I'm not going anywhere, softie."
He squeezes my hand once.
I sit on the steps with the ghost of his fingers between mine and something cracking open in my chest that I don't shove back down this time.
He walks back inside, and I let him go without a word because the thing in my chest is too new to survive being spoken out loud.
That night, alone in my room, I replay every "I love you" Garrett ever said to me and it hurts deeply.
My father was right and I was wrong.
I close my eyes and the taste sits on my tongue like copper, and my body confirms what it tried to tell me for two years while I wasn't listening.
I really mistook the architecture for love because nobody told me the walls were false.
- Writer
