Orla didn’t sleep.
She sat at the edge of Jakob’s bed with her legs tucked beneath her, eyes wide and unblinking as she watched his chest rise and fall.
She was counting the seconds between each breath.
Because if something went wrong, she needed to know exactly when he stopped.
Stanley stood in the doorway like a shadow, holding the toxicology report with his jaw clenched tight.
“We need to know what’s in it,” he said.
Orla nodded. “We need to know who gave it to her.”
The next day, Stanley called in a favor from the only person he trusted to read that kind of chemical signature: Sasha.
They met in a park, away from cameras and the city’s ears. Sasha arrived in sunglasses, dressed in head-to-toe black, but her expression was unusually tender when she hugged Orla.
“I heard what sh
