Chapter 252

She had changed. Gone were the wet, muddy clothes. She wore a sleek black dress that fit like a second skin, heels that clicked with quiet precision on the parquet floor, and a trench coat draped over her shoulders. She looked like a femme fatale from a noir film. She looked like she was dressed for a funeral.

“You came,” Hilliard breathed, rising. Relief moved through him like a tide. He had been terrified she wouldn’t show.

“I said I would,” Cailin replied. She didn’t sit. She stood across the table from him. “Where is the agreement?”

Hilliard lifted a thick leather folder. “My lawyers drafted it within the hour.”

Cailin took it. She didn’t open it.

“Does it give me full custody?” she asked.

“Joint custody,” Hilliard said. “Fifty-fifty. You stay in New York — I set you up in a townhouse on the Upper East Side. The children go to private school. I cover everything.”

“And Amerigo?”

“I handle Amerigo,” Hilliard said. “I’ll threaten to resign. I’ll threaten to tank the stock price. He won’t touch them.”

Cailin looked down at the folder. It was heavy. It was a golden cage.

“I can’t stay in New York, Hilliard,” she said quietly. “This city is poison to me.”

“We can go somewhere else,” he said quickly. “Connecticut. The Hamptons.”

“You don’t understand.” Cailin set the folder back on the table. “I don’t want your money. I don’t want your townhouses. I want freedom.”

“You can’t raise three children on the run!” Hilliard stepped around the table. “They need stability. They need a father.”

“They have a mother who loves them enough to keep them away from the sharks,” Cailin said.

Hilliard stopped directly in front of her. He reached out and took her hands. His palms were warm.

“I’m not a shark, Cailin,” he said softly. “I’m just a man who wants to know his children.”

She looked at him. For a moment, she wavered. He looked so genuinely desperate — so stripped of his usual armor.

But then she thought of Amerigo’s cold eyes. She thought of Charla’s knife.

“I need to use the restroom,” Cailin said, pulling her hands free.

Hilliard frowned. “Now?”

“Nerves,” she said. “I’ll be right back. Then we can talk about the townhouse.”

His face opened with cautious hope. “Okay.”

He watched her cross toward the en-suite bathroom. “Cailin,” he called out just before she reached the door.

She turned.

“I love you,” he said.

Her heart squeezed with a pain that had no clean name.

“I know,” she said.

She stepped inside and locked the door.

Immediately, she kicked off her heels. She bypassed the vanity entirely and moved to a plain, unmarked panel in the wall that resembled a fuse box cover. Kegan’s team had prepared it. She slid it open — revealing not wires, but a dark opening into a service corridor.

It was a tight fit.

She pulled herself through and slid the panel back into place behind her. The concrete hallway stretched ahead, dim and silent.

She ran.

Five minutes passed.

In the dining room, Hilliard checked his watch. Then he looked at the bathroom door.

“Cailin?” Silence. “Cailin, are you all right?”

He walked to the door and knocked. Nothing.

Panic spiked through him. He tried the handle. Locked.

“Cailin, open the door.”