Total pages in book: 56
Estimated words: 54572 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 273(@200wpm)___ 218(@250wpm)___ 182(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 54572 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 273(@200wpm)___ 218(@250wpm)___ 182(@300wpm)
I set my books on the shelf. Hung my jacket by the door. Plugged in my laptop on the desk that would become my temporary command center.
“This okay?” I asked.
He nodded slowly. “Yeah. I want you comfortable. Make the place your own.”
“I don’t need to erase you to belong here,” I explained and he smiled. “This is gonna work, Dante.”
That night, lying beside him in a bed that no longer felt like borrowed time together, I realized how deeply he had been braced for loss. Every touch still careful. Every kiss like it might be the last because the distance between us would return.
That thought gutted me. So I made up my mind, no matter what I was in this. I planned to stay.
In time, I found my rhythm.
Remote work didn’t feel like exile the way I had feared. If anything, the distance gave me clarity. The senator’s name stopped appearing in official channels, replaced by quiet reassignment memos and sealed indictments that never made headlines.
The case didn’t die.
It dissolved. The way many government cases did.
Dante never asked for details.
He didn’t need to.
Because the club was moving too.
Subtle at first. A few phone calls. Old favors collected. A financial trail rerouted. The kind of pressure that didn’t leave bruises but closed doors.
The senator resigned citing “health concerns.”
No press conference. No defiance.
Just absence. And then a man who no longer existed in the cyber world leading me to wonder if the man existed at all anymore.
I asked Dante about it one night while we cooked dinner together, his hip pressed to mine, my hands steady on the cutting board. “You didn’t do anything illegal,” I said carefully.
He smiled faintly. “Nita, baby, don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to. That’s how this works.”
“But you did something.”
“We reminded people that some problems don’t stay contained,” he said. “That power doesn’t always sit where you think it does.”
“And now?” I asked.
“And now he’s not a problem for you,” he said simply. “and he won’t ever be in the future either.”
The weight I’d been carrying since the basement finally eased. I didn’t realize how much fear I’d stored until it let go.
I started being seen around town. At the diner. At the hardware store. At the small park where the kids played and nobody asked questions they didn’t need answers to.
Women waved. Men nodded.
I wasn’t Dante’s ol’ lady or property or anything. Not in how they called me out, but yes in the way they treated me. More than anything though, they all tried and succeeded at accepting me.
Here in Dreadnought, North Carolina, I was just Nita.
One afternoon, as we sat on the porch watching the sun sink low and gold over the trees, Dante reached for my hand like it was instinct now, not need.
“You’re happy,” he stated. It wasn’t a question.
“I am,” I admitted. “I didn’t expect that.”
He exhaled slowly. “I was scared you’d hate it here. Or worse pretend you didn’t hate it but regret coming here nonetheless.”
I leaned my head on his shoulder. “I don’t belong less here. I just belong differently.”
His arm tightened around me, solid and sure.
For the first time since DC, he looked like a man who believed the future wasn’t something waiting to take from him.
Just something waiting to be built. And I was right there beside him. Not as a compromise.
As a choice.
Epilogue
LOCO
Three months changed everything.
Not in the loud, explosive ways people talk about when they mean transformation. No headlines. No blood. No sirens. Just mornings that came softer than the ones before. Just a woman in my kitchen wearing one of my shirts like it belonged to her. Just a future that stopped feeling like something I had to outrun.
Nita belonged here now.
Not because she had bent herself to fit my life, but because we’d built a rhythm that made space for both of us. Her mornings started early, coffee already brewing by the time I came in from a run. She worked from the small office we turned into hers, walls slowly filling with notes, maps, reminders of the woman she was long before she met me.
The senator was a ghost story now.
Officially retired. Quiet. Unreachable. Whatever pressure he had tried to apply had evaporated under scrutiny and distance and the kind of influence that never left fingerprints. The club hadn’t celebrated. They didn’t need to. Problems like that didn’t end with champagne. They ended with silence. And he was forever silent in a way that couldn’t be traced because he wouldn’t be found.
Peace followed.
The clubhouse had accepted her in a way that surprised even me. Not because she tried, but because she didn’t. She showed up honest. Held her own. Didn’t ask questions she didn’t want answers to. The men respected that.
So did I.
The ring sat heavy in my pocket as the sun dipped low, that familiar North Carolina gold bleeding across the sky. I had carried it around for a week, waiting for the right moment.