"I need a lawyer," Carly said. She was waiting outside, scuffed Doc Martens kicking the curb when he pulled up outside the group home where she was staying. It was a dingy bungalow, housing eight other teen girls who were either in and out of juvie, recovering addicts, or teen runaways. A few dented, rusting jalopies were parked outside, next to the yellowed grass and fields of waist-high dandelions.

"Why do you need a lawyer?" Hayden said, getting out of the car. Already he could feel himself sinking back into their routine, like wagon wheels sinking into the ruts of a muddy road. She called. He answered. He wanted to be needed and it was going to kill him. "You're sixteen."

Then Hayden's mind jumped back to what he'd seen when she had shown him the poor excuse for a man who she'd slept with. A ritzy neighbourhood, completely different from this one. They were polar opposites, that much was clear. But it didn't seem like a Romeo and Juliet relationship.

"It's a long story." Her black-lined eyes were red-rimmed, smudged with mascara. She sank onto the curb, putting her elbows on her knees. "Can you sit down? You're towering over me."

He sat next to her. "I have time to hear it."

"Your wife answered the phone."

"That's irrelevant." A blade still carved into his chest, filled the hole in his heart like a scar.

"She hates me." Carly sniffed. "I can tell."

"She doesn't hate you," he said automatically.

"She thinks I'm a whore. Everyone does. That's all anyone thinks of me when they see me like this. But I'm not... I swear..."

"I don't think you're a whore, Carly. Tell me the story."

So she spilled it. "I went to a house party in sophomore year."

As many a teenage girl did, without winding up where she was right now. He nodded.

"That's where we met. I'd never been to a house party before, and... Josh was older, and he was cool, and he liked me. And he had a nice car, and he drove me places, and my parents didn't like him. They thought he was too old for me. I thought it was fine. I was fifteen. I was supposed to be old enough. I would've been. And we were so careful... He said it couldn't... I thought we couldn't..." She broke down into tears, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. "The condom broke. And we were at his house one day after we found out, and then his dad found us. And I didn't even know who his dad was, I just thought he was some rich guy, but he's a senator, and he asked me how old I was. I should've just lied. Because I was fifteen and he was nineteen and that's illegal in Maryland."

Statutory rape. His stomach twisted. "He was wrong, you know that?"

Caryl shook her head. Her blond roots were showing through the black dye, vulnerability peeping through the goth facade. "I didn't care... But his dad did... He wanted me to go away. He made me go away. He told me to sign an NDA... and everything... and then we couldn't see each other. I haven't seen him three months. He told me not to come back around. He said he would call me. He hasn't called me, Mr. Song. He's not going to call, is he? If he wanted to be with me..."

"He would call." He sighed, thinking of the arrogant young man he'd seen back at that mansion. "He's a deadbeat, Carly. And a criminal."

"I know. And he cheated on me. Except... I was the other woman. Because he was dating that girl the whole time and he said she was just a friend, and now the security cameras saw us outside his house and his dad is saying that I violated the NDA. He's trying to get me arrested... I'm gonna have to pay a fine..." She cried harder, her shoulders shaking.

He felt sick. Yet some sicker part of him, something more atavistic than this moment or this time, rose up inside of him, its ugly head breaking the surface. He wanted to hurt the man who had done this to her--the poor excuse for a man. The pathetic little boy. "Hey, hey, it's going to be okay. I'm going to get a lawyer, okay? I'm going to call a lawyer for you and we're going to look at the copy of the NDA you signed--"

Carly was full-out bawling now. "I don't have a copy... He took it... It's in their house."

"Do you want me to go with you to get it?" he said, placing a tentative hand on her shoulder.

She took deep, shuddering breaths through her sobs. "I don't want to go back there, Mr. Song. Don't make me go back there..."

"I'm going to find a way to make this alright." He swore it. He made the promise like a stab wound; a knife sinking into flesh; a sword into stone. Never to be broken, never to be healed, never to fully disappear. "Listen to me, Carly. I'm going to take care of everything, okay? You have to trust me."

She recoiled from the hand he'd put on her shoulder. "Why? Because you're a grown-up? Adults can mess up, too."

"I know." God, didn't he know? "But I'm here for you. Even if we don't get this sorted out the way you want it to be--I'm here for you."

Carly dried her tears, not looking at him. A car whizzed down the street and splattered their toes with muddy water from the summer rains. "Just call a lawyer."

#

He'd left.

He had just left, in the middle of making dinner, and gone to her. To Carly. To a teenage runaway who had more piercings than years she'd spent on earth. To someone who needed him.

Did Layla need him?

Maybe it would be better if he'd had an affair. She'd know how to feel about him if he did. There would be a script, bitter movies to watch, country songs to listen to, a car to key. She could trash talk about him to her friends and get a divorce and fight over custody of their children.

It would be simpler, maybe. Not easier, but simpler. She'd know what to do.

Here? There was nothing to do except wait and watch and only what was she waiting for? What was she watching for? There was nothing to expect from him. There should have been a pattern to his behaviour. She tried to get into his mind--not just into her husband's mind, but into the mind of an FBI profiler.

In the past, he had always been a knight in shining armour, wanting to save people. Wanting to be the hero. He was always the one who wanted to swoop in and solve others' problems, but Layla had never been one to share her problems. Hayden always wanted to save her, but she didn't want to admit that there was something in her that needed to be fixed.

Maybe somewhere along that time, between the filled calendar squares and work obligations of the past three years, that sense of duty and chivalry had warped into resignation and resentment. Maybe he'd grown to hate her, to loathe her over the months, letting his ever-frustrated need to serve others twist into a toxic desire to hurt others.

Was it her fault?

Should she have let her guard down?

Should she have let them become more than they were?

He had married her not for love or for money but to keep her from investigating the drug cartel and all sorts of FBI exploits.

She had married him to thwart his restrictions on her investigations, to keep on discovering the secrets he was so determined to bury.

And after all this time, they were nowhere closer to their goals. A sword that could pierce any shield and a shield that could defend itself from any sword. Butting heads against one another and waiting for the other to break.

At least, until Amara strolled into their lives like a whirlwind, like a hurricane, like a natural disaster. Wreaking havoc, upturning every foundation, shattering every window, destroying every shelter. She'd smashed what fragile peace they might have had, then threw the pieces in her face.

Hayden wasn't to be trusted, at least, according to her sister. And who was she to mistrust her sister, the very person who had broken so many promises as easily as she breathed so long ago? Amara, who, so long ago, had sworn to take Layla with her on a sister excursion before abandoning her, leaving and never being heard of again. Amara, who she had so long idolized and feared and revered, wanting nothing more than to be just like her sister. Amara, who could never fill the shoes that Layla had set out for her at the tender age of nine.

She paced the bedroom, putting a hand on her lower back with a wince. Layla could feel the pain from being on her feet even for a small amount of time, the aches in her calves and back reminding her that she was currently growing two people inside of her. She was carrying the children of a man she couldn't even trust.

Layla tired herself out, plunking down in the middle of the bed, between Hayden's neat, hospital-corner-tucked sheets and her own rumpled, messier side. She stared into the open walk-in closet, the opposite sides like mirror images of each other. Mirror images that could only reflect one another endlessly, with no reference point in reality.

One side held her things, a mixture of starched and stiff work clothes side by side with sweatpants, ratty t-shirts stolen from Hayden, and hoodies. Hayden's side was more congruous, stacks of jeans and a few nice chinos, t-shirts and button-down Oxford shirts. She was divided. He was whole.

And that what was Amara to her ? A sister? A sister who had done nothing but abandon her, nothing but break a dozen vows and her family's hearts, who returned when it was conveneint for her and dressed up her selfish acts as selflessness?

She hugged a pilllow at her chest and stared into the dressing room mirror. The woman staring back was unrecognizable to her.

But she would become her, soon enough. Or the woman staring back would recognize her. Not as a victim of her circumstances but as a victor of them.

Her phone buzzed. She picked it up.

Chapter 16

"This is the place you wanted to meet at, Vihaan?" Senator Underwood cast a disparaging glance at the wooden walls, decorated with taxidermied elk and bear heads, and the scuffed, stained, and beer-sticky floor, over which dozens of men appeared to be engaging in what looked like a drunken line dance or perhaps what would soon escalate into an alcohol-fueled brawl. "Well, it's a far cry from the Harvard Club of Boston."

He remembered those days all too well, his days spent wandering the storied halls making connections far more easily than he had his grades. Vihaan took a drag of his cigarette before extinguishing it on a mermaid-shaped ashtray, which sat next to a pile of discarded peanut shells. He rolled up his shirtsleeves, his rarely-worn blue jeans providing a barrier between him and the cracked leather of the barstool. "That's the whole point, Jake. I doubt anyone here will overhear our conversation--and even if they do, it's unlikely they'd understand us."

"What a low view you have of your fellow American," drawled Jacob, who was technically a carpetbagger, having hailed from the Lone Star State before hightailing it out of there to become a Harvard alumnus. His Texan accent was all but inditinguishable now, though, worn and broken off by years in Ivy Leagues and other blueblood institutions; he'd worked as a law professor for a decade in Harvard, which was how he and Vihaan had met. "What's the matter?"

"Your son," he said simply.

Jacob shifted in his seat, closing his hand around his beer glass without making an effort to drink it. "What do you know about my son?"

"More than you think." Vihaan slid his phone across the grimy bar countertop, trying not to cringe at the filth that had likely accumulated on the surface. Perhaps he should have simply held the device in his hand. "Do you recognize this girl?"

It had been easy enough to follow Hayden Song when he'd left his house, to trace the tiny GPS dot on his phone screen and steer into a part of town that looked like it had last seen better days during the Civil War. It'd been easy enough to park a nondescript car by the side of the road where Hayden Song sat next to a sobbing teenage girl and take a few pictures from the window of his 2004 Honda that he reserved for instances just like this one. It had been incredibly easy to hear every word that the girl spoke, even through her tears and weeping, and to hear the crime about to incriminate Senator Underwood's son.

But it had been far too difficult for him to send the pictures to Layla Lee. It had been far more difficult than anticipated for him to get the incriminating images over to her, and now it seemed even more of an uphill battle to decide what to do with the information he had gleaned.

On one hand, he could keep the information to himself, to hold it over Jacob's head at a more opportune time.

On the other hand, he could strike the killing blow to an already-weakened man.

"I don't know what you're talking about." Jacob Underwood shoved the phone away, knocking it to the ground. It clattered to the floor, and Vihaan considered slapping the man across his hollow cheek for his clumsiness.

"I think you do, Jake. I think you know all too well." He didn't bother to retrieve the cell phone, instead letting it fester in a pool of spilled beer and germs. Nor did he sip his beer. This place would have no effect on him, even if the drunken jeers of the men around them were already reminding him of schoolyard bullies, before he'd learned to rise and take his rightful place in the pecking order. Pulling the strings of the big dogs and major players who thought themselves smart enough to really be the ones in control.

"Speak plainly." The senator wiped his hands on the leg of his khakis, which were cinched with a tan belt that already took in a few more notches than it had even months ago. Cancer was eating away at the man before the public's eyes, and there was nothing he could do to hide it, Even as his obnoxiously clear lust for power consumed him just as much, like a drug that sapped at his life force, it animated him in a sick facade of liveliness. "I don't have time for this."

"You don't have much time at all left in office if you keep going down this path, Jake." Vihaan shrugged. "This teenage girl might take you down."

"She's my son's problem, not mine." Jacob Underwood bit out the words, but each syllable was laden with fear behind the dismissive tone. He was scared. He knew that Carly Sciortino posed a danger to his image, to his iron fist over the gang and people of Chicago as well as his Senate seat.

"Is that why you had her sign an NDA and forced her to stay away from your property?" Vihaan leaned back in his barstool. "Because she's your son's problem, and you had nothing to do with her?"

"How did you know about the NDA?" snapped Jacob.

"You know, old pal, you should have it on good authority by now that I know everyone and everything in this town. There's not a whisper that doesn't get by me."

"Yes, well, maybe you should use your ear to the ground to get us out of this Cytex mess. I mean, a lawsuit five years later," griped the older man. "What have they been doing for the past half-decade?"

"Preparing for this moment, no doubt."

"But who are they?"

"I think the supporters of this lawsuit have been very vocal. Wouldn't you say that?"

He waved a hand. "Yes, yes, I'm aware of the House minority that wants to take power. But the president was just reelected last year. It's been an entire election cycle. Whoever's really behind this, the power behind the throne so to speak--they're awfully slow to act."

"I wonder who that could be," he said, stroking his chin. "What are you going to do about your son's little indiscretion?"

"It's already handled."

"We both know that if I could find it, it isn't handled. It's out there, wandering around, and somebody wants to use it against you. Someone is going to pay that girl enough money that the fine for breaking your NDA will just be pocket change to her. And when that happens, old friend, you won't like it very much." He smiled, a benign baring of teeth.

"You have, as Liam Neeson famously said, a certain set of skills that allow you to ferret out information. Don't mistake that for your sources being the talk of the town."

"If you choose not to heed my warning," Vihaan said, "I cannot help you."

With that, he stood and left. He may not like being the centre of attention, but he did appreciate a dramatic exit.