Page 8 of Yours

Her silence stretched, long and thin, like a wire about to snap. I waited, the phone pressed to my ear, the faint wheezing drip of the basement pipes filling the silence.

I didn’t rush her. Kiera Delaney wasn’t the type of girl you rushed—not if you wanted her to actually spit out the truth.

But I could hear it in her breathing: shallow, tight. She didn’t want to tell me whatever this was.

Which made me all the more curious.

“Kiera,” I said evenly, breaking the silence. “Start talking. Now.”

She let out a shaky exhale, and I could almost picture her on the other end of the line—pacing the room, biting her lip, trying to figure out how to phrase whatever mess she’d gotten herself into.

“I…” She hesitated. “I screwed up.”

A corner of my mouth quirked up, not quite a smile. “That much is obvious. Keep going.”

There was a pause, and then she sighed, the sound so frustrated I almost laughed. “I didn’t mean to, okay? It just… kind of happened.”

“Not an answer,” I said, my voice dropping. “What. Happened.”

Her voice came quicker this time, like ripping off a Band-Aid. “I was at Velvet a couple of nights ago with Leena. We were just having fun, you know, unwinding, and then I saw this guy—this asshole—grabbing girls on the dance floor like he thought they were there for his entertainment.”

My jaw tightened. “Go on.”

“And I… well, I confronted him. I told him off.”

That pulled a laugh out of me, low and amused. “You told him off?”

“Yeah, well, I threw my drink in his face too,” she snapped, her frustration coming through loud and clear. “And he deserved it, okay? He was being a disgusting creep, and no one else was going to say anything, so I did.”

I let the silence drag just long enough for her to start getting nervous.

Good.

She should be nervous. There was going to be a very steep price to pay for my help.

“And?” I pressed.

She hesitated again, but this time, her voice was quieter when she spoke. “And then Leena told me who he was. Marco Benedetti.”

That name stopped me cold.

For a second, I didn’t respond. I just stood there a bit dumbfounded. My grip on the phone tightened. Of all the people in New York she could have picked a fight with, it had to be him.

“You picked a fight with a Benedetti,” I said slowly, tasting each word.

“He was groping girls on the dance floor, Ronan,” she shot back, defensive. “What was I supposed to do? Just stand there and let him get away with it?”

“Yes,” I said bluntly. “That’s exactly what you should’ve done.”

Her breath caught, like she was gearing up for another argument, but I cut her off before she could get started.

“Let me guess,” I said, pacing a slow circle around the basement. “He didn’t take kindly to your little moral crusade, did he?”

She was silent for a moment, and then I heard her exhale shakily. “No. He, uh… he made a call to Columbia. To my dean. I don’t know what he said exactly, but my scholarship is suddenly ‘under review,’ and I?—”

I stopped pacing. “He’s threatening your future.”

I closed my eyes briefly, inhaling through my nose.

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