Page 5 of The Placeholder
The pathetic plea in his voice—so familiar, so rehearsed—washes over me like lukewarm coffee someone’s left on the dashboard all afternoon, no longer hot enough to burn but still capable of leaving an unpleasant stain. “That sounds like a you problem, Jared. Maybe call Henry. I hear his couch is very comfortable for gaming marathons and crying into microwaved Hot Pockets.”
“This isn’t over,” he says, but the threat falls flat when his voice cracks on “over” like a prepubescent boy.
Felix takes a single step forward, and Jared practically leaps backward into the hallway. “It is, in fact, very much over,” my brother says. “Don’t call. Don’t text. Don’t even think about her. Consider Della as deleted from your contacts, your memory, and your life.”
With one final, devastating look, Felix closes the door, the soft click of the latch somehow more final than if he’d slammed it.
The apartment falls silent for three heartbeats before Liana whispers, “Holy. Fucking. Shit.”
A hysterical giggle bubbles up from somewhere deep in my chest. “Did you get that on video?”
“Every glorious second,” she confirms, tapping her phone with a satisfied smirk. “This is going in my permanent collection, right between ‘Drunk Squirrel Steals Dorito’ and ‘Senator Falls Off Stage.’”
Felix returns to the sofa, picking up his beer as casually as if he’d just checked the mail rather than threatened to rearrange my ex-boyfriend’s skeleton. “He’ll be back,” he says matter-of-factly. “Men like that always come back. At least once.”
“Well, then you’ll just have to break his legs for real,” Liana chirps, refilling our wine glasses to celebratory levels.
I sink into my armchair, feeling oddly hollow yet simultaneously lighter than I have in years. The door that just closed behind Jared wasn’t just to my apartment—it was to an entire chapter of my life, one filled with ignored red flags and diminished expectations.
“To new beginnings,” I say, raising my glass. “And to the family who lifts trash out by their lapels when necessary.”
As we clink glasses, my phone remains blissfully silent. For the first time in seven years, I don’t have to worry about what Jared thinks, what Jared wants, or what Jared might say. The only voices that matter are right here in this room—and the strongest one is finally my own.
CHAPTER 3
AXEL
The manila folder hits my desk with a slap, spilling eight-by-ten glossies of Marla Rivers—not the airbrushed fantasy bullshit her teenage fans worship, but hard evidence: grainy surveillance shots of men with dead eyes tracking her every move. These aren’t harmless fanboys–they’re predators marking territory. My jaw clenches. This isn’t some diva’s paranoid delusion. It’s a tactical threat requiring immediate countermeasures.
I drag my calloused thumb across the photo’s edge, the paper slicing my skin just enough to draw blood. Twenty thousand bodies will pack that arena tomorrow night, a security nightmare of blind spots and choke points. My shoulders tense under my fitted tactical shirt as I memorize each face in the photos. The client—Marla—is the primary objective, and I don’t fail missions.
I slam my fist onto the desk. “Her team’s a fucking disaster,” I growl, jaw clenched as Alek sprawls in the leather chair across from me, combat boots propped on theedge of my desk. “Amateur hour. Their head of security used to manage a mall in Tucson. A mall.”
Late afternoon sun cuts through the blinds like knife blades, striping the blueprint where I’ve been marking vulnerabilities for three hours straight. My third cup of black coffee sits untouched, cold as a dead man’s handshake.
“You know she’s gonna be climbing you like a tree again,” Alek says with that shit-eating grin that only younger brothers are perfect for. “Little Miss Pop Princess couldn’t keep those manicured hands off your biceps last time. Kept talking about your ‘protective aura’ making her wet or some shit.”
Heat crawls up my neck like enemy fire, but I keep my eyes locked on the blueprints, shoulders rigid. “She’s twenty-one, Alek. Barely legal.”
“Twenty-one is grown.”
I stab my tactical pen into another weak point at the loading dock. “On paper, maybe. In reality? The woman has a stuffed unicorn named Sparkles with more Instagram followers than most security firms.”
My brother’s laugh ricochets like gunfire off the bare concrete walls of my office. “Look at you, too good for America’s sweetheart. When did you get so picky? Or is it just that you’re getting soft in your old age?”
I snap my head up, drilling him with the same dead-eyed stare that once made a Taliban checkpoint guard drop his weapon. My jaw clenches, the muscle twitching beneath three days of stubble. “The men who can’t handle a real woman are the ones who are soft and too weak to admit it.”
Alek raises his hands in mock surrender, but the cockybastard’s eyes still dance with amusement. “And what exactly is a ‘real woman’ in the gospel according to Axel Warner, former Delta Force?”
I slam my tactical pen down and crack my neck, the vertebrae popping like distant gunshots. “Someone who doesn’t need me to complete her. Someone who was forged in her own fires before she met me and will still stand tall if I walk away. Someone who understands that sometimes I’ll be unreachable for seventy-two hours because a client’s life depends on me, and she won’t crumble like a house of cards.”
My phone buzzes with a text from Marla’s manager—another demand disguised as a request. Something about VIPs having special access that would compromise our security protocols.
I hammer out a response with my thumbs, my forearm muscles flexing. “Someone who doesn’t need security exceptions because she bats her eyelashes.”
Thunder cracks like artillery fire outside, promising a storm. Perfect. Tomorrow’s concert is already a tactical nightmare.
I roll the blueprints with one swift motion, my grip leaving indentations in the paper. “Wheels up in thirty. I want boots on the ground before sundown.”
