Chapter 339: Who the Fuck Is Helping Her?

The cab slowed as it reached the gate.

Lucas looked out and said nothing at first.

The mansion ahead was larger than he expected. Broad. Polished. Quietly expensive in the way that did not need to shout. Long driveway. Clean stone. Tall windows catching the late light. It had the weight of real money behind it ~ company money, old structure, private land. Bigger than his own place in pure size, and that alone made him pause.

He had known Rechelle had means.

He had not pictured this.

The cab rolled closer and the scale settled in properly. This was not a temporary hideout. This was a full life with space and privacy and the kind of wealth that made enemies more dangerous, not less.

Beside him, Rechelle stayed quiet. Her eyes stayed on the familiar building like coming back to it after the night’s chaos felt both natural and unsafe at the same time.

Lucas kept his face calm.

She was richer than she acted.

---

Across the city, in a rented Airbnb that already felt smaller than it had that morning, Aaron was coming apart.

The television was on. Every local channel had some version of the same story ~ gunfire through the streets, a vehicle chase, police units, a helicopter spotlight pinning a jeep in the road like an animal caught mid-run. To ordinary people, it was another violent city night.

To Aaron, it was his plan dying on live replay.

He had been using the last of what he could still scrape together to live like he mattered. Comfort paid for with money twisted out of Rechelle’s company side, old access, pressure, leftover routes that had not fully closed yet. It was not stability. It was leftover air.

And now even that was thinning.

He had borrowed from banks. He had borrowed from worse people than banks. Gangs. Men who did not accept excuses when the date came. He had already paid five hundred thousand for the job, with the rest promised on completion. In his head the logic had been clean: Rechelle dies, the path into the company opens, money starts moving again, debts get buried under new control.

A simple plan.

Now it was on every screen.

Aaron dragged both hands through his hair hard enough to hurt and dropped to the floor like his legs had quit.

"That bitch."

His voice cracked into the empty room.

"That bitch. That bitch. That bitch."

He rocked forward, forehead near the carpet, then snapped back up with wild eyes locked on the news.

"If you had just died, I would be rich already. You hear me? Rich. Not in this cheap box checking balances like a broke clown."

The words came faster, uglier.

She had pushed him out of the house. Blocked joint accounts. Cut the easy money. And after all of that, she still refused to die when it mattered. The one useful thing she was supposed to do for his future ~ stop breathing ~ and she could not even finish that properly.

Now his life was on a timer.

If any of those men talked, money might not save him. And the worse truth sat right under that thought: he was already broke. Broke with debt. Broke with half a gang payment unfinished. Broke with no corpse to unlock the company path he had counted on.

His eyes caught the helicopter footage again.

He crawled closer to the screen, breathing hard, and watched the chase images cycle back through. The vehicle under pressure. The escape line that should have ended cleanly. The figure that was not collapsing where it was supposed to collapse.

Then he saw it.

It was not only her.

There was another man in the mess. Someone else driving. Someone else keeping her alive. Someone else turning a paid hit into a city-wide failure.

Aaron pressed nearer, eyes narrowed, trying to force the blurred shape into a face.

He could not make it out.

But the fact alone was enough.

"Who the fuck is that?" he whispered, then louder, voice breaking. "Who the fuck is helping her?!"

---

By the time Lucas settled into the living room, the mansion had gone strangely quiet.

Rechelle went up first to bathe and change out of the clothes she had survived the night in. When she came back down, she moved into the kitchen and put together something light without making a production of it. Hands busy. Mind half elsewhere.

Lucas sat on the couch and let his eyes travel the room. Wide space. Clean furniture. A tablet left on the center table like someone had set it down mid-use and never returned to it. He reached for the television remote, ready to put on something useless and soft just to fill the silence.

Then Rechelle walked in.

She was in a nightgown that sat too well on her body ~ thin fabric, easy movement, the kind of home clothes that stopped being innocent the moment a man paid attention. In her hands were two bowls of chicken noodle soup and a couple slices of toast. Simple food. Still hot. Carried with the careful focus of someone who needed the act of feeding another person to feel useful again.

She set his portion in front of him.

"Thank you," Lucas said.

She nodded and sat near him, close enough that the night still occupied the space between them without needing a speech.

Lucas glanced at the tablet on the table, then at the quiet room.

"What game do you play?" he asked, easy, almost casual. The kind of question meant to pull the air away from blood and sirens.

Rechelle’s face changed at once.

A short scoff of pure irritation moved through her expression before she even answered, like the question had pressed a bruise she already knew by heart.

"I don’t," she said. "That was him."

Lucas saw the shift and stopped there. No digging. He picked up the spoon and let the hot soup handle what conversation did not need to force.

Rechelle stared at her own bowl a second longer, jaw tight.

Him.

Her useless ex.

The man who had lived on her money like it was free air. While she worked, managed, carried pressure, and kept the real world moving, he knew how to do one thing with talent: sit in comfort, play games, spend, and enjoy the life her effort paid for. That was the marriage she remembered too clearly. Her hours becoming his ease. Her responsibility becoming his free time.

And now that same man had tried to have her killed.

The thought rose hot and ugly. She forced it down enough to eat. Not because it was wrong. Because if she held it too long at the table, the whole night would climb back into the room with it.

Across from her, Lucas drank the soup quietly and gave her space without making a show of it. The living room stayed still around them ~ warm bowls, soft light, a tablet that no longer belonged to a marriage, and the strange peace of two people surviving the first hour after chaos.

When they finished, Rechelle looked over.

"Are you ready to sleep?"

"Yes."

They stood and headed upstairs.

Rechelle led the way.

Lucas followed a step behind, and for all his self-control the nightgown made honesty difficult. The fabric moved with her. Soft. Thin. Each step up the staircase made the curve of her ass shift under it in a slow, natural rhythm that was hard not to watch. Full. Round. The kind of body that turned an ordinary climb into a problem.

He kept his face steady and his thoughts less steady.

At the top of the stairs, Rechelle glanced back once, tired and unaware of exactly how much attention she was pulling, and led him farther into the quiet of the mansion.