Chapter Twenty-Three
The Woman Who Wouldn't Break
Hotel rooms are weird.
They're too clean in a way that feels like erasure. No history, no clutter, no half-open mail. Just crisp sheets, beige walls, and a TV that already knows how to sell you things. After tonight, the emptiness felt almost hostile.
I shut the door behind me, slid the latch, then put the deadbolt on out of pure instinct. The room was on the twelfth floor of a mid-range place in Midtown—nice enough that the carpet didn't smell like regret, generic enough that no one at the front desk remembered my face when I checked in under my own name.
The officer had offered to call someone for me. A friend. Family.
I'd told him I was fine.
Now, standing in the silence with my overnight bag dangling from my hand, I felt anything but.
I tossed the bag onto the bed, then sat down beside it, the mattress dipping under my weight. My hands were still shaking, a subtle tremor that hadn't gone away since the bathroom door rattled under his hand.
He took my laptop.
He stepped into my home.
He stood outside my bathroom door and listened for me.
The images replayed, uninvited, looping with the clarity of a movie I never agreed to star in.
"Stop," I muttered to myself, pressing the heels of my hands into my eyes until little sparks popped in the dark. "You're here. You're alive. Breathe."
Three deep breaths. In, out. In, out. Somewhere, the techniques Janelle had forced on me from her therapy podcasts kicked in.
My phone buzzed on the nightstand, screen lighting up the dim room.
Eli:
You get there?
Me:
Hotel. Intact. Door actually locks. Upgrade from earlier.
Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Came back.
Eli:
I'm in your cloud logs. One backup wiped clean, but the second mirror is intact. External drive is still king. Told you I was paranoid for a reason.
I glanced at my bag. The external drive was tucked inside, buried under a dress shirt and a spare bra. A small, solid reminder that they hadn't actually erased me. Not fully.
Me:
He knew exactly where the laptop was. Went straight for it. He wasn't rummaging. He was hunting.
Eli:
Then this wasn't scare tactics only. It was asset recovery. Cassandra wants her fingerprints gone.
A flash of the shattered door frame hit me again. The footprint on my floor. The zipper sound when he found my laptop bag.
My stomach clenched. I typed before I could overthink it.
Me:
She sent someone to my home.
Eli:
Someone who knew what to take and how to clean up. Not amateur hour. This is organized.
Anger slid up through the fear, slow and hot. Until now, all of Cassandra's attacks had come in the currency of reputation—rumors, HR complaints, planted articles. This was physical. This was a line.
They think they can scare me into silence.
They think I'm breakable.
A bitter laugh slipped out. "They really don't know me," I told the empty hotel room.
I pushed off the bed and paced to the window. Midtown glowed beneath me—neon signs, blank office towers, streams of yellow cabs and rideshares. All that life moving while mine had been reduced to a headline and a case number.
My reflection hovered faintly in the glass: hair mussed, mascara smudged under my eyes, robe hanging open over a tank and shorts. I looked like a woman who'd been crying in a bathroom, not like someone with enough firepower to threaten a merger.
"Maybe that's the point," I whispered. "No one expects the secretary to flip the table."
I turned back to the bed, dropped onto the edge, and opened my bag. The external drive came out first. I held it in my palm like a talisman. This little block of metal and memory could still burn her.
My phone buzzed again.
Eli:
I've started reconstructing some of the wiped logs from earlier. Not sure how much I can salvage, but I'll pull whatever's stuck to the edges. In the meantime, you need to sleep.
I snorted. Sleep. Cute.
Me:
Sleep is for people whose doors haven't been kicked in today.
He replied almost immediately.
Eli:
You're allowed to be shaken, you know. Almost getting caught in the same apartment as the person stealing your evidence would mess anybody up.
I stared at that for a second, the words almost getting caught wrapping around the memory of the bathroom door handle moving.
I didn't want to think about what would've happened if the sirens had come thirty seconds later.
Me:
I can be shaken and still be dangerous.
Eli:
Good. Because they're scared, Amira. You don't send a thug to erase a nobody. You do that when you're looking at a genuine threat.
I exhaled slowly, letting that settle. It felt backwards, twisted, but there was a strange comfort in it. If Cassandra were as untouchable as she pretended, she would've ignored me. Instead, she'd turned my apartment into a crime scene.
She was rattled.
Good.
I set the external drive on the nightstand and flopped back on the bed, staring at the ceiling. The neutral little pattern in the plaster blurred as my thoughts spun.
Tasha's voice popped into my mind: You're really living it now, girl. The thrills, the drama… you didn't think it would stay cute, did you?
No, I hadn't. But I also hadn't pictured police reports and broken locks.
For a few minutes, I let the fear pour through me. The tremors, the what-ifs, the tiny question at the back of my mind that asked if maybe Cassandra was right and I should just take the money, leave town, start over somewhere no one knew my name.
Then another voice came in—my own, sharper, older. The one that got me through school, bills, grief.
They already took your job. Your name. Your safety.
You give them your silence, too, and there'll be nothing left of you but a rumor.
I sat up. Decision solidified in my chest like steel cooling.
"I'm done waiting for them to stop," I said to the empty room. "I'm going hunting."
My phone screen dimmed, then brightened as I tapped it awake. On impulse, I opened my photos app. It was habit more than anything; sometimes when things got bad, I scrolled back through old images just to remind myself my life had once been ordinary.
I swiped up. Brunch with the girls. Kiera's birthday where the cake almost fell over. A shot of Julian from far across the office, in one of those stolen moments when I'd treated him like a skyline.
Then the more recent string—screenshots of articles, photos of the memo pages, a blurred shot I'd taken of my own reflection in the glass doors of the firm the day I was suspended.
A knot formed in my stomach as I reached the last week.
I hadn't been taking many pictures. Survival didn't leave room for aesthetics.
I almost put the phone down—then my thumb slipped, and the photos jumped into grid view.
That was when I saw it.
A thumbnail near the top, timestamped three days ago, right before the XMZ exposé broke. It didn't look like much at first. Just a dark, slightly tilted shot of my living room.
I frowned and tapped it open.
The image expanded. My couch. Coffee table. TV. The angle was weird—like it had been taken from near the door, a little too low, as if the phone had been held down by someone trying not to be seen.
I didn't remember taking this. At all.
I zoomed in. The photo was grainy, a little blurred, but I could make out details. My throw blanket. The mug I'd forgotten on the table. A shoe I'd kicked off halfway under the couch.
And in the far left corner, just at the edge of the frame, a shape.
Not furniture.
A leg. Clad in dark fabric. Half cut off by the border, as if whoever took the picture had moved too fast or changed their mind.
I felt all the blood drain from my face.
"Come on," I whispered. "No. No, no, no."
My thumb flew to the info icon. The metadata popped up.
Date: two nights before my suspension.
Time: 11:37 p.m.
Location: Home.
Camera: Not specified.
I stared. That didn't make sense. Every photo I took on my phone logged the camera details, the model, the lens. This one just… didn't.
"Eli," I typed with fingers that suddenly felt numb. I need you to look at a photo. Now.
Before hitting send, I paused and looked again.
Had someone already been in my apartment before tonight? Before the laptop, the kicked-in door, the bathroom?
The room spun for a moment, then steadied.
They hadn't just come for me once.
They'd been there.
Watching.
Testing the locks long before they broke them.
My pulse pounded in my ears. The hotel room suddenly felt smaller, the walls closer, but the fear that tried to rise didn't make it all the way this time.
It hit something harder inside me and broke against it.
I attached the photo to the text and sent it to Eli.
Then I whispered into the quiet:
"You should've finished the job when you had the chance."
Chapter Twenty-Three — Part Two
I hadn't even processed the photo fully when my phone buzzed again—this time with a group call.
Tasha. Janelle. Kiera. Marisol. Kayla.
All of them lighting up my screen like a rescue flare.
I wiped my face fast. "Hey—"
Tasha didn't even let me finish.
"Drop the location. Right now."
Her voice wasn't frantic. It was surgical.
The voice of someone already grabbing her keys.
Kiera's voice chimed in next, sharp and outraged:
"Girl, Janelle told us everything. You sitting there alone? Uh-uh. Bad idea. Terrible idea. Delete that idea."
"I'm fine," I lied automatically.
Five women screamed "NO YOU'RE NOT" in five different registers.
Janelle's soft voice broke through the chaos:
"Mi amor, the police just left your home. Someone broke in looking for you. You don't get to pretend you're fine."
I swallowed. Hard.
The call went quiet for a moment, like everyone felt that hit at the same time.
"Location," Tasha repeated.
I sent it.
Twenty minutes later, a knock came at my hotel door.
Not the threatening kind.
The frantic, familiar, sisterhood-kind.
"Open up, Rivera!" Kiera hissed. "We got snacks and emotions!"
I unlocked the door, and they rushed in like a storm.
Tasha was first—hair wrapped, sweatshirt on, eyes scanning me like she was checking for bullet wounds.
She didn't say hi.
She just pulled me into her chest so tight I lost my breath.
"You scared the hell out of us," she murmured into my hair.
Behind her, Kiera kicked the hotel door shut dramatically with her heel.
"Who the hell breaks into somebody's place and doesn't even steal the TV? This ain't robbery, this is WAR."
Marisol set down a bag that clinked suspiciously. "Wine. Because… yeah."
Kayla lifted another: "And empanadas because trauma requires carbohydrates."
Janelle came last, eyes full of concern, her hands already reaching for mine.
"Sit, please. You're trembling."
I only realized then that I was.
They guided me to the bed, settling around me like protective currents.
Tasha sat on the left.
Janelle to the right.
Kiera sprawled across the foot of the bed like she was guarding it.
Marisol and Kayla set up food like they were preparing a vigil.
And suddenly I wasn't alone in sterile beige.
I had warmth.
Noise.
Love.
I took a shaky breath and finally said it:
"They came for my laptop."
Silence rippled through the room like electricity.
Tasha stiffened. "So they're trying to bury evidence."
Her voice was low, lethal, very not-sarcastic.
Kiera crossed her arms. "Cassandra's rich, but she ain't CIA-level rich. Who the hell does she think she is sending somebody to break down doors?"
Marisol said nothing—she just poured wine into plastic hotel cups with the fury of a woman making a potion.
"I was hiding in the bathroom," I admitted quietly. "He was right outside the door."
They froze.
Janelle covered her mouth.
"Oh… baby."
"That's it," Tasha said, standing abruptly. "You're coming home with me. Tonight. You should've been with me from the start. Sanctuary is not beige. Sanctuary has mashed potatoes, fried chicken, soft blankets and scented candles!"
I shook my head. "I don't want to drag you into this."
She gave me a look like I'd just spoken ancient nonsense.
"Drag me into what? I'm already in it. We all are. You think you're doing this alone? Absolutely NOT."
Kayla nodded. "Exactly. You were hiding from a man in your bathroom, Amira. You don't get to isolation-queen your way through this part."
Something in me cracked then.
Not in a breaking way.
More like pressure finding an exit.
And I started talking.
Not fast.
Not dramatically.
Just truth, finally un-dammed.
I told them everything:
The XMZ articles.
The humiliation.
The suspension.
The break-in.
The blurry photo from days ago.
The panic.
The rage.
The moment in the hotel mirror when I felt small for the first time in years.
When I finished, the room was quiet again.
Then Janelle's hand curled gently around mine.
"You have been fighting this storm alone," she said softly. "Of course you're tired. Anyone would be."
"But tired doesn't mean defeated," Marisol added, voice fierce. "Look at you. Sitting here. Not broken. Not hiding. Planning."
Kiera leaned forward, tapping my knee.
"And let's be real — you're kinda terrifying when you're cornered. I would NOT want to be Cassandra right now."
They tried to make me laugh.
And it worked—a little.
A small, cracked sound slipped out.
Tasha cupped my face gently.
Her voice softened.
"You're strong. I know that. But even a strong woman needs a place to collapse sometimes. And that's what we're here for."
Her thumbs brushed my cheeks.
"You are not going through this alone. You hear me? Not tonight. Not tomorrow. Not when the next article drops. Not when the police call. Not when Cassandra tries her next trick."
I swallowed. Hard.
"And when you go after her?" Kiera added. "We'll help you choose the outfit."
Marisol raised her plastic wine cup like it was a sacred chalice.
"To Amira. The woman who refuses to break."
Five plastic cups clinked.
And for the first time in days, I felt like I could breathe again.
Two hours later, Tasha had me in the passenger seat of her SUV, my bag in the back, the other girls trailing behind us like an escort.
I leaned my head on the cool window, exhaustion finally tugging at my bones.
Tasha glanced over. "You good?"
"For now," I murmured.
She nodded. "Good. Because tomorrow? We start planning."
"Planning what?"
She smirked, eyes glinting.
"Your comeback, babe."
My heart thudded softly.
Not fear this time.
Not sorrow.
Something sharper.
Something ready.
As the convoy of my girls followed us through the quiet midnight streets, I realized:
Cassandra thought she scared me.
She had no idea what she had just activated instead.
And she definitely wasn't ready.