She sat composed. Pleasant with her face giving nothing away —
To anyone else in the cabin she was simply listening, savouring the demolition with the rest of them.
But Phei was not anyone else, and he could see the small thing the others couldn't: the faint tremor running under her stillness. Hands resting a fraction too carefully in her lap. Because the names being lobbed around the car like punchlines — Anderson, Zack, Aiden — were not punchlines to Emily.
They were the men who had done, and tried to do, the things that did not leave a girl quickly, no matter how much time piled up behind them.
They'd been paid, thanks to Phei doing the punishing personally and he knew, in the cold old part of himself where such accounts were kept, that he would collect far more from them before he was finished.
But a bill settled and a wound healed were two different things.
Only time would close the second.
Time, and something beyond time, and him.
He would not rush her.
