Chapter 354: True Lies

NICK

The small café at the corner of the avenue smelled of burnt sugar and expensive steam.

Lila sat across from me, watching the barista with a sharp, impatient focus while she waited for her order.

When it arrived, it was exactly what I expected... something layered, excessively sweet, and topped with a mountain of whipped cream that had absolutely no structural reason to be there.

I looked down at my own cup. Black coffee, a single splash of cold milk. No sugar. I stirred it once, the metal spoon clicking cleanly against the ceramic, purely to give my fingers something to do while the noise of the café settled around us.

Lila didn’t bother with the usual preambles.

She simply leaned forward, her bracelets clinking against the dark wood of the table.

"You’ve been avoiding me," she said. It wasn’t an accusation; it was a statement of fact, delivered with the absolute confidence of a woman who was used to tracking people down for a living.

"I’ve been hospitalized," I replied, my voice flat, entirely devoid of any dramatic weight.

"Okay but before that, Nick." Her frown deepened, a small, sharp line appearing between her perfectly shaped eyebrows.

"Earlier this month, I came by your apartment. Three separate times. Nobody answered the buzzer. And when I call your personal line, it always goes straight to voicemail every single time. Are you seeing someone? Is that what this is? Have you finally just gotten bored of me?"

I took a slow sip of the coffee, letting the bitter heat steady my throat. Her questions felt loud, heavy, and entirely unnecessary in the small space between us.

I didn’t feel the urge to reassure her, nor did I feel the slight prickle of guilt that usually came with neglecting an arrangement. I just felt a dull, encroaching boredom.

"You’re reading far too much into a simple schedule conflict," I said, setting the mug back into its saucer with a tiny click. "I’ve been busy with the department. Nothing has changed between us."

The words were tidy, packaged together into a single, polite dismissal that left no room for follow-up questions.

But Lila was a journalist; she lived in the spaces between what people said and what they meant.

I could see the exact second the answer landed wrong in her mind, even if she couldn’t quite find the right word for the falseness of it yet.

She didn’t back down. Instead, her posture straightened, her eyes narrowing as she shifted her focus.

"What about Cassian Wolfe?" she asked, the pivot so sudden and sharp it almost made me blink.

"You told me he was perfectly fine. You said the was the rumors were just rumours. Then I find out from a colleague with a different contact in the private ward that he was in a hospital bed for almost a entire month. Shot. Seven times. You lied directly to my face, Nick. Why?"

I looked at her across the rim of my cup, my mind immediately running through the options. I wasn’t calculating what was true; I was calculating what would sound native to her ears.

"Because if you had known the details," I said, keeping my delivery smooth and perfectly even, "you would have written about it. It’s what you do. And if you had published a single line about Cassian Wolfe’s condition while he was unstable, Charles Wolfe would have spent every resource he owns finding out exactly where that leak originated."

I paused, letting the silence carry the weight of the name.

"You would have become the primary target," I continued softly. "Not just professionally, Lila. Charles doesn’t just sue people; he makes the problem disappear entirely. I wasn’t protecting Cassian from a bad press cycle. I was keeping your name out of a ledger you don’t want to be in."

The beauty of the statement was that the core of it was entirely accurate.

Charles Wolfe would have absolutely destroyed anyone who compromised his son’s safety during those first critical weeks, and Lila would have undoubtedly become a massive liability.

But the lie inside the truth, the part she didn’t need to see was that I hadn’t given a single thought to her safety when I made the choice.

It was entirely about maintaining control over the narrative until I knew which way the wind was blowing.

"You’re not inside that circle," I added, leaning back slightly. "I kept you on the outside for a very good reason."

Lila sat back, the anger slowly draining out of her shoulders as she absorbed the explanation. In her mind, the pieces reassembled themselves into something flattering. Probably that I did it to protect her because I cared.

But she had no idea that the real translation was much simpler: You don’t need to know everything because you simply don’t matter enough to risk the position.

"You could have just told me that," she murmured, her voice losing its sharp edge as she stirred her melting whipped cream.

"Instead of leaving me completely in the dark."

"Would you have actually accepted ’I can’t tell you’ as a valid answer?"

She stayed quiet for a second, her eyes dropping to the table. "No."

"There it is," I said.

Lila sighed, accepting the conclusion before moving directly into the next item on her agenda. "And the medical project? You promised you’d get me an exclusive interview with him once the ground broke."

"Preston is running the logistics now," I explained, glad to guide the conversation back toward dull corporate matters. "The administrative control shifted after the incident. They’re using a completely different set of medical consultants, so my involvement has been minimal at best. I haven’t been called into the boardroom in weeks."

I took another sip of coffee, watching her expression. "But now that Cassian is recovering, he’ll likely take the lead back from his brother. When that happens, I might have a way back into the meetings. No promises, though."

"Make sure my name is at the top of the list when he does," she said, her fingers tracing the rim of her glass.

"I’ll see what I can do," I replied. I delivered the phrase with a useful, vague politeness that sounded like an agreement but committed me to absolutely nothing at all.

Lila seemed to relax fully then, leaning back against the leather booth. She picked up her spoon, idly turning it over in her fingers. "How is your brother doing, by the way? Noah."