Lumi POV
The engine hummed low as Briggs drove, one hand loose on the wheel and the other tapping the gear shift like he couldn’t quite sit still.
I stared out the window at the passing storefronts, their lights blurring into streaks, but my mind kept looping back to what he’d said twenty minutes earlier.
“Just wait at the hotel,” he’d told me, voice flat, eyes already on the door like the conversation was over.
I’d shaken my head right there in the hallway of his penthouse, fingers curling around the strap of my bag.
“I’m not staying behind while you walk into that hospital alone,” I’d answered, and the way his jaw had clenched told me he’d expected the pushback.
Now the refusal sat between us in the car like another passenger, thick and unspoken.
My cheek still pulsed where C
