Chapter 361: Papa’s Lap
The next morning, everyone was gathered in the living room. The screen had been looping the same news flash for almost an hour, the logo of a local Underground channel blinking in the upper right corner.
"...the man, identified as Harlan Reiss, known owner of several establishments in the sector commonly called the Red Zone, was arrested last night after the kidnapping and assault of a woman identified in business circles as an executive at Apex Records. According to the police’s initial findings, the victim was held captive and sexually assaulted in a warehouse in Sector 16. Reiss has been placed in pretrial detention pending his appearance before the court..."
A heavy silence fell over the living room. No one had really expected that detail. Sexual assault... a rape? Had Harlan actually raped Monique?
"Wait," Rei said, sitting up straight on the arm of the couch. "Wait wait. Sexually assaulted? Like—" she shook her head, incredulous. "No. No, that has to be a setup. Monique must have made that up to play the victim, to look good in front of the police."
"Rei," Aiko said softly.
"No, seriously," Rei insisted, arms crossed tightly as if to protect herself from the idea itself. "It’s Monique. She’s the one who organized that whole mess with that asshole Jinzo last night. She’s the one who threatened Saya with the worst possible things while smiling. How am I supposed to believe that she, of all people, ended up as a victim?"
No one answered right away. The discomfort thickened in the room.
"It’s hard to swallow," Miko admitted, adjusting her glasses, "because we’ve always seen her as the one who hurts other people. Never the other way around. It’s almost easier to imagine a lie than the truth."
Victoria, who had remained silent since the start of the report, slowly set her coffee cup down on the small table, her eyes fixed on the screen where the journalist had already moved on to another topic.
"I doubt it’s a lie," she said at last.
Every head turned toward her.
"How can you be sure?" Rei asked.
"Because I know Harlan," Victoria said, still not looking away from the now-dark screen. "And I know that kind of man. The ones who crawl their whole lives, who swallow every humiliation in silence while waiting for the moment they can finally hurt someone without paying the price." She let out a bitter breath. "Last night, he got that moment. And he didn’t let it pass."
The silence stretched. No one really knew what to say to that.
"Don’t feel too concerned or sad for her. It’s karma coming back around," Victoria added, quieter, almost to herself. "I hate the way it happened. Truly. But if Nash hadn’t existed, if that whole night had gone differently, it could have been any one of us in her place." She looked slowly around the room, pausing for a moment on each face. "And Monique would have been sitting in the front row, laughing."
No one said anything for a long time. The weight of that truth settled slowly into the room, chasing away the last remnants of disbelief.
Saya had stayed apart since morning, sitting on the edge of a window away from the rest of the group, her arms wrapped around her knees, the bandages Miko had put on her the night before still visible on her lip and forearm.
She waited until the conversation about Harlan died down, until Rei and Aiko left to shower, before standing up and slowly approaching Nash, who was leafing through a book with interest near the large table.
"Nash," she said, her voice hesitant.
He looked up, discreetly closing the manga he had borrowed from Miko.
"I—" she took a trembling breath. "I wanted to apologize. Officially. Not just in the car yesterday."
"Saya," Nash began, his voice soft, almost tired. "You don’t need to—"
"Yes," she cut in, her voice rising a notch, something desperate breaking through. "Yes, I do. Let me say it."
He stayed silent, closing his mouth.
"For Roam," she began, her voice trembling more and more. "For humiliating you in front of everyone back then, for treating you like nothing when you deserved better than all those guys who were circling around you. For the leak." Her voice completely broke on that word. "Me and Jinzo and Mac from the beginning—we ruined everything you’d built, we exposed you and Vic—Ma’am, we put Ma’am and the girls in danger, we—"
"Saya—"
"No, let me finish!" She clenched her fists, tears starting to fall without her making any effort to stop them. "I spent months hating you because it was easier than hating myself. And now I show up, I barely risk my skin once, and everyone acts like I’ve paid off years of shit in a single night. But that’s not true. It’s not enough. I’m not forgivable, Nash. I know that."
She stopped, out of breath, quickly wiping her eyes with the back of her hand before continuing, quieter this time, almost pleading.
"But I swear I’ll spend my life paying you back. A hundredfold. No matter what it takes."
Nash stayed silent for a long moment, deeply conflicted—not exactly angry at her, but at himself, at the part of him that would have preferred to hate her cleanly, simply, without complications. It would have been so much easier. But everything she had done that night—the bottle, the sacrifice, this almost painful insistence on keeping her debt—made that impossible.
He sighed, took a step forward, and raised a hand to gently adjust one of the bandages that had started to slip on her forearm.
"Saya," he said at last, his voice calm again. "Listen to me carefully, because I’m only going to say this once."
She looked up at him, holding her breath.
"A debt, in this world," he continued, "is supposed to be a chain. Something designed never to really be repaid, to keep someone on their knees indefinitely. Apex built an entire empire on that. Girls who owe impossible sums, who keep adding interest every month, who know they’ll never truly pay it off, until they’re finally sold like cattle." He made a vague gesture toward the dark screen behind him. "That’s exactly what we tried to destroy last night—that logic. And you’re trying to build your own version of it, all by yourself, without anyone asking you to."
"But I—"
"Let me finish." He crouched slightly to be at her height. "You feel guilty. I can see that. And you’re right to feel guilty—honestly, what you did back then was real shit." He didn’t soften the word or try to minimize it. "But guilt is useless if you just keep it for yourself, if you turn it into endless punishment. It heals nothing. It repairs nothing. It just makes you someone who suffers on top of someone who caused suffering."
Saya sniffed, another tear rolling down her cheek.
"Look at what you already did last night," Nash continued. "You took hits for this mission. You smashed a bottle over Monique’s head to cover me. You just apologized sincerely, in front of me, without anyone forcing you." He counted on his fingers. "That’s already two qualities you’ve proven this morning. Really apologizing. And sacrificing yourself for others. That’s more than a lot of people ever manage to do in their entire lives."
"That doesn’t erase what I did," she murmured.
"No," Nash confirmed without hesitation. "Nothing will ever completely erase that. But that’s not the point. The point isn’t to erase the past. It’s to build something else on top of it. If you really want to repay something, repay it by becoming better. Not by wearing a debt like a chain around your neck and punishing yourself for the rest of your life. Be someone good—for yourself, for others. There will always be a place in what I’m building for someone who’s genuinely trying to do that."
He straightened up, a tired but soft smile appearing on his face.
"A hundredfold," he added, "doesn’t get paid back in one night. It gets paid back day after day. So stop trying to settle everything at once and just start with today."
Saya stared at him for a moment, unable to find anything else to say, before everything rose up at once—the gratitude, the relief, that kindness she had absolutely not believed she deserved when she approached him a few minutes earlier.
"Thank you," she finally said, her voice trembling. "Thank you, thank you, thank you. I—" she shook her head, searching for her words. "You have no idea what this means to me. That you’d even take the time to tell me all this. After everything I did, you would have had every reason to just let me rot with my guilt, to slam the door in my face, and instead you—"
Her voice broke completely. A sob escaped her, but a different kind of sob this time—lighter, almost liberating.
Nash rolled his eyes. His heart wanted him to pull her into his arms. His brain told him not to.
"I’m sorry," she repeated one last time, softer. "For everything. Really. And thank you. For giving me a chance to do better."
Nash stayed silent for a moment, looking at her tear-streaked face, something soft briefly crossing his own gaze.
"It’s going to be okay," he said simply. "It’s going to be okay, Saya. Everything will be better now."
She nodded, awkwardly wiping her cheeks with her sleeves, a small trembling laugh escaping her despite the tears still present.
The euphoria of the previous night continued to slowly recede over the following hours, gradually replaced by something quieter, more fragile—the kind of suspended calm that always follows the big storms, when the body finally starts to feel the exhaustion that adrenaline had been masking.
Rei and Aiko eventually came back down, showered and changed, settling onto the couch with the others in front of a breakfast that Hina and the subs had made far too elaborate for the occasion—stacked pancakes, fruit cut with almost artistic care, industrial quantities of coffee.
Miko sat down next to Kai, picking absently at her plate, before looking up at Nash, who was watching the scene from a slight distance.
"Nash," she said, adjusting her glasses. "You okay? You’ve seemed a little somewhere else since earlier."
Kai, mouth full, nodded vigorously in agreement, swallowing hastily before adding,
"Yeah, like, we should all be celebrating, and you’ve got that face of a guy still thinking about something not cool."
Nash stayed silent for a moment, his gaze drifting briefly beyond the joyful scene in front of him.
"I’m thinking about Jinzo," he finally admitted. "I feel... a little sad for him."
Silence fell over the table for a second.
"After what he tried to do to Aiko?" Kai said, incredulous.
"Yeah," Nash said. "What he tried to do—he deserved that. I can at least convince myself of that." He looked down at his own hands, the knuckles still marked. "But the way I hit him afterward..." He stopped, shaking his head slightly. "I didn’t stop when I should have. I kept going way longer than necessary. It wasn’t justice anymore at that point. It was just cruelty."
"Nash—" Rei began.
"I already took Jaz from him," he continued, not really listening to them, lost in his own thoughts. "His place on the team. The little respect he still had. And then on top of that I beat his face in until he couldn’t really defend himself anymore. It was too much. I know it was too much."
A different silence settled around the table. The girls exchanged looks—a mix of sadness and a slightly amused affection in the face of this guilt they found almost endearing coming from him.
"You’re really too soft on a criminal who tried to rape one of your precious ladies," Kai said, but without any real mockery in her voice—more a clumsy kind of tenderness.
Aiko, without another word, stood up and came to sit directly on Nash’s lap, her arms wrapping around his neck, her head nestling against his shoulder.
"Stop hurting yourself like that," she murmured, one hand gently stroking the back of his head. "You know what we see when we look at you? We see a man who smashed a door with his bare hands to come save me. Who stood up to Monique without ever flinching. Who managed to bring down all of Apex in a single night." She tightened her hold. "We’re so happy to have a man this strong protecting us, Papa. Can’t you just accept that without beating yourself up about the rest?"
Nash stayed silent for a moment, something slowly loosening in his shoulders at the warmth of the gesture.
"Papa," he repeated, a tired but sincere smile beginning to appear.
"Yeah," Aiko said, without the slightest embarrassment, nestling a little closer against him. "Papa."
Victoria, who had been watching the scene for a moment, approached in turn, a smile on her lips, before leaning down and placing a light kiss on the top of Nash’s head.
"We should enjoy this," she said softly, her gaze sweeping over the improvised breakfast, the laughter, the warmth of the moment. "Because in a few hours, it’s going to start turning sour."
"I know," Nash said, one arm wrapping around Aiko still sitting on his lap. "Hector isn’t going to stay quiet for long. Neither is Apex."
"No," Victoria confirmed. "And Monique probably won’t take what happened to her with grace. And with Harlan in jail, the only ones she can take revenge on are us."
Nash stayed silent for a moment, briefly thinking of that still-open gap in the team that would need filling one way or another, of all the pieces still in motion that would have to be orchestrated in the days to come.
"Give them another hour," he said finally, a slight smile appearing on his face as he watched Rei and Kai now arguing over the last pancake. "After that, we go back to work."
Victoria looked at him for a moment, a smile appearing on her lips, before moving closer and resting her head against his shoulder, Aiko still nestled on the other side.
"One hour," she accepted.