Caterina sweeps my burnt eulogy tray to the side and pulls a clean bowl forward. “All right, stubborn people. Again from the top.”
“I’m here for morale,” I say, moving to the sink to wash my hands.
“No,” they say together.
“You’re here to measure,” Caterina adds. “No eyeballing.”
Elena slides the recipe card closer, reads it under her breath like an incantation, then she freezes and looks up. “Oh!”
I stop with the water running and turn back, panicked. “What? What is it? Is everything all right?”
I’m halfway to her when she nods. “Yeah, yeah. I’m fine. I just remembered something.”
“That’s how you react when you remember something?” Caterina asks, walking to the sink to turn it off. “Panic-inducing.”
“No, I mean, I remembered that I wanted to tell you something when you got home,” she says, cleaning her hands on a towel. “I spoke to Miles today. About Akers.”
I dry my hands on a towel, every muscle tightening without my permission. “You spoke to Miles,” I repeat. “When?”
“This afternoon,” she says, a little breathless now that she’s committed. “He called me.”
Caterina’s eyebrows go up. “What did he say?”
Elena sets the spatula down. “He said they followed an anonymous tip about internal misconduct,” she says carefully, lawyer-plain. “They pulled the access logs, the comms token history, VPN records—everything. It panned.”
My grip tightens on the towel. “Panned how?”
“They found messages,” she says. “Akers used his credentials to pull my schedule, then routed it off-network. They matched timestamps from the coffee shop Wi-Fi to submissions through the liaison’s webform token. And there were texts on a second phone arranging a ‘consult’ with the Russos.” Her throat works; she keeps going. “Miles said OPR mirrored his drives, recovered deleted threads, and got two cooperating witnesses in the office to confirm he’d been asking about me. They picked him up this morning.”
Caterina’s hand flies to her mouth. “Arrested?”
“Arrested,” Elena says. “Charged. Murder-for-hire, conspiracy, obstruction, abuse of position. He’s in federal custody.”
“They may offer him a deal yet,” I say, knowing exactly how it works in the justice system.”
But Elena is shaking her head. “I don’t think so. They might try, but he doesn’t work for the Russos.”
I had gotten confirmation on that after Gabe Russo attacked Elena.
Elena continues, “He doesn’t know anything credible. All he knows is that he hired them to kill me. They won’t get anything to take the Russos down. I think he’s going away for good.”
Caterina exhales like she’s been holding her breath for two months. “Holy—” She stops herself, then laughs, shaky. “Okay. Okay. Good. Good.”
“We made them look,” she corrects softly. “But… yeah.” Her smile is small and a little stunned. Then it falters. “He admitted nothing, of course. But the logs and the burner and the witness statements—Miles said it’s… solid.”
“Solid is enough,” I say. “For them.”
“And for you?” she asks, searching my face.
“As long as he stays behind bars, it’s solid for me too,” I say. “Though I will be making sure his stay is as unpleasant as possible.”
Caterina clears her throat, swiping at her eyes with the back of her wrist. “Does this mean we can, I don’t know, breathe? A little?”
Elena looks at me, deferring the answer. I nod once. “Not completely, but we can breathe a little easier, yes.”
I wipe the flour streak off Elena’s cheek with my thumb and keep my hand there. “That,” I say quietly, “was very smart.”
“I’m very smart,” she says, trying for flippant and failing because she’s pleased I said it.
