"What did you have, Bunny?"
The kettle whistled. I poured water over tea bags, using the ritual to steady myself. "Purpose. Direction. Someone who saw what I could become and shaped it. He made me into something beautiful."
"He made you into a weapon."
"Same thing." I handed him a mug. "Now. Your turn. Who's Emma?"
His hand stilled halfway to the tea. "How do you—"
"You talk in your sleep. Not much, but enough. 'Emma, I'm sorry' featured prominently Tuesday night when I followed you back to your hotel."
He set down the mug untasted, moving to my window. The night city sprawled beyond the glass, all light pollution and hidden violence.
"My daughter," he said finally. "Would have been twelve this year."
Would have been. I catalogued the past tense, the careful distance in his voice.
"The Volkovs?" I guessed.
"No. Different network. Smaller, more specialized." He pressed his palm flat against the glass. "I was working a RICO case. Got too close to something bigger. They took her as warning. By the time we found her..."
He didn't finish. Didn't need to.
"The system failed," I said.
"The system protected them. Lawyers, technicalities, jurisdictional disputes." His reflection in the window looked carved from stone. "So I stopped trusting the system. Started trusting other things. Sharper things."
"Is that when you left the Bureau?"
"That's when the Bureau left me." He turned back, and I saw the same emptiness I carried. "Apparently, executing suspects during raids is frowned upon. Who knew?"
"Bureaucrats." I moved closer, drawn by our matching damage. "They never understand necessity."
"Eight men died before they pulled my badge. Eight direct connections to Emma's disappearance." His smile was winter cold. "I'd have killed more, but I got sloppy. Let emotion override tactics."
"And now?"
"Now I'm careful. Methodical. I find patterns in darkness and erase them." He gestured at my wall. "Though nothing this comprehensive. This is art."
"It's obsession." I stood beside him, looking at my work. "Every name is a thread back to the Institute. Every death brings me closer to understanding what Gabriel built. Why he built it. Why he made me."
"Maybe there is no why. Maybe some people just enjoy breaking things."
"No." I touched a photo of Gabriel, edges worn from handling. "Everything he did had purpose. Every lesson, every punishment, every moment of conditioning. He was building something specific."
"Building what?"
I spread my arms, indicating myself. "The perfect soldier for a war nobody else sees coming. Look at the patterns, Nathan. The trafficking networks, the Institute's graduates placed in strategic positions, the careful cultivation of certain skill sets. It's not random."
He studied the wall with fresh eyes, that detective mind engaging. I watched him trace connections I'd spent years mapping, saw the moment he recognized the scope.
"This is infrastructure," he said slowly. "They're building infrastructure."
"For what?"
"Power. Control. The ability to move assets without oversight." He found a cluster of financial documents I'd stolen. "Christ, the money flowing through this..."
"Billions. And that's just what I could track." I moved to another section. "Here. Three judges, two senators, a deputy director at the DEA. All with connections back to Institute funding or graduates in their employ."
