Not yes. Not no. A prosecutorial question. Defining the scope before authorizing the operation. And underneath it, the trust she'd built across two weeks and one night and a bridge she'd crossed to find him when he was sitting with his back to a door.
"I go dark for seventy-two hours. No federal building, no credentials, no coordination calls that create a paper trail. I work the streets the way I learned to work them. I talk to people who won't talk to a badge but will talk to me." He held her gaze. "I report to you. Only you. Whatever I find, it comes through you first so you can assess whether it's prosecutable before it enters the official record."
"That's a chain of custody issue if you find him."
"Not if I bring you to him before anything official happens. I locate. You recover. The federal record starts when you walk through the door."
Jake could see her measuring it. The lawyer and the woman occupying the same body, running different calculations that pointed at the same answer.
"Three days," she said. "Not seventy-two hours. Three days. You check in with me every twelve hours. Not a text. A call. I hear your voice and you tell me where you are and what you've found."
"Done."
"If you locate Costa, you do not approach. You call me. I come to you with whatever support is appropriate. You do not make contact without me present."
"Done."
"And if at any point you determine he's in immediate danger from Vance, you call Ray and you call me simultaneously. No solo operations."
Jake watched her set each condition like a brick in a wall, and he heard what she was building. Not a legal framework. A perimeter. Every condition was a line she was drawing around him, and none of them were about chain of custody or prosecutorial exposure.I hear your voice.That was fear.You do not make contact without me present.That was a woman who'd spent three decades not needing anyone discovering what it felt like to need someone and hating every second of the vulnerability.
Seventy-two hours ago she'd been asleep on his chest. Now she was giving him professional permission to disappear into the world she couldn't follow him into, and every word out of her mouth was a controlled version ofdon't you dare get hurt.
"Done," he said. And meant it in a way that had nothing to do with operational parameters.
Ray had been watching this exchange with the expression of a man seeing his two best people operate as a unit. Not employer and employee. Not boyfriend and girlfriend. Partners, in thefullest sense of the word, dividing labor along the lines of their respective strengths.
"I didn't hear any of this," Ray said. He picked up a pen and opened a file on his desk. "Jake, you're on independent investigation pursuing leads related to the Costa recovery. Emily, you're coordinating case preparation and witness logistics. That's what I'll tell Morrison if he asks."
"Ray," Emily said.
"That's what I'll tell him." Ray's voice left no room. "Now get out of my office. Both of you. I've got a status report to write that makes Friday sound like a reasonable timeline."
They stood. Jake moved toward the door.
"Jake."
He turned.
Ray looked at him over the open file. The boss was gone. The best friend was there.
"Find him."
"I will."
The hallway was fluorescent and full of people who didn't know what had happened in the glass-walled office behind them. Jake walked beside Emily, matching her pace, aware of the distance between them that they'd agreed to maintain inside these walls.
She made it to the corridor intersection before she stopped. The split where her office went left and the elevator went right, and Jake was about to go right and keep going for three days.
"Emily."
She turned. The composure she'd held in Ray's office was intact, but the edges were different. Tighter. The way a window looks right before the glass gives.
"Don't," she said.
"Don't what?"
"Don't do the thing where you tell me it's going to be fine and you've done this a hundred times and I shouldn't worry." Her voice was low, controlled, the kind of controlled that was one degree from not controlled at all. "I am not the woman who worries, Jake. I have never been that woman. And you turned me into her in two weeks and now you're walking out of this building to go do God knows what with people I've never met in places I can't find you, and I don't get to say anything about it because I'm the one who authorized it. I authorized it. In front of our boss. Like a professional."
