I stood at the foot of a guarded bed and looked at her drained, sleeping face for far longer than any defensible visit requires, cataloguing the colour slowly returning to her lips, the steadiness of the line scrolling green across the monitor, the small unconscious way her hand had found Riot’s and refused to give it back even three floors deep in a coma.
And I felt, standing there, the thing I have spent a career and a constitution training myself not to feel:the cold certainty that if she does not come back from this, I will take the building apart looking for the person who did it to her, and I will not be quiet about the dismantling.
That is not a clinician’s feeling.
I have stopped pretending to myself that it is.
Because here is the thing none of them at this table understand, and I have no intention of educating them:I do not actually require their permission to protect her.
Riot would tear this building apart stone by stone.
Silas would arrange the rubble beautifully. I simply prefer to win by consent, on paper, with a clemency order and a transfer authorization and a paper trail that makes our taking of her look like their idea.
A cage opened from the inside still locks behind you.
A door held open by the warden does not.
“I don’t agree with any of this,” Hale announces from her corner, because she cannot bear the silence she’s been left standing in. “It is obvious that she has something to do with all of it.”
The CEO’s face stirs on the screen for the first time.
“She has something to do with it,” he agrees smoothly, “in the sense that she has been present at, adjacent to, or implicatedin every single incident. Which is precisely why we retained you, Detective. And your colleague.” A pause, weighted, deliberate. “Agent Soren Bishop.”
Hale goes still.
“Who,” the CEO continues, “submitted his resignation in the small hours of this morning, withdrew from the case entirely, and accepted a transfer to a department on a different continent before any of us could so much as ask him what he’d concluded. A remarkable turn of speed, for a man who arrived so very interested.”
“That’s—” Hale’s composure cracks straight down the middle. “I wasn’t informed of any resignation.”
“You wouldn’t have been,” Silas offers, gracious as ever. “It happened this morning, before you arrived. Frightful hour. The man was moving at the speed of light…quite impressive to witness, really, at four a.m.”
Hale rounds on him.
“And why,” she demands, “were you awake at four in the morning?”
Silas laughs, soft and delighted.
“The finest bouquets are built at the crack of dawn, Detective. One arranges in the dark, by feel and by faith—and then, when the first rays come slanting through, one is rewarded with the sight of all that careful beauty waking into the light. The petals, you understand, are never lovelier than in that first hour.” He smiles at her with genuine, unsettling tenderness. “I never miss it.”
I let the silence that follows do its work.
It is one of the great underrated instruments, silence, and Silas plays it as well as anyone I’ve met, which is no accident, given where he learned.
But I file the matter of Soren Bishop, under a heading that troubles me.
Because Riot ran him off.
That much I’m certain of, and that part is simple. What isn’t simple is the question Hale stumbled toward before her composure failed her: why was a federal agent with a navy curtain of hair and an unsettling, studying stillness so very interested in our girl, specifically, from the first hour he arrived?
He watched her the way the killer watches—with patience, with appetite, with the cool fixed attention of a man taking measurements. I noticed it. Vex noticed it from the depths of a coma-cracked half-sleep and surfaced just long enough to point a blade and pronounce him distasteful.
She is rarely wrong about people; it’s the closest thing she has to a sense of smell that works. Bishop fled the instant Riot leaned on him, yes. But a man only runs that fast and that far when running was already half-packed in his luggage—and I find I would very much like to know what Agent Bishop was so eager to be elsewhere from, and whether the timing of his flight and the cooling of a particular trail are quite the coincidence everyone seems content to call them.
Pryce clears his throat.
“Detective Hale, I’ll ask you to step out. There are elements of this discussion the institute will conduct privately.”
“I should be present for this conversation,” Hale says, and to her credit the words come out steady even as the rest of her does not. “I am the lead investigator on?—”
