Page 104 of His Wall

I sat with the phone in my hand.

I thought about Torres on the concrete in a parking garage in Bethesda three years ago. Eleven minutes. The blood under my fingers. His hand on my cheek. Leah.

I had broken protocol that day. I had vouched for a witness who was a professional liar. I had gone around my handler. I had moved the operation on a feeling, and the feeling had been wrong, and Torres had been on the concrete for eleven minutes because of it.

I had rebuilt my entire life on the principle that the system knew better than I did.

The system had said Conrad left the country. The system was wrong.

The system said wait for backup. The system was twenty-nine minutes away.

I dialed Julian.

Voicemail.

I thought about what Torres had said outside the safehouse this morning.

Be brave, Leah. Not careful. Brave.

I thought about Julian on the safehouse couch, my head on his thigh. His thumb tracing the line of my jaw. How he'd said Leah into the kitchen counter.

I dialed Julian one more time.

It rang.

It rang.

Voicemail.

I leaned across the seat. I opened the glove compartment.

My Bureau-issued weapon was inside the small lockbox in the back. I unlocked it with the key on my keychain. I took the weapon out. I checked the magazine. I chambered a round. The slide racked back and forward in my hand with the small clean sound it always made when I was about to do something I had been trained to do.

I slid the weapon into the holster at the small of my back.

I put the car in drive.

I called Harlow on speaker as I pulled back onto Sixth.

"I'm going in."

"Calder. You do not have authorization. Do not enter the building until — "

"Conrad's men are inside that apartment. Or they're about to be. I am not waiting twenty-seven minutes."

"If you go in without backup you are in direct violation of — "

"Then put it in my file."

I hung up.

I drove. My hands were steady on the wheel. I had made them steady three years ago and they had never failed me on a job. The difference was that three years ago they had been steady because I was following training. Right now they were steady because the training had run out, and what was underneath the training was a voice in my chest that had been there for fifteen years before I had ever set foot in Quantico.

The last time I had broken the rules for a man I loved, he had ended up on the concrete.

This time I had followed the rules and the man I loved was alone with a gun pointed at his face.

The rules had never been the point. Torres had tried to tell me. Harlow had told me. The answer was not protocol and it was not instinct.