Page 2 of Crown of Ash

His pulse was a frantic drum against his ribs, a wild rhythm he hadn't felt in years, part fear, part something else he refused to name.

The window had gone dark enough to hold his reflection: a faint, fractured man standing too still with a phone pressed to his ear like a lifeline, waiting in the gray light for an answer.

Chapter 2

By five the task force office had mostly cleared out, leaving behind the low hum of half the fluorescents and the quiet of people who’d already murmured their goodnights on the way to the elevator. Andre stayed at his desk, surrounded by the ghost-smell of stale coffee and paper. He told himself it was the reports. Three incident summaries that should have taken him twenty minutes total had consumed most of the afternoon, he’d retyped the same sentence four times before realizing he’d just been staring at the blinking cursor, watching it pulse like a trapped heartbeat.

A paper cup of coffee sat cold at his elbow, brewed four hours ago and forgotten since.

Something had felt off since he woke, a low-grade static in his nerves. He hadn't been able to name it, and that bothered him almost as much as the feeling itself. He didn't believe in premonition. He believed in patterns, in the small tells a body gave off before the mind caught up, the tightness in the shoulders before bad news, the dry mouth before a confrontation. All day his body had been humming something his mind refused to translate.

His badge was still clipped to his belt, right where it always sat. His weapon lay locked in the drawer, per department policy after hours. He’d loosened his tie two hours ago and now it lay coiled over the back of his chair like a shed skin. Small deviations.

The phone buzzed against the laminated wood of the desk, rattling faintly.

Whiskey brown eyes looked at it before he understood why, before his hand even twitched toward it. The screen glowed with a name: Marcus.

He’d kept it under his real name. Never saw a reason to hide it, not from anyone who might go through his phone, not from himself. If it ever rang, he’d wanted to know exactly who was calling, no half-second of pretending it might be someone else.

He let it ring twice before he picked it up. That much control he still had.

“Jefferson,” he said, professional and flat, the tone he used for numbers he didn’t recognize, except he did recognize this one, had known who it was before the first vibration faded, and the deliberate flatness in his own voice cost him more than any lie he’d told all year.

The line stayed silent for longer than a casual silence usually lasted.

Then, “Andre.” Said in the tone he knew as well as his own heartbeat. In a tone that had been his heatbeat once upon a time before the world had broken him and his life. Before he had walked away from everything that had put a smile on his face and passion in his nights. Before he had ripped out his own still bleeding heart because the man on the other side of this call had walked into a darkness that Andre could not follow. Would not.

He didn't answer right away. His hand had already found the pen at the edge of his desk, one of a dozen identical black government-issue pens he'd never once written with in years of owning this desk, and he turned it once between his fingers before he let himself speak.

"I'm here," he said. Not, 'it's been years'. Not, 'I didn't think you had the balls to call this number again'. Just the two words that kept things exactly as contained as they needed to be.

"I've been following a trail." The silence that followed was thick with the ghosts of case files and unmarked graves. "In Atlanta... too many threads I've been following for years just converged. All pointing to one name."

Andre knew. Knew it in the sudden tension coiling through his shoulders, in the way his umber knuckles went white around the phone. Knew it like the phantom ache in his left knee where the surgeon had dug out a bullet fragment six years back. Marcus wouldn't have called after all this time for anything less.

His body shifted into a different mode entirely, the familiar, weary pivot into a hunt that had defined a decade of his life. Years of slamming into walls some monster had engineered to be unscalable. Years of chasing whispers that evaporated in daylight, of watching the task force's interest wane to polite, pitying nods when he'd mention the name they'd all officially retired. He'd never closed the file. Never purged the number from his speed dial. But he'd also stopped expecting it to ever lead anywhere but another dead end.

"Talk to me," Andre said, his voice low. The pen he'd been fidgeting with stilled completely in his grip.

A shipping manifest, Marcus said. Three sets of coordinates off the Carolina coast. A pattern of movements tracing back further than Andre's career, further than he wanted to consider before coffee.

Andre was already constructing the case in his mind, layer by layer, even as he began picking it apart. He'd seen intelligence this promising crumble over a bad source before, seen a slick defense attorney pluck one loose thread in a courtroom and watch the whole tapestry unravel by lunch. Chain of custody first. Where did this come from? Would it hold up under scrutiny? Was there a way to use it without explaining how he still had a source his department hadn't worked with in years? Parallel construction, if necessary. He'd need something clean, something independent, before any of this ever touched paper with his name on it.

"Send me what you can source clean," he said, voice gravelly with the late hour and emotions he couldn't afford to let slip right now. "Not what you have. What I can use."

A pause on the line, and Andre understood it for what it was, Marcus recalibrating, the same way Andre was, both of them running the same old math on how much of this could stay professional and how much couldn't.

"There's someone tied to it," Marcus said. "I need to know if he's already on anyone's radar before I move on him. Quietly."

Andre wrote nothing down. He didn't need to. He'd have the name inside an hour without leaving a trail that connected it to this call, and some part of him that should have been alarmed at how easily he'd already agreed to that wasn't alarmed at all.

He was, God help him, glad to be doing this again. A part of him that had been slowly and inexorably bleeding for years was soothed by the voice of the man he had loved with every bit of his heart, and too much of his ethos to keep.

They talked another twenty minutes, the rest of it clean and useful and entirely about Atlanta. He'd be able to pull files and reports from the departments down south, though knowing the people with whom Marcus moved… there would be more gaps than details. Ghosts and untraceable details. Victims returned, but no bodies to find that would lead them anywhere. He'd learned over the years that his cases brushed the edges of Lakefront… that there would be nothing to find. There never was.

Marcus ended it the way he'd always ended calls, no goodbye, just: "I'll send the file." The line went dead before Andre could decide whether he'd wanted to say anything else, and that made him rub his chest as a phantom echo of pain took up residence there. The place where memories of better days with Marcus would always live, no matter how much time went by.

The drive home took eleven minutes he didn't remember driving. He let himself in, dropped his keys in the bowl by the door out of a habit older than the apartment itself, and went straight to the kitchen without turning on more than the one light over the stove.