Page 7 of Crown of Ash

By the time Marcus made it back to the factory, the adrenaline had burned off enough to leave the cold underneath it exposed.

He sat with the manifest a long time before he let himself think about what it actually meant. Not that Drakov was ahead of them. He'd known that for days. That there was a hole somewhere inside the exact system Andre had trusted with his career, wide enough to move forty people through it in under two hours, and neither of them had any way of knowing how deep it went or how many other requests it had already swallowed.

They couldn't use official channels again. Not safely. Not until they knew whose hands were dirty, and knowing that meant finding a name inside a system built to keep names like that hidden in the first place.

Ghost found him there an hour later, quiet in the doorway the way he got when he already knew an answer nobody wanted. "I can start pulling personnel records for anyone with liaison access to that request. It'll take time."

"Do it," Marcus said. "Quietly."

Ghost didn't move right away. "And Andre?"

Marcus looked at the manifest a while longer before he answered, at the timestamp still sitting there in the corner like it was daring him to argue with it.

"Andre just found out the job he's spent his whole life believing in has a hole in it he can't see the bottom of." He set the page down, finally, and didn't pick it back up. "Give him tonight before you ask him for anything else."

Chapter 6

Andre hadn't slept. He'd tried, briefly, around four, gotten as far as lying on top of the covers with his shoes still on, and then his brain started running the numbers again on its own, without asking permission. Forty cots. Forty people who'd been warm enough to leave a shape in the air behind them, gone before anyone with the will to help them ever got the chance to try.

He made coffee instead of tea, because tea was for mornings he still believed in the version of himself that drank it. He drank the coffee black, too hot… and didn't taste any of it.

Marcus's last text was still open on his phone, hours old now. Not your fault. Doesn't make it hurt less. I know that too. Andre had read it maybe thirty times since two a.m., the way a person checked a wound to see if it was actually as bad as it felt the first time he looked. It was. Every time, it was.

He knew, in the part of him that still functioned like a cop even at five in the morning on no sleep, that the timeline wasn't his fault. He'd flagged a credible threat through the correct channel. The correct channels… had failed, catastrophically, in a way that had nothing to do with him personally and everything to do with someone he'd probably shaken hands with at a conference once. Someone who smiled and had a family they loved. All while they helped a monster like Drakov take others from their families and sell them into something worse than a nightmare. It made his stomach turn and he had to take a deep breath to keep the coffee from coming back up.

None of that touched the other math, the one that didn't care about jurisdiction or intent. He'd made the right calls. Followed the rules. Forty people had been in that building. Now they weren't, and somewhere between those two facts sat a line he couldn't stop walking back and forth across, no matter how many times the first version of the math told him not to. For the first time in a long time… he wondered if this was how Marcus had felt. If this, right here, this feeling and agony, was what had drivben the man he loved from his faith in the law… and made him decide to beomce it.

His phone buzzed against the counter.

He looked at it a long moment before he picked it up, already knowing it was Marcus even after six years of trying not to remember every detail about the man.

"You didn't sleep," Marcus said, before Andre even got a greeting out.

Not a question. Andre didn't insult either of them by pretending otherwise. "No."

"Coffee or tea?"

"Coffee. Couldn't make myself want the other." He didn't explain why. He didn't have to. Time hadn't touched how well Marcus could hear the things Andre wasn't saying, and this morning he was too tired to mind that anymore.

Silence on the line, but not the careful kind they'd both clung to across a steel table days ago, not the kind either of them managed on purpose. Just two men breathing on either end of a phone at five in the morning, both of them awake for the same forty reasons.

"I keep doing the math," Andre said finally, because somebody had to say it out loud or it was going to keep living in his chest instead. "Every version of it. The one where it's not my fault. The one where forty people are still missing because I made a phone call. I can't get either one of them to actually beat the other."

"I know that math," Marcus said. Quiet. Certain. "I've been running a version of it for years. It never actually settles. You just get better at carrying it without it showing."

"That supposed to make me feel better?"

"No." A pause, and something in it that sounded almost like the ghost of a smile, worn thin by everything underneath it. "It's supposed to make you feel less alone. That's the only part I can actually give you."

Andre closed his eyes. The kitchen light was too bright for how little he'd slept, and he hadn't noticed until just now.

"Six years," he said, and didn't finish the sentence, because there wasn't a version of finishing it that wouldn't have meant something neither of them was ready to hear out loud, not yet, not over a phone call about a warehouse full of empty cots.

"Six years," Marcus agreed, like he understood exactly which sentence Andre hadn't let himself say, and wasn't going to make him say either. "Eat something today. Not just coffee."

"Yes, sir," Andre said, and the words came out almost gentle, almost like they used to.

"Andre." Marcus's voice caught on something before he let it go again. "I'm glad you're the one who answers when I call."