The second cup of coffee tastes worse than the first.
It’s burnt. Slightly sour. The kind of office brew that’s been left on the warmer too long and now tastes faintly of metal and regret. I sip it anyway.
The precinct is still half-dark. Early enough that the streetlamps outside are just starting to flicker off, but not fast enough to pretend it’s morning. Just me and the hum of the overhead fluorescents, a distant copier somewhere warming up like it’s trying to remember how to exist. The clock on the far wall ticks louder when the building’s this empty.
I sit at my desk, shoulders stiff, trying to make sense of the lines I’ve already scribbled into my notebook. Nothing concrete. Just words I keep circling. Spiral. Eye? Ruth Quinn.
Markus.
His name creeps in like a parasite, uninvited, and too damn stubborn to shake. I’m not jealous or at least I keep telling myself that, like if I say it enough times it’ll be true. This isn’t about wanting something that’s not mine. I've met him at a couple of office parties: there’s a slickness to him, a well-practiced smile. The polite way he says Dalia’s name, soft like it’s breakable. The casual possessiveness tucked behind every word.
I stretch my legs under the desk and roll my neck, cracking something near the base of my skull. Markus's voice is still ringing in my ears from the call last night. Not the words—those were forgettable. You didn’t come home. I stopped by the station. Innocent enough. On paper, at least.
The tone was off, like he was trying to sound like a concerned husband, but not actually concerned, like he was reciting what concern should sound like. Polished, practiced. Performed. I’ve spent enough time in interrogation rooms with Dalia playing good cop, bad cop to know the difference. I'm surprised she doesn't notice.
I’m not an idiot. I know the line, and I know I haven’t crossed it. But the way he says her name—low, possessive, too soft—makes something under my skin itch.
I think about her in the motel bed. Lying next to me, curled toward me, her breath feathering the cold air between us. The motel comforter pulled halfway up her back, one shoulder bare, dotted with the faintest freckle I hadn’t known was there. I remember the slope of it. Her light brown hair had come loose in places, a few strands pressed against her cheek. In the dull yellow light, she didn’t look like someone who spent her days chasing the worst the world had to offer. She looked… softer. I’d never seen her like that. Probably never will again.
I could’ve reached for her. Just an inch, just to let her know she wasn’t alone in it. Whatever “it” even was.
I slam my coffee cup on the desk just as the door swings open.
Dalia walks in like she didn’t get caught trespassing in a government institution—shoulders squared, eyes sharp, steps that don’t apologize for taking up space.
But it’s the details that undo me. Black slacks, the tailored kind that hang just right over her boots, worn at the soles from too many crime scenes. A dark green blouse buttoned to the collar, sleeves rolled halfway up like she’s already preparing to dig into something ugly. Her hair’s pulled back into a loose braid today, but strands have escaped, curling around her jaw, messy in a way she would hate if she saw it. I want to fix it for her—tuck them back, drag my knuckles against her cheek like it’s an accident.
And that, more than anything, is the problem.
Her eyes scan the room once before landing on me. I give her a nod. She doesn’t return it.
Fine. I'm still furious over her little stunt anyway.
She drops her bag at her desk, opens a drawer, doesn’t say a word. There’s a thousand things I want to ask. What she was thinking. Why she didn’t tell me. What the hell she thought she’d find buried in those archives. We both know what this morning is. It’s fallout.
She turns towards me, eyes suddenly intense and I can tell she is about to say something when the door at the far end creaks open.
Captain Everett.
“Rowe. Wexler.” His voice cuts across the bullpen. “My office. Now.”
None of the very few people scattered across the office look up. Dalia, eyes still trained on me, turns quick and quiet. I follow, the space between us tight and loaded. We move in step, like we always do, even when we’re on opposite sides of something we haven’t named.
Captain Everett’s office smells like old coffee and tired authority. The blinds are drawn, but slats of the early morning sunlight still manage to cut across the space like prison bars. Every surface is covered in controlled chaos—case files stacked like barricades, a whiteboard ghosted with marker lines that never fully erased, half a sandwich wrapped in a napkin near his mousepad, untouched. I stand beside Dalia, arms loose at my sides, fingers twitching once before I still them. She says nothing either. She knows the game—don’t speak until spoken to, don’t give him more fire than he’s already stoked.
Everett finally lifts his head. He is in his early fifties, balding. Bit of a podgy man, hasn't done field work for the past ten years and rumour has it even when he did, he was shit at it. His eyes land on Dalia first, then on me. He leans back in his chair like it pains him to sit upright. The leather creaks beneath him.
“What the hell were you two thinking?”
No preamble or fake pleasantries, he goes for the throat. I open my mouth, but Dalia beats me to it.
“Elias didn’t know,” she says, voice steady. “I acted alone.”
Everett snorts and it's not from amusement. “You expect me to believe that?”
“I’m telling you how it happened.”
I want to defend her. Want to tell him she only broke protocol because the place was trying to hide something, that there was no time. But there’s no oxygen for that kind of nuance here. There are rules in place, rules we have to follow. Everett taps the edge of his desk with the back of his pen. The sound is maddening. “Do you know who called me this morning, Wexler?”
I don’t answer. It’s rhetorical.
“The head of admin from Whitmoor,” he growls. “Told me one of my detectives impersonated federal clearance to access a private psychiatric archive. Just a fucking badge and a damn good poker face.”
His gaze cuts to Dalia like a scalpel. “That sound about right?”
She doesn’t look away. “More or less.”
“Jesus Christ.”
He throws the pen down like it insulted him. It bounces once, rolls, and drops to the floor with a dull click. No one moves to pick it up.
“This case is already radioactive,” he mutters, rubbing the bridge of his nose with two fingers. I feel Dalia’s tension beside me. It’s not visible, not exactly, but I’ve worked beside her too long not to sense it. She’s bracing for the impact. “You think this department can afford your stunts right now? You think Internal Affairs isn’t watching every move we make after that farmhouse scene?”
Dalia’s lips part, but Everett barrels on. “One more stunt like this, and the case gets reassigned.”
I lift my head. “To who?”
“Major Crimes Task Force.”
I exhale sharply.
“They’ll close it in a week. Two, if they’re feeling theatrical. They’ll slap a motive on it, bury the inconsistencies, and spin the story into something the public can swallow without choking. No nuance, loose ends. And no answers.” Everett continues. He's right and we both know it. It hits harder than I expect. We’ve seen what happens when Task Force steps in—evidence vanishes, narrative gets rewritten, nuance gets paved over for the sake of closure. They’re not bad at what they do and they definitely don’t care who they flatten to do it.
“You’ve got two weeks,” Everett says, voice low now. “I don’t care what theories you’re chasing, give me something that matters. Something I can show upstairs that justifies keeping you both on it. Otherwise, it’s out of your hands.”
No one speaks. Everett leans forward again, elbows on the desk, fingers steepled like he’s praying for us to screw this up. “And Rowe?”
Dalia meets his eyes.
“You pull a stunt like that again, I don’t care what your record looks like. You’re off my floor. Clear?”
“Clear,” she replies, calm as a lake before the lightning hits.
“Get out of my office.”
⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘
We sit in the records room with a thousand bureaucratic ghosts crammed into metal cabinets, quietly molding in the corners.
No one talks at first. The fluorescent light's hum sets my teeth on edge. I’m halfway through organizing case notes when she reaches into her jeans pocket and slides something across the table. I unfold it carefully. It’s cheap printer paper, slightly crinkled at the corners. No handwriting—just a short phrase, barely visible like it had been scanned and then printed by a machine running out of toner.
THE VESSEL SUFFERS FOR OUR SALVATION.
“Where’d you get this?” I ask, but I already know.
“The discharge box,” she says quietly. Whitmoor. She’s not looking at me—just down, like the paper might turn into something else if she blinks. I watch her for a moment longer than I should. Then I refocus.
What an odd phrase.
My pulse jumps. I press two fingers into the edge of the table, grounding myself. I’ve read that phrase before. Some religious group phrase?
"Seems like it's from a pamphlet type of thing."
She nods once. "I have done some digging at home."
After dinner. With Markus. "Yeah?"
She flips through a binder with fast fingers, pages whispering past. Tucked inside a plastic sleeve, she pulls out a page half-crumpled from water damage, handing it to me.
The cover reads: HEAR THE CALL.
With the same phrase stamped beneath an image of a figure kneeling inside a ring of light.
Dalia leans forward. “There’s an address on the back.”
I turn it. Ridgepath community center. February of last year. Not long ago. Close enough to still be warm.
She pulls her phone and snaps a photo of the pamphlet without comment. I can feel the questions building behind her eyes, but she doesn’t say anything yet. She’s doing that thing again—holding tension so tight it makes her still. And I can’t stand it anymore.
“You should’ve told me,” I say quietly.
She looks at me like I just accused her of murder. “About what?”
“About the risk you took. You could’ve been arrested, Dalia. You could’ve gotten me suspended by proximity.”
“I wasn’t thinking about protocol.”
“That much is obvious.”
My voice is sharper than I want it to be. I pull back, sliding a hand down my face. I'm not really angry, just wound tight. She exhales through her nose, the sound brittle. Then, her hand moves—just slightly—toward her hip, where the holster rests like a promise she never breaks. Her fingers tap once against her belt, then go still.
“I didn’t tell you,” she says finally, “because it wasn’t just about Ruth.”
I wait.
“My daughter,” she says. “Wren. She disappeared six years ago.”
It punches the air from my chest.
“She was six years old,” Dalia continues, voice barely a whisper. “We were in the yard. I stepped inside for ten minutes to get water. When I came back, she was gone. No noise. No struggle. Just… vanished.”
There’s no tremor in her voice. No tears, just pure iron. That’s how you survive this job—you forge yourself into something that won’t rust when the grief hits.
I can’t speak. Not yet.
“Markus fell apart,” she says.
Don't give a fuck about Markus.
I reel it back, balling my hands into a fist. All the tension from the case is unravelling me, my feelings threatening to burst out of me. I need to be better.
“Started blaming everything on the job. On me. I took every case I could get. Burned through assignments like they’d give me something to chase. Something to find.”
She turns the paper over again like maybe the phrase will say something different this time.
“I know Ruth’s not Wren,” she continues. “I know that. But something about her case… Set me off."
She finally looks at me. “Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s me. But I need this, Elias. I need to believe we can find Ruth.”
I want to reach across the table. Not to fix anything, but to remind her she’s not alone in this. That she doesn’t have to carry the whole weight of Ruth, and Wren, and the woman in the farmhouse with the stitched-on hands. That someone is here, sitting in the wreckage beside her, willing to help hold the roof up even if it all comes crashing down anyway.
I flex my fingers once in my lap, out of her view. Then again. The need to touch her is not about lust. It’s about recognition.
And yet—I don’t. Because I know what it would mean. Even the smallest gesture, from me to her, in this space, in this moment—it would split something open. So I stay still. I tell myself that not reaching for her is the right thing. The smart thing. The professional thing.
“Then we go to Ridgepath.” I say as I start to wonder if maybe we’re already bleeding for someone else’s god.
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