3. Chapter 3 #2
"I'm not going to be the reason you have to explain to your own people why cargo ships full of trafficking victims got hit by a crew that isn't yours to run.
" Marcus kept his voice even, though even wasn't the same as easy.
Every hour Andre's channels took to get moving was an hour closer to a dock, then trucks, then nothing left anywhere to hit.
He knew that better than anyone in the room.
Trip's read on the harbor master's office made it worse, not better.
He offered it anyway. "You built a career doing this the right way.
I'm not going to be the one who takes that choice away from you.
Not this time. Not… not when it's him." The offer was Marcus ripping out his still beating heart and handing it to the man he loved…
not had loved. Loved still. He knew that as surely as he drew breath.
Just being in the same room as Andre was costing him every bit of his restraint because all he wanted to do was erase the last half decade and take back what they'd lost.
Andre didn't answer right away. He looked back at the coastline crawling north on the screen and said nothing for a while, weighing something Marcus couldn't see the shape of, only the weight of it sitting in the room between them.
"How long do I have?" he asked finally, "Before you stop waiting on me?"
"Not long," Marcus said. It was the most honest thing he'd said all day.
Andre didn't move toward the door right away. He looked at Marcus instead, really looked, the kind of looking neither of them had let themselves do since he'd walked in.
He knew what Andre was seeing. A man handing back six years of oath and duty on a platter neither of them had asked to set, because some part of Marcus that never fully shut off still needed Andre to be exactly who he'd always been, even now, even here, even though giving him the choice might cost them the one clean shot they had at this.
Andre knew that too. Marcus watched the understanding move behind his eyes like weather crossing open water, slow and total and impossible to look away from.
And underneath the understanding, something else moved too, something Marcus recognized from years of watching for exactly this: the same stillness Andre wore when a place cost him more than he'd admit out loud.
Six years hadn't erased the tell. Marcus had asked him to walk back into the one building he'd have avoided for the rest of his life if anyone had given him another choice, and Andre had done it anyway, had stood two feet from a door he could have already walked through, because somewhere on a boat in cold water there were people who didn't have the luxury of anyone's comfort, and Andre would burn every year of pain this place had ever cost him down to nothing if it meant getting them out alive.
That was who he was. That was who he'd always been. It was the exact reason Marcus had never managed to stop loving him, and the exact reason he'd had to let him go.
"Andre," Marcus said, and didn't know what he meant to follow it with.
"I know," Andre said, like he'd heard the whole sentence anyway. Maybe he had. Six years hadn't managed to erase that particular fluency between them, whatever else it had taken.
Then he turned and the door closed behind him. It reduced the room to just a room again.
The door hadn't even fully closed behind Andre before Zain came off the wall he'd been holding up.
"We give the cops first crack. What the actual fuck." Not a question. Zain said it like he was testing how much it would hurt to say out loud, and it clearly hurt plenty. "We've never done that. Not once. Not for anybody."
"He's not anybody," Marcus said.
"That's worse." Zain's jaw worked. "That means you're not even doing the math right now, you're just doing him a favor because-" He stopped himself before he finished it, which was its own kind of mercy, and Marcus didn't thank him for it.
Nate came in then, Jude a half-step behind him with the unhurried quiet of someone who already knew this wasn't his fight.
Jude folded himself onto the arm of Nate's chair without being asked, working the loose cuff of his sweater between two fingers, in and out, in and out, watching the room with the stillness of someone who'd learned a long time ago that some conversations you just survive.
"If his people move slow and it costs lives, that's on him," Nate said, quiet, not taking a side so much as putting a fact on the table. "If we move without him and it costs him his career, that's on us. Either way somebody pays for this decision. Marcus is just picking who."
Zain didn't answer that. He looked like he wanted to, though.
The door opened again, colder this time, rain riding in on the air before Elijah and Jack did. Elijah's hair was plastered flat and dark against his skull, jacket soaked through at the shoulders, and Jack came in half a step behind him shaking water off like it had personally offended him.
"You're going to want to hear this before anybody decides anything," Elijah said, still catching his breath. "We had eyes on the receiving dock for three hours. Security's doubled since last week. New cameras, new faces, guys who don't move like longshoremen."
"He's not just moving cargo through that port," Jack said. "He's protecting it like he already knows somebody's coming to look."
Ghost didn't look up from the monitors, but his hands didn't stop moving either. "New camera install lines up with financial records I pulled an hour ago. He didn't do this randomly. He knew something was coming before we did."
The room went quiet in a different way than it had a moment before.
Marcus felt it take hold in his chest exactly where he'd known it would.
This wasn't a maybe. This was already a fight Drakov had started getting ready for.
He looked at Zain, who wasn't wrong about anything except the timeline, and Nate, who was never wrong about anything, and Trip, still working through what doubled security meant for anyone thinking about a legal warrant now.
He had given Andre time. He was starting to understand exactly how little of it there actually was.
"Seventy-two hours," he said, mostly to himself. "That's what he has."
Nobody in the room argued with the number. Nobody needed to.