Chapter 34
Calloway
Xander’s thumb moves across his phone screen with an infuriating calm.
The adrenaline has fled, a faithless lover who stole the blankets and left nothing but a cold, hollow ache. I slam my mug on the counter. Dark coffee splashes across the pristine white granite, a Rorschach test of my unraveling sanity.
“What are you doing?” The question is a raw nerve. “She’s in a cage, Xander. We need a plan. We need to be moving.”
“I am moving,” he says, not looking up. “I’m working on something while you redecorate my kitchen with caffeine. And I called Darius.”
“Darius?” My brow furrows.
“She needs our lawyer, not some public defender who’ll trade her life for a decent plea bargain.” He meets my gaze. “She’s one of us now, Cal. She gets the full benefits package.”
I nod, the knot in my chest tightening. My mind conjures an image of Jiya in a sterile interrogation room, alone.
“The warrant,” Xander says, his focus already elsewhere. “It mentioned video evidence. Did you hear anything specific?”
“No.” The word is hollow. “Just that they had a warrant.”
“A warrant-level arrest isn’t built on a hunch,” he mutters, rubbing his face. “They think they have her dead to rights.”
I reach into my jacket and pull out Jiya’s makeup bag. The small pouch is heavier than it looks, clinking with the sound of glass vials as I set it on the counter.
Xander’s eyes widen. “What in God’s name is that?”
“Her accessories,” I say. “Grabbed it before they could search the room.” I unzip it, revealing the neat, lethal row of her handiwork.
“Fuck.” Xander recoils as if I’d produced a live scorpion. “And you thought bringing incriminating evidence to my apartment was a good idea? Get it off my counter.”
I can’t help myself. I dangle the bag from two fingers. “What’s the matter? Afraid it’s contagious?”
“Forgive me for not wanting a biohazard on my countertop,” he snaps, his voice tight with genuine alarm. “Some of us have an instinctual aversion to containers labeled with anything more threatening than ‘organic kale.’ Besides, that’s evidence, Cal. Felony-level, go-to-prison-forever evidence.”
“I’m aware,” I say. “Which is why we need to get rid of it. And I can’t exactly flush it down the toilet without poisoning half of Boston.”
Xander’s fingers drum on the counter, his mind processing variables.
“The landfill. Municipal waste facility on the outskirts. It’ll get buried under a mountain of garbage within hours.
Untraceable.” He’s already moving toward his home office, a dark room humming with latent power. “Take it. Before you poison my ficus.”
I follow him, the bag clutched in my hand, a restless energy making it impossible to stand still. He drops into his chair, and the room comes alive, three massive monitors blooming into a constellation of code and data.
“Can you get her out?” I pace behind him. “Bail? Is Ramirez questioning her? Can you check if she’s okay?”
Xander swivels in his chair, a knowing, pitying smirk on his face. “God, you’ve got it bad.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do.” He turns back to his keyboard. “Never thought I’d see it. The great Calloway Frost, dangling from window ledges to save damsel assassins in distress.”
I snort. “Jiya is hardly a damsel.”
“Relax, Romeo. Darius is already on his way to the station. He’ll wrap her in so much legal tape she won’t be able to say her own name.” His fingers fly, windows opening and closing in a blur.
“The video,” I press, leaning over his shoulder. “What about the video?”
“Could be anything. A traffic cam, a neighbor’s doorbell.” He pulls up a schematic of the city’s surveillance network, a spiderweb of red dots. “I’m looking for the path of least resistance into the BPD evidence server. Give me a minute.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
Xander glances at me like I’ve asked the world’s dumbest question. “That I’m hacking into the police database, of course.”
“Of course.”
“You know this compromises all of us, right?” Xander says without turning. “If she tells them—”
“She won’t talk.” The words explode from me, raw and certain.
Xander raises his eyebrows but doesn’t flinch. “Calloway—”
“No. She wouldn’t do that. She understands what we do, what we’re trying to accomplish.” My voice trembles with something I’m not ready to name. “She’s one of us.”
Xander finally swivels his chair to face me, his expression grave. “Cal, she’s been a member for five minutes. She doesn’t have the same loyalty. The same investment.”
“She has an investment in me.” I plant my hands on his desk, leaning in. “I know her.”
“How can you be so sure?”
The question hangs between us. I see her face, feel her skin against mine, the trust in her touch. The way she looks at me. It’s a connection forged not in time, but in truth. In the shared darkness. This differs from anything I’ve ever felt. This isn’t just attraction or infatuation.
“I know it in my bones,” I say, my voice quiet but unshakable. “The same way you knew Oakley wouldn’t talk.”
Xander studies my face for a long moment, then gives a single, sharp nod and turns back to his screens. “Okay. Then let’s see what they think they have.”
The silence in the room is broken only by the frantic click of his keyboard. I watch as lines of code scroll past.
Then, he stops.
His fingers freeze over the keys. A single video file is isolated in the center of the screen.
“Oh, fuck,” Xander whispers, his voice barely audible.
The obsidian table reflects a fractured version of me, my image distorted across its polished surface.
Beside me, Xander is a blue-lit specter, his face illuminated by the laptop screen. Code scrolls in a silent, incomprehensible waterfall. Across the room, Lazlo leans against the crimson wall, his arm cradled in a black sling, and radiating pure, undiluted annoyance.
I wear a path in the priceless Persian rug, the frantic energy under my skin refusing to be still.
“Can you sit down?” Xander’s voice is dry, devoid of emotion. He doesn’t look up. “Your existential dread is wearing a groove in the floor.”
“Sorry.” I don’t stop.
The chamber door swings open without a sound. Ambrose Thatcher stands there, his weight resting on a silver-headed cane. The cane taps once on the marble floor, the sound like a judge’s gavel.
“Thorne’s message implied a certain urgency,” Ambrose says, his deep voice filling the room. He glances at Lazlo’s sling and raises an eyebrow. “Our esteemed surgeon, playing the patient. How ironic.”
“I’m fine.” Lazlo scowls. “It’s a flesh wound. Barely clipped me. And it’s not my operating arm.”
Ambrose’s gaze finds me, his eyes narrowing as he takes in my disheveled state. “And you look like you’ve been dragged through Hell by your ankles, Frost.”
“The police arrested Jiya this morning,” I say, the words flat.
His brow furrows. The name is an unexpected variable. “Jiya?” He savors the word, rolling it over his tongue like an unfamiliar vintage. “And who, pray tell, is Jiya?”
“His murderous girlfriend,” Xander says, his fingers never pausing their dance across the keyboard. “The bartender.”
“Girlfriend?” Ambrose’s head snaps toward me, his composure cracking to reveal genuine shock. “Calloway Frost has a girlfriend? Good heavens. Why was I not informed? I would have sent flowers. Or a condolence card.”
Before I can form a response, Thorne enters, followed by Darius Evers.
“Because her membership was on the agenda for the next meeting, Ambrose,” Thorne says, his voice calm and authoritative as he closes the door. “An agenda we failed to reach.” He moves to his elevated chair at the head of the table, his presence commanding the room.
My eyes lock on Darius. He is an island of tailored, professional calm in the storm of my anxiety. If anyone can navigate this, it’s him.
“How is she?” The question is torn from me. “Did you see her?”
“I saw her a couple of hours ago,” Darius says, his voice even. “She’s rattled. But she’s holding.”
I stare at the way light plays across the obsidian surface, trying to look casual. Like I’m not counting every minute Jiya spends in custody. Like I’m not replaying the image of her being led away in handcuffs.
Darius studies me. “She’s a fighter, Frost. She’s okay. Good thing I arrived when I did, though. She was ready to take the fall.”
“What? Why?”
Darius studies me. “She thought they were going to connect you to her and wanted them to stop looking. But she said nothing yet.”
A breath escapes me. “Good. That’s good.”
Thorne taps a single manicured finger against the obsidian. “Enough with the sentiment. We have a breach. One of ours is in police custody.” His gaze sweeps across the room, cold and hard. “Darius. The warrant. What is their probable cause?”
Darius’s focus narrows, his gaze sweeping from Thorne to me. “The damage is a single, high-resolution elevator camera. They have her on video. Time-stamped. Clear shot of her profile. In the victim’s building on the night of his death.”
“Is that enough to convict?” I ask.
“It’s enough to paint a picture,” Darius corrects, his tone precise as a scalpel.
“And a prosecutor will paint a very simple, very compelling picture for the jury. It goes like this: A beautiful woman with pink hair serves a man a drink. Later that night, she appears at his apartment. An hour later, he’s dead, killed by a poison so rare it screams of intent.
They have means, they have opportunity, and they will invent a motive.
It’s clean, it’s simple, and juries love simple. ”
Thorne leans forward, his hands flat on the obsidian table. “But they can’t connect her to the poison. For all they know, she was there for a nightcap. A hookup. Anything.”
“Exactly,” Darius says, a flicker of approval in his eyes.
“And that is the entire foundation of our defense. The ‘innocent visit.’ You taking her kit out of play wasn’t just helpful, Calloway.
It was the single most important move of the night.
You removed the murder weapon from the board.
Without it, they have no physical evidence. No poison was found in her apartment.”
He leans back, steepling his fingers. “The video proves proximity, not action. Our argument is simple: she was there, yes. But she left. And after she left, the real killer administered the poison. We don’t have to prove who did it.
We just have to make the jury believe that someone else could have. The other-man defense.”
He pauses, letting that sink in before delivering the counter-strike.
“But a prosecutor,” he continues, his tone sharpening, “will call our reasonable doubt a fantasy. They will say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the defense wants you to believe in a phantom. They want you to believe that on the one night Mr. Briggs was murdered with an exotic poison, a woman he barely knew just happened to be in his apartment, and that some other, invisible killer slipped in and did the deed.’ They will make it sound ridiculous.”
“They’ll dig into her life,” Lazlo adds from his corner, his voice a low rasp. “They’ll search for a pattern. Does she go home with men from the bar often? Are there other victims from the bar?”
“Precisely,” Darius affirms. “They will use the video as an anchor and build their entire case around it. Right now, our theory is a ghost. A useful ghost, but a ghost nonetheless. And we’re putting our ghost up against their high-definition video.”
“It’s not enough.” The words are torn from me, raw and desperate. I turn my gaze from Darius to Thorne, my composure finally shattering. “Make it disappear. You need to make the video disappear.”
Darius allows himself a small, wry smile. “Evidence of this nature doesn’t simply vanish, Calloway.” His gaze shifts to the man beside me. “But…data can be corrupted. Files can be lost. Perspectives can be altered.”
Xander looks up from his laptop, a single eyebrow raised in question. “What, exactly, are you suggesting, Counselor?”