Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Three days after Katherine took down Cinder at the east service gate, Jasper stood in his office and watched federal agents pack the Vance papers into evidence containers.
He hated every second of it.
They wore gloves, worked in pairs, photographed each box before touching it.
They logged each folder and treated the old papers with the kind of respect Katherine demanded from where she stood six feet away, supervising the process.
Her sprained wrist was wrapped in a brace, and her mouth was set in that calm, professional line that meant she was one inconvenience away from verbally skinning someone.
And Jasper was hopelessly and irrevocably in love with her.
Her color had returned. The bruising along her shoulder was fading from angry purple to yellow-green.
The knot at her temple had gone down, and the doctor had cleared her concussion symptoms as mild, with the usual warnings about headaches, dizziness, and not trying to solve an entire federal conspiracy while sleep-deprived.
Katherine had listened politely, then ignored the spirit of every instruction while technically following the letter.
Jasper admired that more than he cared to admit.
A federal evidence tech reached for one of Katherine’s handwritten logs, and Jasper saw her inhale through her nose.
“Carefully,” she said.
The tech paused. “Yes, ma’am.”
Katherine’s expression didn’t change. “That log cross-references the Cinder page, the flame watermark notation, and the cipher terminology. If you separate it from the chain without logging the connection, you’ll create a gap.”
The tech glanced at the senior agent, a gray-haired woman named Porter who had arrived from D.C. with a face that suggested she had once frightened committees for sport. She gave the slightest nod. “Log the connection.”
The tech obeyed.
Katherine relaxed by maybe one millimeter.
Jasper leaned against the edge of his desk, arms folded, and told himself not to interfere. This was her world. She’d earned the right to stand there and make everyone in the room do it correctly.
She’d also earned the right to leave.
That was the part he couldn’t get his head around.
Outside his office window, Blackridge sat beneath a washed-clean sky, the storm from the night of Cinder’s arrest long gone.
Sunlight flashed on the pines beyond the compound fence.
Garrett had reopened most of the perimeter that morning.
Mack and CB were back from a meeting with Detective Mallory.
Vivi was in the conference room with two federal attorneys, Reid, and enough coffee to keep a courtroom awake through jury instructions.
The compound had survived.
Katherine had survived.
Emma, her husband George, and the twins were safe.
Garrett had put a protective detail on Katherine’s sister within twenty minutes of learning about the threat, and by the time Katherine woke the next morning, the family had already been moved to a secure hotel outside Richmond with the girls, two federal marshals, and one very confused golden retriever named Waffles.
Emma had called Katherine crying, furious, and terrified in equal measure, which Jasper respected.
Any sister worth having would lead with all three.
Cinder had been arrested under the name Nathan Soot.
The name had almost made Jasper shake his head when Mallory said it, because of course the bastard had chosen a joke only he understood. Nathan Soot. Cinder. Smoke and residue. A man who had lived for decades under false names, private contracts, and off-book orders.
The formal identification had come through after the FBI ran his prints against old sealed personnel records that someone in Washington had suddenly become very motivated to unseal.
Nathan Soot had been buried in a defunct operations file tied to Walter Vance, Matthew Caldwell, and a restricted action channel no one wanted to admit had ever existed.
Upton’s authorization code on the flame-marked original had changed that.
People could deny a memo. They could dispute a copy. They could smear a woman, attack a private security firm, misroute a flag, kill a paper trail, and call every ugly thing an administrative error.
But the original had survived. Katherine had made sure of it.
Jasper looked at her now, watching as she corrected another evidence tech’s handling of the sleeve containing the flame-marked page, and his chest tightened.
Nathan Soot was alive, though in federal custody and lawyered up so tightly he might as well have been sealed in laminate.
He hadn’t admitted to being Cinder. He hadn’t admitted to working under Upton.
He hadn’t admitted to killing anyone, including the missing courier Katherine had identified as her attacker.
Corrigan.
They finally had a name for him, too. Michael Corrigan, Agency security contractor with a history of clean assignments, sealed travel, and a suspiciously narrow digital footprint.
Jasper had pulled him from the gate footage, the false retrieval order, and a buried contractor file Porter’s people had delivered.
Corrigan had worked with Caldwell Strategic Risk on at least three records-transfer operations, and now he was gone.
Not arrested or hospitalized. He’d just disappeared.
His blood had been recovered near the quarry road where CB lost the SUV.
The SUV itself had been found abandoned twenty miles outside Blackridge, wiped clean and burned from the inside out.
Mallory suspected Corrigan had been executed for failing and disposed of somewhere between Blackridge and the state line.
Cinder hadn’t admitted to anything, and Jasper doubted he would.
Men like Nathan Soot didn’t confess. They waited to see what the surviving paper would prove. Unfortunately for him, Katherine’s paper proved a hell of a lot.
Agent Porter closed the final evidence case and signed the seal. “Ms. Townsend.”
Katherine lifted her chin.
“We’ll transport the Vance materials under federal evidence protocol. You’ll ride with Agent Ramos and me to the airport. Your statement will continue in Langley tomorrow morning.”
Jasper’s jaw tightened before he could stop it.
Katherine didn’t look at him. “Understood.”
Porter’s gaze flicked briefly toward Jasper, as if she’d felt his objection from across the room.
She probably had. “Mr. Perault, Shadow Point’s cooperation has been noted.
Your footage, chain-of-custody logs, and assistance in preserving the Vance papers will be included in the investigative file. ”
“Noted by whom?” he asked.
One corner of Porter’s mouth twitched. “The people currently deciding how many careers this case ends.”
“Upton?”
Her expression cooled. “Associate Deputy Director Richard Upton has been placed on administrative leave pending a formal investigation. His access has been suspended. That’s all I’m authorized to say.”
“That isn’t enough.”
“And that isn’t your jurisdiction. Your video statement has been logged. If we need further assistance or clarification, we’ll be in touch.”
Katherine finally looked at Jasper, and the warning in her eyes was gentle but clear. Don’t pick a fight with the one federal agent who is actually helping us.
Fine. He could delay that particular fight.
Porter nodded to her team. “Five minutes.”
The agents carried the evidence cases out of Jasper’s office, leaving the room strangely bare and too quiet. The way it had been before Katherine Townsend had blown into his life.
The Vance boxes had occupied the wall for days, turning his workspace into Katherine’s archive, and now the absence of them seemed louder than their presence had.
The coffee table still held one of her pencils.
A yellow sticky note with her handwriting hung from under one of his monitors.
Priss’s gray hair decorated the corner of his chair like a tiny declaration of ownership.
Katherine stood in the middle of the room, her injured wrist tucked against her body.
Jasper closed the office door. For a moment, neither of them spoke.
The silence hurt more than the wound in his arm, which had settled into an annoying pull beneath the bandage every time he moved wrong.
Katherine had patched him up twice since the gate shooting.
Once while trembling. Once while scolding him for not resting it.
He’d let her because it gave her something to do with her fear, and because having her hands on him had become a thing he wanted too much.
Now she was leaving.
“You don’t have to go today,” he said.
Her expression softened in a way that made it worse. “I do.”
“Porter can take the papers. You can give a deposition remotely.”
“Not for this.” She glanced toward the door, where the evidence cases had disappeared.
“The Vance papers are entering federal custody because of what I found, what I decoded, and what happened here. I have to testify to the chain. I have to explain the cipher. I have to sit in the room and make sure they don’t turn this into another administrative fog bank. ”
“They’ll try.”
“I know.” She stepped closer. “This is my job, Jasper.”
He hated the pride in her voice almost as much as he loved it.
Love. Not attraction. Not protectiveness. Not the adrenaline aftermath of bullets and blood and fear. Those things had been there, but this was older than the kiss, deeper than the past few nights they’d spent in each other’s arms, sharper than the fear of watching her run toward danger.
This was him watching her stand in his office with a sprained wrist and a federal investigation waiting, determined to walk back into the institution that had nearly gotten her killed because truth mattered more to her than comfort.
He loved her, and she was leaving. “You might still be in danger,” he said.