CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO #2
He tried to respond, found the words wouldn't fully assemble, and felt himself drift toward something dark and formless, aware only distantly of more gunfire, more shouted commands, the exact chaos of a tactical operation reaching its violent, uncertain climax somewhere around him while he lay bleeding on cold ground, Vanessa's hands the only solid anchor keeping him tethered to consciousness at all.
The corridor, he knew, some fragment of professional pride surfacing even through the pain, had worked — he heard, distantly, tactical's coordinator confirming a breach through the unmarked service entrance, heard the gunfire finally beginning to taper toward silence, heard, faintest of all, something that might have been a child's frightened crying somewhere inside the building, a sound that told him, even as the darkness finally closed in fully around his vision, that whatever tonight had cost him personally, it had also, somewhere inside that building, actually worked.
I'm still in here, he thought, the same promise he'd made himself weeks ago in a different terrible night, and let the darkness take him, trusting Vanessa's hands, trusting the operation, trusting that he'd fought hard enough tonight to have earned the right to wake up on the other side of it.
? ? ?
She called Daniel at two-fifteen, unable to sit with the fear alone any longer, and found him already awake, his own voice carrying a tension that told her, before he said a word, that something had reached him too.
"I got a call," he said. "Not from Vanessa. From somebody official — I think task force personnel, though they didn't fully identify themselves. Just told me there'd been a development tonight, that she was safe as of the call, and that I should expect to hear more within the next several hours."
"Ruiz called me too. Asked for financial records — something about a facility, a raid happening tonight.
" Mia paced the length of her small living room, unable to sit still with the distinctive electric fear currently coursing through her.
"He wouldn't tell me if Nash was okay. Just that I needed to trust him. "
"That's what I got too. 'Safe as of the call.
' Which is either really reassuring or the most carefully hedged sentence I've ever heard, and I can't tell which.
" Daniel's voice carried the exhausted strain of a man who'd spent seven weeks — eight, now, she supposed, counting from his side of things — learning exactly how to sit with information this incomplete.
"I keep telling myself no news is good news.
I don't actually believe that anymore, if I'm honest. I think no news is just no news, and my brain fills the gap with whatever it wants regardless of what I tell it to believe. "
"I know that feeling much better than I'd like to.
" Mia sank onto the couch, phone pressed hard against her ear, needing the sound of another voice carrying the same fear as much as she needed any actual information.
"Will you stay on the phone with me? I don't think I can sit with this alone right now. "
"Already not planning on hanging up," Daniel said, something warm and steady underneath the exhaustion in his voice. "We'll wait together. However long it takes."
They stayed on the line for the better part of two hours, trading small fragments of conversation interspersed with long stretches of silence neither of them felt any need to fill, two people bound now by noticeably more than a shared coffee shop table and a mutual understanding of uncertainty — bound by an actual, specific, terrifying night neither of them could do anything about except wait, together, for whatever news finally arrived.
It was nearly four-thirty when Mia's phone buzzed with an incoming call from a number she didn't recognize, and she answered it with hands shaking so hard she nearly dropped the phone entirely.
"Mia." Fuentes's voice, unmistakable even through the specific exhaustion carried in it. "I wanted to call you myself, rather than let this come through Webb secondhand, given everything tonight."
"Is he alive." The words came out raw, stripped of every careful composure she'd built over seven weeks of exactly this waiting.
"He's alive. Injured — not critically, I want to be clear about that immediately, but injured, and I'd be doing you a disservice pretending the injury is minor.
He's being transported to a hospital now, under protective custody until we're certain the operation's fully contained.
" A pause, and when Fuentes continued, her voice carried something Mia hadn't heard from her before across seven weeks of careful, measured updates — genuine, unguarded relief.
"Your information tonight, Mia — the financial map you sent Ruiz — that's what let tactical move fast enough to hit the facility before anyone inside had a chance to disappear the evidence, or worse.
Seventeen children were recovered tonight.
I wanted you to know that specifically, because I think you've more than earned understanding exactly what your work made possible. "
Mia felt something break open in her chest, grief and relief and horror and a fierce, overwhelming pride all tangled together too closely to separate, and found herself crying too hard to speak for a long moment, Daniel's voice still faintly audible through the other phone still pressed to her other ear, asking, gently, what had happened, whether she was okay.
"Which hospital," she managed finally. "I need to see him. Please, Agent Fuentes. Whatever protocol says, I need to see him."
"Port Callahan General," Fuentes said. "I'll clear you through security myself. You've more than earned that much tonight too."
? ? ?