Chapter 7 #2
"Well," I said, taking another bite of omelet, "for what it's worth, these eggs are legitimately fantastic. Not adequate. Fantastic. I'm going on the record."
He blinked at the tonal shift, and then the corner of his mouth curved. Not the startled laugh from earlier. Something smaller. Quieter. The kind of smile that was just for me, in this kitchen, on this morning, and nowhere else.
I looked at my plate because looking at that smile for too long felt like looking at the sun.
"Fantastic," he repeated. "That's an upgrade from adequate."
"Don't let it go to your head."
"Too late."
We finished breakfast and I washed my plate because I was a guest and because it gave me something to do with my hands that wasn't reaching for him.
He dried it. We moved around the kitchen in the same careful choreography we'd developed in the storage unit, aware of each other's positions, maintaining distance, orbiting like planets that had agreed on their trajectories.
It was comfortable and unbearable at the same time.
Agent Joseph Bates was not what I expected.
I'd pictured standard FBI: dark suit, stern expression, the kind of humorless competence that came from years of bureaucratic service.
Bates was wearing a rumpled blazer over a polo shirt, had a coffee stain on his sleeve, and greeted us at the cafe with a tired smile that suggested he hadn't slept well in approximately a decade.
"Ms. Ashford." He shook my hand with a firm grip, his eyes doing that assessing thing that law enforcement types seemed hardwired for. "Will tells me you're the one who cracked the financial trail."
"The financial trail was there. I just followed it."
"Modest." He glanced at Will. "I like her better than you already."
"Everyone does," Will said dryly. "It's becoming a pattern."
We settled into a corner booth, and I spread out my evidence: the timeline of Meridian fund transfers, the utility payment correlations, the shell company map. Bates listened without interrupting as I walked him through each connection, his expression growing grimmer with every page.
When I finished, he let out a low whistle. "This is exceptional work. You've built a roadmap to prosecution."
"But?" I could hear the hesitation in his voice.
"But." He tapped the page showing the discretionary fund transfers.
"This gets us to Meridian Tech's accounts.
It doesn't get us to Victor Reeves personally.
Without proof that he authorized these transfers with full knowledge of what they funded, his lawyers will argue negligence at worst. Rogue subordinates. Plausible deniability."
"He'll walk," I said flatly.
"He'll walk," Bates confirmed. "And the subordinates will take the fall while he starts the whole thing over somewhere else."
I looked at Will. His expression was carefully neutral, which I was starting to learn meant he'd known this was coming.
"There's a way to get direct evidence," he said. "Reeves has a personal assistant named Eric Mendez. Handles his private scheduling, communications, the things that don't go through corporate channels."
Bates raised an eyebrow. "And?"
"Eric has a gambling problem. Significant debts to people who don't accept payment plans.
" Will's voice was calm, clinical. "If we leverage those debts, not with money, but with the right kind of pressure, we can turn him.
He has access to Reeves's private study.
A surveillance device in that room would capture authorization conversations and payment discussions. Direct evidence."
The silence that followed was heavy.
"That's illegal surveillance," Bates said finally. "Anything obtained that way..."
"Would be inadmissible, yes. But it would tell you exactly where to look. What to subpoena. How to build an admissible case." Will held Bates's gaze. "Sometimes the system needs a nudge to see what's right in front of it."
Bates rubbed his jaw, looking deeply uncomfortable. "You're asking me to look the other way while you commit multiple felonies."
"I'm asking you to be ready when the evidence materializes through legitimate channels."
They stared at each other for a long moment, some kind of silent negotiation that had the cadence of a conversation they'd had before, in different forms, about different targets. Then Bates sighed and gathered up the copies of my financial evidence.
"I'll start building a file," he said. "Officially, based solely on Ms. Ashford's forensic work. The rest..." He shook his head. "I don't want to know."
He left. Will and I sat in the quiet cafe, the weight of what had just been discussed settling over us like fog.
"You've done this before," I said. "The nudging."
"Yes."
"And it worked?"
"It got people off the streets who would have walked otherwise." He met my eyes. "That's not a justification. It's just the truth."
We drove back to the penthouse in silence.
The city slid past, all glass and steel and people living their ordinary lives, unaware of the trafficking ring operating in their midst. I watched a woman walk a golden retriever.
A man argue into his phone. Two teenagers share earbuds on a bus stop bench.
Normal life. The kind of life that Victor Reeves's victims didn't get to have.
"The surveillance," I said finally, still staring out the window. "The blackmail. It's a crime."
"Yes."
"It's the kind of thing my father did." The words came out before I could organize them properly.
Before I could frame them in something less raw.
"'Just this once.' 'It's necessary.' 'The end justifies the means.
'" My voice went tight and I hated it. "That's how it starts.
A line in the sand, and then you just keep moving it until you can't remember where it was. "
Will didn't respond immediately. He drove in silence, and I appreciated that. The silence. Some people fill pauses because they're afraid of what the other person is thinking. Will left them open.
"Your father stole for himself," he said finally. "For money. For status. For a life he thought he deserved."
"And you're different?"
"I'm asking you to help me put a man in prison who traffics human beings." His voice was quiet. "I won't pretend the method is clean. But I won't pretend the alternative is acceptable either."
I thought of the photographs in the Reeves file. The young faces. The hollow eyes. Subject 7. Subject 12. Not numbers. I kept trying to see them as numbers because numbers were what I understood, but they weren't numbers. They were people. Somebody's people.
"I need to think," I said.
"Take whatever time you need."
He meant it. I could tell because he didn't follow up with an argument.
Didn't lay out a case or present counterpoints or try to lead me to the conclusion he wanted.
He just... let me sit with it. Which was either genuine respect or very sophisticated manipulation, and I hated that I couldn't always tell the difference, and I hated more that I was starting to trust him enough to assume the first one.
Back at the penthouse, I retreated to the guest room and sat on the edge of the bed, staring at nothing.
His jacket was still on the chair. I could smell his cologne on it, or maybe I was imagining that, or maybe the distinction didn't matter because my brain had apparently filed "the way Will Steele smells" under "essential data" without my permission.
I thought about my father. Not the headlines version.
Not the twelve million dollars and the forty-three families.
The real version. The one who'd started with one bad decision and told himself it was temporary, reversible, not that serious.
The one who'd looked at the line in the sand and taken one step over it, then another, then another, until he was so far past it he couldn't see it anymore.
I thought about what made a line a line.
Whether it was the act itself or the reason behind it.
Whether my father's crime was worse because it was selfish, or whether the selfishness was just the detail that made it easier to condemn.
If he'd stolen the same money and given it to charity, would I feel differently? Should I?
The answer came slowly, not as a revelation but as a settling. Like sediment finding the bottom.
Yes. The reason mattered. Not because it made the act legal, but because it determined what kind of person you became on the other side of it.
My father had crossed the line and become smaller.
Greedier. More willing to lie. The crossing had corrupted him, inch by inch, because the thing he was crossing for was himself.
Will crossed lines too. But every time he did, he was reaching toward somebody else. Toward victims who had no one. Toward a system that couldn't fix itself.
That wasn't the same thing. It wasn't clean. It wasn't comfortable. But it wasn't the same thing.
An hour passed. Maybe two.
Then I got up, walked back out to the living room, and found Will standing at the window, staring out at the city. He turned when he heard me approach, and I saw the question in his eyes, have you decided? but he didn't ask it.
I crossed to the kitchen island, opened my laptop, and pulled up the files on Eric Mendez.
"His biggest debt is to a bookie named Sal Terranova," I said, scrolling through the data. "Forty-three thousand. Independent operation, no ties to Reeves."
Will moved to stand beside me. Not behind me, not looming. Beside. Equal.
"That's our leverage," he said quietly.
"We offer to make it go away if he cooperates. Clean slate. And we make it very clear that if he doesn't cooperate, Sal will learn exactly how much Eric's been skimming from Reeves's petty cash to cover his losses."
"That's... creative."
"That's forensic accounting." I finally looked at him. "I'm not doing this because I think it's right. I'm doing it because those photographs won't stop showing up when I close my eyes, and I can't live with that and do nothing. There's a difference between that and thinking it's right."
He studied me for a moment. Something in his expression shifted, but he didn't name it, and I was grateful for that, because I didn't want this moment to be more than what it was: a decision, made with open eyes, by someone who was choosing to act.
"And if you start losing sleep over it? Over whether this is the same slope your father was on?"
"Then I'll tell you. And you'll tell me the truth, even if it's not what I want to hear."
"I can do that."
"Promise me."
"I promise."
It wasn't enough. Promises were just words, and my father had been very good at words.
But it was a start. And Will was looking at me with an expression that was the opposite of glib, the opposite of casual.
He looked like a man who understood exactly what I was asking and exactly what it would cost him to follow through.
We stood there, side by side at the kitchen island, the city glittering beyond the windows. I'd crossed a line. There was no going back now, only forward, into whatever came next.
But standing beside Will in the kitchen that smelled like coffee and omelets and the ordinary domesticity of a morning that had no business being ordinary, I realized the line hadn't felt like a cliff.
It had felt like a door. The same one I'd been thinking about since the drive home from the storage unit.
I still couldn't see what was on the other side. But I'd stepped through it. And Will was standing there too, which meant whatever was coming, I wouldn't be figuring it out alone.
"Lindsey," Will said, and the way he said my name had changed somewhere in the past week. It used to sound like a chess move. Now it sounded like something else. Something I wasn't going to think about right now because I had a gambling addict to profile.
"Yeah?"
"Eric Mendez has a routine. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, he works late at Reeves's private residence. The security system goes into maintenance mode between 10 and 10:15 PM for scheduled updates."
My pulse picked up. Not fear. Not exactly. "That's our window."
"That's our window." He met my eyes, and there was something fierce in his gaze. "We have ten days to prepare. And once we start, there's no stopping. Reeves will know we're not backing down."
I thought about my violated apartment. About the message they'd sent. About Subject 7 and Subject 12 and all the other numbers that were people.
"Good," I said. "Let him know."
Will smiled then, not the almost-smile, not the ghost of amusement, but a real, dangerous smile that transformed his face into something sharp and intent. I felt it in my chest like a match striking. Filed it under "problems to address later," where it joined a growing collection.
"Ten days," he said. "And then we take him apart."
The words settled into me like a promise. Ten days to prepare. Ten days to question whether I'd made the right choice. Ten days of living in Will Steele's penthouse, eating his omelets, arguing about restaurant hygiene ratings, watching him roll up his sleeves and pretend I didn't notice.
Ten days before everything changed.
I was going to need a lot of coffee. And possibly a therapist. And definitely a better strategy for maintaining professional detachment than the one I currently had, which was no strategy at all.
But first: Eric Mendez.
The rest could wait. Probably.