Decker
The road runs straight out of town before it starts to climb, and I don’t slow down until the buildings give way to trees.
I check the mirror. Empty road. Enough men got a clear look at my face today that empty doesn’t mean much yet.
I run it back while I drive, because that’s what I do when a job goes sideways. Find the moment it turned. Learn from it.
The meeting was a setup. That’s the first thing.
Whatever she went down that lane expecting, the men waiting for her were there to close an account, and they’d planned it well.
Two ends of the lane covered before she arrived.
A vehicle in reserve. That’s not a handler losing patience. That’s an operation.
The second thing is harder to look at. So I make myself look at it.
I didn’t decide to go in there for her. There was no moment where I weighed it, picked a side, and moved.
I was watching a suspect, and then I was breaking a man’s wrist, and I’m not sure how I got to that point.
I’ve worked twenty years on instinct, and my instinct has never once skipped the part where I choose.
I rub a hand over my face, put it back on the wheel, fingers drumming.
I could dress it up. Tell myself I needed her alive because a dead suspect answers no questions, and that’s even true. A tracker protects the thread. Any professional would’ve done the same.
Yeah, right, Decker.
Any professional would’ve called it in by now, too.
The phone’s been sitting on the seat for an hour. I haven’t touched it.
That’s the part I can’t square. I always have the next move.
It’s the one thing I’ve built a reputation on—hand Decker the mess, he’ll already be three steps into cleaning it up.
Right now I’m driving north with a bound woman under a tarp and no plan past the next curve, and every time I reach for one, the bear leans on me instead.
“Goddamn you,” I mutter. The beast’s been leaning since the lane. A steady weight, low and certain. He knows exactly what he wants. He’s just waiting for me to stop pretending I’m still deciding.
The phone goes off on the seat. Viktor.
There’s no good way into this, so I put him on speaker and keep both hands on the wheel.
“You’ve gone quiet,” he says.
“Driving.”
“Where’s the woman?”
“With me.”
“Good.” A pause, and I can hear him waiting for the rest. I don’t give it to him. “The depot clerk logged a van out with her this morning, and it never came back up the mountain. You want to fill me in?”
“There was trouble in town. Third party. I got her clear.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“The kind I’m still working out. I need time to put more information together before I bring her anywhere.”
“You don’t need more information.” His voice doesn’t climb. It never does. “That’s why I’m calling. We have enough.”
I watch the road and let him say it.
“My team searched her quarters this morning. Zoe led it, two witnesses, by the book. The room came up clean. But her badge history puts her in the restricted wing six nights running, every one during a shift change, in spaces she’s got no clearance for.
A supply runner’s credential, opening doors it was never cut for. ”
My shoulders go tight against the seat. I make myself ease back before I answer.
“That doesn’t fit what I watched all week. She runs errands. Keeps her head down. I watched her walk past an open door with our ops board in plain sight and never once turn her head.”
“Maybe you just didn’t see her. Maybe you weren’t around when she did it.”
“I was around.” My teeth clench. I release them. “I would have picked it up.”
“Or she’s better at this than you gave her credit for, and you missed it.” He says it flat. “That’s the whole point of someone who’s good at it, Decker. You don’t catch them being good at it.”
I don’t have an answer for that. The logs are real, or real enough that I can’t prove otherwise from a truck cab forty miles up a mountain. All I’ve got standing against his file is a week of watching a woman not do the thing it says she did. And a hunch.
“Bring her in,” Viktor says. “She goes into containment tonight. It keeps her contained while we finish the investigation, and it keeps her safe from whatever went down in town. The system works. You saw it work with Jericho. We took that file apart piece by piece until it cleared him.”
“Jericho had half of Aurora fighting for him while that file sat open. Who does she have?”
“She has the process. That’s what it’s for.”
“I’ve seen your process in action, Viktor. I don’t like it.”
“You’re talking about the feral—”
“He wasn’t feral. They made him that way. We kept it going. The process.” I let out a breath through my nose.
“Nobody in that chain wanted to hurt him, Decker. Every one of them followed procedure.”
“A procedure built for a situation that wasn’t his, and it broke him more. You put him in a room with a psychopath. Your procedure.”
He lets out a long breath. “And I’ve told you that I made a mistake. I know that now.”
“So who’s to say you won’t make another one with her? She came from a place just like his. Locked up. Strapped down.”
I fight down something that wants to crawl up my spine. It’s never been this visceral to me before.
“We wouldn’t strap her down, for fuck’s sake.” He’s losing patience now. “We did that for his own safety. We were trying to save him.”
“Right. What saved him was Sable putting him in a van and driving him out of there. Away from Aurora.”
I’m probably being unfair. Aurora does the right thing. I believe that, or I wouldn’t have worked for Viktor in the first place. But their system is built for clear cases, and I’ve spent a week learning that whatever this woman is, she isn’t one.
Hand her over tonight, and the evidence convicts her by the weekend. I don’t trust the evidence. And if the trouble in town means what I think it means, the story is bigger than it seems. She’ll never tell it from inside a cell.
I can’t take her back.
“Decker,” Viktor says into the quiet I’ve let sit too long. “Tell me you’re bringing her in.”
“I’ll call you when I know more.”
“Decker, you—”
I end the call. Give him a straight no, and he either has to make it an order or let me walk away from one. I’m not ready to find out which he’d pick.
I set the phone face-down on the seat. It vibrates three more times, then stops.
So that’s the outline of my next move, and it’s nothing I’d have drawn up.
Bring her back, and she disappears into a process that isn’t built for her.
Leave her loose, and the people from town finish what they started.
The only ground left is mine. Which means I’m about to do the one thing I’ve spent my whole life not doing: take a woman who wants nothing to do with me and keep her somewhere she can’t leave.
I’m not going to pretend that’s okay.
The bear settles as the turnoff comes up, scenting the air with a satisfaction that unsettles me. He should be pacing. Strange ground, rules broken, a hostile organization behind us, no plan. Instead he’s calm, like something that’s finally going the right direction.
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to. I’m the one who took the turnoff. I’m the one who started driving us here in the first place. I knew where I was heading the moment we left town. I just had to admit it.
Road gives way to gravel, gravel to packed dirt, trees closing in until I see what I’m looking for. A clearing. A path leading into the foothills of mountains I’ve called home. Of a sort.
I cut the engine and sit with my hands on the wheel. Behind us the track’s already gone to shadow. I check the mirror once more. Nothing back there. Not yet.
I get out and drop the tailgate. Pull back the tarp. She’s awake, eyeing me. Neither of us says a word.
Whatever fight was in her back in that lane, she’s used it up. What’s left is worse: the flat, careful look of a woman working out what I’m about to do next.
And the real problem is that I have no idea.