Chapter 16 Brenna #2
Luke who’d spent three days at my apartment after my bad breakup with David, not saying a word when I cried into his shoulder, just being there.
He’d made me eat when I had no appetite, made me laugh when I thought I’d never smile again, never once saying, “I told you so,” even though he’d warned me about David from the beginning.
Luke who’d stood in the rain at Arlington National Cemetery as we buried our grandfather, his hand never leaving mine through the entire service.
“He would’ve been so proud of you,” Luke had whispered as they folded the flag and handed it to our father.
“A prosecutor fighting for justice, just like he always talked about.”
The memories crashed over me in waves, each one making the current situation more impossible. This was Luke. My protector. My champion. My best friend before I’d even understood what friendship meant.
We reached the Sausalito house just after one in the morning. Zero one hundred. But I couldn’t think in military time. It reminded me of Luke. Everything did.
When we pulled up, the familiar structure looked the same but felt completely foreign, like returning to a childhood home to find it on the wrong street. Even in the wrong town.
Kodiak and Emma immediately transformed the dining room into a command center.
Their laptops opened with soft chimes while secure phones charged with tiny LED indicators, and encrypted connections were established with quiet electronic handshakes.
The house that had felt like a sanctuary when we left it, where Atticus and I had played at being married, now felt like a war room where battle plans would be drawn against my own brother.
“What if we misunderstood what we heard?” I asked Emma.
“We have to follow the evidence,” she replied.
“Even if it destroys an innocent man?”
Her eyes met mine, but she didn’t respond.
One-thirty came and went, each minute an eternity.
Two o’clock. Two-fifteen. Two-thirty. I paced the living room, unable to sit still, unable to think clearly.
Atticus stood at the window, a silent sentinel watching the bay as if answers might sail in with the fog.
Emma worked quietly at her laptop, occasionally exchanging encrypted messages with the team.
Kodiak monitored multiple screens, his usual jokes replaced with focused intensity.
The coffeemaker gurgled. The clock on the wall ticked with metronomic persistence. My phone sat dark on the table—I couldn’t bear to look at it, to see if Luke had texted again, to see his name, reread his message, like nothing in our lives had changed.
Admiral and Tank arrived at two-forty. The private jet from New York had made good time, but the weight of what we were dealing with showed in the lines around his eyes and the set of his jaw.
By then, Alice had compiled what they’d found—evidence discovered only after seeing Luke at the resort, patterns that became suspicious only in this new context.
“Three deposits to Redpoint accounts over the past week,” Admiral said after initiating the videoconference with Alice, Dragon, and Tex.
He spread printouts across the dining table where, just days ago, Atticus and I had shared breakfast like a real couple.
“Each structured just under federal reporting limits—$9,900, $9,850, $9,920. Classic structuring to avoid detection.”
“Luke’s credentials were used to access classified systems five times in the past seven days,” Alice said, then added, “This all appears very recent, despite some attempts to backdate.”
“There’s also encrypted communication metadata from the past week, backdated to look older,” said Tex.
“These could be mistakes. Coincidences,” I suggested.
“This pattern…it’s not random, Brenna,” Atticus said, studying the data, his voice strained.
“But it’s Luke. Your best friend.”
“I know.” The conflict was evident in his tone.
Each piece of evidence felt like another stone added to my chest, making it harder to breathe.
“This is enough for probable cause,” Admiral said sometime after the sun had risen. His voice sounded heavy with the weight of the decision. “Not overwhelming proof, but enough for arrest warrants. The FBI will want to move quickly.”
When each new piece of evidence came in, Atticus asked questions—specific, targeted, clinical.
“Could someone else have used his credentials?”
“What were the exact timestamps on the system access?”
“Which encryption protocol was used for the communications?”
“What specific data was downloaded during each breach?”
He was suggesting possibilities, but the evidence kept contradicting them. His defense gradually weakened as more proof mounted.
I watched his increasing resignation with growing frustration.
“The FBI is prepared to move,” Admiral announced after ending a call, setting his phone down with finality. “Federal magistrate will review at zero nine hundred. With the evidence we have, warrants will be issued. Arrest teams will be briefed at ten hundred hours.”
“When will he be arrested?” I asked, my voice barely audible, as if speaking quietly might somehow make this less real.
“Eleven hundred hours. They’ll take him at his hotel. They want him in custody before he has a chance to flee or destroy evidence.”
Atticus stood at the window, studying something on his tablet. His shoulders were tense.
“We should be there,” Admiral said, gathering the papers into a folder. “Luke knows you both. Seeing familiar faces might prevent escalation, make him more likely to cooperate.”
“Agreed,” Atticus said, turning from the window.
“Maybe seeing us will help him explain—” I started.
“Or make him feel more betrayed,” Atticus said quietly.
The morning continued to crawl by with agonizing slowness.
But each hour brought us closer to the moment that would shatter everything.
I attempted to eat something—Emma had made toast—but I couldn’t swallow.
I tried to review the evidence again, but the words blurred.
I thought about calling my parents, but had no idea what to say.
Could I actually tell them not to warn my brother of what was about to happen?
At ten-thirty, we left in a convoy of black SUVs that moved too quickly through the sparse Sunday-morning traffic.
I sat between Atticus and Emma in the middle row of the vehicle, my hands folded in my lap like a child in church, focusing on breathing.
In. Out. In. Out. Anything to keep from screaming, from demanding they stop, from calling Luke to warn him.
But I couldn’t. I was a federal prosecutor. I’d taken oaths. I had duties that superseded even family. Even when those duties meant helping destroy my own brother.
“There’s still time to stop this,” I said.
“The warrants are signed,” Atticus replied.
“But if we explained—”
“Explained what? What we heard?”
Luke’s extended-stay hotel looked ordinary in the morning sun—a medium-rise building with a coffeehouse on the ground floor, the kind of place where tech workers lived for months while on projects.
The vehicles surrounded it, and agents took positions at the exits.
Everything was by the book, designed to prevent someone from escaping.
We climbed to the fourth floor. The hallway was empty except for our footsteps on the industrial carpet, the sound both muffled and somehow too loud. The numbers on the doors counted up like a countdown. 419. 421. 423. 425.
Room 427.
The lead agent knocked with authority. “FBI. Open the door.”
Shuffling sounds from inside. Then Luke’s voice, confused but not panicked. “What’s going on? Is there a problem in the building?”
“Sir, we need you to open the door. Now.”
The lock clicked. The door opened. Luke stood there, in track pants and an old Air Force Academy T-shirt, faded now from too many washes.
His hair was mussed from sleep, his laptop open on the desk behind him, showing a presentation titled “Redpoint Q3 Projections” with charts and graphs I couldn’t process.
His expression shifted from confusion to shock as agents flooded into the room like water through a broken dam.
“Luke Austen, you’re under arrest for violations of the Espionage Act, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and theft of classified government property.”
“What—” His words cut off as they pulled his hands behind his back, the handcuffs clicking with horrible finality, a sound that would echo in my nightmares.
They read him his rights while Luke’s eyes swept the room wildly, trying to understand what was happening, trying to make sense of the impossible. His gaze landed on Atticus standing in the doorway, with the FBI team, and the betrayal that crossed his face made me want to wretch.
“Mason? What the hell is this? What are you doing here?”
Then his gaze found me, hovering behind Atticus, trying to make myself invisible, and the anger drained away. Something infinitely worse replaced it. Hurt so deep it made my knees buckle. Emma caught my arm, keeping me upright.
“Bug?” His voice broke on my childhood nickname, the one he’d given me when I was three and obsessed with ladybugs. “You think I—? You actually believe—?”
“Luke, please—” I started forward, but Emma held me back.
“No.” He straightened despite the cuffs, drawing on the military bearing that had never quite left him even years after his service ended.
His shoulders squared, his chin lifted, the same posture he’d had in his dress blues at military events.
“I did nothing wrong. I have never accessed classified systems illegally. I have never sold information to anyone. I have never betrayed my country.”
“The evidence suggests otherwise,” Admiral said quietly from behind me.
“I don’t care what evidence you think you have. It’s wrong.” Luke’s eyes never left mine, boring into me with desperate intensity. “Bug, you know me. You know I would never do this. Not to our country. Not to our family. Not to you.”