23. Chapter 23
The kitchen at mid-morning was warm and full of bread-smell.
Elena had coffee on because Elena always had coffee on.
She had a plate of something at the table in front of Maren and another in front of Jace and had put both plates down without asking if either of them wanted to eat, because Elena had been a pack-mother long enough to know that the plate sat in front of you until you touched it, and then the pack-mother was right and you were grateful.
Jace had showered. He wore a clean shirt. His hair was damp.
Maren had showered too. Her hair was in a towel. There had been blood in it that had taken three washes to come out. She hadn't been angry about any of the three.
Neither of them had slept.
Federal SUVs had been and gone. The survivor of the pre-dawn attack had been transferred to federal custody at five forty-six in the morning.
His statement had been logged by six fifteen.
His lieutenant's name had been on Morales's phone by seven, and a separate warrant team in Seattle had been mobilized.
Maren and Jace hadn't been at the federal end of any of it.
Theo had. Theo had coordinated with Morales at the lodge porch as the sun came up.
Jace and Maren went to the cabin and Jace had put her in the shower and then had gotten in himself.
They came to breakfast at ten in the clothes of two people who had nothing left to carry today but each other.
Jace's phone buzzed.
He didn't pick it up.
It buzzed again. Rhys. Then a third time, Theo.
He picked up the third.
“Yeah.”
Theo's voice.
“Turn on the news.”
There was a small television in the far corner of the kitchen behind the swing door. Elena kept it there for the weather. Jace walked over and turned it on.
National cable. Midday headline loop.
FEDERAL WARRANT SERVED AT SEATTLE PENTHOUSE on the chyron.
The anchor was halfway through the story. Video was rolling underneath. Brock Bastian being led out of the front entrance of a high-rise in a charcoal coat with his hands cuffed behind him and an agent's jacket pulled up over the back of his head to block the cameras.
Brock looked small on the screen.
He hadn't looked small in the clearing.
He looked small now.
Maren got up and went to the kitchen door and Jace followed her because her going to the kitchen door wasn't about the kitchen door. She stopped with one hand on the door frame and watched the television across the room.
The chyron cycled.
FEDERAL WARRANT SERVED AT SEATTLE PENTHOUSE.
BASTIAN HOLDINGS PLACED IN FEDERAL RECEIVERSHIP.
TWELVE ADDITIONAL INDICTMENTS EXPECTED ACROSS FOUR DISTRICTS.
brOCK BASTIAN NAMED PERSON OF INTEREST IN 2023 MURDER OF FORENSIC ACCOUNTANT ELIAS PALMER.
EVIDENCE DESCRIBED AS DUPLICATE INTERNAL LEDGERS COPIED FROM BASTIAN HOLDINGS' OWN BOOKS.
NEW: CONSPIRACY TO MURDER FEDERAL WITNESS BASED ON SWORN STATEMENT FROM CONTRACTOR IN FEDERAL CUSTODY AFTER PRE-DAWN RAID ON WESTERN MONTANA RESIDENCE.
The anchor cut to a legal analyst in a studio in Washington.
The analyst said the word cascade once and the word networks twice and the phrase the amount of exposure building around this individual inside the next seventy-two hours once.
Maren heard the words and also didn't hear them.
What she was hearing was the sound of a thing she had been carrying in her chest for three years not being the sound of a thing she was carrying alone anymore.
Her father's name on a chyron.
In a context that wasn't a death notice. That wasn't a cold-case file. That was a federal matter being handled by federal people in the present tense.
Person of interest in the 2023 murder of forensic accountant Elias Palmer.
It read past her on the bottom of the screen and came around again and read past her again.
Jace behind her put his hand on her shoulder.
She laid hers over his.
She was past crying for her father.
The pride she'd carried in a storage-unit hallway yesterday came back to her, and it sat in her chest the same place it had been sitting, and it got wider.
The cascade started by one in the afternoon.
Theo came in with updates on the hour. The federally-flipped contractor from the pre-dawn raid had given up the Seattle lieutenant by nine.
The lieutenant had faced life and had named Brock as the payer by eleven.
By noon the federal team had pulled three more names out of Brock's closest advisors, two of them people Morales had been trying to turn for a year without success.
Maren’s hand stayed on Jace’s chest. The bond held it steady.
Brock's network didn't collapse in the orderly way a legal-analyst TV panel would describe it. It collapsed the way a multi-state criminal network ran by a patient man always collapsed once the dam broke. People who had owed Brock silence for fifteen years started typing.
By two the task force had a warrant team at Brock's attorney's office in Seattle.
By two forty the receivership order had been signed in the Western District of Washington and Bastian Holdings' accounts were frozen.
Maren felt Jace’s heart not change pace. She listened to it like a metronome.
By three the DOJ had scheduled a press conference for Thursday at noon.
Maren watched most of it from the kitchen table with her hand on Jace's chest because sitting close to him with her hand on his chest was the thing her body had needed to do for three days and hadn't yet done.
She felt his heartbeat through the fabric of his shirt.
The bond held between them the way it had been since yesterday morning.
He was quiet on the couch side of the kitchen with her tucked against him for most of the afternoon. He didn't bring up the case. He didn't narrate what he was feeling. He wasn't a narrating man.
Once, when the chyron cycled past murder of forensic accountant Elias Palmer for the fifth time, she felt his chest do one small thing under her hand.
Once, when the TV analyst said Brock had no chance of making bail, Jace said the same three words into her hair, quiet, not for her, for himself.
“Not getting out.”
Maren pushed away from the table at four fifteen.
“I need to sleep.”
“Yeah.”
He got up with her.
He walked her back to the cabin. The compound was still on doubled patrols, but the patrols had lightened because Morales's teams had swept the southern woods at dawn and the federal SUVs were now permanently stationed at the county turn.
Every wolf Maren passed dipped their head.
A young one at the path to medical handed her a mug of something that turned out to be broth.
She took three swallows and handed it back.
At the cabin Jace took her coat off her. Her boots. Her sweatshirt.
She was asleep under the covers before she was all the way awake.
He got in behind her. Shirt on, jeans off, the way they had slept the first night she had invited him into her bed two weeks and a lifetime ago.
He was asleep inside of a minute.
She was asleep inside of three.
Neither of them woke for twelve hours.
The compound stayed on patrol the whole time, and nobody came to the cabin door during that time because the pack knew that some mornings, the alpha and his mate were owed a door nobody knocked on.
Outside the cabin, the country's news cycle was running stories filled with pictures of Brock’s face.
In a Seattle courthouse, the Bastian legal team was already filing the first motion.
Inside the cabin, they slept.
Maren was in the training yard at five forty-five in the morning.
She'd wrapped her own hands as she’d done for five days in a row now with tape Jace left for her in a drawer in her nightstand. Kira appeared five minutes later at the wedge of packed snow ready to go.
“Morning.”
“Morning.”
“Ribs.”
“Sore.”
“Good. Sore ribs are ribs that are learning.”
Kira set them to the wedge.