Chapter 25
Chapter Twenty-Five
River
The call ended.
Finn set the phone face-down on the desk, and we stood there in the silence it left behind.
Tell her hello.
I was the only her in the room. The only her that was also involved in this case, in Finn’s orbit, and in the crosshairs of whoever that voice belonged to.
The Watchers knew about the two of us in a way that wasn’t tactical.
It was personal. Specific. It was the kind of knowledge that only comes from someone close enough to watch.
“They’ve had eyes on us for longer than today,” I said.
“Yeah.” Finn’s jaw was set. “Which means we’ve been moving through a building that’s been leaking since well before the tripwire. We suspected, but now we know.”
I turned toward the window that overlooked the bullpen. Through the glass, Jordyn Vale sat at her desk. She was typing slowly, the kind that wasn’t actually typing—fingers moving without intention, body going through motions while the brain was somewhere else entirely.
I watched her for a moment, the way I watched clients when they thought the session was just small talk.
“She got a call,” I said.
Finn came to stand beside me. “What?”
“Since she left your office. Somebody called her.” I kept my voice even.
“Look at her hands. She’s been off rhythm since she sat back down.
She was performing with confidence when she came to see you.
That was rehearsed because she’d been told exactly what to say.
Now, she’s waiting for new instructions and they haven’t come yet. ”
Finn was quiet.
“She’s not the decision-maker here,” I continued. “She never was. She’s a relay. Someone activated her this morning, told her to assess the situation and report back, and now she’s sitting there waiting to find out what she’s supposed to do next.”
“And when those instructions come,” Finn said slowly, “she’ll move.”
“Probably somewhere she thinks is safer than here.”
Atlas appeared in the doorway, his shoulder against the frame, arms crossed in that way he had of taking up space without appearing to. “You two are doing the thing where you talk like I’m not here,” he said. “I’d like to be included.”
“She’s going to bolt,” I told him.
He looked at Jordyn through the glass. Back at me. “How soon?”
“I’m thinking as soon as her phone rings.”
We waited.
She checked her phone at 9:04 a.m., and her shoulders dropped just a bit—the release of someone receiving information they’d been dreading. It wasn’t the move of someone relieved. Just resigned to whatever came next.
She stood, grabbed her bag, and walked toward the back exit with the brittle, controlled stride of someone who had been told where to go and was making herself go there.
We gave her about five minutes, and then, “Atlas,” Finn said.
“Already moving.”
I fell into step behind them both, and nobody argued.
We’d passed the point where Finn told me to stay behind and I argued back.
Despite the short time that’d passed, we operated differently now.
It wasn’t without friction, but it involved a shared understanding of where we each needed to be.
Right now, I needed to be in that truck.
Atlas had placed a tracker on Jordyn’s sedan the minute she arrived this morning—standard precaution, he’d said, in the same tone he used for most things that weren’t standard at all. He pulled it up on his phone as we crossed the lot, and there she was, already pulling out onto Route 9.
“Where’s she going?” Finn asked.
Atlas read the route. “West on nine. Then what looks like the old quarry access.”
Finn didn’t react. Or rather, he reacted in the way he had when information landed exactly where he expected it to, and he didn’t like being right.
“She’s gotta be meeting someone,” I said.
Finn nodded. “She’s reporting in,” he said. “In person. Which means whoever she’s meeting doesn’t trust anything electronic anymore.”
“Smart,” Atlas said.
“Smart and scared are the same things this morning.” Finn opened the passenger door for me, the gesture unconscious. “Let’s go.”
In daylight, the quarry was just a scar—stripped earth, stagnant water, the skeletal remains of equipment nobody had bothered to haul out when the money dried up.
The Maple Ridge teenagers used it for dares, rendezvous, and keg parties, and parents pretended they hadn’t done the same thing twenty years before.
At ten in the morning, under a sky the color of old concrete, it looked like something sinister waiting.
Atlas killed the engine a hundred yards back from the broken gate.
We walked in—single file, boots quiet on the gravel, breath close in the cold air.
Finn’s hand hovered near his holster. Atlas ranged left, fading into the shadow of a crumbling outbuilding.
I stayed on Finn’s six without being told.
We reached the ridge and crouched behind a stack of collapsed concrete blocks, the quarry basin opening below us like an empty palm. Rusted crane arms rose against the sky, dark water filled the old pit, and a gravel lot on the near side, flat and open, contained—
A black SUV.
Much too clean for this place. Its engine was running.
Finn went very still beside me.
The driver’s door of the sedan opened, and Jordyn climbed out.
She was in civilian clothes now, her hair still pulled back.
Even from here, I could read the tension in the way she stood.
Her arms were folded across her chest, and she shifted her weight forward.
It was the stance of a person braced for something unpleasant.
Finn’s hand found mine. Squeezed once.
Record.
I already had my phone out.
The passenger door of the SUV swung open.
Lucas Grant stepped down, coat collar turned up against the cold, salt-and-pepper hair neat, wearing that easy smile he used at ribbon cuttings and town halls. He looked like a man arriving at a campaign event. The quarry didn’t touch him.
My stomach turned.
“Grant,” I breathed.
“I see him,” Finn said, his voice flat and carefully empty.
They were already talking. I angled the phone to check the audio. The wind dipped, and their voices carried up the ridge in fragments. The recording app registered the sound. Something was said about timing, about the file. Jordyn’s tone was defensive and thinning at the edges.
Then the back door of the SUV opened.
And Finn stopped breathing.
I felt it before I understood it—the quality of the silence coming off him. It wasn’t the still, tactical silence of a man managing a situation, it was something older. Something that lived below the level of training.
I looked harder.
The man who climbed out of the back seat was tall and broad-shouldered. His tie was loosened and jacket unbuttoned as he moved with the particular ease of someone who had never once in his adult life doubted he belonged wherever he stood.
It took me a moment.
Then it didn’t.
The jaw. The set of the shoulders. The way he turned his head at that exact angle like a habit. It was identical to the man crouched beside me.
Sean Callahan.
Finn’s brother.
The district attorney.
My throat closed.
Finn didn’t move, didn’t make a sound. He didn’t do anything except go so absolutely, completely still that the air around him seemed to stop, too. Like the world had paused out of respect for what he was being asked to absorb.
Below us, Sean said something to Jordyn. His tone was smooth. Clipped. That of a man accustomed to managing people who were less competent than he was.
Finn exhaled once.
It was the worst sound I’d heard in years.
Not rage. Not surprise. Something that had no clean name. The grief of recognizing a stranger inside someone you built your whole life alongside.
I didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say.
I kept the phone steady and kept recording.
Below us, the three of them talked. Jordyn’s voice cracked at the edges while Grant’s was smooth and patient, and Sean’s was a controlled murmur that cut through both. Their words drifted up in pieces, enough to understand the shape of it. Enough for the phone to catch what mattered.
Enough.
Atlas’s hand appeared at Finn’s shoulder.
It was barely a touch, just contact, and Finn shook it off without looking.
His eyes were locked on the basin below.
On his brother standing in the ruins of an abandoned quarry at a bit after ten in the morning, explaining to a compromised deputy why the Watchers’ work was still necessary.
I watched his face. Watched him make a choice I couldn’t make for him. Then he straightened, slow and certain, and looked at Atlas.
Atlas looked back.
Neither of them said a word.
Atlas was already moving, but they let them go.
That was the part I hadn’t expected—the tactical restraint of it.
Atlas stepped back into shadow before any of the three below even registered his presence.
Finn pulled me back from the ridge’s edge by slow degrees, and we held position while Grant straightened his coat and spoke in low tones to Sean, and Jordyn stood with her arms still crossed and her eyes anywhere but on either man’s face.
Then they dispersed. The SUV reversed and disappeared through the broken gate, and Jordyn followed in her sedan two minutes later.
We stayed where we were until the sound of both engines faded into the distance.
Then the three of us stood up.
Atlas said nothing. He had the expression of a man who had seen enough of the world to understand that some moments needed to breathe before anyone spoke into them.
I looked at Finn.
He was staring at the empty lot below and the space where his brother had been standing thirty seconds ago, like he’d been there a thousand times before. He looked at the gravel and the crane and the stagnant water and all the ordinary ruin of it all.
“Finn,” I said.
He turned. His face was composed, the composure of someone who had put a thing somewhere it couldn’t be dealt with yet and locked the door.
“We have the recording?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Grant. Sean. Jordyn. All three of them, on tape, at a quarry at ten in the morning.” His voice was even. Professional. Completely controlled. “That’s enough for a referral to the Attorney General.”
“It’s enough for a lot more than that,” Atlas said quietly.
Finn nodded once, then turned and started walking back up the ridge toward the truck.
I watched him go for a moment, took in the set of his back and how he moved like he was carrying something heavy and wouldn’t let it show.
Atlas fell into step beside me. “Give him a minute,” he said under his breath.
“I know,” I said.
“No, I mean—” Atlas paused, seemed to choose his words.
“He’s been making excuses for Sean his whole life.
Little ones. Nothing he names outright. Just...
things that didn’t add up that he filed away because Sean was his older brother.
” He exhaled. “That filing cabinet just emptied out. Give him a minute.”
I looked at the lot below one more time, at the space where three people had stood and spoken about Eleanor Jenkins and my credibility and the Watchers’ necessary work like it was a budget problem to be managed.
I thought about Sean Callahan at Finn’s kitchen table back in the day, at holiday dinners. Sean in his DA’s office, signing papers, closing complaints, steering the current of the town in directions that kept the Fund invisible and the Watchers quiet.
Sean was a man Finn had trusted his entire life.
I started walking.
When I reached the truck, Finn was leaning against the passenger side, head tipped back, eyes closed. The cold air moved through the pine stand behind the lot, and somewhere down the fire road, a bird made itself known.
I didn’t say anything, just stood beside him.
After a moment, he opened his eyes. “I need to call the AG’s office,” he said.
“I know.”
“And I need to figure out how to build a case against my brother without giving him enough warning to run.”
“I know.”
He looked at me. There was something in his face that he wasn’t trying to hide, and the fact that he wasn’t hiding it, that he was letting me see it, felt like the most significant thing that had happened in over a day. And that was saying a lot.
“I don’t know how to do this,” he said.
“You don’t have to know yet,” I said. “You just have to drive.”
He held my gaze for another beat.
Then he pushed off the truck, walked around to the driver’s side, and got in.
Atlas climbed into the back without comment.
I got in beside Finn.
The engine turned over, and the quarry disappeared in the rearview mirror. Just a gap in the tree line. A place where the road bent away from something that had been waiting a long time to be found.
Finn drove.
And I watched the road and let him.