Chapter 30
Evie
I’ve prosecuted enough cases to know what waiting does to people.
Witnesses fall apart in the hallway outside the courtroom. Not from fear—from the space between knowing what’s coming and having it arrive. The mind fills that space with everything it can’t control. I’ve watched composed, intelligent people dissolve in forty-five minutes on a hallway bench.
I always thought I was different.
I’m not.
The drive home was the worst of it. Ten minutes of performing normalcy—signal, turn, park, keys, door—knowing that if anyone was watching, they needed to see exactly that.
A woman coming home. Alone. Nothing unusual.
If they’ve made Gabe at all, they’d expect him at his own place tonight, not stationed outside mine—which is exactly why he isn’t, not visibly.
I took off my jacket in the entryway the way I always do and hung it on the hook by the door and reminded myself that every ordinary thing I did was the operation working.
It helped, a little, right up until I closed the door and was alone.
Gabe’s voice came through the earpiece before I’d made it to the stairs: Visuals are good. Stay off the windows. Check in every fifteen.
Check in. Which is why, seven minutes ago, I tried to send a message and watched it sit undelivered.
I’m on one bar. Sometimes less. I try again from the chair by the window—better signal there, marginally—and watch the icon. Nothing sends.
The unease that’s been living in my sternum since I pulled into my parking spot shifts into something unruly.
KOAN wouldn’t use faulty apps.
I set the phone face-up on my desk. The back office has always been patchy—that’s true, that’s real, and it’s also not something I believe, not tonight, not with everything that’s led to this moment.
I’ve been handed a mundane explanation before.
Brake lines that failed too smoothly. Files that vanished with no access log.
A particular quality of being watched that I couldn’t prove and everyone politely refused to believe.
I’ve been right every time I refused to believe the mundane explanation.
I’m not about to start believing one now.
Atlas is on the desk beside the laptop. He came in when I did, which he never does during his late-afternoon sleep—he has opinions about schedules that I’ve come to think of as aspirational—and he’s been here ever since, not settled, just present.
His tail moves in a slow, deliberate arc. His ears are forward.
He’s watching the wall that faces the hallway.
I follow his gaze.
It’s just the wall.
I look back at him.
He doesn’t look back at me.
I’ve had Atlas for four years. I know the difference between him watching a wall because there’s a shadow and him watching a wall because he’s bored.
Creatures possess a fight or flight instinct.
Atlas will choose flight. His whole body has a quality of attention I don’t have a word for—the specific stillness of a creature that has not yet decided whether to run.
I open the recording app on my phone. The one I downloaded two days ago and haven’t used, because I’m a DOJ attorney and I understand evidentiary chains and I knew, when I downloaded it, that there might be a moment.
I tap record. Set the phone face-up on the desk, angled away from the doorway, close enough that it will catch everything.
Then I hear it.
Not at my door. Below it—from the staircase.
A sound that isn’t the building settling.
A building settling is random, asymmetrical.
This is deliberate. The particular quality of someone taking stairs one at a time with their weight distributed carefully, committing to each step before lifting the next foot.
They’re already inside.
I heard this sound once before. A corridor outside a hotel room. I didn’t know what it was then.
I know what it is now.
“Evie.”
Gabe’s voice in the earpiece. Quiet. The particular register he’s using feels like he’s trying to not alarm me, which perhaps should alarm me most.
“Don’t open the door.”
“Someone’s in the hall,” I say. My voice comes out steadier than I expected.
“Stay in the room. Lock the door.”
The handle lock on my office door is original to the building—a standard pin tumbler, old enough that the mechanism sticks if you turn it too fast. I cross the room and turn it slowly and feel it catch.
Then I move to the wall beside the door. Not in front of it. The spot where, if the door opened, I wouldn’t be the first thing visible. Two feet of plaster and the sound of my own pulse between me and whatever is happening in the hallway.
Atlas has not moved.
What does he see? I almost ask Gabe, and stop myself, because the answer is that he sees someone who got into the building without triggering a perimeter alert, which means they were already inside before the perimeter was set, and I don’t want to hear that out loud right now.
Then the sound arrives at my door.
Soft. Low. The specific, almost delicate sound of someone working a lock with tools rather than a key—careful, practiced, unhurried. They’re not forcing it. They’re picking it. Clean entry. No evidence of intrusion.
Because the scene they’re planning to leave behind doesn’t include a broken lock.
I understand, in the length of a single breath, exactly what they came here to do.
“Gabe—”
“I’m here. How long since it started?”
I check the recording app.
“Forty seconds.”
A pause.
“Noah is four minutes from the stairwell. Keep your phone recording. Do not open that door.”
Four minutes.
I look at the door handle.
The basic lock.
A five-year-old with a bobby pin could get through that.
How much time do I have?
Three minutes, maybe. I use them.
Deep breath in.
I step to the door.
“This is Evie Thompson.”
I hold the phone, angling it to the door as I clearly state my address.
“I’m an attorney for the Department of Justice, currently on voluntary leave. There’s a person outside my home office door, picking the lock. Could you please state your name?”
The knob quiets.
“Could you share who sent you? It’s obvious if you are breaking into my home office, you aren’t here to steal anything. It’s also obvious you were waiting in my home for me.”
Gabe’s voice comes through the comm, as steady as mine. “Noah is thirty seconds out. Keep talking.”
“Are you here because of Lina Morozova? That’s M-O-R-O-Z-O-V-A. Are you here because a murder investigation opened? Or did they send you to prevent Project Safe Passage from re-opening? Please. I am recording this, and the information will be used against you in a court of law.”
Loud pounding up the steps.
That’s got to be Noah.
A siren sounds.
Faint.
Maybe for us.
“Evie. You okay?” That’s Noah.
“I’m good.”
“Stay there. I’m going after him.”
I stay against the wall.
The recording is still running. I can hear my own breathing on it, slower now, the specific deceleration of a body deciding it’s allowed to come down. Footsteps down the hall—Noah, moving through rooms. A door. Another door.
Gabe hasn’t spoken since Noah arrived.
I wait for it. The check-in, the you’re good, the next instruction. Thirty seconds. A minute. The comm is live—I can hear background noise, movement, the ambient sounds from outside.
“Gabe.”
A beat. Then Jake’s voice, even and careful in a way that tells me everything before he says anything.
“He’s outside. Come out when Noah clears the floor.”
He’s outside.
Present tense. He’s outside. Not he’s coming up. Not stand by.
He’s outside.
My hand finds the wall. My chest drops and doesn’t come back up, and for one unprofessional second all I want to do is run down those stairs regardless of clearance, regardless of protocol, regardless of anything except getting to him.
I don’t. I make myself breathe instead.
“Noah.” My voice is steady, which surprises me—because inside, I’m quaking. “I need you to clear the floor.”
It takes ninety seconds. It feels considerably longer.
When Noah opens my office door his expression does the thing faces do when they’re being professionally neutral, and I walk past him without stopping and go down the stairs and through the front door and out onto the sidewalk, and I don’t run, but it’s close.
The first thing I see is the response vehicle.
The second thing I see is Jake, standing with his back to me.
The third thing I see is Gabe, sitting on the ambulance bumper, jacket off, left shoulder dressed in white that isn’t staying white, directing two Metro officers with the particular focused economy of a man who has decided that the situation in front of him is more important than the situation happening to him.
He’s hurt. He’s alive. He’s hurt.
He looks up when I approach.
Whatever he was about to say to the officers stops.
His expression alters—relief, unguarded and immediate, there and gone before he schools it back into competence—and for a second neither of us moves.
I think about the last twenty minutes. His voice in my ear. Lock the handle. Noah is four minutes out. Keep talking. Steady. Present. Operational. Not a single word that would have told me.
He was already down here when he said all of it.
I cross the sidewalk fast, faster than dignity strictly requires, and sit next to him on the bumper, my hand finding his uninjured arm and gripping harder than necessary. My fingers quiver ever so slightly.
“You kept talking,” he says finally.
“So did you.” My voice isn’t quite steady this time, and I don’t try to make it be.