Chapter 31
Gabe
I’d been watching it for six minutes—long enough to be certain, not long enough to have done anything differently. When the driver spoke into whatever comm he was using and my angle confirmed he was alone, the air shifted.
I gave it thirty seconds, then keyed the channel and moved. Not toward it directly. Parallel, using the parked cars along the south side for cover, working the angle so I could see the driver’s hands before he could see my face.
He saw my face first.
I don’t know if it was the earpiece or the way I was moving or just the particular quality of attention that reads wrong to people who are paid to notice it. But his head came up, and I watched him reach, and I was already going low when the window came down.
The shot came from the driver’s side. Disciplined. Precise. It struck the seam between vest and shoulder—the gap every vest carries, the one I’ve catalogued on other men for years. The shooter knew where to aim.
I fired off a shot. Don’t know if it hit.
The impact didn’t feel cinematic. It felt mechanical. A sharp torque through bone and nerve. My arm dropped before I told it to.
I went down on one knee.
The van fled.
I keyed the channel: Shot fired. I’m hit. Check Evie.
I was already running the math in my head—how many seconds Evie had if someone was already in position.
The answer was not enough.
Noah messaged back: Tango spotted. Inside. On the move.
Someone’s inside. With Evie.
Evie’s voice cut through the comm.
An intruder.
Coming for her.
The arithmetic collapsed into something simpler. My left arm wasn’t responding correctly. Noah was still working his way toward the building, cutting through yards, vaulting whatever stood in his way. Evie was upstairs in a locked room with someone working her door.
I ran it once.
Sent Noah to the stairwell.
I didn’t tell her.
There was no version of telling her that helped. Information is only useful if it changes behavior. If I told her I was hit, she would adjust—her breathing, her cadence, her thinking. And she needed to stay exactly where she was. Steady. Prosecutorial. Talking.
She needed to stay calm and stay put and use those instincts. She could do all that without knowing I was on the pavement.
So I stayed on comms and directed Noah and told Evie that Noah was four minutes out, and I said all of it in the same voice I use for everything, because the voice is a tool and I know how to use it.
It was all I had left to give her.
Jake reached me somewhere around the two-minute mark. I told him to finish getting to the building before he touched the shoulder, and to his credit he listened, because Jake understands operational priorities even when they’re inconvenient. Brie caught the operative out back when he ran.
By the time the Metro PD rolled in, I was sitting up.
That felt like a win.
Now Evie is beside me on the bumper of the response vehicle, skin pale, sitting close enough that I can feel the warmth from her arm against my good side, and the medic is doing something to my shoulder that I’m choosing not to observe directly.
He talks about transport, and I’m nodding in the appropriate places without tracking most of it.
The street is filling. Two Metro PD units. A third easing in. The hum of radios. Contained chaos. Jake stands a few feet off, talking to a detective. Hudson is somewhere with the van, dumped about a mile away—driver location unknown.
Evie isn’t asking how I feel.
I’m grateful for that.
She’s been quiet since she sat down—not the quiet of someone in shock, but the quiet of someone processing. Adding things to a mental case file. Exercising her strength to maintain calm and to act as the situation requires. I understand.
I’m waiting for something I don’t have language for. Not the shoulder—the shoulder is a mechanical problem and it will be solved mechanically.
This is different.
I sent Noah to the building instead of me.
Evie is alive and uninjured.
That suggests my math was right.
But right math and right choice aren’t always synonymous, and I haven’t finished reconciling that yet.
All thoughts to keep to myself.
Jake crosses back to us. He has the particular set to his jaw that means there’s something he’s deciding how to say.
“They searched him,” he says. To Evie, not to me. “When Brie brought him down.”
Evie lifts her gaze.
“He had a phone.” Jake pauses. “And a piece of paper. Folded. Typed.”
The quality of Evie’s stillness changes.
“Three paragraphs,” Jake continues, and his voice has dropped to something quieter than his usual register. “It was written in the first person. Written like it was meant to sound like Evie.”
Silence presses in.
I watch Evie’s face. She’s very still, the way I imagine she gets before a cross-examination—all the motion going inward, everything that matters moving behind her eyes—fast, efficient, ruthless in its clarity. She’s already three steps ahead.
“They weren’t going to stage a break-in,” she says. “I suspected as much.”
“They definitely didn’t want any signs of an intruder. Used a cell phone blocker just in case—didn’t want any 911 calls.”
“The new deadbolt didn’t slow them down at all?” she asks.
“Not enough to matter,” Jake says. “Whoever this was, picking a residential lock—even a good one—wasn’t the hard part of the job.”
“Clean entry. No forced locks. No sign of a struggle.” Her voice flattens into prosecutorial cadence. “A DOJ attorney on leave. Exhibiting stress. Colleagues suggested therapy. Documented instability. A tragic outcome.” She stops. “The note would have closed the case permanently.”
“That’s what we think,” Jake says.
She nods once. Very slow. “I want to see it.”
“Evie—”
“I need to see how it’s written,” she says. “If it references anything internal—case terminology, personnel language, anything from my file—that narrows the field immediately. That’s not cartel improvisation. That’s access.”
Her eyes flick to mine. “And if it sounds like me—if the cadence is right—then someone’s been studying my work.”
Jake looks at me.
I look at Evie.
She’s right. She’s been right about most things since the beginning of this, and the times she wasn’t right, she was only wrong about the scale, not the direction.
I’ve spent the better part of this case managing her proximity to the danger, and every time I’ve done that I’ve slowed us down.
She just survived someone picking the lock on her office door by talking through it in her prosecutor’s voice, building a record in real time because she understood what the moment required.
And she was right about the breach.
Right about the escalation.
Right about the bait.
It’s tempting to step in front of her.
She doesn’t need that.
“Let her see it,” I say.
Jake nods and moves off.
Evie stands for a moment, hand braced against the side of the vehicle. I watch the recalibration happen in her posture—the shift from reaction to strategy. She’s already thinking about leverage. About interrogation timing. About whose phrasing will betray them.
By the time the operative decides whether he wants to broker a deal, she’ll know exactly what to ask him and exactly what to offer.
This is what she does. This is who she is.
I don’t know why it took me this long to stop trying to protect her from being herself.
She sits back down. Not because she’s done—she’s not done, she’s already somewhere else in her head—but deliberately, the way she does things when she means them. Her shoulder is against my good arm.
“You stayed on comms,” she says.
“It was all I had left.” When she reported the intruder, everything in me narrowed to a single point: we thought we’d anticipated every angle. We hadn’t.
She doesn’t tell me it was enough.
She doesn’t offer comfort or absolution.
She just stays.
Ten seconds. Maybe fifteen.
Lets me feel the specific weight of her sitting here, alive and present. Unharmed.
That’s the answer.
Then she rises.
“I need to see that note,” she says. “And I need to be at the station before his lawyer arrives.”
“Jake will take you.”
“I know.” She looks at me. The particular way she looks at me that I’ve been cataloguing since Geneva and still can’t fully translate—something between trust and recognition, something that says she sees the discipline under the composure and isn’t afraid of it. “Come when you can.”
Not if. When.
As she turns away, her fingers press once against my mobile hand. Not goodbye. Just contact. Connection.
She brushes her lips against my forehead. Squeezes my good shoulder and looks me straight in the eye. “You do what they say.”
Her eyes glisten with emotion that she’s tapping down.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Her chest rises on an inhale, and she turns.
I watch her cross the sidewalk to where Jake is waiting. Straight spine, that slight forward tilt in her walk, the messenger bag she somehow retrieved from the townhome slung over one shoulder. A woman with somewhere to be and the absolute intention of getting there.
The medic tells me to lie back.
I do.
Then she’s gone.
I close my eyes.
She’s out there. She knows what she’s doing.
That’s enough.