13. Forty Minutes to Burn #2
Dominic's control fails. It is the first time I have seen it happen completely. His jaw tightens. His eyes go somewhere else, somewhere years away, somewhere I cannot follow. And when he speaks, his voice is rough with a grief that has never healed.
"My sister," he says. "She was my sister."
The silence that follows is thick enough to choke on.
I look down at the footnote again. Civilian witness. Present by accident. Debriefed by H.V. The initials burn in my vision because I know who they belong to. Harlan Voss.
"She was at Geneva," I say slowly, piecing together what the document implies. "She was there when the weapons authorization happened. And Voss debriefed her."
"Eleven days." Dominic's voice is barely above a whisper. "She died eleven days after Geneva. A car accident in the Alps. Mechanical failure, the report said."
"But you do not believe it was an accident."
"No." His hand presses harder against his jacket pocket, against the photograph that must be of her, the sister he lost, the ghost who has been in this room the whole time without me knowing.
"I have never believed it. I have spent eight years not saying that aloud because saying it would require me to explain Geneva, and explaining Geneva would require me to explain the burial, and the burial is the reason three NATO allies still have functioning intelligence networks. "
I think about the weight of that. Eight years of silence. Eight years of political debt to Harlan Voss, the man who helped him bury the truth and might have been responsible for his sister's death.
"The messages," I say. "The coded threats Voss has been sending. 'Geneva votes by Friday.' He is not just threatening to expose the weapons authorization. He is threatening to expose Elena."
"Yes."
"He knows you would do almost anything to protect her memory."
Dominic meets my eyes. The rawness there is something I am not prepared for. I have seen him angry, controlled, commanding. I have seen him come apart in my hands at four in the morning. But I have never seen him this exposed.
"Yes," he says again. "And he is right."
I set the document down carefully. My mind is already moving, building the evidentiary chain, connecting Voss's current operation to the Geneva past to the Sicilian cipher to the burner phones to Petra's unwitting reports. There is a case here. A real one. The kind that takes down senators.
"This changes the evidentiary picture," I say in Italian, because some truths are easier in a language that has not been corrupted by a cover yet.
"Voss had a reason to silence Elena that goes beyond the weapons authorization.
If she knew something, if her debrief contained information he could not control, he might have arranged the accident himself. "
Dominic does not answer. His hand is still pressed against the photograph in his pocket.
I want to reach for him. I want to offer comfort, to close the distance between us, to be something other than an agent building a case. But I know him well enough now to understand that softness he did not ask for would feel like pity, and pity is the last thing Dominic Thorne can accept.
So I do not reach. I do not offer empty words. I let him sit with his grief for exactly as long as he needs.
And then I say, in Italian, "I am going to take him apart. Voss. Whatever it costs. Whatever I have to do. I will not let him use your sister's death as a weapon anymore."
Dominic looks at me.
The silence stretches. I can hear the house settling around us, the old pipes ticking, the distant sound of traffic on the Georgetown street outside. His hand finally drops from his jacket pocket.
"I know," he says.
I press my thumb against my ring finger, the habit I cannot break, checking for something that should be there. He watches me do it. Neither of us speaks.
There is more to say. There is always more. But Dana's clock is ticking, and Voss is recalibrating, and somewhere in this house Petra is making tea while the life she thought she understood crumbles around her.
I pick up the supplemental memo again. "This footnote. The debrief by H.V. If there is a record of what Elena actually said, what she actually knew, it would be stored somewhere. Intelligence archives. Voss's personal files. Somewhere."
"I have looked," Dominic says. "For eight years, I have looked."
"You looked as a senator with political capital to protect." I meet his eyes. "I am going to look as an FBI agent with nothing left to lose."
Something moves across his face. Not hope, exactly. Something harder than hope. Something with teeth.
"Then we had better get started," he says.
I nod and turn toward the door. There are calls to make. Strategies to coordinate. A forty-eight hour clock that started ticking the moment Petra made her final, unwitting report.
But I stop with my hand on the knob.
"Dominic."
He looks up.
"The photograph in your pocket," I say. "The one you touch when something costs you. Is it her?"
His jaw tightens. For a moment I think he will not answer. Then he reaches into his inside pocket and pulls out a small, folded square of paper, worn soft at the edges from years of handling. He unfolds it carefully.
Two people stand in front of a hotel in Geneva. Dominic, younger, less guarded, with a smile that looks nothing like the controlled expressions I have learned to read. And beside him, a woman in her early twenties with his same dark eyes and a laugh frozen mid-motion.
"Two days before she died," he says quietly.
I look at the photograph for a long moment. Then I look at him.
"I will find out what Voss did to her," I say. "I promise you that."
His hand closes around the photograph. His control is back, but something underneath it has shifted. Something that trusts me with a grief he has carried alone for almost a decade.
"I know," he says again.
I open the door and step into the hallway, and I am already calling Dana before I reach the kitchen.