Chapter 62
AVA - CONNECTING THE DOTS
There are moments in life when time seems to stand still, no longer meaning what it once did.
When you’re a kid, days blur together, endless and forgiving.
Summers stretch forever, and waiting five minutes feels like torture.
But then there are moments, the kind that rip something open inside you, where every second matters.
When you’re waiting for the doctor to come back with test results.
When you’re holding someone’s hand in a hospital bed, praying for one more breath.
When someone you love walks out the door, and you don’t know if they’ll come back.
Those are the moments when you start counting. Hours. Minutes. Heartbeats. Days.
This was one of those moments.
It had been one day since we’d heard from Remi.
And I told myself that was ok, that we all had a job to do. That we didn’t come here to hide, we came here to fight smart.
I kept repeating that as I sat cross-legged on the cabin floor, laptop open, drive humming softly beside me. But the silence pressed in from every angle, making each breath feel louder than it should’ve been.
Soft rustles of paper. The occasional creak of wood. The steady clack of Gray’s keyboard. Those were the only sounds inside the cabin, and somehow, they made the quiet worse.
Harlan sat at the kitchen table, sleeves rolled up, his hands buried in files and printouts.
His brow was furrowed deep, the kind of focus you only get when betrayal and purpose finally meet.
Jack stood near the window, one hand braced on the frame, the other holding his phone to his ear.
I couldn’t tell if he was trying to find allies or ghosts.
I glanced at my phone for the hundredth time.
Nothing from Remi. I closed my eyes and leaned back against the couch.
The ache in my chest hadn’t eased since we left her.
It wasn’t just fear. It was worse, that hollow kind of knowing that curls under your ribs and whispers that something is shifting, and you might not be able to shift with it.
On the second day, I woke gasping, heart racing, hands already reaching for my phone before my eyes were open.
Still nothing.
Every morning felt like that now; the first five seconds between dreaming and remembering where we were and why were brutal. For a moment, I’d think maybe this was over. Then reality came flooding back, sharp and cold.
Jack was already up, pacing by the window, coffee forgotten and cooling on the sill. Gray hadn’t slept at all; he was still hunched over his laptop, scrolling through precinct rosters and sealed records like he could crack open Erin’s sins if he just stared hard enough.
Harlan came over with two fresh mugs and crouched beside me. He didn’t speak right away, just scanned the chaos around me, stacks of files, mugs of now cold coffee, and my laptop syncing our backup data to Kane’s secure cloud.
“You keeping track of what we’ve already flagged?” he finally asked.
“Colour-coded folders,” I said, pointing at the mess on the table like a deranged kindergarten teacher. “Red is confirmed corruption. Blue is new info. Yellow’s inconclusive but suspicious.”
He huffed out a low sound that was almost a sigh of amusement. “Of course it is.”
I rubbed a hand over my face, feeling the exhaustion settle into my bones. “There are so many I haven’t even touched yet. It’s like… I haven’t stopped moving since the raid.”
Harlan’s voice softened. “Don’t be hard on yourself, Ava. That’s what this is for, to catch up, to fight back.”
That was when he froze, brows knitting like a memory had just clawed its way to the surface.
“Shit… Remi mentioned a woman,” he said, kneeling beside me. “Rachel… something. She couldn’t remember all the players, told me I should ask you.”
I nodded slowly, rifling through the files until I found the thin one near the bottom of the stack. Rachel. One of our first clients, when the clinic was still fighting to prove its legitimacy.
“Rachel was married to a cop,” I said quietly, unfolding the notes in Remi’s handwriting, messy, frantic scrawls like she was chasing the truth before it slipped away.
“Emotionally abusive. Controlling. She said he had connections that no one would believe her. Never said who, just that he ‘knew people’.”
Gray wheeled closer, leaning over my shoulder. “What’s his name?”
"Hmmm, let me look." I put the folder down, searched our digital database and found nothing on Rachel. "I am going to have to dig through Rem's notes."
The room went quiet again as I dug through post its, ripped notepad pages, scribbles in margins of her case file. I flipped the page, and there in Remi's handwriting was a name and a question mark. “Martin Rourke.”
Gray went still. “Officer Rourke?”
“Yeah, I mean, that is what it looks like. I think Remi was digging into him without wanting to have it flagged. Why?”
He didn’t answer. Just spun back to his laptop, fingers flying. “Hold up… give me... I need to look into this.”
On the third day, sleep was impossible.
Every sound outside had me jerking awake, the creak of branches, the groan of the cabin settling, the distant whine of tires on a road we couldn’t see. Every time, I reached for my phone before I even knew I was moving.
Still nothing from Remi. Harlan told me not to worry that if she had gone quiet, it was likely for a good reason and that he was reaching out to the MC. But the tightness in his jaw and the uncertainty in his eyes made my gut sink.
Jack was making breakfast or trying to. Something hissed on the stove and filled the cabin with the faint smell of burnt eggs, but no one complained.
Gray finally spoke, his voice hoarse from too much caffeine and not enough sleep. “I think Erin was sleeping with Rachel’s husband.”
My head jerked up. “What?”
“Wait, wait…” He pulled up precinct rosters, old HR complaints, and archived images. “Here. Martin Rourke. Flagged for inappropriate conduct with another officer. Erin was never named, but…”
Jack leaned over his shoulder. “There. That’s Erin.”
I stared at the photo on Gray’s screen, an old district party. Erin and Martin are in the background, too close, too familiar.
“Oh my god,” I whispered, flipping through Remi’s notes again. “Rachel found texts. Said she thought she was losing her mind. Then one night she confronted him and he… he attacked her.”
“She file charges?” Harlan asked, voice rough.
“Withdrawn,” I said bitterly. “Her statement disappeared."
"And Erin?" I asked Gray.
He sighed and then answered, "She got transferred. Quietly. No fanfare. No reason given.”
Jack swore under his breath. “She warned him. Or hell, maybe she set Rachel up from the start.”
“Either way, she had her hand in what happened to Rachel,” I said flatly.
By the fourth day, it felt as though the walls were closing in.
Gray hadn’t stopped digging. Every few hours, he’d come up for air with another file, another connection, another fucking lie we hadn’t seen coming.
“There’s another sealed case,” he said suddenly, eyes darting across the screen. “Different name, but…” He clicked open a transcript. “Remi gave testimony.”
I froze. “Not for Rachel?”
“No. Separate case. Lucas Morris. Accused of stalking and harassment. Victim’s name redacted, but Remi’s all over the witness list.”
Jack tilted his head. “Morris… that name…”
Gray opened a new file, eyes scanning rapidly. “Fuck... the son of Judge Everett Morris.”
Silence fell, thick and charged.
Gray looked up. “Judge Morris. That’s Erin’s stepdad. Lucas Morris is her stepbrother.”
“Holy shit,” I breathed.
Harlan stood slowly, hands braced on his hips. “That’s who’s protecting her. Why she thinks she's invincible.”
Jack crossed to the table, voice low and sharp. “So, Erin was having an affair with Rachel’s husband. Rachel finds out and gets hurt. Erin warns him, covers it up. Later, Remi testifies against her stepbrother. Erin gets promoted. The clinic starts getting flagged...”
Gray added, “She probably used her access to track Remi’s clients, to interfere with investigations. The raid wasn’t the beginning; it was the finale.”
“I don't think she’s done,” I said, the words thick in my throat. “She’s been trying to ruin Remi for years. She just finally got bold enough to do it in public.”
Harlan looked at each of us. “We need to finish connecting the dots. Every report. Every sealed case. Every shift record, badge check, missed logs... everything. If she made one misstep, we’ll find it.”
“We already have,” Gray said, turning his screen. “She used department resources to access sealed records. And I’ve got a list of emails that went to her stepfather’s clerk account.”
“That’s enough to raise hell,” Jack said.
“It’s not enough to take everyone connected down,” Harlan replied.
He turned back toward the table, eyes sharp. “I want it all. Every link, every leak, every string she pulled. We’re not just sending this to IA. We’re sending it to the FBI. And if they ignore it? We send it to every goddamn reporter with a spine.”
His voice softened, but the fire in it stayed.
“For Erin. For the people she hurt. For Remi. And for every case that woman tried to bury.”
By day five, I was a complete mess.
My phone finally buzzed.
I nearly dropped it.
But it wasn’t Remi. Just another automated warning from the bank about freezing the clinic’s accounts.
I stared at it until my vision blurred, then tossed it on the couch.
“Five days,” I said quietly. “And still nothing.”
Jack didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. We were all thinking the same thing.
Outside, the woods whispered in the shifting wind, as if they knew something was coming.
Inside, we kept digging, stitching together every thread, every sealed record, every quiet cover-up Erin thought she’d buried.
Four people who’d already lost too much, slowly building the kind of truth that could burn her entire empire to the ground.