CHAPTER NINE #2
"Just me," Nash said, before he'd fully decided to say it, some instinct older than the operation itself taking over.
"Whatever you need to see, however much of it you need to see, I'll give you.
Give it to me twice over if that's what settles it.
She doesn't need to be part of proving anything.
She's not the one you're worried about."
Voss tilted his head slightly, something almost like interest crossing his face.
"Chivalrous. I'll give you that." He didn't move toward the case.
"Here's the thing you're not accounting for, Trent.
A man who volunteers to take on his girlfriend's share too — that's not reassurance.
That's exactly the kind of protectiveness a cop would show, trying to keep his partner clean of anything that might actually stick to her later in a courtroom.
You offering to cover for her tells me more than either of you saying nothing at all would have. "
"That's not what this is."
"Maybe not. Doesn't matter what it is. Matters what it looks like, and right now it looks like a man with something to hide about exactly one of the two people standing in this room.
" Voss's voice didn't rise, didn't sharpen — if anything it gentled, which made it land worse.
"You want to protect her, there's exactly one way left to do that from where you're standing.
Sit down, don't fight it, and don't give anybody in this room a fresh reason to wonder what you're so afraid she might tell somebody afterward. "
Nash felt the offer collapse in his hands, knew, with a sick, sinking clarity, that he'd just made it worse rather than better — that the network had already decided, before either of them walked into this room tonight, exactly how far they intended to go, and that nothing he could say or offer or trade was ever going to change that math.
He looked at Vanessa one more time, an apology he had no words adequate for, and saw her give him the smallest possible shake of her head — don't, it won't work, don't make this cost more than it already has to.
"Okay," he heard himself say, the word landing strange and distant in his own ears, like someone else had spoken it for him.
What happened next existed for Nash afterward only in fragments, disjointed and half-formed, the way trauma sometimes chose to store itself rather than let a person carry it whole.
The younger man's hands, efficient and clinical, offering no comfort and expecting none.
Voss's voice somewhere in the background, flat, instructional, the specific horror of watching a violation get administered with the bored competence of routine.
Vanessa's hand finding his at some point, gripping hard enough to hurt, both of them holding onto that single point of contact like it was the only solid thing left in a room that had otherwise gone entirely unmoored.
He didn't consent to any of it, not really, not in any sense that mattered — agreed to it the way a person agreed to a car crash they saw coming and had no way left to stop, a choice that wasn't really a choice at all once every other door in the room had already been closed.
The needle itself registered distantly, a small sharp wrongness against his arm, and then a warmth spreading through him that his body responded to with a relief so immediate and total that some small, horrified part of him recognized, even in that first moment, exactly how dangerous that relief was going to be.
He heard Vanessa's voice somewhere beside him, tighter now, and understood, through the growing haze, that whatever mercy he'd hoped might extend to her alone had never actually been on the table.
"Her too," Voss said, somewhere at the edge of Nash's narrowing awareness. "Can't have a loyal man and an untested woman standing on the same side of this. Wouldn't be fair to either of you, keeping the math that uneven."
Nash tried to speak, tried to make the same offer one more time even knowing now exactly how little it had bought him the first time, and found the words wouldn't fully assemble themselves anymore, his own voice thick and slow and increasingly far away even to himself.
He caught, at the very edge of what he could still process, Vanessa's face — steady, even now, even here, some hard professional core in her refusing to let the fear fully surface where the room could see it — and then the same clinical efficiency turned toward her, and there was nothing left in him with which to stop it.
He would carry that failure, he knew dimly even then, much longer than he'd carry whatever the drug itself was about to do to him.
? ? ?
He surfaced sometime later — minutes, hours, he had no way of knowing which — in the truck's passenger seat, Vanessa's hands white-knuckled on the wheel beside him, both of them silent in a darkness that felt, to whatever fragile awareness he still had access to, noticeably heavier than the dark outside the windows.
"I'm getting you back," Vanessa said, voice tight and controlled in the exact way of someone holding herself together through sheer force of will. "Stay with me, Nash. I need you to stay with me."
He tried to answer her. The words wouldn't come, not yet, his own body still foreign and slow beneath him, a wrongness settling into every part of him that he recognized, distantly, was only just beginning.
Outside the truck, Port Callahan's outer districts slid past in smears of orange streetlight, and somewhere three hundred miles south, Nash thought, with the last clear fragment of himself he could still access, that Mia was almost certainly asleep by now, safe, unknowing, still trusting a promise he'd made her on a fire escape that he was no longer entirely certain he still had the ability to keep.
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