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Miron sighs back, planting espresso in front of me. “Yeah.”

***

On the drive home, I find myself rehearsing what the fuck I’ll say to her. I have to remind myself, over and over, why I have to do this. What’s at stake if I can’t finish this—if I can’t find this mole.

It doesn’t seem to matter, though, that I’ve talked men out of wars and into graves on pure instinct, reading the room and saying the thing the room needs said. The whole way back into the city I’m moving words around like furniture, and every arrangement feels completely wrong.

Meera, what do you know about your father’s finances is an interrogation. Meera, I need to ask you something and I need you not to hate me is a confession. There is no version of this that isn’t a blade; the only choice I get is which end I hand her.

The folder stays in the car. That much I decide in the garage, staring at it on the passenger seat like it might apologize. If she sees documents, it becomes evidence. If it’s just my voice, maybe it can stay a question.

Upstairs, the penthouse smells like cumin and butter. She’s cooked. Of course she’s cooked—it’s what she does when her hands get restless, and I’ve been gone since before she woke up, with a note that said errands because I am a coward in at least one specific way.

Div hits me at the door, all velvet skull and shameless joy, and Mara ghosts in behind him to take her tithe of attention. Past them, Meera stands at the kitchen island in my shirt and her own leggings, hair in its thick braid, red pen tucked behind her ear like she forgot it there.

She’s nervous.

Immediately, that twists my stomach.

I clock the way her thumbnail works the seam of her own knuckle, and she tries too hard to keep a smile in place that doesn’t reach her eyes.

Some gear in my chest, already stripped raw by that fucking folder, slips its teeth. She knows something.

Fuck. Fuck. I’m not ready.

“Hey,” she says. “Good. You’re home. I—” Her breath hitches, the corners of her mouth pinching. “I have something to tell you.”

“I have something to ask you, too,” I burst. “What kind of cop is your father, Meera?”

She blinks. The amenableness is a mask that slips off her face, and what’s underneath is a cocktail of confusion and anger. “Excuse me?”

“It’s a simple question. You’re his daughter. His only child, even. What kind of cop is he?” I keep my voice level. Conversational. It’s a skill, and I am, apparently, exactly enough of a bastard to use it on her. “Decorated? Beat cop turned detective, twenty-five years, all that overtime. You ever ask yourself what keeps a man that busy?”

“I—What is this?”

“Because here’s the thing.” I’m moving now, slow, around the island, and Div tracks me with his ears up because dogs know a storm is coming before people do sometimes. “Not every cop is an absent father. Some of them coach Little League. Some of them make the graduation, the recital, and all the other shit. All the shit you’ve told me Ray never did for you. It’s not the badge that eats a man’s life, Meera. So I have to ask myself—a woman as smart as you, a woman who catalogues everything—did you really never wonder what he was choosing over you?”

I can see my words slip between her ribs like razorblades, exactly where I aimed without admitting I was aiming. Her chin juts out stubbornly, even as her eyes go glassy.

“Wow,” she exhales, very quietly.

“Meera—”

“No, that’s—” She shakes her head, her face pale. “I spent my whole childhood on that question. I built a personality around surviving that question. And you’re going to stand in your marble kitchen and ask it like you thought of it first? What happened today, Leo? You leave a note that says errands and come home talking like a—” Her breath snags. “Why are we talking about my father?”

“Because something doesn’t add up, and I think part of you has always known it.” I shouldn’t say the next thing. I can feel its weight on the launch rail and I fire it anyway. “Stop protecting him. He’s never once protected you—he didn’t even report you missing—and you’re standing here ready to bleed for his good name—”

“I’m not protecting anyone! I don’t even know what I’d be protecting him from—”

“Your fucking father, Meera, is—”

The terrace wall fucking collapses—a hundred square feet of floor-to-ceiling glass turning to white gravel in a single percussive blink—and underneath it, a floor down, something thumps hard enough that the wine glasses sing on their rack. Charges. Plural. The dogs detonate with them, both at once, at a register I’ve heard exactly twice in their lives—not barking at a stranger, baying at a breach—and the argument doesn’t end. It just stops existing. The part of my brain that has kept me alive this long shoves everything else off a cliff and takes the wheel.

I’m over the island before the glass finishes falling, taking Meera to the floor with my body, and the first rounds come in through the ruined terrace exactly where her head had been. I’m going to be fucking sick.

“Leonid!” she screams, panicked, clutching at me.

“Stay under me.”