Chapter Twenty-Nine – Tangled and Twisted All Up in Us
Diana, Derek, and I all looked up at once when Neal came back into the conference room, pushing the door open for himself with his back while he carefully cradled a drink carrier close to his chest. The three agents all cheered, and at the attention, Neal started to smile, eyes darting up to Diana with a proud grin.
"You went for coffee!" Derek clapped his hands and sat up in his seat. He was more invigorated by Neal's return (or by the arrival of coffee) than he had been about our discussion. "Nice!" On the edge of his chair, he held his hands out on the table, inviting Neal to bestow him with the drink of gods.
Neal set down the carrier. Now that he was in the room, I could see that he also had a fifth cup from Starbucks in one hand, and the carrier was full. They were unmarked, so I didn't just reach out and take one, lest it be someone else's, and we all waited impatiently while Neal set down his drink and started to sort out ours.
We'd been here for over an hour, growing progressively duller and duller as we tried to work out a new angle to a case that Hughes had personally handed to us involving a company and inconsistencies in several different ledgers. Because it was corporate and they had good lawyers, we were supposed to solve it ASAP. I didn't know that Neal had ever left the building after lunch, but since he had brought back souvenirs from my favorite café, I wouldn't get on him about taking unsanctioned break times.
"Whose is that?" Diana asked, eyeing the drink remaining in the carrier with a gleam of thirst in her eyes, even though there were already cups for everyone.
"Hughes'," Neal answered, not touching it. Instead, he set one in between himself and Derek, moved his own out of reach of any of the three of us, and put two others in between Diana and I. Neal stood at the side of the table, able to lean over the top and reach any of the cups as he so pleased. "I solved our embezzlement scam," he announced smugly. "It's a lapping scheme."
"A lapping scheme?" Diana echoed, tilting her head back to look up at Neal.
"It's another way to siphon money," I summarized for her helpfully. Judging by the expression she sent me quickly in retaliation, she had already known what a lapping scheme was. Oops. Helplessly, I put my hands up to show I was innocent.
Neal seemed delighted by my mistake, but he took back the spotlight anyway. "I'll show you!" He worked the last cup free from the carrier and pushed the cardboard towards the end of the conference table. Holding it up demonstratively, he narrated, "Let's say I wanted a sip of Hughes' latte."
Diana snorted. I raised my eyebrows. Honey, I love you, I thought at him emphatically, but there is no justifiable defense in the world for the stupidity you're about to act on. I smiled despite myself, biting my lip. I love you. It had been so long since I'd felt able to say I loved someone in the way I loved Neal, and it was so much more powerful and potent now than it had been when I was a stupid teenager who would 'love' anyone who treated her nicely. I couldn't say it out loud, to Neal or anyone else, but I knew I loved him, and it was an incredible feeling, to be able to think about how much I loved him and finally feel free to admit that to myself.
"I wouldn't do that," Derek warned, even as Neal brought the lid to his lips and took a long drink. The agent shuddered and looked away.
Neal licked his lips as he put down the coffee, leaning on the table with both hands. "Oh, that's delicious," he commented before going back to the matter at hand. He gestured to the latte and then took the top off. "Now I have a problem."
"Yeah," Derek deadpanned. "Hughes is going to make you look like a Baroque painting for drinking his coffee."
Neal hesitated, just for a second, as he privately realized how dumb of an idea that had been. He glanced surreptitiously out the conference room's floor-to-ceiling window as if he thought an angry supervisor would be watching like a creeper from just outside. "… Right. So, I take a little bit of yours…" He took Derek's out from in front of him, took off the lid of Derek's, and ignored the latter's agitated protests. "… And pour a little bit into here." He tilted it just enough so that some flowed over the edge and back into Hughes' latte. I frowned slightly. Hughes was going to know that someone had mixed his latte with someone else's order. Neal took one look at Derek's narrow-eyed and stoic face before he stopped smiling. "And now, you're going to single-handedly throw me back into a super-max."
"You're damn right I will," Derek agreed with a growl.
In response, Neal stared right at him while he slowly nodded. Then, like lightning, he reached for Diana's, swept it to the side away from her, and skittered out of her reach.
"Hey!" She squawked, looking aghast that he would dare to try it.
"It's a lapping scheme," Neal nervously laughed in his defense as he took the top off of hers, too.
Diana held out both of her arms incredulously, yet she didn't stand up in preparation of castrating him. "That doesn't mean you get to take my coffee!" Neal hurried to pour some of Diana's into Derek's before the idea occurred to her, then quickly pushed that one back to her.
My artist stood up straight with the Hughes' and Derek's coffees in front of him, both of them just as full as they'd been when he entered the room. "I just keep going like this for as long as I can," he explained. Through process of elimination, I knew whose coffee was going to be next, and I wrapped my hand around mine before Neal had the chance to take it. "In the end, I've got a cup full of coffee and no one's any the wiser-"
I interrupted. "Until I catch you and threaten you out of trying to steal mine." I raised my cup in a toast. "Very entertaining, though. Props for the amusement value." With that, I took a drink, closing out the production.
Promptly, I made a disgusted face and shoved the coffee away from me, horrified.
"What the hell, Caffrey?!" I shrieked, making Diana lean back in her chair, giggling. Neal pursed his lips to try to hide his smile, but he wasn't successful in appearing innocent. Derek tentatively shook his cup a little to mix in his order with Diana's, then took a small, cautious sip. He deemed it acceptable with a surprised hum. "This is disgusting!"
Neal stopped trying to hide his grin. "That's because it's Diana's order," he quipped.
My probie stopped laughing.
He wasn't looking like such a catch when he was playing tricks on me with my caffeine. Someone forgot to bring their survival sense. "You said it was mine!" I objected, scowling at him, betrayed. Neal fed me good coffee. Imported coffee. From Italy. Now all of the sudden he was fooling me into drinking – drinking whatever it was Diana apparently ordered?
"No," Neal defended, holding his hands up and shaking his head. "I just… pushed it towards you. It was an implication, at most."
Diana took the drink I had sampled, sent me a glare for taking some of it, and possessively moved it onto her thigh, where no one else could tamper with what she intended to keep. Derek watched the unfurling match like a ping-pong game, turning his head from side to side and casually staying refreshed.
"You made me your accomplice in the desecration of coffee?!" I demanded, throwing my arms out. "How could you?!"
"Well, now you can't turn me in without it coming back to you," Neal pointed out logically.
So not only did he make me an accomplice, but he took Diana's coffee – which was actually my coffee – and gave it to Derek?! I stared at him for a very long moment. It was at least thirty seconds between his attempt at rationalizing his actions and my response, and in that time, Derek and Diana both grew more and more anxious to see what would happen next.
Finally, I found my words. "I'm going to take all of your fedoras and send them through shredders!" I declared irately and slumped back into my chair, crossing my arms over my chest while I pouted, glaring at my (possibly soon-to-be-ex) boyfriend.
Derek let out a tiny snort. Diana kicked him under the table.
Someone's phone beeped. Neal took it out of his back pocket to check the notification, scanning his eyes over the screen before he pushed it away again. It was hardly out long enough to see that it was a Smartphone before he was hiding it again, but luckily, neither Derek nor Diana were nearly as suspicious of his actions as they used to be.
"Oh, man, I totally forgot," he groused, planting a hand on the table and leaning heavily over the top. He turned his head to Derek, guessing that the man was probably feeling more hospitable towards him than either of his female coworkers. "June's doing a champagne dinner tonight, with fondue." Derek raised an eyebrow as if asking what Neal expected him to do about it. Neal turned his eyes on me, pleading. "Do you mind if I cut out early?"
So not only does he get my coffee, but he gets fondue, too.
"Why not?" I sighed, reaching up to pinch the bridge of my nose. I took the opportunity to check the time on my watch while my hand was up and saw that it was almost time for me to wrap things up for the end of the work day, regardless. "I consider this enough of a breakthrough for everyone to go home. Pack up and head out, guys."
Derek and Diana both got up quickly, immediately dissolving into chatter between themselves like high schoolers released from class. Diana was bouncing date ideas off of Derek, and Derek proposed that she and Christy double-dated with him and Katie.
After they left, I was still in my chair. I rolled my shoulders back and stood more slowly, while Neal waited patiently. He collected the cardboard drink carrier to toss it out on the way past a trash can. Rolling my shoulders back stretched my muscles until I felt something pop in my right shoulder, and I sighed softly as I rolled my head.
"Long day?" Neal asked gently, picking up my blazer from the back of my chair.
I looked at him over my shoulder and saw that he was holding up my jacket for me. I turned my back to him again and let him help me put it on, then I turned back around and flipped my hair out from under the collar. "I didn't know desk work could be so tiring," I shared, reaching out for his waist, intent on bringing my hand up to the small of his back.
Neal chuckled quietly and let me guide him. "Hey, Kenna, she made sure to remind me that you're invited, if you're up for it." I was about to ask if the invitation included Katie when Neal lowered his voice to add, "She wants to show you this music box she got, she's curious if you can fix it so it plays again."
I inhaled sharply and looked out over the bullpen as we left the conference room. My wallet and my phone were both still in my pockets, but I'd need to grab my messenger bag from my office. Music box. June wasn't big on them, as far as I knew, and Neal wouldn't have waited to tell me after Derek and Diana had left if it were just any old music box picked up in an antique store.
This is about the music box.
It had been close to a month since we'd last seen Alex. After she left the penthouse the day we arrested Wilkes, not even Mozzie had a word on her whereabouts. I hadn't pressed too hard. She wanted that box, and she wouldn't be giving up on it. I knew she'd come back to us sooner rather than later, because if she were capable of getting it on her own, then she wouldn't have risked cutting us into the operation to begin with. The problem was that waiting left the anticipation to simmer, and before long, I found myself just as obsessed with the thing as Neal, saving tabs on my laptop on the Nazi treasure loots and looking up online archaeological websites to speak with professionals who might know anything. I couldn't go through a day without thinking about it, wondering how much longer it would be before we were free of its shadow.
In the meantime, we had to continue as usual. No huge cases had come up, so most of our days consisted of working in the WCCD and taking lunch breaks together, sometimes dragging other members of our team, sometimes going to visit Kate with take-out at her daycare. Kimberly Rice was still awaiting the results of her hearing, but, true to my promise, I had laid off. Since she had tried earnestly to recover Neal and Lindsay both, I didn't make hell for her, but I still gave a thorough and honest review of her conduct. It wasn't going to look nice on her record, but she had made her own bed, and if she intended to continue pursuing careers in the bureau, I would take feeling guilty over worrying that she hadn't learned her lesson.
At nights, Neal, June, Mozzie, and I had a game night at least once a week, usually on weekends. We had discovered that, while Neal and Mozzie could occasionally come to an agreement on video entertainment, it was much harder for the three of us to come to a consensus, so movies were what Neal and I did when we were alone and just wanted to spend time next to each other. I spent a couple nights a week with him, and the rest of my free time was given to Katie, helping her design worksheets suitable for four- and five-year-olds. She had gotten me to help her look into field trip opportunities to get them out of the building sometime.
Things were settling into a nice rhythm. I could say without lying or mincing words that I was more than content. My sister was safe, I had a small and comfortable social circle, I had enough variances in my routine not to be bored, my work was still somewhat engaging, and I had enough distractions through other means not to dwell on the past or my demotion. For the first time in a long time, I was going to work without feeling sour about it, and while part of it was thanks to Neal, I believed that more of it was due to coming to more comfortable conclusions about myself, provoked by the situations I'd been forced into by Neal, Matthew, and Fowler – among others.
Except now that short period of tranquility was coming to an end. If there was something about the music box, something about Alex… well, I'd learned that with the good came the unfortunate, and there was always a catch – especially with something as shady as the things that we were getting into.
I pressed my hand a little bit harder into his back, just to feel his warmth through his clothes. Neal didn't speed up, just let me have the pressure I wanted. Alex and I were not best friends, and that was probably for a good reason. The two of us would never see eye-to-eye, and at least half of it was because of our relationships with Neal. I could be friends with a lover's ex, but not when they kept flirting with him.
I love you, I thought again, biting my lip. Alex is just an ally. I know I haven't told you, but I know you care about me, too. I couldn't assign those specific words to him… I could hope, I could guess, but I didn't want to take anything for granted, and I didn't need him to express commitment the way I might have done in other circumstances to feel safe and wanted.
"Only an idiot would refuse champagne dinner with music and Parcheesi," I answered lightly. June's staff were excellent chefs, and she had a taste for liquor that rivalled Neal's. No one would ever have to be wise to that there was something unscrupulous hidden underneath civil plans of a social gathering.
Neal picked up his hand and waved over the mezzanine at Derek. "See you guys!" He called as I left him standing by the rail, slipping into my office to grab the rest of my belongings.
As I was bent over by filing cabinets to unplug my computer charger, I stopped and looked up at my reflection in the window. Brunette-dyed hair swung down over my front, spilling in curls around my face and making my eyes look bigger and bluer, and since I was bent over, my shirt was pulled at by gravity and I could see cleavage below my neckline. I hesitated to move again, just looking at my reflection with the charger in one hand.
She looked a lot different than I remembered from the woman who had been woken up in the hospital after almost a week of in-and-out drug-induced sleep. Longer hair, different clothes, different posture, more guarded, a little bit more weight.
I took a deep breath. The woman I was seeing had a lot to be worried about, but her primary concerns were a rustic antique and a (so far) nonviolent, lying OPR agent. I no longer had to worry that I might be ambushed in my own home, or that I might wake up to a man standing over my bed with a doctor's mask over his mouth. The person I'd left behind might have skinned me alive for what I was planning to do – what I already had done in my quest to protect my loved ones – but at least now I had the loved ones I did those things for.
No matter what was going to come from the music box, I was still me, and even though I had changed, that didn't necessarily mean anything bad.
… Did it?
Kate was informed that we were at the store, picking up some stuff for Neal to nurture his artistic hobbies. Neal pleasantly told June that we were at my house, going to the movie theater with Katie. Suffice to say that neither of them knew the truth. I felt guilty for lying to my sister, but even the minimal involvement she'd had during the diamond heist was enough to attract Fowler's attention last time. I was wary to even give her information, lest she be made into a mark again. Mozzie was probably the only person who knew where we really were.
A splash echoed through the acoustics of the large, open indoor pool.
Well, Mozzie was one of two people who knew where we really were.
Neal kept a few feet between himself and the edge of the swimming pool. It had its own small building, attached to the public gym that had closed almost four hours ago. Neal had brought his lock-picking set, but we'd found the door to the pool jammed open with a thickly-folded origami flower. Even if there had been a question about who was using the pool after hours, there was no doubt in my mind after that.
I looked over the surface, rippling softly. Bright lights glowed from the bottom of the pool, underwater lights making the color turn a light blue in some places and a darker blue in others. The chlorine was pungent and offensive, but I couldn't deny that there was something inherently peaceful about the wide, darkened room, only one row of overheads turned on. On the other side of the pool, near the stairs in the shallow end, was a pile of clothes. My eyebrows arched.
Neal slipped his hands into his pockets. I crossed my arms and ventured slowly a little closer to the edge. I wasn't worried about falling in, since I still wore my shoes, but I wasn't a big fan of public swimming pools. A lithe blur of tan and brown swam under the surface.
About ten seconds later, the water broke, distorting in waves from the center of the disturbance. Alex tossed her head back, slick hair flying out of her face and plastering itself to the back of her head and neck. She reached up with her hands, wiped her eyes, and started smiling, slicked brown hair clinging to her face. The fence brushed it away and blinked, looking up at Neal and I from where she paddled to stay above the water in the deep end.
There's something poetic and fitting about that which I don't want to acknowledge.
I glanced back to the clothes on the other end of the pool and sighed, looking to her shoulders. No, I couldn't see any bra straps, either from a bikini top or a bra.
"Classy," I dryly complained, voice unintentionally echoing. I startled myself a little bit with how loud it was to speak out loud. The hum of fans and the water filter in the background, the chemical smell, and the wavering blue lighting made it all seem tranquil and dreamlike, as if I could blink too hard and wake up from anesthetic. "You know, if you wanted to go skinny dipping, the Hudson wouldn't have required breaking in."
Alex grinned at me mischievously and let her head bob halfway underwater. She tipped her forehead forward and then swept her hands over her hair, using water to mold and weigh it back so none of it was in her way.
"I got your message." Neal's voice sounded even louder than mine, but, standing next to him, I could tell he was only using his normal volume. "Was wondering when you were going to call." He was casual. I was a little annoyed. This wasn't the first time Alex had stripped off her clothes in the same vicinity as my boyfriend, and this time she was entirely naked.
She drifted back from the edge, gliding through the water gracefully, until she was a couple of yards away and able to stand on the tips of her toes. "Hop in," she invited, raising a hand above the water and crooking her fingers. "We'll chat, hang out a bit…"
We'll definitely not have sex, I thought, fighting not to growl or glower. Alex was being unnecessarily provocative. Couldn't she take a hint?
I lowered myself into a kneel at the edge of the pool and dipped my hand over the concrete edge, expecting it to be cold. It was cool, but I suppose the lights in the floor must've been keeping it warmer than it should've been otherwise. After watching as my hand slipped through the surface, I looked back up to Alex.
"I'd understand the assumption if we were in California, but sadly, I actually do not wear a swimsuit under my clothes at all times."
Alex was not modest. She raised both of her arms. Everything below her throat was still submerged, but the clear water left very little obscured, even taking light distortion, diffraction, and reflection into account. Gesturing to indicate how empty the place was, she not only made her point, but she also made another: she didn't have a problem with being undressed, and she expected us to join her.
"This building is closed," Alex emphasized, her voice teasing. "There's no one here to get on you for jumping in in less than proper swimwear." She looked past me and up to Neal, smirking at him. "If there was…" She bit her lip and giggled quietly. "I'd be in trouble."
I took my hand out of the water and crossed my arms, unimpressed. By no means was I a prude, but skinny dipping in a public swimming pool long after the sun had gone down was the kind of fun that I'd long since outgrown. Maybe I'd have been laughing, too, if it weren't for what we were there about. If it weren't for that she was naked, enticing my boyfriend to similarly strip.
Standing up, I stepped back from the edge, back to Neal's side. Alex was his contact. If I reacted in the wrong way, then she might just refuse to talk to me, which wasn't a risk I was willing to take. I let him make the decision. Thankfully, Neal didn't seem all too eager to jump in at her invitation, either.
He surveyed her skeptically. Alex sighed and she gave up the pretenses of playfulness. Getting along was a stretch. Whatever had happened between her and Neal in the past made me wonder, and their trust in each other was very conditional. When she spoke again, her voice was its normal, calm, and half-irritated tone. "Relax. I know you're still wearing the anklet. What I don't know is if you're wired. Get in."
I forced the bristles to go down. That… actually made sense, and I reluctantly concluded that I couldn't argue her logic. Someone in her profession would have to be dumb to take it for granted that a fed was still going rogue and wasn't actually looking to catch her on audio evidence. The anklet didn't record anything, and the only way to be sure we weren't wearing a small mic affixed to any clothing was to have us shed it all and get in water, which would destroy most recording equipment. Being naked might have been a come-on, and it certainly doubled as one when she approached us the way she had, but moreover, it was a semi-respectful indication. She was doing what she expected of us, holding herself to the same standards.
In hindsight, I felt a little bit silly for assuming that she was hitting on my boyfriend. Not everything was about me and my relationship. Alex just had a way of making me edgy and defensive.
"I hate public pools," I grumbled, just to make sure everyone knew where I stood on the issue. Then, just to get it over with, I started to quickly remove my jacket and my sidearm, moving to start a collection like Alex's, far enough away from the edge of the pool so that they wouldn't be splashed.
Undressing in front of her didn't really faze me. I knew that she had started it, and the worst thing she could say to me would be about the scars on my stomach. However, in spite of the personal grievances with her, she was courteous (to an extent) and tactful (when she chose to be), so I wasn't very worried about that being an issue. Undressing in front of Neal, for that matter, was barely worth blinking at. I figured that my modesty where he was concerned had kind of been thrown out the window, and just wanted to strip quickly and get in the water.
A hand touched my shoulder. I paused before I could get more than two buttons undone on my shirt and looked over at Neal. His face was questioning. I turned to face him with my head cocked. "What?" I asked plainly.
He was the one who was desperate to get the box, and he was the one who felt Alex was the best person to go to for assistance. I would've thought that he'd be jumping in headfirst at the incentive of information, a new lead to follow. Sure, it was skinny dipping with his ex, but I was there, too, and hell, I was already getting in on the action, so to speak. Neal had his quiet, well-hidden issues where he wasn't too secure about himself, but those were more emotional and intellectual than physical, and he exploited his beauty often enough that I didn't think it would bother him, even if he and I weren't together.
"Let me?" He asked quietly, rubbing his hand down my collar and to my front. I lowered my hands. Neal kissed my cheek, his lips warm and dry, and started to undo my shirt for me. Both of my hands fell to his hips and my eyes slid shut. Some of the tension drained from my shoulders as he lowered his head to my neck, pressing his mouth to my throat as he gradually exposed more and more of my flesh.
How he turned something clinical into something sensual – or why he tried it at all – was beyond me, but I found myself softly sighing and relaxing, spreading my fingers against his sides. Before he had pulled the side of my shirt down my left arm, I had reached for the front of his pants, pulling at the hem of his shirt and untucking it from his trousers, reciprocating the actions and divesting him of his clothes. As I pushed the buttons open, Neal bit softly and sucked on a hot spot on my neck. I inhaled shakily and felt more than I heard our clothes falling to the floor.
The fence in the pool was curiously quiet. I unbuttoned Neal's slacks and hooked my thumbs under the waistband, sliding my hands around his hips and to his back, and deft fingers snapped open the clasp of my bra. While I toed off my shoes and our pants and underwear joined our shirts, jackets, and shoes on the floor nearby, I opened my eyes enough to look at Alex.
It wasn't my imagination that her eyes were half-lidded, or that she was sucking on her bottom lip, or that both of her hands seemed awfully close to her breasts. I felt as though I'd triumphed somehow, what with having Neal's hands on my bare thighs and his head down on my shoulder, my fingers in his hair.
The water reflected pale blue spots over Neal's torso and I traced the light as it moved with the ripples of the pool, crossing from his ribs to his upper arm and then disappearing, returning on the far wall behind him. Standing entirely nude in the public pool, I cupped his chin in my left hand and kissed him, tasting his tongue and pressing my chest against his.
I hadn't ever thought I was into exhibitionism. Had it been someone else in the pool and I probably wouldn't have been. Something about making Alex watch and see that Neal was mine and I was his and neither of us (and especially not him) were hers made me feel more comfortable, and, yes, a little bit egotistic.
We jumped in from the deep side of the pool. The water felt cooler than it had seemed on my hand, and as I rose back up and my head broke the surface, I gasped quietly as gooseflesh rose on the back of my neck. I tangled my hands in my hair, doing as Alex had and streaming it down my back. Neal was already rubbing his eyes from the sting of chlorine, and his hair was slicked down like wet fur. Through the water, we couldn't see each other as clearly, and that, coupled with the cold rush, eased the sexual tension.
Neal was the first to speak after we proved no one was looking to double-cross anyone. "Where's the music box, Alex?" His voice was low, confident and smooth as silk, and I thought it was impressive that he could still be so sure of himself, even after that show we put on, making out in front of his ex-lover. Maybe that was why he was so at ease; maybe he thought that cleared the air.
She arched her thin eyebrows. "No small talk?" The brunette asked, feigning a wound.
What do you think the three of us have in common to talk about? I didn't have time for games. Neither did Neal. If someone else checked his anklet and came to see why he was at a gym after closing time, they'd find us both having a covert meeting with a known black market fence.
I felt I'd indulged her enough by going for an unplanned swim without a swimsuit. "Your note said it's in Manhattan." I stubbornly stayed on-topic. "If you're back for it, then that means there's an opportunity to get to it."
She stopped smiling. Her joking expression turned into a slight frown. "I'm not going to give you all of the information. I'm not dumb. I want to make sure you won't go get it without me."
Mozzie was lucky that his paranoia had an eccentric charm to it. Alex's was just getting on my nerves.
"I told you," Neal reiterated, sounding sincere as he offered her a conspiratorial, sneaky smile. "We'll get it together."
She pursed her lips like she didn't believe him and she crossed her arms under the water level, another indication of skepticism. The three of us all stood in a raggedy triangle in the pool. Neal and I had more of our bodies out of the water, since we were both taller than Alex, but it was still so high that if I looked down too far, I'd end up with a wet face.
Finally, Alex gave in, still looking suspicious. "It's in the Italian Consulate," she reluctantly divulged.
I groaned and tipped my head back, looking up at the high ceiling. It seemed two stories above my head, and the narrow, crisscrossing beams supporting the overhead lights appeared as if they could snap and fall at any time. "Of course it is," I whined. "Why would it be somewhere easy to get to?"
When I looked to them again, I got the impression that Alex had just finished rolling her eyes. "I traced it to the consul general. He tucked the box into his own private safe in the Consulate last year, and he's flying in next month to pick it up," she explained to Neal.
Although it was hard, I managed to resist the impulse to ask how she could've figured any of that out, what kinds of contacts she had, and if she had had to break any laws to get her paws on the information. "And then it'll be in Italy, where it's at least ten times harder to get to," I predicted.
"A Consulate's a hard target," Neal pointed out the obvious, a frown on his lips. Unfortunately for me, that frown was more indicative of him thinking than it was of him resigning. He was taking it as a challenge, not a deterrent.
"They're having a party this week," Alex informed with a pleased smirk. "That's our chance to get inside."
His lips quirked. A trail of water slipped from the shallow dip in his collarbone down the back of his shoulder and rejoined the liquid in the pool. "I'm always up for a party," he grinned, turning his eyes to me hopefully.
A Consulate? This week? My stomach twisted. It was awfully short-notice, and although a party was good enough for them, a Consulate wasn't even technically American land. If we were caught, we'd be facing the jurisdiction of an entirely different country. Trying to rob from another sovereignty's land was definitely worse than trying to break into a post office. It might've been naïve, but I'd been subconsciously hoping that the music box would be hidden somewhere inconspicuous and low-risk.
But we needed to get it. Neal's sister and mine both had lives and emotions that were manipulated and threatened because of Fowler, and he wouldn't stop until he'd gotten the amber music box. If I said no, then Neal and Alex would probably go after it on their own, and I shuddered to think of what kind of trouble they could get themselves into. Both of them seemed like the impulsive kind.
"Okay," I hesitated to say, and knew I'd regret it on some level when we came up with a more detailed plan. "But what about when he notices that it's not there? Then it's taken to the authorities. The bureau is definitely going to hear about it." I didn't need to remind them both that any high-profile theft in the New York area was going to turn heads to Neal before anyone else was considered. We'd already proven that once in the last year.
Alex and Neal both shared a reasoning glance between themselves before I became the center of attention again. "The Nazis took it from the Russians…" Alex started to prompt me in the right direction.
Neal concluded the thought for her. "He wasn't supposed to have it in the first place, so he won't talk when we steal it from him," he said, sounding certain enough to stake his freedom on it. When he smiled at me reassuringly, I forced one back, but it seemed more like a grimace. Mostly because he really was staking his freedom on it. And Alex's, and mine.
This is insane, I realized with a flood of vertigo that suddenly hit me. If I hadn't been supported by water on all sides already, I'd have sat down hard. I'm signing on for a heist. A real, live heist. Of Italians. Of the Italian Consulate. Oh, God.
I raised my hand to wipe water from my face before it dripped into my eyes. I only smeared more of it over my forehead, but it did take away the threatening drops over my eyebrows. "Okay," I said, forcing myself to take a deep breath. It felt weird, a little stifling, to do so in a pool, because the liquid kept pressing in from all sides. "Question that's not related to the consulate."
Neal looked towards Alex curiously, interested in what sort of thing I'd ask of her that didn't have to do with the sole reason I was willing to talk to her. My relationships with most of his contacts were weird; I had a friendship with Mozzie layered with banter and arguing, I disliked Alex yet conspired with her, and I pretended that the people I knew he and Moz chatted with to get info didn't exist. I didn't usually ask things I didn't think I could get legitimate answers to, so what I wanted to get from Alex had to be a very limited field.
Alex looked a little surprised, too, but she covered it well, underneath an assured smirk and a stretch of her shoulders, pushing her arms behind her back. This really would've been an incredibly awkward meeting if it weren't for the pool doing its part to obscure views. "Shoot," she invited.
"You chose to meet here, so you knew we'd be swimming." I put a hand on my hip underwater, only reminding myself how I was completely nude when my fingertips slipped over slick skin. "How come you didn't plan on a swimsuit, either?" She couldn't be trying to record Neal or I; if she wanted to turn it in, she had no cover (such as being a federal agent) to excuse the fact that she was here with us.
The fence just grinned wolfishly at me, giving me a sexy little tilt of her head and holding her lower lip between her teeth. It was not a promising reply, and I ground my teeth while narrowing my eyes at her.
With wet hair and damp clothes (we may have slightly overlooked the problem of drying off…), Neal and I sat with Mozzie around the dining table near the kitchenette. We parted ways from Alex at the gym. She remained in the water, practicing her swim strokes while we pulled on our clothes and departed. The woman claimed she was waiting so that we weren't all leaving at the same time, but I suspected part of it was so that she could watch us (specifically, Neal) while we dressed.
My bra was very uncomfortable when it was wet, my hair was dried out from chlorine, and some warm pants, be they mine or Neal's, would've been greatly appreciated. Instead, we took care of the important discussions first, and when Mozzie was already in the penthouse by the time we arrived, I concluded that Mozzie had likely been the intermediary between Alex and Neal about where and when to meet up.
This talk did not end so well. With each sentence, Mozzie became less and less pleased. His excitement over having a target to steal did not compute with his desire to stay far away from all forms of official government when the mark was the consul general of the Italians. While Neal and I sat there, tired and resigned, Mozzie went through an indignant spiel about how he was not looking to die for a box, whether it played a tune or not.
"A consulate? Oh, great, it's become an international incident," he sarcastically drawled, throwing his arms. Neal and I glanced at each other, sighed in synchrony, and stared at different spots on the table while we let our friend get his ranting over with. "Look, I don't want to end my days in some underground prison, adopting cockroaches as pets!"
Repulsed, I wrinkled my nose. "Ew. Even if we were arrested and extradited to Italy," I made sure to say it hypothetically, because I had no intention of doing this without a more-than-decent plan, an escape route, and some sort of insurance to ensure everyone's individual cooperation, "I'm pretty sure we wouldn't be kept underground. And I hope there would be better pest control if we were," I amended as an afterthought.
"We're not breaking into North Korea." Neal responded similarly, rolling his eyes and reaching out to place his hand over Moz's. "It's just the Italians, Moz."
I frowned at the chess board altered to hang on the wall and cocked my head. I dunno if we should go that far with the mitigation…
"They do prison just fine!" Mozzie swore, taking his hand out from Neal's reach, tossing himself grumpily back in the chair, and crossing his arms in a sulk. "Ask Galileo!" He has a point, I acknowledged with a flutter of nervousness. They wouldn't screw around if – when – we stole from them. If this wasn't a smooth, one-and-done heist, then the ramifications would be… extreme. The conspiracy theorist swallowed and shook his head less fervently. This time, his face suggested he couldn't believe he was even considering this. "Can we do it without Alex?"
Neal was indicating a negative before Mozzie had finished asking the question, but I took up the burden of verbally answering. "She's counting on us wanting to try, so she's not going to tell us which safe we need to break it out of until she's already in on the action," I explicated delicately, trying not to let it show how agitated I was by her forcible involvement.
Mozzie sighed down at the table. "She always was a smart girl…" he wistfully reminisced.
"Yeah," Neal agreed quietly, with a voice that sounded like he wasn't too happy to think about it.
I wondered more about their relationship with the crafty brunette. Neither of them had ever said anything to make me think Mozzie hadn't known Alex as long as Neal had, but everything about her seemed to focus on her history, both as criminals and as partners, with Neal that sometimes I forgot she had a past with Mozzie, too. More than I had earlier, I felt left out. These three that I was trying to break laws with had known each other for years and shared a bond I'd never be able to have a part in. For all that I was breaking my own rules, the country's laws, and a lot of my self-imposed morals, I still thought Mozzie was wrong about the merits of crime. I still thought four-oh-ones were important, that it was good to have accessible records, that the government was important and usually beneficial.
Even while I was spending more and more time in their shoes, I was still a federal agent. I looked down. Much as I wanted to understand and empathize with them both, it seemed unlikely that I would ever come closer to understanding it than I was right then, and… it was still as murky as ever.
Mozzie shook himself out of it first. He sat up straight, squaring his shoulders. "All of this is moot, anyhow." He briskly went back to business, shrugging his arms. "You can't get out of your anklet anytime soon. If you do get it off for a case, you'll still have to lose a bunch of tails; that alone will put suspicions up."
I paused, chewing thoughtfully on the inside of my cheek. "Fowler's putting himself in a lot of nooses to get this box," I gravely mentioned. They both looked even darker when reminded of the common enemy we all detested. "If he wants it, he has to shut down the anklet, or at least manipulate the tracking aspect. He's done it before, he'll have to do it again." I shifted to change how I was sitting, and dampened and stiffened clothes scratched at my torso. Cringing, I pushed my chair away from the table and rose. "I get that this is an important decision, but my bra still hasn't dried, and I'm guessing neither of you understand how uncomfortable that is, so I'm going to go change into dry clothes."
Neal made a horrified face and I took that as meaning he wasn't going to try picking a fight about it. I pulled up my shirt's neckline to straighten the fabric. Mozzie's chair scraped as he pushed his feet against the floor. I went by him calmly, already reaching for the buttons to begin taking my clothes off.
"We would've been just fine if you had simply said you were going to dry off!" He told me firmly.
"Yeah, but then I wouldn't have gotten to bother you as much!"
I paused in the short hallway between the studio apartment and the bathroom and laundry, both small rooms that really were crammed when two people tried to use them at once. It occurred to me that I hadn't brought anything to change into except the pantsuit in the bag stuffed in his closet, and I didn't want to stay the night in that.
I'll just get some of his, I decided. I liked Neal's clothes, but not necessarily for the sappy reasons. While I did like the idea of just wearing what was his, and he liked to smile at me and roll up the sleeves of his shirts so I could make pancakes, I just liked a lot of men's styles of clothing. His sweatpants were comfortable and loose, and his tank tops and casual shirts were roomy and warm. Typically, they were also more expensive, which usually implied they were softer and held more heat.
Before I could venture all the way to find some, I heard Mozzie's voice picking up again where we had left off.
"Let's say you get Fowler the box," he proposed cynically. "Then what happens?"
A second passed in which no one responded. "What do you mean?" Neal asked then, a little guarded. I suspected he knew exactly what his friend was getting at, although it eluded me. If it were something that I should be concerned with, why wait until he thought I was out of earshot to bring it up?
Mozzie made a sympathetic, but frustrated, sound. "You give Fowler the music box and he gives you Kate, who comes running back into your arms." Mozzie's voice was a little sardonic. Fortunately for me, when Mozzie was appraised of my conversation with Moreau, he was much more open to questioning the motives of everyone involved, so when I told him my suspicions about her and asked him to keep an eye out for Neal on his end, Moz didn't waste time or energy protesting that there was no way Kate would betray Neal. I knew what I'd seen, what she'd said. "What do you think is going to happen then? Kate and Suit become best friends, you finish your term with the bureau, then – buy a fixer-upper in the suburbs, have a picture-perfect life with your sister, girlfriend, friends, and two-point-five reasons to join the PTA?"
Why the fuck would Neal join the Parent Teachers' Associ- oh.
My right hand covered my stomach protectively before I really thought about moving. I looked down at my abdomen as if I could see the silvery-grey lines through the fabric. Aside from the assumption that our relationship would even last that long (which I truly hoped it would, I loved him, I love the man for Christ's sake), it was a huge leap to guess that we'd ever invest in a family.
Especially since I wasn't sure I could even offer Neal a biological family, if that was what he wanted. There was a very high probability that Køhler had damaged my reproductive system when he attacked me, but because I'd been bitter, spiteful, and altogether sour about what had happened and how the bureau had handled it, I'd refused to see any more physicians than necessary. That included an OB/GYN, since there was nothing obviously wrong with me. Would Neal want kids? I supposed, if he got out of the life of crime and settled down… well, he did like children, and seemed to enjoy playing with them when we saw them… My stomach twisted uncomfortably. I didn't even want them. Maybe my opinion on that would change someday – anything was possible – but if I couldn't have children, that wasn't something that would alter itself just because I wished it to do so.
Couples in love had broken up for much less.
I shoved those thoughts away meanly. Just like way back when, I refused to think too long about what could've been done to me, the longer-lasting repercussions. I could see an OB/GYN sometime when it was convenient and relevant, not when I was planning to steal a national Russian treasure that had been looted by Nazis and found its way in the hands of the Italian government.
My focus was back on the men at the table quickly enough to hear Neal's response. He had steeled his tone and held his jaw tensely, which effected the way he sounded. "Yeah," he said testily, daring Mozzie to contradict him.
He sounds pretty dead-set on that happily ever after, I thought uncomfortably. We'd never talked about it. It was a big commitment – a huge one. Was it a fantasy he had in his head for himself, or was it a fantasy he built around us? What would happen if we didn't share the same ideals once the dust had settled and we had the options of moving forward?
"Neal…" Mozzie halted for a moment. Honestly, his voice was sad. Disappointed, upset, and more than a little bit sympathetic, as if he was mourning for a lovely potential future that he knew could never happen. "Happily ever after… it isn't for guys like us."
"It is this time." Neal stubbornly insisted, voice quiet and determined.
If he won't even listen to his best friend talk to him about it, how can I have any sway? Feeling like I was going to be sick, I pressed both hands harder into my abs, ducked my head down, and watched my feet on the floor as I hurried to the laundry room to borrow some pajamas.
And possibly to turn on the sink so neither of them heard me dry-heaving in the bathroom.
I wasn't going to lie – I felt a little crowded, pushed into the side of the couch while Neal leaned against my shoulder to see the screen of my phone. Mozzie sat on Neal's other side but maintained his personal bubble, elbows on his knees while he worried the hems of his sleeves. The speakerphone button was lit up.
The number for the OPR offices in DC was on the top of the screen. The first step to doing anything about the music box this week was to figure out the anklet. If we couldn't get what we needed from Fowler to do his dirty work, then there would be no point in detailing a hypothetical heist.
I ground my teeth as I was patched through to a secretary. I hated that I was doing Fowler's work for him. It felt like I was letting him win and use me for his own gain. What choice did I have? If I refused, then the torment on my family continued. If I intended to just get the box before he had the chance, I would've been alright with that, but no; I was running his errands for him.
"I want to talk to Agent Garrett Fowler," I said clearly, tone cool and hard. Neal and Mozzie were both silent, not even daring to move. The dim penthouse room was kept light with a lamp turned on in the corner. "Extension two-two-one."
"One moment," the secretary politely requested, turning the phone over and transferring the call.
Long fingers forced themselves underneath my left hand. I picked up my wrist and let Neal wrap his fingers around mine before settling my hand back on my thigh, squeezing him reassuringly as we waited. Calling Fowler… were we allying with the enemy, or did the ends justify the skeevy means? Whichever it was, whatever kind of people we were, we would be seeing the ending of this soon.
The line changed and the microphone picked up more background noise. "Agent Fowler's office," he promptly greeted. I didn't recognize the voice.
Well, he wasn't Fowler, but he was close enough. Refusing to talk to anyone but Fowler would've probably raised more suspicion than I wanted. Without introducing myself, I went ahead and spoke while Neal's grip on my hand tightened. "Leave Fowler a message that I have the information he wanted on the music box."
It was such a weird message to leave that I wasn't surprised when the clicking and tapping keyboard of the multitasking agent stopped. He paused before replying, and when he did, he was cautious and confused. "Who is this?"
As if I'm going to tell you! Voice recognition would be the undoing of any mysteries, if they were determined enough to find out for sure, but I was betting that Fowler would know as soon as the call was relayed to him that it was either myself or Neal. Hopefully, he'd have the sense to realize that he should contact me and not my informant if he was desperate to get in touch.
"He's a smart guy," I rolled my eyes. A smart man wouldn't've have started this mess… but, at the same time, a stupid man wouldn't have been able to almost get away with framing a diamond heist on an innocent one. "He'll figure it out." I stopped a second for effect. With everything that had gone into this so far, Fowler would've had to be pretty dumb if he couldn't logic out who we were. "Also tell him that we want to meet at midnight tomorrow."
Typing resumed, probably as a message was written up. "Where?" The brisk, businesslike demeanor was a relief. I'd been getting a little worried at how I would field away questions without putting him on alert.
I glanced to my side at Mozzie, who was staring rigidly at the floor by his feet. "He'll figure that out, too," I responded tonelessly, not giving away anything I didn't have to. Mozzie wasn't very proud of his own ingenuity tonight.
I hung up the phone, severing the connection before any elaboration could be made or asked for.
The means of contacting Fowler had been mostly Mozzie's idea. I was the one who established that we could not talk to Fowler about the box over phone lines. I didn't put it past him to record us just so that he could stab us in the back after he got what he wanted. That meant we had to lure him out to New York, which I'd just done.
Next, we had to actually confer about the box and Neal's anklet, which had to be entirely discreet and off-the-record. We needed to stay so far outside the box that we couldn't do it through the bureau at all, so we had to choose a different venue. A secluded one, without security guards or cameras, one that was unimportant and left alone at night. Neal suggested the second-highest floor of a parking garage within his radius; the garage wasn't in a ton of use during weeknights, and the top several floors should be practically empty. Even if there were other cars, the point of a parking garage is to park and leave. It was a relatively open space, so it would be hard for someone to spy without getting caught.
Signaling the parking garage to Fowler was a trick. That was where Mozzie came in. He had proposed that we use Fowler's hypervigilance about Neal's anklet to indicate the right place. While simultaneously scoping out the garage, Neal's anklet would create a cartographic figurative flashing neon sign. Why else would someone spend over an hour hanging out outside the corners of a parking garage? It was within his range, so no alarms would go off, and no one really bothered to check Neal's anklet without incident except for myself and Fowler.
Now we wait. It would take Fowler until morning to get the message, when he went back in for work. Even if he took the first flight to Manhattan, he wouldn't get in before lunch. For the night, our jobs were done. We had a respite, however brief, before things would snowball and we'd be up to our eyes in crime and conspiracy.
"Was that too cryptic?" Neal asked. The fact that he had to ask belied his uncertainty just as much as his tight grasp on my hand.
"No," I promised, stroking my thumb over his knuckles. "Fowler knows the context for everything I said. The bastard who pulled the strings behind Tulane and Le Joyau can riddle it out himself. Hey." I said quietly, giving him a nudge with my elbow. Neal scratched behind his ear and held his breath. "It'll be okay. We just have to get this stupid box and then we can be done with all of this. It'll go back to the way it was before we even met Fowler."
"Time only ever moves forward, Suit," Mozzie mumbled from the other side of the couch, and, personally, I agreed.
My nerves wouldn't quite settle themselves. I wasn't nearly as confident as I was acting, but if neither of them were sure of themselves, then I had to pretend to be. Mozzie had taught me that cons have a higher chance of going wrong when the con artists start to second-guess their plans. I knew we had made the best decisions we could and were acting to the best of our ability to take care of ourselves and our friends, but that didn't mean I wasn't scared that maybe it wasn't good enough, or maybe we would be caught.
Fowler had done a lot to damage my faith in the bureau. Corruption happened, but it was never so smoothly integrated that kidnap, conspiracy, criminal activity, sanctioned theft and burglary, stalking, harassment, fraud, bribery, obstruction of justice, and a dozen other criminal acts were all permitted to happen without getting caught. Even if things went back to the way they'd been on the outside, my perspective on my career and where I stood with the law had changed.
I would never be able to shake the guilt and shame of becoming a con artist alongside my soulmate.
The shutting door was the indication that Katie had returned from work. In the kitchen, I sipped some more coffee. The taste felt muted against my tongue, and though the heat numbed my cheeks, I didn't feel it the way I usually did. With my computer out in front of me, I read up on the Italian Consulate's website, skimming my eyes over Italian paragraphs for the fifth time, committing everything I'd need to know to memory.
I paused with my finger over the arrow key, hesitating before I clicked it to move down the webpage. "Hey, Katie," I called preemptively.
"Hey!" Katie responded suddenly and with a yelp. A minute later, she entered through the doorway. I was already focused on my laptop again, scrolling down and coming to the next header. "You scared me," she accused, taking it lightly. She dropped her purse down on the marble island and put a hand against the wall while she kicked off her shoes. "I didn't think you'd be home early on a weekday."
This time, I didn't stop to talk, just kept reading. When I tried to take a break, I just made everything worse. My anxiety would build up to an upset stomach and I'd end up either stress eating or gagging. I'd come home a few hours ago, leaving Neal to orchestrate the rough outline of the heist with Mozzie while I stayed away. Spending too much time with him would be a little risky.
I needed time off of work. I couldn't go in and face my colleagues today. I couldn't walk through those double-doors and look in their eyes, talk to their faces as I planned to betray them and their agency in one of the truest ways I could. Had I gone in, I'd have surely had a nervous breakdown, which I was managing to avoid doing as it was merely by keeping my mind occupied. So I called in sick, said I had a migraine, and then came home, just in case some concerned good Samaritan decided to check on me or bring me some ice cream, which Diana and Derek were both likely to do.
It turned out that that worry had been unfounded. They were both so wrapped up in compiling the evidence against the corporate lapping embezzlement with our forensic accountants that they hadn't even realized I was out until a few hours ago, and although they called me on speakerphone, I told them to stay in. Neither of them seemed very torn to pieces that I wasn't there, so my secret lack of illness was safe. Neal's company would've been liked, but I preferred being safe. Taking comfort in his confidence would've been all fine and dandy, but it would've backfired, had a very not-sick handler been found hanging out with her parolee.
"I didn't go in today," I finally answered as Katie made herself a snack. Surely she assumed the conversation had already ended from how long it took me to reply.
She stopped, closed the fridge, and waited. When I didn't say any more, she leaned on the counter and asked expectantly, "Are you hurt?"
Not physically, I almost said, but then I would've had to answer why I specified, and I couldn't in good conscience say that I was shaking at the seams and I was one nightmare away from doing something rash. As if robbing the Italians wasn't rash enough already.
"I'm fine."
"You're uptight," Katie corrected suspiciously.
Damn it. "I'm nervous," I corrected, holding my chin up huffily. I wasn't uptight. Well, I was, but I didn't want her to see how true that was, nor did I want to have to lie to her about the reasons.
Katie and I shared almost everything. She knew about my parents, about Zarra, about Køhler, about the reckless things I did when I was a teenager to lash out or to get attention. I told her about how hard it was when crimes were against children, I told her about how I felt when I was demoted, I confided in her constantly about my complex feelings for my thief. I had even told her about it when I realized how in love I was with Neal. The only things that had been off-limits were the specific cases during my blue-collar days and the dirty details of my sex life.
Until now. Possibly the worst decision of my entire life had been made, and it was entirely possible I was going to pay for it dearly. I didn't want to worry her with it. I didn't want her to waste her energy freaking out about something she wasn't going to talk me out of. I didn't want her to feel guilty or remorseful if she found out that a huge part of my motivation for doing it was for her behalf. I didn't want her to know any information on it that someone else might want to know; not only could she become a target (if it was this important to Fowler, it had to be important to other people, too), but she could be charged with crimes for not reporting mine.
I felt exponentially lonelier after making the decision to cut Katie out of this one, but Neal, Mozzie, and I had all agreed that it was the best course of action for her sake. If she was reason enough for me to give up on the ethics I'd stuck to for most of my life, then telling a little lie to her was nothing in comparison.
Katie sighed softly and hung her head. Although the air conditioner was still rumbling on in the room across the hall, it felt like we were the only people making sound. The only things my ears told me were worth registering were the clicks of my keyboard and her footfalls on the kitchen linoleum.
When she finally spoke again, she sounded sad in a way that made my heart ache. "This isn't something that you want to talk to me about, is it?" She guessed dully.
The only thing that kept me from spilling my guts at how dejected she sounded was the knowledge that we'd both be hurting even worse if I didn't keep my mouth shut. I suppose neither of us had realized how much we enjoyed my potentially-dangerous job being suitable for airing openly between ourselves until it no longer was.
"I wish I could," I promised to her, turning around to look over the back of my chair. I looked as earnest as I could, hair swinging down loosely, eyes wide and pleading. "I just don't feel comfortable telling you what's wrong. It's mostly a personal problem, you know?"
I wrung my hands. It was a tell of mine that I was well aware of. Katie saw and smiled sadly.
"Well, on my account, the bugs around the house are becoming a serious problem." She bent one of her knees and scuffed her toes along the floor, turning her heel uncomfortably. "We may need to call in an exterminator again."
I wish it were just bugs this time, I tried to tell her with my eyes, squeezing them shut and looking down. I twisted back around to look blankly forward at my laptop.
A moment later, I felt her leaning down behind me, her arms going over my shoulders and squeezing me from behind. "If you can't tell me, that's okay," she whispered into my ear, resting her chin on my shoulder. "Just know that I'll listen if you decide to share. I love you."
She kissed my cheek and held her lips to my face for a few seconds, then tilted her head so her forehead was pressed against my temple. I heard her breathing, steady and soft, and closed my eyes, reaching to tangle my fingers in her hair.
"I love you too, Katie," I replied, leaning my head into hers. "I love you so much," I whispered like a record.
Neal and I entered separately, but both of us were on the floor for almost half an hour before Fowler arrived. He took the elevator up from a lower floor. When it dinged, we both shared a look and waited to see who came out of it. Neal's face was shrouded in shadow from the walls of the garage, and the moonlight was blocked by the stone ceiling over our heads. The only way to see each other and the new arrivals were the dull, orangey overhead lights and the yellower fluorescents near the elevator.
The doors slid open treacherously slowly, and out stepped a black-haired man with his mouth thinly pressed and his suit absolutely impeccable, straightened dozens and dozens of times. He was an agent I recognized from when Fowler had framed Neal for stealing the pink diamond. After no one tried to murder him, he signaled with a hand behind his back, and Fowler left the elevator next.
"Fowler," Neal called, insolently speaking with a lilting, jeering voice. "Oh, you brought a friend!"
The blond's head snapped around to us and he sneered. We ambushed him, coming closer to the elevators. As the steel doors slid together behind him, Fowler had nowhere to go unless he could get through us first. He had expected us to be there, but something about our attitudes and the barely-constrained hostility kept us all on-edge and ready to run.
It did occur to me that a place chosen specifically for its discretion would be a good place to dish out some satisfying vengeance, but then I remembered that Neal was against that and, if I wanted to be a better person than Fowler, Wilkes, and Matthew, then I needed to be, too.
"Nice to know that none of us are stupid enough to come alone," I drawled, coming out. Fowler and I were both dressed like typical agents, but neither of us wore our holsters. I kept my blazer open over my front so that they could see I wasn't hiding anything, and Fowler's, which was never cut to close in the first place, offered the same view.
Fowler sent a scowl at his accomplice. The brunet stalked forwards swiftly. Had he gone for his gun, I probably would've attacked him before he attacked me, but he was equally unarmed. I lifted my arms, understanding why a coward like the OPR agent before me would want a human shield. If he needed to have us pat down to trust that we weren't going to kill him, then so be it. If it made him feel like a man to be one of the people who warranted those kinds of underhanded attempts, then that was his problem.
The man stood behind me and felt my shoulders, my arms, and my lower back before I started making comments. He touched my hips to feel for any holsters or handles and I scoffed loudly.
"Whoa there, honey, I don't put out on the first rendezvous!"
Fowler's face turned pink in annoyance. The man behind me didn't lower himself to acknowledge what I'd said, but the blond looked ready to break my nose for it. I made a sassy face at him. What was he going to do about it?
Mr. Grunt moved on from me and went to Neal. Neal held his arms out and spread his legs so his ankles could be checked. I kept my eyes on them in case the silent one tried anything stupid. "We're not wired," I announced irately.
Fowler smiled at me saccharinely. "You'll forgive me if I don't take your word for it," he sourly remarked.
My eyes darkened as I glared. Oh, I will, will I? I didn't like it when Katie told me what to do, much less when some jackass puppeteer tried it. Icily, I clenched my hands into fists and took a threatening step forwards. "I really don't think you're in a position to tell me what I will and won't forgive," I growled.
Fowler's "friend" (did parasites ever really have friends?) stepped back from Neal and rubbed his hands off on his pants. "They're clean," he confirmed dispassionately.
I looked over the puppeteer dubiously and jerked my head towards him. "Quid pro quo," I said to Fowler, "Or we shut up and walk out."
Fowler pretended to know the meaning of graciousness. "By all means," he offered sarcastically, holding his arms up and putting his hands behind his head. A glance was shot to his accomplice, and the other man did the same.
I cleared them both, not touching them for any longer than I had to. Neal checked his watch and seemed to dislike that I was so close to either of the antagonists, much less both of them at once. While I checked out Fowler, I longingly stared at the back of his neck and thought seriously about chopping him in the throat, knocking him out with the pressure point. Moving away from them without inflicting violence was harder than it should've been.
As I rejoined my boyfriend, I stood by his side and crossed my arms. Fowler, I noted, hovered very close to the elevator, anticipating needing a convenient escape plan. He saw me looking at his hands behind his back and moved them into his pockets instead.
"This had better be good," he threatened lamely. I couldn't imagine what he'd have done if it wasn't "worthy" of his time. We were vital to his plot, otherwise he wouldn't have bothered showing up in the first place.
I gestured for Neal to go ahead and start. I was mainly with him as his version of Fowler's stooge, except I was talkative and very pissed off. I wanted to ensure Neal's safety more than I wanted to stay away from my enemy, and I didn't trust anyone I didn't know well not to harm Neal if given the chance, left alone in an empty parking garage at night.
Neal lifted his chin, exhaling shortly through his nose and holding his hands stiffly in his pockets. "We're getting close to the music box." The men locked eyes meaningfully.
Fowler's lip twitched. "Is that supposed to mean anything to me?" He played dumb, playing like he hadn't spent at least the last six months screwing up other people's lives for it, playing God. I hated faux gods.
I cocked my head and stormily interrupted. "You flew all the way to New York from DC, so I'm pretty sure it does." I cracked my knuckles furiously. I was doing this for reasons that were important to me, forced into taking action because he wanted some fancy block of amber, and the least he could do was not be a dick about it. Hadn't he done enough of that already? "Or was there some other reason you spontaneously booked a direct flight?"
Fowler hatefully bit his lip. Neal cut in before things devolved and got nasty, which they were wont to do. "The window to get the box closes in the next week. I need my tracking anklet off now to make it happen." He tugged on his pant leg indicatively, staring right at Fowler, looking for a micro-expression or a tic.
Fowler rocked back on his heels. "You're not suggesting something illegal, are you, Caffrey?" He taunted insincerely, feigning shock. I wondered how much of it was to save face before I realized that there was no one he needed to save face for. No agent without something to hide would have agreed to this kind of meeting.
"If he was, don't you think I would arrest him?" I crossed my arms, rolling my shoulders and pushing out my shoulder blades tensely. I could feel a bubbling pit in my abdomen that I could've sworn was more than just an emotional response. It burned and stung and rose to my throat like bile, and all of it called for an immediate assault. On Fowler's face.
I continued. "We are officers of the law, aren't we?" He stared right at my blue eyes. I looked into those of the devil and smirked while I did the same thing he did, pretending to be innocent of all lawbreaking. Really gets on the nerves, doesn't it? "And we'd never think to take advantage of that, and twist circles around such an upstanding federal agent like yourself."
His eyes lit up meanly. Fowler's lip curled and he bared his teeth, snarling, "You're pushing it, Anderson."
"You pushed it when you invaded my home! You destroyed any boundaries when you screwed my sister over with some Henna dye and a clever acting job!" I raised my voice at him in revulsion.
Neal touched my side and offered his input. He was better at staying controlled than I was. Most people couldn't push my buttons the way that the scum before us could, but then, most people had never led my sister around by the nose and then broken her heart.
"I think we're in a reasonable position to want to push it some more, so I will." He strongly offered his deal, but let Fowler know exactly how bitter he was, too. I kept my gaze locked on the two corrupt agents, but admired my lover's composure. "We will give you the box, and we never hear from you again." He negotiated with a firm, unarguable hand. "You lose our numbers, and you forget entirely about Kate Moreau, Katherine Anderson, ourselves, and the rest of our families. That's the price you have to pay for what you want."
For someone being bargained with, the blond didn't waste much time actually thinking about the stipulations. "You know, I don't give a damn what you do," he frankly spat. It was relieving to have the pretense of civility disregarded. It was much more comforting than having him pretending to be something he wasn't. Either we'd really pissed him off, or he just didn't give a fuck what happened to his chess pieces in the future as long as he accomplished his goal. He was incredibly determined to get the glorified box. "Just don't make it my problem." Dismissively, he waved his arm at us like telling flies to shoo away.
"Then don't make it our sisters'," I retorted, incensed, to his turning back.
It was a sort of concession, but it laid poorly with me, and even though we'd done what we'd wanted to do, I felt as though something was missing or wrong. Probably because I didn't get to make him bleed, I rationalized.
"This is the Italian Consulate." Mozzie whacked a thin metal rod on the front of a page of blueprints, set up against one of Neal's art easels. Mozzie ended up almost poking a hole through the diagram. I pinched the bridge of my nose while he circled the front doors. "It's not a bank, or a museum; it's a little, tiny piece of a foreign country shoved into New York. If we had an air force, maybe this would seem doable."
Not even Zarra had access to an air force, and although Zarra could get me a lot of things, she couldn't get me much more than a swift, easy way in the doors. The rest of it would all come down to scheming and plotting, which was why the brain trust had gathered in Neal's loft for a session of heist planning with a side of champagne.
Neal stood at my left with his arms crossed in pajama pants and a plain white muscle shirt. "Well, we don't have an air force, but the party will get us in past the first line of security and into the main ballroom."
"Where did you get the floor plans?" Alex questioned, nursing her glass as she sat on the sofa, one leg up and crossed over the other. The brunette's hair spilled down her shoulders loosely and her heels were sitting on the floor beside her feet.
I held up my hand halfway and sent her a look not to ask too many questions. "That would be me." It was bad enough that I was abusing my powers and government access; I didn't want to have to say aloud that I was doing it, especially not to her, of all people.
Neal walked forward to Mozzie, took away the long metal stick, and leaned it against the other side of the easel. Mozzie crossed his arms now that he didn't have anything to wave around imperiously. Neal used his hands to indicate the different rooms and security levels while Alex and I attentively watched. I had already memorized most of the blueprints, but reviewing them while the experienced con artists determined their relevance seemed like the smart thing to do.
"There's only one way into the inner sanctum, where the safes are kept." True to its name, the inner sanctum was close to the core of the consulate's manor, yet slightly more towards the back of the building than it was to the front. It was small, dense, and separated from the easily-accessible portion of the building by a thick, bulletproof glass door. It was easier to exit than it was to enter. "It's through this security door. This door is our biggest obstacle."
"Ah, yeah." I agreed, ignoring the guilty conscience telling me to shut this down and find another way to get the box. "I even tracked down the corporation that installed the electronic bypass, but there's not a cheat."
"There's no keypads, no biometrics, no lock to pick." Mozzie listed off the hackable means of entry like they were no big deal. "The only way in is to be buzzed through by a guard already stationed inside."
Neal held up a hand to him. "Let me worry about that part," he soothed.
I raised my eyebrows skeptically, and despite myself, I glanced at Alex. She happened to have the same reaction, so the two of us shared a doubtful look in a moment of camaraderie before we both turned back to Neal, who was staring at us with sarcastic appreciation. There was no chance he had missed the cynicism of his partners.
"Grand," Mozzie sarcastically grumbled, but having that responsibility reassigned did lessen the bristle in his tone.
Neal pressed his hand over the light blue sheet past the security door, hemmed in on either side by narrow walls told apart in dark blue and thin black lines. "Once through, there's this long hallway monitored by a closed-circuit camera. When I make it down the hallway, I can get into the vault room." The vault, as he gestured, was a larger, square-shaped room to the left of the hall past the door.
"Where he will then break into the safe and recover the music box," I concluded. That was part of the plan, but even once all of those kinks were ironed out with a game plan, we'd still have to make an escape plan and back it up with a contingency. "Which safe is it, by the way?"
Alex smirked. "I'll let you know," she promised, not missing a beat.
I sighed. Mozzie looked frustrated and disappointed. Neal tried not to react as obviously, but still squared his shoulders as he concentrated on the easel. "It was worth a try," I justified with a shrug of my shoulders. I hadn't really thought it would work, but you never knew.
"I have to admire your persistence," the other woman allowed courteously.
Neal tapped his fingers on the paper sheet. "When I find the safe, all I have to do is crack it."
"Oh, well, if that's all," I mocked. I couldn't crack a safe if my life depended on it. I didn't even know how to use a stethoscope on a combination safe, much less break through whatever biometric lock Mozzie had been talking about. The best way to open a safe I didn't have the key to was to use some controlled explosives.
I never wanted it to be said that I didn't admire Neal's abilities. His intelligence and his adaptability were laudable traits and I enjoyed listening to him work his way through problems. That said, it would never stop being alarming to see those skills being put to criminal use. I could get past it without too much analysis when it was for cases, but times like this, when I was actively involved in something I knew to be very, very illegal, it scared me. A lot.
"Don't be bitter," Neal chided. "Safecracking's not for everyone." That's not what I meant and you know it!
"It's high-security and torch-resistant," Alex warned calmly. She didn't seem too concerned about what this meant for Neal.
While I perked up, thinking that maybe not all safes were designed the same and she had just possibly given away a clue, I simultaneously questioned exactly how good Neal was at this sort of thing. I knew he was a master lock pick, but it wasn't like I'd spent much time face-to-face with all of his dirty work. Peter hadn't had a ton to stick him with forensically, so even when I looked at his case files, safecracking and locked places weren't strictly linked to him. There was a reason he had only been convicted of one charge, out of the likely hundreds of times he'd broken various laws.
Mozzie held up a finger and opened his mouth, hesitating before confirming it. "You'll need heavy metal to get through the fire-resistant plate." It sounded more like he was talking to himself, making a list of what materials he'd need to inconspicuously gather.
"Alright, those are the details. One thing at a time, Moz." Neal left the blueprints where they were, but he changed the focus to getting through the door. "Let's start with the party invites." He pushed his hands into his pockets and surveyed his three partners-in-crime.
Alex uncrossed her legs elegantly and smoothed her grey skirt down her thighs. "I'm looking for a man without a plus one," she announced. The fence didn't rely on Neal or Mozzie to guide the moves she made like I did, and that made me a little jealous. I thought an independent person was much easier to work with, and feeling dependent on them in comparison made me feel like more of a burden than an asset. "I'm leaning towards Sir Ignacious Barden."
I exhaled and dropped my head down into my open palm, squeezing my eyes shut.
"Why him?" Neal prodded, likely intending to vet whoever Alex intended to use.
"He's a foreign duke," I answered before the other woman had the chance. Picking my head back up, I smiled thinly at Neal's ex. "You're aiming high, Alex." Warning her seemed like the best thing to do. Our goal was to be inconspicuous, not to be wearing diamonds on the arm of royalty. We didn't want anyone to be able to remember what we looked or sounded like.
The only exception to that was me, and that was more because I had the identity to be permitted in without leaving probable cause for questioning. Alex didn't have that luxury. Neither did either of the men. I preferred to stay stealthy and unnoticed, but I was resigned to doing damage control and being a distraction if one of them received too much attention. Having been an Italian civilian in the past, and being part of a family that was well-respected for their diplomatic work in Italy, the consulate would let me in if I used my former name. I had already cleared it with the PR executive planning the event.
"Wouldn't you?" The brunette asked mischievously, showing a flash of pearly teeth as she bit cheekily on her pink lips.
"Um…" I looked down and ran my hands through my hair nervously. "I don't need to aim," I confessed, wincing. Looking up to Neal, I locked eyes with him to steel my nerves as I came clean to the other two. I didn't really give a damn what Alex thought about it, but I was more than a little worried that the admittance to Mozzie would push us back to an earlier stage in our friendship, before he trusted me even half as much as he does now. What if he took it as a threat that I had never told him about Zarra? "I'm sort of already there."
Her scoff was cautious and wary, set on alert by the cryptic words. I cringed to myself as I realized I shouldn't have been so vague. Mozzie looked to Neal with narrowed eyes when the latter didn't seem at all surprised, and he took a step further from me. I tried not to feel that it hurt, but being treated like that by a friend stung.
Neal was the only one who didn't act like I was about to pull my badge and reveal a wire. I went for a slow break instead of a sudden reveal.
"The LaMontagnes have always had a pretty good relationship with the Italians. I wave a name like that around and I get in, easy." I snapped my fingers to demonstrate and looked down. Mozzie and Alex both relaxed slightly, but Alex, who had yet to actually decide whether or not she trusted me to any extent, remained on her guard.
Mozzie started policing my chosen method using the same logic I had applied to Alex's. The brunette hung back by the sofa, watching me closely. "Wouldn't something a little less conspicuous be better?" Moz suggested, throwing a look at Neal for some input. "They might recognize the name and know who you aren't, or there might even be actual LaMontagnes there."
I grimaced. I had thought of the latter already, and although it wouldn't be fun, it still wasn't anything that would out the heist or my co-conspirators. "Not a problem," I promised him, looking right at his eyes as I vowed. "Mostly because the ID isn't a fake."
A clip from Alex's hair could've dropped, and we probably would've been able to hear if it had landed on a padded cushion. Alex set her wine down on the coffee table. Neal awkwardly lifted his shoulders when Mozzie stared at him suspiciously, as if to say surprise!, and I waited expectantly for any sort of response. When I got none, I tentatively made a decision to go forward.
"I mean, sure, other LaMontagnes might make it a little bit uncomfortable," I allowed, because I definitely didn't feel like reconnecting, "But nothing that will warrant apprehension. Surprise; my name used to be Zarra. I don't want to hear it from you, Alex." I pointed a finger at her to shut her up before she had the chance to start on any string. I did not need her approval and I didn't care to work to receive it; what my name was, where my family came from, and how I was raised had no impact on that I was still in a position in which my sister's security was dependent on getting the music box. I turned my focus to Mozzie next, who was uncharacteristically quiet, and instead of disrespectfully pointing at him, I just tried to look as honest as possible. "Before you go off on me, it's not exactly something I like people knowing," I explained, knowing it wasn't exactly up-to-par with other justifications I could've made.
Last time I had had to explain any of it to Neal, I had ended up crying, and he'd brushed away my tears. I didn't want to cry in front of Alex at all. Mozzie didn't respond the same way to my empathies; if I wanted something from him, I was more likely to get it through confidence than vulnerability. Both to save face and to preserve the working balance until I could more thoroughly address the matter privately with Moz, I had to keep it short and undiscussed.
"How are you planning on getting in?" Neal asked Mozzie, jumping on board with my actions helpfully and turning the conversation away from my hidden past.
Mozzie, to my great shock, didn't press or pitch a fit about it. Instead, he stared at me very closely with squinted eyes. I held my hands out sarcastically. Whatever he saw must've fit his temporary requirements, because he made a mocking half-bow that I took to mean that we were okay.
"As the princess has become a civil servant, so the thief has become a catering servant." Mozzie rose from his bow without further pause. He took that better than I expected. Neal's expression suggested he thought there was a caveat to the acceptance, but neither of us were going to bite the proverbial hand. "As the proprietor of The Greatest Cake bakery, I fully expect a glowing reference."
"Of course," Neal graciously promised, what with being the bakery's owner and highest authority.
"You kept the bakery," I groaned, recalling the small little shop Neal bought with liquidated funds from one of his bank accounts. I'd thought they were just going to sell it after they used the canopy to assist Neal's window-jumping spree, but they had kept it, and even staffed it. They put it under someone else's management and now Neal was technically the owner of a bakery.
I can't believe these two, I exasperatedly rubbed my face.
The three of us all just sort of happened to look at Alex, who hadn't said anything. She steadfastly observed her fingernails and didn't once look in my direction. "What's your in?" She asked, rubbing at her cuticles with her lips tightly pursed. I didn't know what that reaction meant, but it couldn't be particularly fond.
Presumably, she was talking to Neal; he was the only one who hadn't already explained his entry plan. He gave me a helpless lift of his right shoulder but then gestured with his hands that it wasn't a big deal and I shouldn't worry about her response. I wasn't so sure I agreed with that, but I let him handle it. Neal knew Alex much better than I did.
"I'm planning to make a very generous donation to the people of Italy," my boyfriend thoughtfully proclaimed.
I opened my mouth to interrogate him on the specifics of a planned donation that wouldn't be too heavily questioned, but stopped myself before the impulse carried itself out. I clicked my jaw shut and then asked tactfully, "I'm guessing this has something to do with the boxes of art supplies you had me pick up and pay for with cash?" They'd been retrieved from outside of his radius, which was why Neal needed someone else to do it for him. He insisted that the materials he required for his project were unobtainable within his allotted area. Neal looked up at the ceiling and didn't answer. It was its own reply. "Alright," I sighed. "Well, this is definitely going to be a wild ride. … Anyone else want some vodka?"
I decided I probably didn't want to know what Neal was planning until closer to the heist. It would be pointless to add to my already noteworthy anxiety.
"I should be getting out soon, actually." Alex smiled plastically at Neal and didn't even go to the effort of trying to seem like she wasn't just getting far away from me as quickly as possible. I sighed again and bit the inside of my cheek. Whatever her hang-up was, she would just have to grow up and get over it. "I have correspondence to make and an errand to see through."
The fence started to slip on her heels. They were made like sandals, so they were easy to pull on and off in a matter of seconds. She stood up, left her wine glass on the table without finishing it, and reached to fluff her hair.
I remained quiet, feeling like I'd driven her away. The feeling of being more trouble than I was worth came back in full swing and hit me hard. Any other context and I'd have been pleased that she was leaving, but as it was, she was essential to the plan.
"We should space out the times when we leave," Mozzie decided. From the way he folded the blueprints down and covered them up with a half-finished sketch of the Chrysler on canvas, he wasn't in a hurry. Being abandoned by Alex wasn't as personally harmful as being ditched by Mozzie, so I was thankful that he was staying a little longer, no matter what his reasons were. "If someone's keeping an eye on the house, they could already have reason enough to know we're all involved in this."
"Hiding from my own agency," I moaned into my hands, closing my eyes as I mourned for a career ideal I'd been forced to let go of. Alex straightened her purse on her arm as she opened the door and slipped out of the loft, quiet as a cat burglar and swift as a fleeing fox. "God, I hate this." I sat down on the couch and covered my eyes.
I was officially conspiring to commit a crime and actively concealing my intentions. Now that I'd come this far, there was no turning back. I wasn't alone in my choices, but somehow, knowing that I was doing this with Neal was only comforting in that I could confide in and trust him. In every other respect, it made it worse. It meant that I had an entire second person to care for, to fear for if something were to go wrong, and adding Mozzie to the list made three.
How could any decent cop be where I was now?
With just over forty-eight hours left on the clock, I returned to Neal's loft after a long and uneventful day at the office. It was so quiet, in fact, that it hurt. I wanted to scream and yell and throw things. I was right there, surrounded by federal agents. Could none of them see that I was becoming a felon?
I didn't actually want to be caught, of course, if only because getting caught would put them on Neal's trail. It was an ongoing mental struggle between feeling confident that the intentions justified the actions and fretting that I was losing sight of myself, giving away my integrity for the sake of a man I thought I loved. Who did that? What kind of independent role model was I if I was forsaking all that I valued for the sake of a man I'd only known for a year? If someone caught on and took the choice away from me, I no longer had to endure the stress of swinging back and forth.
The FBI didn't feel safe. It felt like a trap. Every phone call was the beginning of an interrogation. Every agent that walked through the doors to the division was there to arrest me. Each email was regarding Neal's suspicious anklet activity from the parking garage.
I tried to pinpoint the last time I had felt so anxious, which was easy: it had been when Neal was kidnapped by a homicidal brat. The last time I had been so fidgety, however, was… gosh, I didn't know if I'd ever been so outwardly nervous. When Neal had been kidnapped, when Fowler had invaded my home, when a serial killer was hunting down his next victim, I had a clear-cut goal: rescue Neal, chase away Fowler, catch the serial killer. I had a logical, understandable, and approved motive. This time, I didn't have that neat little safety net. I was about to rob an Italian Consulate for an amber music box. What was the reasoning behind that? Why didn't I just take what I knew to the authorities and get Fowler in trouble?
I looked at the photograph on my desk. The picture frame that held the Halloween picture of myself and my honorary siblings had been partnered up with a new friend, a photo of Neal and I toasting with bottles of water to celebrate closing a case.
Oh, that's right. Without fail, that photo reminded me why I wasn't doing what any sane person would do. Fowler had such a position of authority that he could crush me and everyone I loved without trying. Sure, I could take the moral high road… but all it would do is get me fired, my partners possibly scrutinized or demoted, Neal incarcerated, and my sister unsafe in her own home. Playing by-the-book would only hurt my loved ones, so I had to work around the system and hope for the best.
Pretending that everything was fine when it felt like I was about to snap at the next person to say my name was more difficult than it sounds. I even stayed a little later than normal, just to be convincing, before I feigned a yawn as I said goodbye to Diana out in the open bullpen, where several other agents bore witness.
In two nights, everything had the potential to come crashing down around our heads. A misstep, an error, a change of plans... a betrayal from Alex… any of it could lead to us all being imprisoned. This wasn't just about keeping evidence away from someone else, it was about committing its own huge crime. If we stayed away, we weren't risking anything immediate, unlike when Clark and Fowler had recorded me in the judge's chambers.
There was no way of telling for sure if I would get another opportunity before the job to enjoy the tranquility of my lover's apartment and his company, so I arrived late, let myself in with the key under the mat (June told me about it, so I didn't feel like I was sneaking in), and crept up to the penthouse while trying not to let the stairs squeak.
"Neal?" I asked quietly as I entered, closing the door slowly behind me. I tried not to let the latch make any noise, but it clicked anyway when I turned the lock. The lights were off and the only illumination came from the door out to the roof and the skylight over the bed, which cast shadows of city lights into the alcove.
An adult-sized lump under the blankets remained still. I smiled slightly to myself as I watched his breath shape his body, his back rising and falling steadily. He didn't stir.
I put down my bag on the couch and started to strip out of my pantsuit to join him, pulling my shoes off and silently placing them by the door. Then I took off my jacket and placed it over my bag, where it was joined soon thereafter by my shirt and pants. My undergarments remained on me, but mostly because it was a little too chilly to take them off and stay cozy. Checking that my phone was on vibrate instead of maximum volume, I padded over to the bed and set my phone on the table, then picked up the blankets and crawled in behind Neal.
The mattress sinking interrupted his slumber. My thief started to roll from his stomach onto his side. I reached for him before I was fully laying down, propping myself up on my elbow and stilling his movements. "Sh," I cooed. "It's okay, darling. It's just me." I rubbed my hand over his shoulder until Neal mumbled something incoherent into the pillow and the tension in his upper body eased.
More carefully, I laid down and tucked the blankets, snuggling up into Neal's back. The convict wore pajama bottoms, but going by how he was huddled into the comforter, he was close to regretting the decision not to pull on a shirt to sleep in. I pressed tightly to his back, hugging him from behind, and pressed a kiss to the nape of his neck before settling in with my forehead against his shoulder.
The docility was more soothing than the bureau offices had ever been. Despite how at home I used to feel there, it had never been this intimate or warm. The bureau used to make me feel safe and wanted and useful, but the bureau was an entity that looked after itself, not the emotions of its employees. Neal was a very emotional and very sensitive person who made me feel safe and wanted and useful, not just because I had a good track record, but because he felt those things, too. He knew I'd protect him, he knew I loved him, and he knew I probably wouldn't have the guts to use crime as a way to attack Fowler and protect my sister if it wasn't for his assistance.
He was hot to the touch, and yet didn't rouse as easily as was typical. I wondered what he had been doing that tired him out. Maybe the stress was just getting to him, too? I felt like it was eating me alive, but Neal knew better than anyone what was at stake for us. He'd already spent four years being caged. My breath caught and I pressed my palm flat against his stomach, squeezing my eyes shut. Not again. Neal would be safe. I'd make sure of it.
Except if I was being Mirandized, I wouldn't have much say over anything that happened to him, would I?
The truth of the matter hit me hard all over again and I fought the urge to turn my back to my boyfriend and curl up shamefully. This was possibly the last time I'd get to share a bed with him for a few days (be positive, I could practically hear Mozzie scolding me; you have more tells when you're nervous). I wasn't going to waste the opportunity by being fearful or guilty.
Although I wished Neal had been awake to hold me or talk a little bit, I was glad that he was getting some well-deserved rest. Both of us were going to need it – as would Mozzie and Alex, wherever they were staying. I pressed my cheek to his back, being lulled to sleep by the rhythm of his breathing.
I usually didn't mind being left alone in bed. I liked to spread out and hog the mattress. If Neal was still there, then the odds were high that I would cling to him like I was glued onto him, and I knew it would happen even while I was unconscious.
Rolling over onto my right side, I blinked my eyes open sleepily and looked out of the alcove, sheets twisted around my legs and tight across my back. I could see Neal from where I was, standing in front of a large pedestal that hadn't been there when I'd entered. So he'd had it stashed. If that wasn't enough to tell me it was suspicious, then the pieces of drying, grey clay sticking to his hands and wrists did. Neal was artsy, but when he was nervous, he didn't sculpt statues his height. He sketched in his nice sketchbook.
For a few moments, I admired him as he worked. It amazed me that he could bring things to life so vividly. There were a lot more layers to him than I had realized, and with each new layer that I found, I fell a little bit more in love. I loved the charming gentleman. I loved the sensitive artist. I loved the idealistic romantic who liked to make love to me with the lights low. I loved the devious, sharp-minded conman, too, although that particular layer had the potential to scare me more than the others.
It wasn't clear just to anyone, but to me, who had seen Neal at any given point of dress before, it was obvious that he hadn't bothered wasting time after waking up to get back to work. He was still in his pajamas, still shirtless, his hair fluffy and soft but falling down unevenly on his forehead. He looked messy and sleepy and focused in a way that seemed staged, but it was just a supernatural ability he managed to have: graceful, even in crime.
I stretched my legs from my thighs down to the very tips of my toes before I even set foot on the chilly tile floor. The first thing I did was take a silk button-down shirt from the armoire and slip it on over my arms, flipping my hair out from under the collar. While I fixed the buttons so it closed in the front, I circled around Neal, watching him mold what looked like a kneeling old man out of grey clay that hardened to look like stone. Reference photos had been printed out and taped to the glass door leading out to the roof.
It almost pained me to wait for him to take a break, but when he arched his back, leaning backwards to survey his work-in-progress, I stepped up behind him and slipped my arms around his middle, hugging him loosely and pressing my cheek against his upper back. Neal relaxed as if my touch drained him of tension. I unclasped my hands and laid my palms over his stomach, gently tracing my fingers over his six-pack muscles and nuzzling my nose against the back of his neck.
"This is incredible," I murmured against his shoulder, leaving it up to him to decide whether I was referring to the partial statue or the gentle curves and elegant planes of his body. Both of them were art. I definitely knew which I'd prefer to have in my bedroom.
He reached to his abdomen and covered the backs of my hands with his. Dried clay flaked off when our skin rubbed together, but I didn't mind. Clay would wash off in the shower. I kept my hands against his flesh while Neal rubbed his thumbs into the sore joints of my fingers.
"It's still a work in progress," he informed me modestly.
Neal? Being modest? Huh. The world really has flipped.
"But wow," I insisted, pressing my lips against the nape of his neck. I turned my head to the side and laid my cheek on his shoulder, forehead towards his throat. "It seems weird that we have a plan, you know?" I asked quietly. Neal's hands stilled. "It's been so abstract and now that we're actually going to do this, it seems… unreal."
Neal took a deep breath. I felt it through his back – it was deliberate, big, and meaningful. There was intention behind it that he hadn't had before I had said something. Before I knew that he was moving, Neal had already twisted in my arms, turned to face me and wrapped his arms around my upper back, cradling my body to his front while still being able to look down and make eye contact.
"After this is all over, I promise I'm going to pay you back for all of this," he vowed, voice a hushed whisper as he stroked my hair and leaned his head down. I pushed just slightly up onto my toes so that our foreheads touched, and he rested his head on mine while cupping the back of my neck through my hair. "Everything you've done, everything you've risked, everything you've been put through just for being associated with me, much less by helping me. I'll make it all up to you."
I snaked my arms up his back. It was as close to an embrace as I could get without changing how we stood and taking away the breadth Neal felt we needed to talk. "None of this is your fault," I promised, lifting my chin and gingerly pushing Eskimo kisses over his nose. "It's all Fowler, and whatever it is that he wants the music box for."
Mozzie's words came back to me. His paranoia was rubbing off. His concerns for Neal's ideas on what might happen after everything came together were becoming more and more valid with the more I saw. My mate acted as if he thought that once we had the box, we were out of the woods. As if we wouldn't have to deal with the fallout of robbing Italians, or of conspiring with-and-against Fowler, or of misappropriating FBI authority and resources to do so. He wouldn't be free to do much of anything, much less make any perceived debt up to me.
"Forget about paying me back," I told him, dragging my right hand sensually down his side. "I'm not just doing this for you, remember? And even if I was, I know what I'm getting into." This is what people do for the people they love, I thought, but no, it really wasn't a romantic must-do notion. We were never going to be a normal couple.
I still wanted to tell him I loved him, though, but something prevented me from saying the words. I was getting frustrated with myself. They were three words. Tiny words. Monosyllabic words, even. A mere, skimpy eight letters.
His eyes shut. Neal seemed like he was about to kiss me, but he didn't close the space between our faces. As if arguing with himself, his eyebrows furrowed and his face frowned delicately.
"Kenna," he started to haltingly say, his breath warming my lips tantalizingly. "I-"
At that exact moment, the door to the penthouse swung open. Neal cut himself off instantly, looking chagrined, and a pale blush dusted his cheeks adorably. I looked over my shoulder, questioning how the fuck to explain to June why I was wearing one of Neal's shirts that barely covered my ass, a flimsy excuse about spilling coffee on my pants on the tip of my tongue. I ceased all plotting when I saw that it was just Alex, dressed in a black chiffon gown, dark nylons, silver sandals, silver wrist bangles, and a dark purple shrug.
"Aw," she cooed tauntingly. Her voice wasn't malicious, but it wasn't sincere, either, and her tone put me on edge defensively. The fence held her hands up and framed her thumbs and forefingers like a rectangular camera. "Look at this!"
Had Neal been wearing a shirt, I'd have curled my fingers into the material to hide my aggravation. As it was, I grit my teeth and scowled. She just let herself in as if she belonged in Neal's home. The last uninvited woman to do that had held a gun on my boyfriend not an hour later.
I couldn't shake the feeling that Neal had been about to tell me something important, something that made even the confident wordsmith pause and reconsider trying to articulate. A large part of me hoped that maybe it had been the same battle I'd been fighting, over whether or not I was strong enough to say one of the most vulnerable sentences in the world.
Clearing his throat, Neal removed his arms from me and moved a step back. I missed his hands and his smell already. Sulkily, I crossed my arms and turned to Alex, making it clear that I didn't appreciate having our privacy interrupted so rudely.
"Your date went well, I take it." Neal's voice was subtly rude, inflected with just enough sarcasm to suggest to her that he had been trying to spend time with his significant other.
She giggled girlishly. "You'd be amazed the kind of places a duke gets you access to," she gloated.
I rolled my shoulders back and bit down on a snide remark about how being a LaMontagne opened a lot more doors than she realized. I had money, I had a name. McKenna, Zarra – whoever's resources they were, if Neal needed them, he had them. I could provide for him, and I didn't need her flaunting it in his face that she'd scored the attention of an influential entertainer.
I swallowed. Getting into another war over possession on Neal was uncalled for. He was not a possession to own, regardless, and he'd made it clear to both of us that his affections were with me. Whether Alex was trying to make him jealous or just always boasted in a somewhat flirtatious manner didn't matter, because I trusted him when he said he wanted me.
"I thought you were just going to use him to get into the Consulate?" I asked tightly. My question had a legitimate concern to go with it. The more time she spent with the duke, the higher the odds that he rethought who she claimed to be.
Alex cocked an eyebrow and slipped her velvet shrug down her shoulders. The chiffon accentuated the curves of her torso while simultaneously flattering the simple pendant of her gleaming necklace, and it flowed enticingly down her legs with the smoothness of water. Part of the reason she made it so hard for me to see straight was undoubtedly that it was easy to imagine anyone preferring Alex to myself. She was fun, she was confident, she was sure of herself and knew what she wanted, and she dressed less professionally. I rarely wore anything other than pantsuits or jeans, which certainly effected how people approached me. If Neal wasn't a factor in our dynamic, and I wasn't a cop or she wasn't a black-market smuggler, I could've seen us getting along. I might have even been interested in pursuing her.
Her attention had moved to Neal's clay structure before she'd even answered me, but she did so airily and carelessly, which wasn't very promising when it came to how she viewed my right to ask questions and be involved. "No harm in having a little fun while I'm at it. Wow – your gift to the Italians?"
Neal looked to his side at the sculpted body and a proud smile overtook his lips. It was small and modest, but genuine. It wasn't even his original art, but he still took pride in his ability to recreate it. Had I had that kind of talent or passion, I probably would've gone into art restoration, not con artistry.
"It's Fancelli's study, Statue of Divo Cano."
Meant nothing to me, of course, but Alex made a humming noise in her throat as she stepped closer to examine it. Again, I felt left out. Again, I felt inferior to her. God, I hadn't known when I'd had it good; at least Kate Moreau had never been competitive in the romance department.
"This is beautiful. It looks like the real thing," she complimented, stepping around towards the reference photos and comparing them to the different angles of the three-dimensional replica.
Neal's wan smile turned wry. "Don't let it fool you," he somberly cautioned. I felt there was more to it than what was simply on the surface.
Going by Alex's reaction and the way the temperature seemed to drop five degrees, I was dead-on with that assumption. "I won't," she swore with a firm, stony quality. Her face had shadowed and her praising smile had fled from her beautiful face. Their obvious history and inner messages made me feel like an outsider, so I again reminded myself of how I trusted Neal. I did trust Neal. I just really didn't trust Alex. "About your tracker," she changed the subject inorganically. "We've been avoiding it. If you can't get it off, then none of this is going to matter."
Both of them looked down to Neal's left ankle, where the sweatpants caught on the bulge of the anklet and pooled around the top. A dim green light reflected on the plastic sheeting he'd used to cover the floor while he worked with wet clay.
Neal looked up and gave his pant leg a tug, which unsettled the fabric and let it fall down around his ankle, completely obscuring his tracker. "It'll happen," he stated definitively, leaving no room within the subject for argument.
Alex snorted. I stepped up to Neal and raised my left hand to the center of his back, silently supportive. I've got you, I might as well have said. I've got this. "We've ensured it," I told her flatly. If Neal's word wasn't good enough for her, mine sure as hell wouldn't be, but if I got the message not to push her luck across, she might heed. "Looking very sharp there. Where exactly did you go?"
"Oh, a few places that cost a pretty penny." The fence's evasion of a direct answer did not escape my notice. She sent a full, amused smile our way. "None of mine, though."
"Of course," Neal agreed dryly, unsurprised.
He didn't sound like he condoned it, exactly, but I didn't understand how he could condemn her arguably reckless choices when he, himself, had made many similar ones in the past. He never seemed to regret anything about his criminal history except for the part where Peter caught him. I convinced people in the bureau that prison had reformed him, but I knew deep down that it had done no such thing. That thought intimidated me a little. If he hadn't really learned a lesson, then what was to say he wouldn't repeat his old errors?
After rubbing his hands together to shake off the last of the flaky, thin clay, Neal raked a hand through his thick mess of hair. "Can I offer the beautiful women a glass of wine?" He offered, looking between Alex and me with a hint of his sexy, alluring, womanizing smirk.
Oh, no, you don't. I knew that look. It was one thing for him to take advantage of his looks and his charisma when it was for an ulterior motive, but it had no place being shared with Alex. It wasn't supposed to be womanizing when he looked at me like that. It was supposed to be fun, and playful, and a little bit challenging. Alex could take away my security and she could take away my privacy, but she was not going to pollute the behaviors and comforts of my relationship.
So although Alex answered with a seductive affirmative, biting her perfect white teeth into her glossy lip, I reached for Neal's shoulders and stroked my left hand along his jaw, turning him to face me and pressing a long, hard kiss to his mouth. Neal swept me up right into it, palming my sides and sliding his hands down my hips. On the return journey up to my waist, he hiked up his shirt and pulled the hem up past my panties.
My boyfriend's shirt, my Neal, my rules. I thought victoriously, suckling on his bottom lip while Neal groaned as if I was driving him nuts and pulled away. I smirked, licking my lips from the taste of his mouth, and played innocent when he shook his head at me slightly, an amused and pleased expression on his face.
I had been on this couch hundreds of times in the last year of my life. Many times, I'd been sharing it with more than one person. It had never seemed as small as it did when the third person I shared it with was Alex. Even though I was cuddled into Neal's side, his arm around my shoulders, my legs were pressed to Alex's. I could feel the softness of her dress against my outer thigh and the heat from her seeping into my skin. Truthfully, it was comfortable. I liked the heat and the sensation of chiffon. I didn't like that it was comfortable. I should've been angry and unsettled that she was invading my personal space. There was about a foot on her left that was completely unoccupied.
I didn't know why I liked being sandwiched between her and Neal. That bothered me the most. It obviously wasn't because she was Neal's ex. If I was being realistic, then maybe it was because this wasn't her first con. No matter how nervous and frightened I was, Alex being there was more proof that I wasn't going in alone. Neal aside, there were two other con artist experts on my team.
My emotions about Alex and her presence were a mess, and not the way that my emotions about Neal could go through highs and lows. The sooner she left, the better, but for everyone's sake, I needed her to stay until after the heist. I didn't say anything about how close she was.
Because I would have to go to work in just a couple of hours, I turned down the offer of alcohol. I had a pretty high tolerance, but Derek always knew when I'd had something to drink. Something at night was no big deal, but something that motivated me to drink in the morning was going to make him ask questions. Instead, I just kept lazily kissing Neal, then licking the taste from his tongue and my lips while he and Alex enjoyed theirs.
It was quiet. Dawn was just breaking. Despite the presence of someone I would've preferred not be there, it was peaceful and relaxing. The chill of not wearing pants was soothed by the body heat from my partners, the reference photos for the sculpture were being tinted with pinks as the sun started to filter though the paper, and birds outside were starting to trill. The noise was starting to rise again as people started on their early days, and although the closed windows and doors mostly muted the sounds during the night, they were more noticeable during the day.
Alex sighed and tossed her head back. Her long brown locks fanned out on the back of the couch cushion and smelled like vanilla. "Remember the last time we were this close to getting the box?" She asked wistfully, turning her thin champagne glass around in slow circles.
A handsome smile lit up Neal's features beautifully. "Copenhagen," he answered nostalgically, flexing his arm against me, rotating his wrist around in a stretch. "Sneaking into the Amalienborg Palace, hanging out with the royal family."
Does he even realize what he's doing? I was mostly resigned to impugning my own honor as an agent of law enforcement. Much as that saddened me, there were more important things – such as protecting my loved ones – that I made those decisions for the sake of. There was no way I could knowingly turn him in on anything he admitted to me. Did he ever consciously take advantage of it? Or were the times when he shared information I would rather not have known just come naturally as a byproduct of feeling safe? Was it a test, or an indication of security?
Alex bit her lip and held out her right arm. She turned it over so the pale inner side of her forearm was held out to the light and pointed out a slim mark from the crook of her elbow to almost a third of the way to her wrist. "I have a scar from the jump off of the gate house," she remarked.
Neal lifted his chin to see over my head. "It healed nicely," he commented.
"You didn't visit me in the hospital." Alex stated stiffly, as if offended that he had an opinion on it now that he hadn't been there while she recovered.
Neal's grasp on me tightened. I grimaced and wriggled to sit up when I sensed the conflict. "You didn't visit me in prison," he retorted swiftly. Alex had the decency to look a little guilty, but just as quickly, she seemed annoyed with herself for responding that way.
I could see both sides of the argument – even Alex's. Neal and she made a commitment to each other for the duration of their con, and when it went wrong, they should've been in it as equals. If she had to go to the hospital, she must've been hurt semi-seriously. An injury like that on her inner arm could've nicked an artery. I'd be pissed if my partner didn't seem to care. At the same time, Alex would've had to get emergency care right after that happened, and it would've definitely gotten attention. Had Neal shown up, he might well have been in serious trouble.
As for prison, much the same thing applied. Although the situation was slightly different – Alex couldn't get in trouble just by visiting an inmate – anyone Caffrey saw would've been looked into closely, and if they discovered that Alex had a file and a record? Well, things may not have ended well for her. She probably would've been taken into custody, even if there was nothing that would stick, out of paranoia that she was helping Neal to plan an escape.
Ultimately, my sympathies for the situation had to lie with Neal, and not just because I was his girlfriend. Alex had never been arrested in Copenhagen or any surrounding locations, so clearly, she hadn't just been abandoned to closing-in police, and Neal was the one who had been confined against his will in a hostile environment. They had their reasons, but I thought Neal had gotten off worse.
Revisiting old wounds, though – especially literal ones – was not going to be conducive to working together, much less on something high-stakes, and I knew that without needing a lecture from Mozzie. "Hey," I said softly, interrupting, putting a hand on Neal's leg reassuringly and turning to look at Alex, placating. "Maybe now's not the best-"
I had no sway on the latter's mood. Inflamed by Neal's accusation that she abandoned him, she sat up straight. "You burned that bridge and cut-" she started to raise her voice.
Neal raised his even louder. "You cut me out!" He declared, while I put my head in my hands. I hated being in the middle, and I was very much in between them physically.
Alex's voice dropped back down again, and that, more than what she said, soothed Neal's raised hackles. "We cut each other out," she murmured thoughtfully, casting her eyes down to her lap. "That's…"
"Who we are," Neal reluctantly agreed, sinking into the corner of the sofa. "It's not a game this time."
Abandoning each other when you need each other? That's who you are? Abruptly, I jumped off of the couch and walked away. If it was 'who he was' to leave his partners… what was to say he wouldn't leave me, the way he had apparently left Alex? I wasn't just his business partner, but then, neither was Alex. He promised me I was more than she had been to him. Did that matter? Was it true? Was it fair? Was it any indication that his loyalty to me could vanish as soon as I was more of a liability than an insurance? What if I wasn't worth as much to him once he was off of his anklet and didn't need the help of an inside cohort?
I lifted my phone from the counter. My first impulse was to call Katie. As my heartbeat increased, the first thing I wanted to do was talk to the one person who made everything better. I had never felt insecure like this with Kate, never felt like I might lose her for no reason other than being an inconvenience. I loved Neal so much that I couldn't imagine doing that to him, but I couldn't remember not being afraid of Neal taking off, even before we were sharing kisses and caresses at twilight. The stakes if he ever left were higher now than they had ever been.
Then I remembered that I was taking the first step of what I was terrified of Neal doing to me – cutting Katie out of this event. She didn't know anything about the music box. She didn't know anything about Alex. She definitely had no idea that we were planning to rob the Italian Consulate, for fuck's sake. I couldn't risk letting her get involved, even for something like this, that made my hands start to shake as I looked at her contact ID in my phone.
I defected from that and opened up a new contact, carrying my phone back to Neal and Alex on the couch. They'd grown suspiciously quiet. I avoided looking at Neal while I handed my phone to the fence. They were far from stupid, and I strongly suspected I'd be having another careful talk with my lover before long. He had to know what had triggered me to get up and remove myself.
"Phone number," I said, standing over the back of the sofa and looking down at the screen of my phone while Alex held it. "Come on."
She scoffed. "What makes you think I'll just give it to you?"
Rolling my eyes where she couldn't see, I pinched the inside of my left wrist. Even Mozzie wasn't this difficult. "You really can't think of a situation in which I might need to get into contact with you quickly?" I deadpanned. "We're planning a major heist together. We're a little past the 'fed versus fence' thing." Not only were we partners-in-crime, but I had my position in the FBI to exploit. The reasons I could need to talk to her were unlikely, but serious. I would be the first to know if something came up that would harm our plan, or if something had drawn attention to Alex and she needed to hang low for a time.
Pursing her lips, she started to tap numbers into the box. "As soon as this is over, I'm changing out my phones again," she told us both, clearly less than pleased with me having her contact information. "I don't need any more heat falling on me because I didn't take the right precautions. It's not just you," she told me to take the sting out of it.
If there was actual sting, I'd have appreciated it, I guess. Except it didn't detract from that she had implied that it was partially me, but that wasn't very offensive. It was no secret to anyone in the room that Alex and I weren't what anyone could call friends, and I couldn't imagine wanting to be able to call her up and chat for no reason anyway, so I kind of preferred being denied the responsibility of keeping her contact info a secret.
"Sure," I said amicably.
Neal chuckled. "Look at that. You're getting along with Kenna better than we do, evidently." There was something like regret in his voice that he tried to drown with his wine, polishing off the rest in his glass.
She saved her phone number under a simple 'A.' I almost made a Pretty Little Liars reference, but didn't have enough patience with Alex to start cracking jokes about her pseudonyms and aliases.
"There isn't a long history to make a girl touchier," she told Neal, handing two phones over the back of the couch. I pocketed mine and opened hers. Her swappable phones were more expensive than the twenty-dollar drugstore flip phones Mozzie kept on him. I woke up the monitor with a touch and started to dial my own phone number.
Instead of calling, I saved the number as a new contact, and put in 'Z' as the name. Although legally my name started with an M, her touchy behavior about my former identity was not forgotten, and it was easier to be dismissed when the initials used didn't appear to match my own. For the mission, I was using my old name as an alias. It was good enough.
"Okay! There's mine." I gave her phone back and smiled plastically. "I expect you to lose it once you skip town. I don't need to be linked to you if you get caught on anything else." No matter what contact ID I chose to go by, I could still be identified if they called the number.
Alex took it as graciously as I had, sliding her phone back into her dress. Oh, so that's where she was keeping it. Neal twirled his empty glass with nimble fingers. "Never mind," he commented, taking back his earlier observation. He watched the blank TV while he played with the glass, but then he stopped. His wine glass stilled. "Huh…"
"What?" Alex and I asked in tandem, and we gave each other weird looks over the back of the couch afterwards.
The man moved one of his feet off of the coffee table, but sat up and pulled on the leg of his pants. The grey sweats pulled up past his ankle to show all of the tracker, including the lack of light from the device. I swallowed hard when I noticed it right away.
"This light has never been off before," he told Alex, rubbing his fingers around the line where the plastic pressed into his leg.
"That light's the sign that it's transmitting," I quietly informed, crossing my arms.
We no longer had an excuse to back out.
Fowler may have come through for us in this instant, but what if it was part of a plot? What if he was going to reactivate it in the middle of the heist? – That would be incredibly dumb of him, I calmed myself, tightening my fists worriedly. He won't get the box unless he lets us get away with stealing it. He had done this seamlessly before, so we all knew he could pull it off just as perfectly and convincingly as he had last time. There was no real reason to fear that it was part of a ploy to get Neal arrested, because if the music box was just a misdirect, then all he had to do to put Neal in prison for good was to manipulate the tracker in the opposite way.
Still, something felt wrong. It was the same gut-wrenching, paranoid feeling that I'd felt in the parking garage – the one that twisted my stomach and made me feel queasy. Like I was forgetting something, or that something just didn't quite add up, and for the life of me, I couldn't figure out what it was.
Neal looked up at me, his hand still over the anklet, a little amazed at the first taste of freedom he'd had in five years. Any other time when he'd clipped the anklet, a half-dozen federal agents had been ready to give chase if he went off-script. Now, though… now the anklet was dead. It could be cut without setting off an alarm, and by the time Fowler would think to turn it on after the heist, he could be halfway across the world.
A chill went up my back as I realized how much faith I was putting in him, in Fowler, in Alex… in all of these wild cards I didn't know, because while I did trust Neal not to intentionally hurt me, Mozzie was possibly the only person who understood as well as I did that our friend had a bad habit of acting before thinking things through.
"I think we're in play," Neal said with a slow smile as things came together.
I nodded, far from assured, and swore to myself that I had to stay with him. Especially now that not having an anchor could let him make a terrible mistake, I couldn't back out. The cold in my feet was from the tile. That was all.
Neal's work on the lapping scheme gave us what we needed to finally make an arrest. The guy came willingly as soon as he saw our badges, though he clammed up and didn't say anything. Diana, Spencer, and Cruz were escorting him to booking while Derek and I went to go to his office to collect his computer. It was entirely possible there was digital evidence that we could use against him in court.
Working the two different cases at once made me feel like I was living two lives, trying to be two different people. During the day, I was the same McKenna I'd been since I'd turned eighteen: hardworking, determined, and confident, hell-bent on the nearest goal within her sights, playing by the rules and only occasionally toeing the company line when I absolutely had to. By night, I was Zarra again: idealistic, romantic, frightened, repressed, and desperate, acting impulsively and telling myself that it was okay because I wouldn't get in trouble.
This double life is going to make me slip up sooner or later. I'm glad the heist is tomorrow; it'll be over sooner rather than later. I blinked as I unlocked my van remotely. And that's not something I ever expected to be thinking.
Derek whistled and skipped off the edge of the sidewalk, jogging around to the passenger's side during a gap in traffic. I climbed into the front and started the car, putting Neal, Alex, and Mozzie out of my mind. It was time McKenna was piloting.
Derek turned down the CD that started playing automatically when the car was turned on. "This guy's gonna go away for a long time," he said delightedly, settling in against the seat as if it was a masseuse chair.
Just like me, if I'm caught.
Go away, Zarra.
"Mm-hmm," I agreed distractedly. This arrest wasn't as big a deal as many others, so Derek wouldn't think it was weird if I had other things on my mind. It was hard to feel satisfied or proud when I was constantly fretting about everything that could go wrong in a much more personal battle. "Thanks to Neal figuring out how he's taking the money," I added.
"Right," Derek allowed, laughing quietly and shaking his head. I pulled us out into the traffic and merged into the lane nearest to the highway. I'd need to turn off and go to Queens to get to the arrestee's business office. "For a con, he's pretty invaluable. Hughes won't think so if he ever finds out about the coffee thing."
For a moment, I didn't know what he was talking about. The props had been a matter of mere days ago, but it felt like so much longer since our devious plan had begun coming together. I had more important things to worry about now than Hughes' coffee or how Diana drank some disgusting order that happened to be the bitterest coffee I'd ever had.
I guess while I thought of a response, Derek thought I just didn't have anything meaningful to reply with. After fidgeting in his seat, he settled in with his left leg drawn up onto the seat, his knee bent and foot almost solidly on the floor. "Hey, babe, I need to level with you about something," he said plainly.
"Seatbelt," I ordered. Derek rolled his eyes and strapped himself in while the car accelerated, and I said, "What is it?"
With a punch of his finger, my brother turned off the stereo system altogether. "I think someone's been listening in on my phone calls," he admitted somberly, looking into the side mirror outside of his door.
While driving, I snapped my neck around to stare at him. I decelerated for the cars in front of us jerkily, pressing on the brakes harder than strictly necessary. My hands sorely held onto the wheel. Derek hissed and grabbed onto his seatbelt, glad now that he'd put it on when I told him to, and sent me another bewildered look.
"You're serious?" I demanded, heart sinking. I should've known. Compliance was too much to ask.
Nervously, Derek nodded. I could understand why he hadn't wanted to tell me in the office earlier, but waiting until I was driving probably wasn't the best decision he could've made, either. I hoped he realized that now. I swore under my breath and slammed my fist against the steering wheel, then rubbing my temple, scratching woolly pink gloves on my cheek.
"I was talking with Katie while she was going to work this morning and I heard the clicks," he explained, voice lowered. He sounded apologetic. You have nothing to be sorry for, I wanted to assure him, but to do so would be to confess that I knew who was stalking him and why. "I've tapped dozens of phones myself. I know what it sounds like."
Damn it. The odds were slim that he was the only one. I hadn't heard any such thing on my phone, but if it had only started this morning, then I wouldn't necessarily know. I hadn't had an actual phone call since yesterday afternoon, instead texting Katie a few times and Diana once. Diana…
"Have you asked Diana about this?" I questioned tightly, acting as if I didn't feel incredibly guilty for them being pulled in yet again. I had been so careful not to let anyone else get involved, but it was fruitless – Fowler was making them a part of it anyway.
He was gesturing positively before I had even finished asking. "She's agreeing with me. I asked her first; I didn't want to alarm you over nothing. But now Fowler is back. Do you think there's a connection?"
Of course. He was staying in the city until he could leave with the music box. We had told him we'd get it by the end of the week. He was just taking our word for it… and dishonoring his own by making it our friends' problem, on top of everything else. That bastard was probably hanging out in the OPR offices, leaning back in his comfy office chair, safe behind bulletproof glass and a badge he didn't deserve.
My jaw hung open while I pinched my tongue with my teeth. What did I say to that? How did I tell Derek that I knew there was a connection? Would confirming that I knew there was raise suspicion, or would knowing about Fowler's plots with Le Joyau and Judge Clark be enough reason for him? What if I didn't agree, said I didn't know, and he started looking into it himself? That would be worse – it would lead him right into the path I was trying to shove everyone else away from.
I was saved by my phone ringing. Katie's ID came up on the screen display in the center console. Although Derek made a discontented sound about not getting an answer, I hit the green button on the monitor, taking the interruption with a sigh. This would give me a couple of minutes to develop a response crafted to get Derek worried about something else.
"Katie?" I called towards the microphone behind the steering wheel. "You're on speakerphone with me and Derek."
"Kenzi, help!"
Derek and I both looked at each other again. I knew Katie wasn't in Queens, so despite my previous destination, I turned on my turn signal and moved into the other lane to head towards her daycare. Her daycare and our house was in the same direction from where we were.
My sister sounded terrified. Her voice was pitched and harsh and hysterical. I couldn't hear any violence in the background, but she hadn't sounded like she was that scared since Køhler put me in the ICU.
"Stop it, those are mine, you put them back!" She shrieked at someone I couldn't hear. Something creaked near to her phone – it sounded like a squeaky piece of furniture. "I need you to get over here now, they won't stop tearing everything up!"
I activated my sirens.
"Who?!" I demanded, looking in my mirrors. The break in the median was coming up, and cars were parting to let me rush through as I came up to them, slowing to crawls in the next lane or on the shoulder of the road.
Who would be tearing anything up? What kind of enemies did I have?! Katie worked in childcare; she didn't have enemies. Barelli? No, he and I had a sort of deal – so long as I left his churchgoers out of our legal dispute, he would leave my family alone. Køhler and other people like him would never have let her call me if they were striking at me through my sister. I couldn't think of any enemies I'd made in white-collar, other than Barelli with his mob ties, that weren't behind bars. Even Wilkes was firmly secured.
"The FBI!" She screamed, and whatever I had expected, it wasn't that. Derek and I were both horrified and speechless. Our own organization was harassing her? Katie? The sweetest woman ever? My sister, his soulmate? She started to shout at someone else. "No, don't touch that, it's my personal computer; you can't touch that!" She sobbed. No one answered or listened to her. "They did a raid and they shut me down and sent all of the kids home. I can't even get up because I'm handcuffed to my chair!"
"You're handcuffed?!" I raised my voice furiously.
Handcuffs were only to be used when a suspect was under arrest or posed a threat. If she was under arrest, then why would she still be in her chair instead of led to a squad car? She could fight back – I made sure to teach her some basic hand-to-hand, for my own peace of mind – but she would never harm anyone in her care, and she knew better than to start a fight she couldn't win, much less with anyone on the police force.
Derek's face shadowed darkly. "What the hell is going on?!"
"We're on our way, Katie, I promise," I tried to say as soothingly as possible through a tightness and dryness in my throat. "Just – just don't disobey them, don't give them a reason to arrest you."
Fowler, I snarled mentally, vibrating with rage. I made a deal with him. He was dishonoring his. I should just give up on the box. He shouldn't have what he wants if he's such a brat he'll go back on his word. I knew that would just make the situation worse, but God, I had never wanted to spite any brat more than I wanted to punish Fowler for his tantrums.
"Are you kidding?!" She screeched at me incredulously. "I didn't! I've already been Mirandized!" Derek punched the side of the door. I couldn't even be pissed at him for property assault. All I could think was at least he didn't punch the window. My sweet, darling Katie, arrested? For what?! Glitter-glue trafficking?! "Get out of my purse, you creep! … Oh, I'm sorry, you found tampons?! Well, that's the kind of thing that happens when you go through someone's personal bag!"
I jerked a hand roughly at the monitor. "Look up the fastest route, taking traffic accidents into account," I commanded with a throaty growl, making a U-turn and picking up the pace. Derek was on it in an instant, talking to her through the speakerphone, trying to calm her down so she'd stop crying, asking why on earth she'd been arrested, coaching her to demand to see the arrest warrant, because they couldn't possibly have probable cause.
They don't need to have probable cause, I realized. The last of the trust I had ever had in the bureau felt like it was hanging by a thread. They have OPR in their pocket. Everyone is fair game.
From the moment I stepped foot in the daycare, I knew something was wrong. Not only was the parking lot almost empty, but the front room was a mess in a way Katie never tolerated. She always, always made her kids pick up after themselves, and she did an extra sweep before she came home. If she had voluntarily ended the day early, then there wouldn't be glue sticks out on tables, shimmering piles of glitter dumped onto the floor from an open bottle, or markers left open to dry out. Construction paper, dull craft scissors, and wadded-up tape belied what they'd been doing before they'd been rudely interrupted.
"What the fuck is going on in here?!" I bellowed, giving a hard kick to the door to her office, which was attached to the front room. It sprung from ajar to gaping, letting Derek and I storm in as if we were raiding a suspect's apartment.
The first thing I saw was Katie, sitting slumped over in her chair, pulling uselessly on her left hand, which was chained with a set of silver handcuffs to the arm of her rotating, wheeled chair. Her short heels were buried in the carpet. Going by the tread of wheels in the short fuzz, she'd been wheeling herself around like a maniac to yell and protect her things. I would've giggled, if we were alone. Men and a couple of women with their hair up donned gloves and rifled through things in cabinets, drawers, and folders that had been dug out of her desk, and Katie's purse was upturned on the edge of her table.
Fowler, in the flesh, stood gloating in the corner of the room, watching the chaos. I dismissed him at first, going for my sister. I knelt down in front of her, taking out the key to my own handcuffs. FBI-issued cuffs used the same kind of lock, and even if my key hadn't fit, I'd have taken a pin and picked the ones on her.
A nasty scowl formed on Fowler's face and he came out of the shadows. I was surprised he didn't melt when he was struck by sunlight through a window. "Stay away from my suspect, Anderson!" He jeered.
Derek took up a position behind me as if he thought someone would attack me before I could free Kate. She kept her hand still but her feet bounced impatiently, face red and tear-streaked. By now, her fear had transitioned to anger, which kept her cheeks red and her jaw set sternly as if she was about to give the mother of all lectures. Her cuffs clicked and popped open. She took her wrist out so quickly that one of the sides scratched the back of her hand.
I rose up to my feet while Derek knelt in front of her, taking her arms in his hands. "Your suspect?!" I snarled, disgusted. I advanced on Fowler, pushing the sleeves of my shirt up to my elbows. "Well, you just don't know when to quit, do you, you little bitch? You can't be her mate, so you'll be her arresting officer?"
"You are insane!" Katie put in from her place on the chair. She hadn't gotten up – her legs were shaking, and Derek had his mouth to her forehead in a kiss while she trembled, pointing at Fowler anxiously. "I don't know what we ever did to you, but I'm pretty sure at this point that you deserved it!"
He snorted through his nose. "You'd better calm down your sister there," he told me airily. It amazed me that he could be as callous as he was now and still have managed to successfully convince Kate that he had wanted to fall in love with her. "We wouldn't want to have her charged for assault. She's already threatened to punch my teeth out."
Indignantly, she shrieked again. "I am not calming down!" She probably wasn't helping her own case, but until he produced probable cause for this, I would not let him walk all over her. He couldn't seriously have thought that he'd get away with causing her all this distress, did he? "You've terrified my kids and handcuffed me to a God damn chair!"
"Oh, I'll threaten much worse than that," I vowed, sneering. "What are your grounds?!"
"Oh…" The OPR agent smiled coyly at me. Don't you know already? He seemed to be asking with his eyes. If I'd started foaming at the mouth, I wouldn't have been even slightly surprised. "Suspicious bank activity with the daycare's funds. Some assets were recently liquidated and given to-"
At the accusation, Kate was sent over the edge. Seething mad, she stood up and stalked over to us. I moved out of the way graciously to let her yell in Fowler's face.
"He's talking about reservations I made for a field trip I'm planning next month!" She spat, smacking her open hand against Fowler's chest with a resounding slap. The agent looked briefly startled and took a step back.
"That is assault!" He shouted, drawing the attention of his lackeys who were combing the daycare for 'evidence' of 'suspicious activity.' Fowler raised his right hand up above his head as if to retaliate, and Kate flinched, lifting her arms to defend herself from a blow.
Several things happened at once.
Derek roared, "Don't you touch her!" and lunged into the fray, wrapping his arms around Katie and carrying her away like he'd pulled her out of the way of a car. Fowler started to bring his hand down to strike, but never got the chance; as a desk drawer broke when it was permitted to fall off of the counter by a shocked agent, I pounced on Fowler, redness clouding my vision as my face warmed.
I dove right in, clocking him dead-on in the face – in the mouth, in fact, and I felt the wetness on my knuckles before I'd even taken my hand back to see that my punch had split his lip on his teeth. I raked my other hand down the side of his face, leaving pink crescents from my acrylics, perilously close to his eye. Next time, I won't miss!
I took my hands back to fight again, but before I could strike, multiple hands came to Fowler's rescue. A familiar and yet painfully tight set of arms wound around my midsection and picked me up off of my feet, carrying me backwards before I could land any more hits. From my front, a woman with a black ponytail grabbed at my hands and shoved my arms down towards the floor, and a man stripped off one of his latex blue gloves to put a hand on Fowler's chest to push him further away from me.
Derek set me back down on the floor after a few seconds, when I was at least a yard away from where I'd been and I was no longer trying frantically to swing my arms at the target no longer within reach. What had just transpired had probably seemed, to an outsider, like the kind of thing that only ever happened on TV. I'd just gone fucking ballistic. Any modicum of self-control had run screaming in the other direction the moment it looked like he was going to abuse Katie.
We waited in stunned silence. Fowler dragged the heel of his right hand over his lip and chin, feeling the split and the blood dripping down from the rip in his flesh. My chest swelled with pride and satisfaction, the sneer fixed on my face as he looked at the red liquid staining his skin. No one else dared to speak, too afraid of what Fowler's reaction would be.
"In a room where no one so much as asks if you're okay because they're afraid of you, do you finally feel like a man?" I found my voice again. He didn't scare me.
Glancing down to his bloodstained hand, Fowler looked back up to me slowly. And started to smirk, his lips pulling apart to show blood marking his formerly-white teeth. It looked grotesque.
Even Kate was stricken in horror, her hands covering her mouth. The violence wasn't what really shocked her – it was that I had done it to Fowler, in this capacity, at this time. I'd just gone flying viciously at someone we all knew had it out for my mate, and Kate was probably terrified of what that would mean for me and for Neal.
Her voice trembled when she whispered, "You shouldn't have done that…"
"Am I really the only one who sees him grinning like the fucking Joker?" I complained, looking around the room. I refused to be chastened. I'd protected my sister. I would not let anyone make me feel ashamed for that.
Fowler turned his hand around so I could see the blood. Cheekily, I curtsied. Fowler narrowed his eyes, keeping up the pretense of barely-lidded fury. "You just got yourself a suspension," he hissed at me, pressing his fingers tenderly to his lower lip. "Attacking a federal agent?"
"You were going to attack my baby sister, you son of a bitch!"
"I'm sorry," Fowler paused mockingly, "But can you prove that you were defending anyone else?"
I bit the inside of my cheek as I realized what even Katie had thought of first – I couldn't prove anything. I hadn't let him go far enough to leave any evidence. The only people who would stand up for me were a civilian currently under arrest and a lone agent who everyone knew had been in my corner since we transferred to the WCCD. On the other hand, there were almost a dozen agents on-scene that answered to Fowler. Even if they would tell the truth ordinarily, he would intimidate and threaten them into lying about what had happened, just to cover his own ass.
Discounting the testimony of Katie by placing her under arrest… fuck, I thought, jaw going slack as I breathed heavily from the whirlwind of a fight. He never needed probable cause. He didn't do this to fuck with her. He did it to take me out of the game.
"You can't." Patronizingly, Fowler smiled. "I, however, have witnesses and injury. Look at this, I'm bleeding." He waved his hand around and got a drop or two of blood on Kate's office floor. "This is proof against you. Agent Johnson, take her gun and badge."
Derek froze up behind me. "You crafty little fuck," I accused, finally piecing it together. I felt pretty stupid for not getting it sooner, but I was still holding my head high in pride. I had defended my family as I'd sworn to do. If I would rob the Italians for Kate's sake, then making someone I hated bleed was nothing in comparison.
The handcuffs that he knew I would let her out of, the threats of assault he knew I'd respond with if he treated her like that, the physical assault he knew he'd get if I thought he was going to touch her. Any single one of them were grounds for OPR to suspend me, pending some sort of investigative or disciplinary action. I'd let my anger and protectiveness blind me and walked right into the trap, like a fly drawn to honey, and now he was going to get what he wanted – me, not able to shield behind the bureau or hide within their walls.
"I'm not going to help you suspend my sister, you slimy, pathetic freak," Derek was insulting when I came back to the present, glaring at Fowler stonily.
"Take her gun and badge," Fowler repeated persistently, testy and resolute. There was a threat of his own mixed in there when he had to repeat himself, an unspoken vow that if he had to tell Derek a third time, then I wouldn't be the only one having my credentials taken from me.
As bad as this was going to look on me, it was still bringing unnecessary attention to Fowler, who was going to be getting the hell out of dodge as soon as he could to avoid being associated with Neal's malfunctioning anklet and the Italians' missing treasure. I stared at him and started to smile right back, in an eerie, inappropriately delighted way.
He wouldn't have done this unless he felt like he had no other choice. He thought he was backed into a corner because he was afraid of me – afraid of what I could do if I wasn't cut off from my resources.
Finally, you're right about something. You're right to be afraid of me, now more than ever.
"Don't argue with him," I told Derek in the silent battle of wills between the two men. "He'll suspend you, too. That's what this was. This entire thing was a setup to provoke me into attacking you." I accused Fowler, who feigned innocence and confusion so poorly that it wouldn't have even fooled his own agents. A couple of them looked very uncomfortable. "You never would've worried about being reprimanded for hitting Katie because you knew I would never give you the chance. Want my things?" I asked, letting a careless smirk take over my expression. "Come get them."
If my position had already been stripped from me, then I had nothing to lose from misconduct. I took my sidearm out of its holster, removed my badge and credentials from the back pocket of my slacks, and, while showing both items to Fowler, I walked towards the counter near the window. Locking eyes with him, I moved my badge into the same hand as my gun, reached behind me to move back the curtains, and unveiled the class pet – a copper-colored ball python, twice as long as my arm.
I dropped both gun and badge into the terrarium with a content smile. The snake hissed at me and Katie looked torn between nervous laughter and concern for her pet. It slowly slithered up to the gun (safety still on, of course) and laid its thick upper body over the barrel, wrapping around the items and claiming them.
Fowler looked distastefully through the glass. No one seemed excited to find out who would be ordered to retrieve my things.
"Derek, take my car and go straight for the FBI." I ordered, scooping my keys out of my pocket and tossing them to my partner. He snagged them out of the air and clenched them in his fist in case someone else tried to take them. "Inform Hughes of what's going on. Make sure to tell him all about how Fowler decided to arrest my sister without a warrant and made a move to attack her before I hit him."
Derek nodded. He had absolutely no reason to follow my orders anymore except for loyalty, which I truly appreciated. "What are you going to do?"
I took a deep breath. "I'm going to get a lawyer," I answered, only telling a half-lie. If Mozzie's University of Phoenix degree was to be believed, then I was getting a lawyer. "I'm pressing charges for wrongful harassment, and I'll see if there's anything else I can add on." Not right now, but that would be coming up, after the music box was secured and Alex wasn't in town and Katie was safe and I'd ensured her business wouldn't be professionally harmed by the FBI sending her kids home in the middle of the day. "Katie, just – just do as they say."
She nodded, too worried about me to object to remaining in their custody. Tactfully, she avoided pointing out that she didn't have much of a choice, what with being under arrest and all. Without evidence, it wouldn't stick, so that wasn't something I was too upset about. Overcoming that would be simple, albeit a little time-consuming – post bail, provide receipts from her banking history, and bam, she'd be exonerated of whatever stupid accusation Fowler wanted to hit her with.
"What about you?" She bit her lip.
I reached out for her. Katie walked hurriedly to me. Setting my hands on her face, I stroked my thumbs over her cheekbones. "Thanks to his screwing around, there isn't anything I can do but get the lawyer." Get Mozzie. All I could do now was fight on Neal's and Mozzie's front, but that was okay. It meant less distractions. I pulled her face down and pressed my lips dryly to her forehead. "But I'd much rather you spend some time in the bureau than in the hospital."
I released her and sent the finger to the blond OPR agent.
"You want me off the bureau, Fowler?" I taunted, strolling backwards and loosening my tie. "Don't make the mistake of thinking that you've cut me down. You've just forced me off the reservation." He'd just made his own reasons to be afraid that much worse. I didn't have someone to answer to if I wasn't an agent.
He rolled his eyes, scoffing at the dramatics, and wiped his lip with his jacket sleeve, rubbing away some of the blood.
As I left, I let the door to the daycare close on its own and walked past my car. I ripped off my tie, whipping it off from around my neck, and shoved it in my pocket after sending a last look at the vehicle. I knew where I was, and I was in New York. My convenience wasn't as important as Hughes hearing the story from someone I trusted before another variation managed to find its way around.
So much for being two different people. The FBI agent no longer had a role to play in the final round. Rubbing my hands together, the thought occurred to me that I had, in a way, gotten what I'd wanted. There was no more ethical obligation to report Neal for his stories, to report Mozzie for his illegal obtainment of things he shouldn't have. I wasn't hurting my integrity as an agent by manipulating the system if I wasn't an agent anymore.
If I couldn't have both lives, I'd just have to lead one of them and throw my whole heart into it. I had never thought I'd need to choose between being a cop or a criminal, but as Fowler made part of the choice for me, I learned that there was no way in hell I could let myself be benched. Cop, civilian, or criminal. I knew what course of action I'd be taking. Fowler was afraid of me as a cop, but I was useless to my loved ones as a civilian.
Criminal it is, then.
When Mozzie picked up the phone, I knew that I had gotten the number copied right from my contacts. I put my cell phone away and leaned against the outside of the drugstore, an ancient prepaid phone I'd paid for with cash against my ear. There was a security camera facing the doors that I was just out of sight from.
"Hey, Haversham, I majorly need you right now. NYPD – Katie needs a lawyer." I hesitated, grimaced, and pinched the bridge of my nose painfully between my index and middle fingers. "I probably do, too," I groaned.
There was something in the background that I hadn't heard any other time I'd initiated contact with the street con. It sounded like water – water trickling down a small fountain, maybe? It was quiet, but not like at a park.
"I'm on my way," Mozzie said wearily after grumbling something inaudible and undoubtedly displeased. "Would you care to elaborate a little bit on what I'm needed for? And why aren't you calling from your phone?"
"My phone's tapped," I hazarded a guess. It was entirely possible, and it only made sense to tap mine if he was also tapping into Derek's and Diana's. Buying a burner cell with the cash from my wallet seemed like the best course of action. "Fowler arrested Katie for some bogus embezzlement accusation. He moved to attack her, so I attacked him, and he put me on suspension for it."
Mozzie was quiet for a moment. I turned my free ear towards the red-brick wall of the pharmacy, crossing my legs and leaning heavily on the building. He had a soft spot for Katie, and not only was she now in federal custody, but Fowler had gone back on his word and taken another shot at me. If the FBI started closing in on Neal or realized that his tracker was tampered with, we wouldn't have any advance warning.
"That's not good," he murmured. The water in the background had gone as he moved away from it. I didn't bother asking where he was, because I knew there was a ninety-five percent chance he wouldn't tell me. "What are you going to do?"
I shrugged, rocking my head back and looking up. "Get Katie home safe." I figured that was the first step. "After that, there's only one thing to do: get this over with." I imagined swapping out Men in Black-style sunglasses for a set of Neal's Ray Bans. "Anderson out, LaMontagne in."
"Yeah, about that, why didn't you tell me you were rich?" The conman complained crankily. Since he was leaving wherever he was to help me and Kate, I decided not to gripe at him as much as I normally would've.
"It would've taken you longer to trust me," I pointed out, despite that not being the real reason. It had a part to play after I'd come clean to Neal about my biological family and my French roots, but from the beginning, Mozzie's trust had not been my motivation for keeping my secrets.
"That's probably true, but I miss when you were confused by me."
"And I miss when you were too afraid of me to be as annoying as you normally are."
Well, so much for not bantering. Oops. Well, at least it was friendly bickering. Mozzie and I could probably communicate through nothing but snide retorts and sarcasm.
"I am a mystery wrapped in an enigma, for your information!"
"Yeah, yeah," I muttered, flipping the phone shut.
Katie slammed her purse down onto the kitchen counter with so much force that it slid off the marble island and fell to the floor on the other side. I padded after her, subdued and a little frightened to talk to her while she was so upset. Tears rolled down her cheeks, but her misery was punctuated with aimless anger that didn't have an outlet.
"Katie," I said her name hopefully. She didn't listen. My sister continued like she hadn't heard me, storming past the kitchen and towards the stairs at the end of the hall. "Please, please, Katie," my voice broke while I jogged to keep up. "Don't run away," I pleaded.
She turned on me suddenly. Her hair almost hit me in the face. "What else can I do?!" She cried, fisting her hands in her thick hair and tugging. "I mean, your crack lawyer posted bail. I'm on bail because I was arrested for trying to take my kids to a Broadway play, and you are out of your job because you didn't want to let him hurt me!" The whine in her voice was close to a bawl, and I knew I had to walk carefully on the thin ice to prevent it from becoming exactly that.
Holding up a finger first, I corrected her. "Okay, let's get this clear: I am not fired. I am suspended. Huge difference. The suspension will be overturned," I told her soothingly, holding out my arms for a hug.
My arms were batted away. "I was arrested! In front of all the kids in my daycare!" She wailed, humiliated and ashamed.
I wrapped my arms around myself loosely, sucking on the inside of my cheek. "Yes, I… I remember that part," I agreed softly, grimacing. It didn't look good for anyone; that was true.
She covered her face in her hands and sat down hard on one of the spiral stairs. She tucked her ankles underneath the lowest stair and balanced her elbows on her knees. I cautiously sank down next to her, half-expecting to be given a hardy shove right down onto the hallway floor.
Kate sniffled into her hands. "The parents had to come pick them all up because the FBI was calling them all and saying that their caretaker was in federal custody," she bemoaned, shoulders quaking. "I'm not even going to have clients in two weeks. No one is going to trust me with their kids after this!"
That was probably not actually true. Kate got rave reviews on her website and in person. The parents loved her almost as much as the kids did. Sure, they would be confused and a little guarded, but I would personally see to it that they knew Kate had been a victim in the situation, and her client base would be back to normal. She adored working in the daycare. Fowler wouldn't get to take that from her any more than he had the right to take away her excitement to have a baby of her own.
"I'm going to fix this!" I swore, holding one hand over my heart and the other up by my face in a scout's honor. "As soon as Fowler's gone, I'll be going to see the parents myself, alright? I'll explain how it was a ploy, or a misunderstanding, and how you are absolutely innocent and were wrongly accused."
But in the meantime, her kids' parents were still thinking whatever it was Fowler had wanted them to think. Kate didn't react angrily when I touched her shoulder, but she sobbed harder into her hands, a broken, choked cry escaping her mouth. It felt like a hard hit to the chest. She cared more about what people thought of her than I did. The general opinion of her personality had an impact on her livelihood and her relationships. It didn't matter to me if someone thought I was a bitch and complained about me online as long as I didn't break the rules and get into legal trouble. I wasn't hired to be a tactful babysitter; I was hired to investigate things. Kate's job relied on near-strangers trusting her to protect and supervise their children.
"Come here," I cooed, holding out my arms again for a second time. 'Don't cry, sweetie, c'mere."
This time, Katie leaned into me and burrowed herself into my chest. I scooted up a step higher and spread my legs so that she could lean against my breasts without my knees getting into her side. After resting my chin on her hair, I stroked her arms and back lovingly and squeezed her tightly in a protective, loving embrace.
"Sh," I hushed her quiet crying and pet her hair, kissing the top of her head maternally. "I love you. I'll fix it, I'll work it out…"
Katie took a long, hot shower that left the bathroom humid and stifling. I sent Neal a text while she was washing up and then beckoned her out into her bedroom, where I handed her some pajamas hot from the drier and turned my back while she changed into them. Then I towel-dried her hair and brushed it out, tying it off in a French braid for her before she asked in a very small voice, embarrassed from her crying fit, if she could take a nap.
I said that of course she could and I tucked her in like she really was my baby sister before going downstairs to meet Neal.
We went through the house from the front and came out onto the back patio. Neal sat in one of the chairs at the mostly-decorative metal table and I pulled out another, sitting at an angle so I was facing Neal but was also able to see in through the sliding glass door in case Katie woke up and came downstairs. Neal sipped on a can of coke from the fridge and I played with the laced strings of my gloves.
Neal put down his aluminum can and pressed his thumbs into the front. He made the metalloid squeak protests as divots formed under his thumbs, the can bending inwards. "I never thought he'd come after Katie again. I thought it would just be the one-time thing." He murmured to me, his eyes not leaving the coke.
I turned my hands over. I was as clueless as he was, and angrier, to boot. "Why come after her at all?" I kicked the leg of the table and relished in the loud clanging. Neal picked up his soda before the shaking table made it fall and sent me a short-lived look for my actions. "I know he wanted me suspended, but why? I was doing what he wanted."
"We all have our weaknesses. He has mine, he found yours." Neal said it like it made sense. When he talked with that tone, that melodic ring, it did make sense. "He took the bureau away from you… I don't know, maybe so he can come after you after he has the box?"
Isn't that a pleasant thought?
I shook my head, hardly able to believe that any of this was even still on the table. "This is ridiculous. I thought I made it clear last time that Katie is off limits." Katie herself had even slapped him so hard I had expected his jaw to be broken, and threatened to take out a restraining order on him.
Neal reached out for me across a portion of the table, wiggling his fingers into my open palm and squeezing my hand. "It'll be okay," he told me helpfully. I smiled back at him, less certain, but closed my fingers around his hand. "We just have this one thing to do, and then we take him down. For good." Neal pushed his soda can away and looked down at our joined hands, stroking my smaller one consistently with his thumb. "Look at this," he said, giving my hand another, harder squeeze and kicking out his left leg from under the table.
I glanced down at his anklet. It still wasn't activated. "Yeah, the light's off. I know."
"But according to Di, the monitoring station says I'm at home."
"Of course." I smacked my forehead and shook my head. Now that makes sense. His means of going about it remained inexcusable, but at least now I understood his intentions. "That's it." Neal cocked his head, unclear. "Your handler no longer has the authority to supervise you, and you're put on house arrest until someone else figures out what to do with you in the meantime. No one will think twice about you being in the penthouse; it's where you live."
Neal nodded slowly as he understood, his eyes wide and his expression grudgingly appreciative. "He's brilliant." I sent him a glower. Neal put his hands up quickly. "He's awful and I can't wait to see him go down, but you have to admit, it's like he thought of everything."
I hummed. Fowler sure seemed to give that impression. He tampered with the tracker, he planted evidence, he used patsies, he made contingency plans, he had judges and cops living out of his pockets – he even had the foresight to use Henna because he predicted that my temper would snap and I'd try to scrub his fake soulmark off of his arm. Fowler had never come across as that manipulative, but appearances could be deceiving. A shiver ran down my back. The last person who had been able to anticipate my moves so well had been a complete, certified psychopath.
"Yeah," I agreed harshly. "It really seems like he has everything planned out." Which begged the question: was getting the music box really the end of it? Additionally, were our steps against him actually just playing further into his hand? I put an elbow up on the table and rested my cheek on my fist. "Do you think this is really an honest exchange? You give him the music box, and he lets Kate go?" I asked candidly.
Neal blinked, didn't seem to know what to say, and blinked again. "You'd do the same for Katie," he pointed out a little defensively, assuming that I was going to talk him out of it.
I just bowed my head. "Yes, I would." I knew I would. There was very little I wouldn't do for her. That list was apparently much shorter than even I realized, going by the circumstances I found myself in. "I'm not saying you shouldn't try," I clarified. "I just want you to be realistic. I'm still not convinced Kate is being held against her will, but either way, the sooner Fowler has the music box, the sooner he stops stepping on our toes."
I frowned at the ground of the patio. Fowler was seriously crossing more lines than I had even known existed. If he was afraid of me enough to strike me down, then maybe that was for a reason. I wasn't above being vindictive. No matter what he wanted or what he went after Katie for, he had still gone after Katie. He deserved to pay for that.
Neal saw the hateful expression on my face and bumped my foot with one of his. "What are you going to do?"
"He's aiding us in illegal activity," I reminded slowly. "He's tampering with your tracker." I knew it, Neal knew it, and Fowler knew it. The Marshals didn't know it because Fowler had found a way around them. If I found that route, then I would find the evidence that it existed and had been utilized. "He thinks he can take my badge? Well, I'll take his." I worked damn hard for the right to call myself a special agent, and I wasn't going to lose that right to a corrupt, insensitive son of a bitch without one hell of a fight.
Neal raised his eyebrows but said nothing to deter me. I think he wanted to see Fowler be knocked down a peg, too, beyond just getting him out of our hair. Watching Katie make him look like a terrible person in front of the entire WCCD just wasn't quite cutting it anymore.
"He's going to be watching you and everyone you work with," my artist warned. "Derek, Diana, Hughes, the entire department. The blue-collar team you used to work with." That was the only objection he had to my declaration of revenge-seeking.
"I know. That's the problem." I rolled my shoulders back, still holding his hand. Having his warm hand in mine felt natural, right. I loved the feeling of his palms in mine, soft but a little calloused. "I need someone in the FBI whom he can't professionally link to my casework that also trusts us, and whom I trust."
"Have you got someone in mind?"
And that was where the real problem began. I met people in the bureau through cases. The people I knew that I hadn't worked a case with was surprisingly short when I called it to mind, and try as I might, I couldn't find any other names out of my memory to add to it. When cross-referenced with the list of people that I would trust to get involved with this already-risky mission, there were no matches.
The people I trusted the most already had their phones tapped. The others weren't local, and Fowler would likely have already assumed I'd ask them for help and gone to take the same precautions with their communications, too. I was in a tight corner.
I realized suddenly that it wasn't going to be the late past that had the answers. Fowler had come into my life after studying me and my files, talking to people that I knew, finding information that I had thought only myself and Køhler had. He used all of that as fodder against me. If I looked into my career's past, I wouldn't find any unlocked doors that I had forgotten. The key was going to be things that had happened since Fowler made his debut as my number-one enemy, parts of my life and my relationships that had changed as a result of his influence.
While Neal waited patiently for me to think, I worked back through the last three times Fowler had visited New York. There had been the time with the dirty judge. The only new face I'd met then had been Detective Herrera. I liked the guy, sure, and we'd met for coffee since I got his job back for him, but I wasn't going to entrust him with a matter of this caliber. And, even if I had been so inclined to do so, he was employed by the NYPD, not the FBI.
The second time he'd come by uninvited, he hadn't even stopped in the FBI offices. He'd recruited some freshman college brat to help him spy on me and Neal. I hadn't seen him or talked to him once, but I was glad that had happened. Though stressful, that was the event that served as a catalyst for Neal coming clean about Project Mentor, and the reason I told Neal that I'd seen his sister.
The first time, I had met Adrian Tulane (who was now living in a medium-security prison) and… not many other people. I had run point on the investigation until it was taken over by OPR, and no one on OPR's team was worth even a second thought. Tulane had been our only suspect, because by the time we'd confirmed he had an alibi, Fowler had already changed course to attack Neal head-on and sent him to prison. My focus shifted to exoneration, and I had called in backup. Even my backup had focused his efforts on clearing Neal's name.
My backup, however, hadn't been an old friend.
"Oh, look at that," Neal admired my face sweetly. "That gorgeous smile."
"Peter did say to call if I needed him," I ran it by Neal first, smiling hesitantly. Peter was the safest bet. Fowler and he had met, but Peter hadn't been on the case in any official capacity, and Fowler probably had no way of knowing that I had kept in touch with the Burkes. "I think this qualifies."
I met Peter discreetly in Central Park. At my advisement, he had come alone to give Fowler even less of a reason to try to use Elizabeth to get to him. Elizabeth said hello, but she was swamped at work anyway and didn't think she could have gotten the time off, so it worked out well.
Meeting Peter as a renegade rather than an agent felt weird, but when I had him on the phone, I hadn't had the bravery to tell him upfront that I no longer had the authority to arrest anyone. He was at a bench near one of the few children's playgrounds when I found him, and I took a seat to his right, crossing my arms and legs.
"I'm never going to be done thanking you, am I?" I asked rhetorically. I knew full well that I would never feel as though I repaid Peter for what he was risking with helping me, even if he chose to back out. My hope was that Peter would be an unseen attack on the legal front while I dedicated my attention and my time to Neal's heist on the Consulate, which I had to be ready to head into in less than twelve hours. Butterflies fluttered in my stomach and consumed my appetite.
Peter reached for my leg and patted my knee. "I told you to call if you needed anything." He stared at me intently until his eyes boring into my cheek convinced me to uncomfortably turn my head and look at him. His expression was oddly earnest. "After last time, I expected it any time since."
Well, that's great. Had my slide into criminality been such a long time coming?
Guilt made me cough. I covered up well when I lied to strangers; it was lying to friends that always threw me off. I could do it, it was just harder, and I usually felt worse afterwards than I had before trying. Peter knew how dangerous it was to stand by me while Fowler was watching, yet he had come anyway, and I was repaying him by going behind his back to rob a foreign sovereignty.
"How's El?" I asked politely, also concerned. I had called them through a burner phone, which Peter had yet to ask about. My best guess was that Fowler wouldn't think to immobilize the Burkes, but Neal was right about one thing: he was good at this 'evil villain' thing, and taking something for granted would be a mistake.
"She's good." Peter nodded with slight relief. Before he even made the plans to drive up as soon as he woke in the morning, I had warned them both about what Fowler had done to my sister. Elizabeth was horrified, but she was also thankful for the forewarning, just in case. She was making a point of not asking many questions that she knew she wouldn't like the answers to. "Mostly worried," he admitted, "And concerned for Katie. We took your advice and postponed her meetings, just in case. She won't be seeing clients in person for at least the next couple of days; any correspondence will be done over the internet or through her phone."
I nodded my agreement and rubbed my upper arms. Fowler pulling another stunt on her like he'd done at the daycare would possibly be even more destructive to El's business than it could be to Kate's. As an event planner, there were a lot more financial responsibilities and money changed hands between clients, managers, and contracted businesses more frequently. Fowler would have an easier time framing her than he had my sister, and since El's clients tended to be a bit wealthier, losing their trust would make a huge dent in her revenue and reputation.
"God, this is insane," I moaned into my hands, taking deep breaths and inhaling the faintly-lingering scent of my hand soap. "How's was traffic?"
"The drive here was a lot more direct than you're acting," Peter bluntly told me, still trying to get me to look at him.
I sighed and put my hands down, locking eyes with him like he wanted. I wanted him to trust me, even while I left some really big details out. If that's what it takes… I reluctantly did what it took. The music box was paramount; not just to Neal and Moreau anymore, but also to my and my sister's continued freedom. If Fowler kept throwing tantrums like this, sooner or later we'd stop getting so lucky.
"Okay, message received." I curled my fingers into my shirt. I'd donned clothes I hadn't worn in a while, and being out and about during the day in civilian attire felt weird and strange. "Fowler suspended me," I said quickly, wincing, getting it over with.
Peter blinked and leaned back physically. "On what grounds?" He demanded angrily. He sounded much madder at OPR than he was with me. I prepared for that to change.
"… I may have… tried to… um…" I wriggled and rubbed the back of my neck, unable to look him in the face as I confessed. I didn't regret my actions, just felt embarrassed to be explaining them, as if I was letting him down. In a way, I wished I could feel remorse, because maybe then I'd feel better about my morals. "Claw his face off…?" I said it like a question.
Peter slapped his thigh and uncrossed his legs. He made a loud scoffing noise and looked away while his shoulders straightened and tightened. The set in his jaw made his temper pretty evident, but I appreciated that he was restraining it.
"It wasn't my fault," I asserted rapidly, trying to explain myself before things ended up even worse. I couldn't lose one of my only allies. "He was going to hit my sister. I just protected her."
When I mentioned the almost-abuse, Peter looked swiftly back to me. I was surprised his neck didn't hurt with how quickly he swung around. Just like that, the blame was directed back to Fowler. Had Fowler been preparing to hurt El, I doubted anything would've stopped Peter from taking matters into his own hands.
The older agent rubbed his fingers into his forehead. "Damn it," he groused. I was silent while he processed and waited for him to say something again. When he did, it was as he lowered his hands. "Leave any marks?"
"Uh…"
My not-quite-an-answer gave him all he needed to know. As if the rakes of my nails down his face hadn't been enough, Fowler's split lip and the agents he had authority over would nail me if it went to an administrative decision, especially since none of them would be brave enough to talk about how he had raised his hand to an innocent civilian.
Peter reacted like he'd expected as much. "That's going to be hard to get out of," he pondered, letting himself sink back against the back of the park bench. He mimicked my posture and crossed his arms again, glancing sideways towards me. "I don't suppose there's any physical proof that he was going to hit her?"
I shook my head, feeling chagrined. What should I have done? Was pouncing the right thing to do, or would things have been better if I'd just let him make contact so the proof would have been on Katie's skin? Immediately after wondering the latter, I cringed and felt horrible. How could I seriously consider that I should've let someone assault the woman I called family?
After a moment, Peter uncrossed his arms, clapped his hands together, and rubbed friction into his palms. "What do you need me to do?" He asked me resolutely, a steely gleam in his eye.
This was where my counterattack came into plan. Instead of merely complying under duress, I wanted to launch an offense while Fowler was distracted. The problem was that doing so was jeopardizing another good, hardworking agent – and a better one than I was, at that. It wasn't hard to be a better agent than I had been in the last year. All anyone would've had to do is not sleep with their consultant, or report when laws were broken, or – even better – not plan to participate in a major international felony.
"I need you to look into Fowler," I said, taking the route that drew the least attention to Neal and I. If Peter was focused solely on OPR, then he wouldn't be led to Neal's and my activity later on. We needed to be left alone to work tonight. Any interruptions, any distractions, could throw the entire heist off. "He's using his position to manipulate the information being fed from Neal's anklet. I don't know how, but if we can prove it, then he's defrocked and done for. … Thing is," I followed up with grudgingly. Much as I desperately wanted the aid, I couldn't ask for it without putting everything pertaining to Peter on the table. "Investigating him is almost career suicide."
Indicatively, I pointed at myself. If Fowler got his way, then no matter what I'd told Katie, I would be out of a job. Neal would probably be sent back to a prison – Riker's, if someone in an admin position felt particularly vicious – and with a charge like assault on my record, it would be pretty hard to be employed again, especially by the government.
I brushed that train of thought aside. I could worry about my career after my loved ones' safeties were ensured.
From the moment Peter looked at me with the flinty frown and clenched fists, I knew what he was going to say. As advantageous as it was to me, I couldn't help but wish he would have refused. Then if it went wrong, I would have one less thing to feel responsible for.
"I vowed to protect, not to cower away from a dirty agent." Peter said firmly. "A guy like Fowler has no business being in our bureau. I'll be glad to do whatever I can to knock him down."
Hours later, after Peter had managed to get into the bureau and do some quiet inside reconnaissance, he brought everything back to the Anderson household. I hated being left out. I felt useless and pathetic when I couldn't help, so having him return was sadly looking to be the highlight of the day. Anything to catch Fowler was more exciting than dwelling on why, exactly, I'd been pushing through my wardrobe when Peter arrived.
He overturned a cardboard box he'd probably taken without permission. There wasn't a clear label on it, so it wasn't stolen from the archives, but it would likely be missed by some trainee or probie who was assigned to sort paperwork. The things that came out were disappointingly limited; most were thin sheets of paper clipped together, or printed-out records that happened to have his name somewhere on them.
"This is everything I can find through normal means on Garrett Fowler," Peter announced, pushing the cardboard off of the kitchen table and letting it fall to the linoleum flooring. "There's not much there, unfortunately. Turns out that a lot of it is sealed."
I picked up a photocopy of a lab result request that Fowler had signed off on. It wasn't to do with the Le Joyau heist or the mortgage fraud foreclosures, so I had no context for it. I still put it aside to look up the case number (assuming I could still even log in to the database. If I couldn't, Peter could).
"Sealed? What on earth for?" I asked, guessing Peter wouldn't know. Sealed records weren't generally good news. Fowler was very obviously an FBI agent, so that left him as a protected witness or someone with skeletons in his closet that had been dismissed by higher powers. I wanted to know what those skeletons would be.
Peter gave me a long look over the table like I'd asked a really dumb question. "Well, if I knew that, then they wouldn't be sealed," he pointed out.
I stuck my tongue out at him childishly.
"We don't need much of anything from his past," I told him, rooting through to the next best thing: his open profile. It wasn't very detailed. All we could get without raising alarms to OPR was pretty much the level of information one could get off of a professor's curriculum vitae, but the exposed leads there could be used to dig around independently on the computer. It seemed like a job well-suited to Mozzie, if it came to that. "We just need the key to how he's altering the anklet data."
I reached across the table to pull open a folder and see what was inside, jumping onto several different collections of paper all at once in my eagerness. My wrist was stopped by a larger hand closing around it. Sighing, I raised my eyes to Peter, awkwardly bent halfway over the kitchen table and stretching for more evidence.
"I've got to ask one more time," Peter said hesitantly, clearly uncomfortable with looking up another agent's personal life. I could appreciate the graciousness, but really didn't have time for it. Peter had morals that I had been pushed into discarding months ago. "You're sure it's him pulling the strings?"
At once, I recalled everything he'd done to force my hands. It wasn't just the actions themselves – it was the attitudes, the responses. The way he patronized me when he tried to get me fired with the blanked videotape in Hughes' office, the way he grinned at me with blood dripping down his chin. Fowler was acting of his own will, and sometimes he even appeared to enjoy it.
I knew that no one could manipulate other people like psychopaths could, and yet Fowler didn't give me that feeling. That didn't seem important. He could fake being normal, or he could have some background in psychology, or he could have someone else helping him behind the scenes. It didn't matter. It was too foreboding and too irrelevant to think about. If there was some deeper conspiracy, it could wait until I had my job back and my mate safe in my arms instead of planning to break into Italian Consulates.
"I have no doubts that he is responsible for his actions," I told Peter levelly, standing up bravely and squaring my shoulders. I felt like I was making an assessment as an expert witness, one that would sway the jury, because I could see in his stance that he would believe whichever way I swung him. "And even if he's not the biggest fish," I paused, just to show him that I had indeed considered that he wasn't acting alone, "He's still made his decisions."
The husband nodded slowly, taking it in and setting himself on that path. For just a second, I worried that I was misleading him before I told myself I was just being paranoid and anxious. I had known for the last six months that Fowler was corrupt. Getting him fired was the best thing for everyone he had pull over.
"Okay. Well, the Marshals are the ones who monitor the tracking anklets, and the DOJ supersedes their authority. Fowler could override them and get access, or he's altering the data remotely." Peter shrugged his shoulders as he offered the second option, and seemed to place more merit in it.
I agreed. "Going over the DOJ would draw attention, and I think it would take more time to prepare than he had." Unless he has more pocket pets… "He couldn't remotely go in and alter information from just wherever he gets Wi-Fi, could he?" I didn't think so, but I wasn't a technician.
"No." Peter confirmed definitively. "He needs a secure line."
Okay, a secure line that he would have easy and quick, non-suspect access to at any given time. He couldn't get that from a home computer or a personal laptop. It would have to be connected to a mainframe server for the maximum amount of personal security, and that meant it was in a government-run office connected to the bureau and/or the US Marshals. It couldn't be done from the average computer in any agent's office; it would have to be special.
Peter and I looked at each other at the same time.
"The OPR offices," I realized excitedly, him echoing just a second behind me.
I took out my phone to look up the address (the addresses of federal buildings weren't confidential). Peter drummed his knuckles on the table thoughtfully. "There's one of those here in New York. That's where you need me to go." If Fowler was hiding his own dirt, then the carpet to lift would be in the office he used when he was in New York City – a computer that he regularly used and had used in the past to tamper with Neal's anklet.
It wasn't ideal, of course. If things were perfect, then it would be his assigned office back in DC, where he came from. I was willing to bet that there would still be some form of electronic proof that he was messing around with the Marshals' tech on the computer in his borrowed office space when he traveled here for whatever excuse he manufactured. Someone like Fowler, with so many loaded guns aimed at his feet for his troubles, would be paranoid and careful enough to keep an eye on his secrets… which meant he kept the key to them wherever he was. If he was as smart as I was, then he would have some way of transferring those digital skeletons between locations. Maybe a flash drive; maybe he sent himself an encoded email that he downloaded to whatever server he needed to use.
I found the place on my phone, copied the address, and texted it to Peter's cellular. "No one's getting in there without clearance and an appointment." I frowned and leaned down over the table, bracing my hands flat on the surface. "And God knows they wouldn't even let me on the front steps, much less into Fowler's office."
Although I knew he would never admit it, Peter puffed out his chest a little bit. He came alarmingly close to preening the way that Neal did when he was proud of something he claimed not to have done (even when everyone knew he'd done it). "They'd let me," he declared smugly. "Model agent, and I caught Caffrey to begin with. They'd probably like me on paper."
OPR wouldn't like him so much once he tried to break into an agent's computer and steal information he wasn't supposed to have.
My eyes softened as I listened to him laugh. He thought it was funny. He had to realize what was all at stake, didn't he? Maybe it just didn't sink in? I'd been living with looking over my shoulder and half-expecting a random attack out of the shadows for far longer than I had known Fowler's name. Køhler had taught me that I was never actually as safe as I felt, especially not as an agent of law enforcement. Wilkes, using Neal, had taught me that the same applied as a criminal. With my feet in both worlds, who knew how safe I ever actually was?
"Thank you for doing this," I said honestly again, feeling emotionally raw and exposed with every sincere word that crossed my lips.
I remembered the stories and the appraisals of warning signs that someone might be about to take their own life. I knew that one of those signs was uncharacteristic sentimentality – giving away their possessions for sentimental reasons, being more touchy-feely or emotional than usual, or being atypically heartfelt. It was like a stealthy way of saying goodbye and finishing their business, making sure their friends and family knew that they loved them before they killed themselves.
I felt like that was what I was doing. I was making those preparations to cut ties. The queasy feeling in my stomach doubled when it occurred to me that I was displaying those same signs. I'd told Katie that I love her, touched her more than I usually did in a week just in the last couple of days. I was being honest and sincere without guards to Peter, and I had been so relieved that I'd gotten to talk to El before the heist that I'd almost teared up.
It was because a part of me was dying with each step closer that the heist became. The woman I'd promised myself I'd be was being put to rest in favor of someone that eighteen-year-old me never would have approved of. Not only was it an emotional thing, but it was because I was scared. I was scared, and I felt lonely, because although I knew Neal and Mozzie would probably listen, that didn't change that I was still in the situation that warranted the fear. Neal and Mozzie… the conmen felt these things differently than I did. They lived with different ethics. They prioritized full freedoms over security in liberty, while I was all too willing to agree to live by certain laws in exchange for the rights I was guaranteed as a citizen.
I could too easily lose everything I had and what I had worked to become. So long as this paid off, I could live with myself and find a new way to define my identity, but… was I really McKenna Anderson anymore? I invented her to be a specific persona. I hadn't wanted to be Zarra, I'd wanted to be someone I had wished I could've looked up to as a child. The idea of any child looking up to me now was laughable after everything illegal I had done for Katie and for Neal.
Peter touched my shoulder kindly. "Stop thanking me," he scolded patiently. "I've already told you, I'm not doing it for you." Here, normally, I'd have sarcastically quipped a thank you. Instead I just felt a little less burdened. If I wasn't his sole motivation, then it would be less of a disappointment when – if – he ever discovered what I was doing on the side. "It's also for me, my wife, my country, and my own friends." He exhaled heavily and looked at the open file on the table, Fowler's profile picture looking blankly up. His resting face was vaguely annoyed in the photo. Peter's shoulders fell. "This whole hassle still begs the question of what it's all for."
I almost giggled. Peter had just asked the question Neal, Mozzie, and I had had on our minds for the last year. Why did Neal's sister leave? Why did Mei Lin tell Neal that the bad guy was in the FBI? Why did Fowler try to turn Neal against me, and what would've happened if he had succeeded? Why was Moreau still guiding Neal around by a leash in the dark, not telling him how she really felt, letting him believe she loved him even as she toyed with him? Why was I being victimized for no reason other than associating with Neal, and then why was I worth being victimized a second time? If Neal didn't have the music box, why was it so crucial that he and his handler be tormented? And – finally, but not necessarily most importantly – what the actual fuck was so important about this music box that made it worth all of this drama and risk, and why did Fowler want it so badly that he would put everything but his life on the line for it?
We'd theorized about it a couple of times, around a table, sipping on wine and getting just buzzed enough to loosen up. I had been the one to point out that music boxes could hold things. There was a general agreement that the music box was hiding something. It wasn't purely for the aesthetic, or the monetary worth, or the catchy tune that it might play. There were more secrets wrapped up in the box, in its history.
For as much trouble as it caused, I would've been stupid not to be curious. I wanted to know, but I could've forgotten about it and let it go if that was the price of letting the dust settle and moving on. That just wasn't presented as an option, and I wasn't too sure Neal would've been willing to spring for that even if it had been in the cards.
"If I knew," I murmured, looking soberly down to the table and stroking my thumb over the edge of the smooth wood. "I'd probably know the rest of the story that goes along with it."
The most important part of anything isn't what's on the outside. Nothing is as it seems. And no, I don't mean that in a creepy, Apocalyptic plague sort of way. It's just that things are more complicated than they first look. Everything can be opened up. Everything tells a story.
Nine times out of ten, I do not have the patience to discover or listen to those stories, but they're there whether or not I care about them.
People are my favorite and my least favorite simultaneously. There are many sides to the same person. I'm curious how many sides you need to be compatible with in order to be compatible with the overall person.
I'm curious what my soulmate thinks of all of this. What are their sides like?
This is the last time I'm going to write, McKenna, because starting tomorrow, I'm no longer Zarra. I'll be you. I'm sorting things out, getting records, getting my final money transfers – everything I'll need to get out of this stupid (actually rather nice) hotel and take the next plane to anywhere but here.
Here's the point: I know that if you're dredging up all of these letters, then it's because something's happened to make you think you need to remember me. I have no idea what that might be… that's a lie: maybe it's the special one, the one with the wing on their body, too. Maybe you're not happy with yourself and you're struggling with a hard time. Or maybe even it's something about the family and they're trying desperately to drag you back and you have to cling on and remember why you left.
If you're reading this one in particular, then you need to be reminded that you have sides, too, and it's okay if they're not all what you expected them to be. People have so many. At times, you're going to learn about parts of yourself that neither of us knew existed.
Here's to hoping that those parts are ones we can be proud of, in the end.
Zarra LaMontagne
A/N: Chapter title from Lucy Hale's "Come On."
Next chapter: As the search for the music box and evidence against Fowler comes to a climactic head, McKenna has to rush to recognize and correct a mistake that could cost her dearly.
Wow! This is the penultimate chapter! It feels like it's been quite a ride. And it doesn't feel like I've been posting this long enough to make up an entire story! Oh, well. Time flies :)
Thank you for sticking with me for so long! This story, in its entirety, took fourteen months to write, from the very first scene of the first chapter to the last scene in the next. I can't say for sure I know how long the sequel will take, but I'm in the process of outlining it and deciding how I want it to go.
Love it? Hate it? Let me know! I'm dying to hear from you.
