June 4, 2014

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" she hissed as the office door slammed closed, barricading the pair of them in with the glow of the monitors and the quiet hum of the electronics.

"Liv-" Brian started to say, not sheepish but self-righteous. She didn't give him the chance to finish that thought.

"How fucking stupid are you?"

"The guy's a cop," he reminded her bluntly. "He's a fucking cop, and that makes him a threat, and I'm not gonna just-"

"You find out there's a cop in here you tell me, and we figure it out together! You just showed him our hand, and now he's holding all the cards. He's got all the power here, and we've got nothing. Less than nothing. We're fucked."

"He's the one that's fucked," Brian insisted, crossing his arms over his chest, still refusing to see reason. "We-"

"What exactly do you think is gonna happen now?" she demanded. "Lemme work the possibilities out for you. One, we let him keep working Kosta, and when that's finished, he fucks us. Two, we tell Kosta he's got a rat, and Kosta kills him. Three, you kill him, and the entire NYPD shows up at our doorstep."

"Four," Brian snapped stubbornly. "We let him keep working Kosta, and when that job is done he leaves us alone because he knows we're the only reason he's alive."

"In what universe, Bri? In what fucking world is he gonna leave us alone? Why should he? Once he's done with Kosta he won't need us any more, and once we've been arrested there's not a whole hell of a lot we can do to him. Unless he's got family, or something. Is that your plan, Bri? You gonna threaten his kids? You gonna kill a cop?"

Brian Cassidy was a lot of things, but he wasn't a cold blooded killer. Especially not a cop killer; however resentful he might have been over the way his career with the NYPD had imploded he was still one of them, in many ways, and he had a good heart, just wasn't the type to go executing people. He definitely wasn't the type to threaten a kid.

"Look, you got connections," Brian said. "You've beaten the rap before, Liv. I say we let him work, squeeze him for as much as we can get out of him, and then when it's done you call in some of your chips and let someone else clean up this mess."

That could work. The Chief of D's, the Commissioner of the NYPD, those guys were vulnerable. Historically Oak House hadn't done much business with public servants, had instead focused on the old money families with real funds to spend, but she could cast a net, capture a few of the higher ups on the force and maybe protect herself. It could work, but it might not, and she was cursing the situation she found herself in. Brian was too blinded by his own desire to see the guy twist to realize there wasn't shit they could get out of him; sure, maybe they could use Eddie's - Elliot's, whoever's - pull on the force to run plates or other small favors, but anything he did for them he'd probably run through his bosses first, and it would just add to the pile of crimes Olivia would be charged with later. A cop was no fucking use to her, was in fact a danger to her house, but she wouldn't kill him, and she couldn't just let him go.

"How did you even find out who he was?" she asked, the wheels still turning in her mind, trying to find a way out of this mess.

"When Kosta first turned up I had a buddy at DOC dig up Eddie Wagner's file."

That much Olivia knew already; she'd looked over the rap sheet with Brian after that first visit.

"Then I noticed something. Eddie Wagner doesn't have any fucking tattoos."

Shit. How had she missed that? The DOC file contained information about identifying features, she should have seen it. Brian had seen it, and it had made him suspicious, and she figured that explained why he'd been so surly about Eddie's presence in the house, but it didn't explain how he'd made Eddie for a cop. The guy could've just as easily gotten the tats after he was paroled; just because he didn't have them when he went in didn't mean he couldn't have gotten them once he was out.

"And the way he talks, the way he holds himself…look, I was a cop, Liv. I knew what I was looking at. So I called a different buddy on the job. Told him an off-duty officer had helped me out of a jam and I wanted to thank the guy but I didn't know his name. I described him, and yesterday my guy called me back with a name."

"You didn't even know for sure it was the same guy-"

"But it is the same guy! He just told us himself, Liv!"

There was no arguing with that; if the guy in the locker room downstairs wasn't Elliot Stabler he had no reason to pretend to be, unless he had a fucking death wish. And besides, there was something in his eyes, in the way he spoke, that was too sincere to be a lie. The man she'd thought was Eddie Wagner, the man she'd thought was handsome, and interesting, and maybe somebody she could look forward to talking to, was really Elliot Stabler, a cop, a question mark.

"What do you know about this guy? Stabler?"

Brian shrugged. "Nothing, yet. My contact told me he used to be SVU."

SVU. Olivia knew what that meant, remembered the SVU cops from her own days as a working girl. Sister Peg had been friends with some of them, had told Olivia more than once that SVU wasn't interested in busting girls for selling themselves, that those guys were safe. As angry as she was, as much as she wanted to hate Elliot Stabler for lying to her and putting her livelihood, her freedom, in jeopardy, she was glad to know he'd been SVU. That he'd been one of the good ones, once. That maybe he still was.

"What are we gonna-"

"Just let me think," she said, waving her hand to ask for silence, beginning to pace.

There was a fifth option on the table. One that didn't involve Elliot Stabler's untimely demise or Olivia's own incarceration, one that was more realistic than Brian's pie-in-the-sky dreams about Stabler just letting them go. If Stabler was investigating Kosta he was probably working a racketeering angle, and those cases took years to build. There was no telling how long he'd been under, but probably his case wasn't gonna wrap up in the next few months. That meant Olivia had time to plan, and maybe this was just the sign she'd been waiting for. For ages now she'd been thinking about the future, about where she'd go after Oak House, about how she was going to extricate herself from it before Noah started school. Stabler's presence downstairs might have been the death knell for the business, but maybe that was ok. She had money squirreled away, she could start slowly, carefully, making plans to run.

It wouldn't be that hard. She'd need a little bit more cash, just a little bit more to make sure she'd be taken care of, to buy new identities for herself and Noah, but she could do it. Get them new names, and a new address, somewhere else, somewhere far from the city, somewhere Noah could grow up looking at trees, somewhere they could be safe. Maybe take Brian with her, not because she needed him but because they'd both be lonesome without each other, and where the hell else was he gonna go, anyway? The girls would find other places to work. Elliot Stabler might be the end of Oak House, but he didn't have to be the end of her. All she had to do was run before he had a chance to clap her in handcuffs.

"All right," she said. "Here's what we're gonna do."


It took a long, long time, that conversation Olivia and Brian were having. That conversation about whether or not to shoot him in the head and dump his body in a ditch somewhere. Strangely he wasn't too nervous about it; whatever they'd decided, there wasn't a whole hell of a lot he could do to stop it. His fate was in God's hands now, so he just sat on the edge of the desk and waited, calm and quiet, to see if his number had finally been called.

When the door opened he half expected Brian to shoot him on the spot, but the man's gun was tucked safely under his jacket. There was murder in Olivia's eyes, though, and that gave Elliot pause. Hurt no more, she looked angry, now, like now that the news had been given a chance to sink in she was furious with him for putting her business at risk. Like she hated him.

"Mr. Stabler," she said coolly.

"It's Detective, actually."

The look she shot him was pure venom, and if there'd been anywhere for him to go he would've backed away, then.

"You're a problem for me," she told him bluntly. "You've compromised the security of my house, and you pose an imminent threat to one of my customers."

"You don't even like Kosta-"

"That's not the point," she snapped. "But maybe we can work out a deal here."

"Keep your money," he told her. "I'm not taking a bribe, and you don't want to add bribing an officer to the list of charges."

That was probably a stupid fucking thing to say, but Elliot Stabler couldn't be bought, and he didn't really want her to try. He wanted her to be better than that.

"Who said anything about money?" she asked. "Your life is in my hands, Detective. One word from me and Kosta finds out what you've been up to. How long do you think he'll let you live, once he finds out you're a rat?"

So that's how it's gonna be, he thought. She wasn't willing to kill him herself, wouldn't stoop to getting her own hands dirty, but she was holding his life over his head nonetheless. If she let him walk out of this room a good cop would've gone straight to his boss, told them he'd been made, and get reassigned somewhere else, let the case drop, let it cool off, before a new UC was set loose on Kosta. Elliot was a good cop, but he wasn't ready to watch his case go up in smoke. He wanted Kosta, and Sinatra, too, didn't want all the time and resources OCCB had already poured into this operation to go to waste. And stupid as it might have been, he didn't want this to be the last time he saw her. He wanted to see her smile at him again.

"What're you offering?" he asked.

"We let you live," she said simply. "We'll let you live, we'll let you keep working Kosta. We'll even let you back in the house. In return, you do a couple favors for us, and give us a head's up before Kosta goes down."

"What good will that do you?"

"Damage control," she shrugged. "We'll need time to prepare, people are going to have questions. Do we have a deal?"

He should've said yes and then run straight to Ayanna, but he knew in his heart he wasn't gonna. He needed this too bad. This operation had become something of a crusade to him. He'd put in his twenty, he could collect his pension after this. One last case, and he could take out three of the most notorious criminal enterprises in the city. One last case, and he could find the answers to all his questions, and maybe, just maybe, bring the ledger into balance. And if there was a part of him that craved the danger, that wanted the adrenaline rush of knowing he was walking a tightrope, if there was a part of him that wanted her to like him, well. Nobody else needed to know about that.

"Deal," he said, holding out his hand for a shake.

She took it, her hand soft and warm in his own, and as they shook he seemed to hear the distant sound of a lock clicking into place, shackling him, and his fate, to this woman.