Location: Safe House, New Jersey
Date: Nov 6th
Time: 02:38
Emmy bit her lip and squeezed at a knot in her right trapezius muscle. The kidnapping victims had been taken to a nearby hospital and were being supervised by Megan. The fourteen criminals were in different interrogation rooms in the underground base in upstate Jersey.
The remainder of the team headed toward the rectangular observation area connected to the eight isolated rooms via separate one-way glass segments. Now that the terrified and drugged children were secure, there was no way for Emmy to keep avoiding the elephant in the interrogation room.
Akio's unconscious body was strapped to the chair, his chin hitting his chest and his black hair flopping forward in a voluminous curtain. Emmy stared at him with a blank look, carefully hiding the mental tempest beneath. The Team was curious to solidify their lantern's relationship to the driver who recognized her, but Emmy had been unreceptive to any passing inquiries and, until now, they'd had more pressing matters.
Emmy rolled her right shoulder and kept her critical gaze on Akio as her teammates finished entering the room. Can't avoid the inevitable anymore.
"Emerald," Kaldur's voice firm but not unkind. "We need to know who this person is and his relation to you before we proceed."
Emmy repressed a sigh and turned to the group with crossed arms, "His name is Akio Park. Nineteen years old. Father was a Japanese immigrant, died nine years ago. Mother was a low-ranking kkangpae in Bludhaven, died seven years ago. Park spent some time in Juvie then lived on the street until he became Sparks' personal errand boy at fourteen."
That particular story involved stolen fireworks, rotten nigiri, a rival gang, and a white tiger, but none of those details were currently pertinent. She looked through the glass again. Akio had constantly mentioned wanting to 'move up the food chain' the last few months she was with him. Emmy thought that at worst he would get into drug smuggling. She was doing her best to dampen the overwhelming and misplaced betrayal she felt about his devolution into human trafficking.
"So, a met-at-work situation," Robin quipped with a knowing look Emmy didn't appreciate while he pulled up Akio's record on his holo-glove.
"I didn't meet him until my second-year fighting, but yeah, we technically worked together," she replied coolly. "He's Sparks' glorified lapdog, so he'll have the most information out of all the morons we caught."
Wally's shoulders relaxed some, but his glare remained on the guy at the table. He saw the look on Park's face when he saw Emmy. She wasn't telling them everything.
"Was he into you or something?" Wally asked with deliberate nonchalance.
Emmy's head whipped toward him so fast that in a different environment he would have made a joke about her becoming a speedster. He bristled when Connor traded a look with a snorting Robin.
"He just looked fairly…elated to see you," Wally crossed his arms warily and looked down his nose at the guy bound to a chair.
"Yeah, and he recognized you too quickly to be a casual acquaintance," Artemis interjected, sounding surprisingly caustic.
"I-" Emmy paused. She didn't want her team around right now, but she also didn't want to lie about something Akio could so easily reveal. She shifted slightly on her feet and made a vague confession with a wave of her left hand, "We went out some, but I broke it off a month before I got my ring."
Wally's jaw clenched reflexively. Robin and Kaldur were unfazed by the information, having guessed it previously. Connor once again attempted to use his non-existent laser vision on the side of Akio's hanging head. Artemis scoffed and folded her arms across her chest. Emmy clocked it in her peripheral but focused on getting Wally to look at her again.
Megan's voice cut through the mental link she had kept dormant since her arrival at the hospital, "Is he the ex-boyfriend you and Sage fought about that one time?"
"It wasn't serious," Emmy blurted out, unwilling to identify why she felt the need to say that so quickly while repeatedly glancing at Wally. His jaw unclenched when he noticed the attention. Wally winked at her; his lips twitched upward when Emmy looked away with slightly pink cheeks.
Kaldur nodded at the information, "Will your history with him be a problem or an asset? We can take measures with Martian Manhunter to have his memory of your identity removed after he speaks."
Emmy paused. She did not want to be the one to interrogate Akio. A part of her still really wanted to punch him in the jaw, and it would be a veritable nightmare to interact with him in front of her team. Emmy pinched the bridge of her nose as the selfless side of her brain argued that nothing was more important than stopping Bobby from hurting more people, including keeping her past from her present. Akio wouldn't cooperate willingly or easily, but if she were the one in front of him at least his compulsive need to fight her would get him talking.
"I'm probably our best bet to get him to talk," she begrudgingly admitted.
"This would work better if Miss M were in range to read his mind," Robin frowned and grabbed his chin with a gloved hand. The hospital was far enough away that Megan was only able to use well-worn and practiced mental links. They could have had someone else stay to watch over the victims until the League took over, but Kaldur felt her empathy and telepathy made her the best option to handle the terrified kids. "But it doesn't hurt to send GL through for an initial pass to see what he'll tell us about the operation."
Kaldur nodded, turning to Emmy, "Make him aware of the ramifications of not cooperating. We need to know how these children fit into the Kobra Venom smuggling."
Emmy took a deep breath as she looked at the doorknob, four inches of cement separating her from a guy she hadn't talked to in eleven months. Once she entered this room there would only be an inch of one-way mirror separating Akio and her from her five teammates. Why couldn't Wally have gone to the hospital with Meg and Connor?
Emmy frowned at the intrusive thought. She shouldn't care if Wally was here or not, but she still found herself wishing he were running around the hospital making the kids laugh instead of watching her talk to her shitty ex.
"Are you alright, Em?" Megan's voice was simultaneously welcome and dreaded, "I can feel some, um, turmoil coming from you."
"I'm fine, Megs," her hand paused on the doorknob. "Can you take me out of the group link and just send messages specifically for me through as necessary?"
Megan agreed immediately and, to Emmy's great appreciation, did not ask any further questions.
Dark, honey brown eyes snapped to Emmy the second she entered the room. She kept her face blank and her gait steady, but her stomach churned at the unexpected eye-contact. He was still unconscious when she entered the hallway, but in her thirty-second trek he had managed to wake up with an alarmingly clear gaze.
Akio stared at her as she walked forward and sat across from him. The tension was so thick Emmy almost choked on it when she inhaled. His face was a raging sea of emotions, hers was a still pond, the same substance with vastly different presentations.
His eyes squinted as he roughly scoured over her uniform, following the blips of light circulating toward her ring before he stared dumfounded at her temples and cheekbones, covered with a mask. His gaze landed on her eyes, and he winced when he saw that they were the same unfamiliar and artificial shade as her hair.
Emmy's shoulders relaxed infinitesimally. It was too much for him at once. Her ring warmed her finger for a second and she felt the mask disappear as her hair and eyes returned to their normal states. Relief inexplicably flashed across Akio's face before he realized she was still wearing the rest of her uniform. A frown tweaked his mouth and forehead.
If any of her teammates asked, she would say that, strategically speaking, it was better to wait for him speak first. However, the truth was that Emmy had absolutely no idea how to open this conversation, so she was more than happy to wait for Mount Akio to erupt.
They observed each other intently. He scanned the extra five inches her hair had grown, particularly the strands around her face, which were now permanently green, the skintight uniform that made her look even more toned than he remembered, the freckle on her bottom lip. She took in the bruise on his left cheekbone, the small silver hoops with a dangling cross hanging from his earlobes Sage got him for his birthday a year ago without Emmy's permission, the black butterfly tattoo on his neck with the edge of its wings brushing the underside of his angular jawline.
They sat there for at least a minute, silently studying each other after almost a year of no contact. Emmy was determined not to let the intensity and unintentional intimacy of the moment interrupt her interrogation. She could see it in his eyes, the wonder of her being alive was wearing off and the rage was beginning to resurface.
Akio shattered the silence with a breathless question, "Are you okay?"
Emmy lips parted in surprise. She had not expected that, "Yeah, you're the one who took a Kryptonian fist to the face."
"Would you cut the damn attitude for a fuckin' minute, Emery?" Akio snapped lowly, his Jersey accent becoming more noticeable. "Don't act like any of this is normal. You disappear in February after backstabbin' Bobby, no one hears anything from you for a fuckin' year, and now I see you flyin' 'round with the Primary Color Crew? I thought you were dead!"
"Sorry to disappoint," Emmy deadpanned.
"You think…" his voice fluttered to a pained whisper, "you think I could ever be disappointed that you're alive?"
Confusion flashed across Emmy's face. She subconsciously scratched over the scar on the left side of her neck; their last interaction had not left the impression of any residual affection.
"Speaking of disappointment," she crossed her arms, "I see you got the promotion you wanted."
"Don't you fuckin' take the high ground," he snarled, leaning forward against his binds, "You lost the right to care about my choices when you bailed in the middle of the night without a word."
"Oh, there were words," Emmy scoffed. "You just don't remember because you were drunk off your worthless ass."
"You're such a damn hypocrite," Akio snapped through clenched teeth.
"Yeah, because I get faded and start swinging every night," her face was blank despite the venom in her tone.
"Please," Akio's smirk was a dark taunt, "we both know you like being hit, and you were never shy to return what you got."
Emmy couldn't feel any reactions from her team thanks to Megan, but she hoped none of them caught the implied domestic abuse. She had grown up with a dad who hit whoever pissed him off regardless of relation, so she hadn't been bothered by the fist fights Akio instigated when he got too drunk or high. It was essentially just extra training practice for her, and he never did it when the kids were around. She wouldn't put up with that shit now, but she had not known better at the time.
She bypassed his comment, delicately interlacing her fingers and resting her chin on them as her elbows hit the table, "At least I got out instead of dropping my pants to get bumped up the ladder."
Akio snarled, "'Ey, not all of us can get away with stealing a fuckin' fortune by switching sides." He looked at her uniform with distain, "Why the hell would you join the lantern shit anyway? You hate heroes more than anyone I know."
"I didn't choose to join; I was chosen," Emmy narrowed her eyes in slight embarrassment as she remembered how angry she used to be with the heroes who didn't come for her and the kids, "and I didn't hate the heroes that much."
A deadpanned look of disbelief schooled his features, "Sure, and I'm Batman."
"You don't know what you're talking about, Kiki," Emmy scoffed. She realized her mistake a second too late.
Akio sent her his trademark lopsided grin. The one that typically made all the girls in the room and a few of the guys melt until their will matched his. "Been a long time since you called me that. Missed me pretty bad didn't you, Nabi."
She glared at the old nickname. Emmy crossed her arms and leaned back into her chair, "Where did Bobby tell you to take those trucks?"
"What makes you think Bobby's involved?" Akio smiled with blatantly false innocence.
"Cut the shit, Park," Emmy looked down her nose at him. "We know Bobby's branched out. Just tell me what your orders were."
"I'm not telling you shit," Akio struggled against the cords strapping him to the chair pointedly. "Where the hell am I? I've been arrested before, and this ain't it."
"Do I look like a cop?" She flashed her eyes green. "You're out of your depth. If you're not going to answer my questions, your memory will be erased, we'll flip one of the other jackasses you were riding with, and you'll go to jail."
"Oh, you'll have me sent to jail?" Akio scoffed. "Do your new spandex-wearing friends not know who you are?"
"They do actually," Emmy's jaw twitched slightly. "You don't."
Akio huffed dangerously, "I don't know. I'd say I know you pretty well, Emery."
"Not anymore."
"You're the one who always said that people don't change."
"My bad. I should have been more specific. I meant people like you don't change," she smiled at him patronizingly.
Aqualad exchanged glances with the team. There was clearly more strife between the two than they had anticipated.
"Oh, so there's people like me now? This is why we broke up. You think you're so much better than I am when we're the exact fuckin' same," Akio clipped.
"We broke up because you put Sage and Hunter in danger by doing the one fucking thing I told you not to do!" Emmy snapped.
"It was a fuckin' parade, Nabi. They were fine but then you left me and moved out in the middle of the night for no reason!" Akio yelled.
"No reason!?" Emmy laughed in disbelief. "You took them to Gotham! While you were high!" The teen looked a little ashamed at that. "What? You think I don't know what it looks like when someone's using again?" Emmy scoffed and a scintilla of hurt entered her tone. "You said you were clean, and you knew what I went through with my mother and you still-" she stopped abruptly. This was getting away from her.
On the other side of the glass Wally gritted his teeth to the mild interest of the rest of his team.
"Guess it wasn't that casual after all," he thought bitterly into the link.
She schooled her features and sat back, wall impenetrable once more, "We're not here to talk about you and me. We're here to talk about the work you've been doing for Bobby Sparks. You can either answer my questions, or I'll erase your memories, and you can spend the rest of your life in jail trying to figure out what got you there."
"Life?" Akio snorted. "For drug smuggling?"
"For drug smuggling and human trafficking," Emmy crossed her arms. "You do know that 19-year-olds don't get tried as minors, right?"
Akio looked between her eyes with a look of betrayed bewilderment on his features. "The fuck do you mean human trafficking?"
"You really expect me to believe you didn't know that children were inside those trucks?" Emmy lowered her eyelids to appear void and unimpressed, but she really hoped he hadn't known.
Akio's eyes widened, "I didn't!"
Emmy fake hissed to hide her grateful expression, "If I don't believe you, why would a jury of twelve of your peers?"
Akio frowned, "Emery, you have to know that I had nothing to do with that. I love kids. I miss ours."
Emmy blanched. "They are not our kids. They are my kids."
"You are so fucking territorial with them," the boy frowned at her. "Hunter calls me dad."
The team wondered if Wally or Emmy would be the first to punch Akio at that comment.
"Because you fucking taught him to!" Emmy stood up and slammed her palms on the table. "Before you almost got them killed."
"They were fine!" Akio insisted. "I don't know why you got so pissy about it."
"Because I trusted you!" Her rage flared. "I trusted you with the two most important people in my life and-"
"Lantern. Focus." Aqualad's voice cut through her fury, and she shoved it back down.
"Look, Park." She glared down at him. "Let me tell you how this is going to go. You're going to keep your mouth shut until I tell you to open it. I'm going to ask you questions, and you're going to answer them or spend life in solitary."
Akio smirked darkly at her, "Tied up. Bruised. Not allowed to talk until you tell me. Reminds me of the night I took your virginity."
Emmy sighed deeply and pinched the bridge of her nose. Their physical relationship was something she would have preferred to keep private. A loud crash came from the opposite side of the glass.
"Oooh," Akio sing-songed with fake sympathy. "Was that your new little boyfriend? I can't believe you didn't tell Red that I used to be the one keepin' you up all night." He simpered at her in a way that would have made her hot in the past but just made her want to break his jaw now. "I assume that's the one you're fuckin'. You did always have a thing for redheads."
Her jaw ticked, "If you're going to waste my time, I can always tag Superboy in. How attached are you to keeping your hands?"
"Refrain from unnecessary physical threats, Lantern," Aqualad's calm voice sounded in her head.
"Say the word, and I'll do it," Superboy's strained voice cut through Aqualad's warning, and Emmy felt less guilty about her threat of violence.
"Do they know the story behind that?" Akio chuckled to himself despite the fear he felt at another run-in with the clone. "Of course not, you don't like to share. Well, our dear little Emerald was fightin' this monster of a fucker, and he was beatin' the shit out of her. Like, you'da thought she'd murdered his dog or somethin', but she's got a bet on herself to last to round four, and she is strugglin' in the third. So, this asshole gets a little too aggressive, and she needs a distraction so boom she jumps at him and kisses him for the eight seconds it takes the bell to ring before she breaks both his wrists." Akio chuckled humorlessly while Emmy snarled at him.
"It was so hot I wasn't even mad about the cheating." He leaned toward her and lowered his voice while making sure their audience could still hear, "You think Red would be mad if you came over here and took advantage of the fact that I'm cuffed to a chair at the angle you like?"
Emmy's jaw ticked. That's it. In a second, she was sitting on the table and kicking his sternum. She stopped him an inch before his head hit the floor with a green lasso around his chair. She pulled him up slowly. His face twisted in alarm.
"Did I tell you to speak?" Emmy's gaze was ice. Akio shivered and shook his head. "Then why did you?" he gulped slightly, and she looked at him to make sure he wasn't going to start talking again. She kept his chair at a precarious angle.
"My team wants to know what Bobby's been doing lately. And before you even think about mouthing off again, you should keep in mind that right now you are directly responsible for the kidnapping of four hundred and sixteen children." She brought the chair down onto its front legs roughly and put her feet on the seat on the outsides of his knees. Rope still around his chest and in her right hand. "I don't give a shit what the next 70 years of your life look like, but I assume that you do. Talk and we might be able to help you get a more lenient sentencing."
Akio glared at her for a moment before sighing shakily. "Bobby got tired of being the fight guy. He realized that he could make more money moving drugs around in the SUV's that transport his fighters," Akio bit his lip and looked down. "I heard rumors that he was getting into the human trafficking side, but I swear I didn't know they were true."
"What else did the 'rumors' tell you about the trafficking?" Emmy deadpanned.
Akio sighed and stretched his neck backwards, exposing his tattooed throat. Emmy momentarily had the repulsive urge to nip at it and cursed her muscle memory.
He righted his head. His honey eyes held a sorrow that almost looked genuine, "A few weeks ago, one of Bobby's Venom shipments got snagged right before it was about to go out. It was for some big hitter, and suddenly Bobby was out 110K of the product promised."
He shifted in his seat, "I…I suggested we do somethin' quick and easy to make up the loss. Like moving cocaine or somethin' to make cash to replace all that Venom before the buyer found out there was an issue. Bobby rescheduled with the buyer, but I really had no idea what was in the trucks."
"You didn't ask?" She raised an unimpressed eyebrow.
"Didn't think I needed to," Akio grumbled defensively.
"So, Bobby loses product and scrambles to find new stem cell kids to replace the Venom before the buyer finds out," Emmy bit the inside of her left cheek while she thought. It must have been the shipment that she and Wally stopped last month.
"Find out when the rescheduled buy is supposed to take place," Kaldur called through the link.
"When and where is the rescheduled buy supposed to take place?"
Akio sighed, "That's above my paygrade. I have no idea when the meet is. I just know that the buyer was fuckin' pissed by the delay, and that Bobby's panickin' so much that he's havin' people work on it through the gala Sunday."
"I have an idea," she mentally called to Aqualad. A few seconds later he confirmed that she should continue.
"Where's the gala going to be this year?" Emmy asked.
Akio sneered. "What do you have a death wish? Bobby will kill you the second he sees your face. Hell, I got a broken arm after you skipped town because he thought that I knew where you were." Akio nodded toward his left arm indignantly. "The only reason I'm not fuckin' dead right now is because Vinny came in, saw me, and told Bobby, 'That the dumb bitch dumped his ass before she left'."
"Yet another reason to dislike Vinny," she deadpanned.
Akio sent her an incensed smile, "That's sweet, Emerald. Thank you."
"The gala. Where is it this year?" She narrowed her eyes for a second. "Last chance to cooperate before I go offer this deal to one of your teammates."
"I'm the one who was supposed to let Bobby know when the trucks made it to Texas, so they won't be much help anyway," he argued but Emmy's face offered no other course of action.
He sighed, "Tijuana. At 7pm tomorrow." He snarled slightly, "And they ain't my teammates."
"Great. You won't mind betraying them then," Emmy leaned forward putting her elbows on her knees. "You're going to get us inside."
Akio's eyes widened. "Emerald," his deep voice got serious. "If Bobby sees you, he will kill you."
"That's the idea."
Emmy left Akio in his seat and walked back to the observation room. Akio was going to help get the team into the gala so they could find Bobby's file room with all the evidence they would need to bring down his entire operation. He moved the gala to a different spot on the globe each year. His fighters, supporters, prostitutes, and lackeys would converge for an all-night party while their boss counted his money and went over his ledgers for the past year before joining the chaos.
Emmy had never been to the gala before. She had always been careful to avoid the invitations and refrained from scheduling fights too close to the date. She hadn't wanted to leave Sage and Hunter alone while she left the country, and she'd also been wary of the types of people who would want to party with a kid her age.
Akio would help them and in exchange, they would put a good word in with the DA who took his case. He hadn't been happy about the Bobby aspect of the plan, so he had negotiated time alone with Emmy to 'catch up'. He started by saying that he wanted a night with her and an hour with each of the kids; Emmy almost wrung his neck, so he hastily agreed to half an hour with her.
Emmy hesitantly walked back into the observation room. Kaldur and Robin had sent the occasional message and suggestion, but the rest had been surprisingly quiet. That, or Megan had just prevented most of their messages from reaching her. Six pairs of eyes shot to her as soon as she opened the door. She avoided Wally's intense gaze.
"Good negotiation," Robin offered. "I let Batman know what was going on. We're going to turn the other creeps over to Canary, get some sleep at the mountain, and they'll both clear our plan and brief us at 16:00."
"The kids have all been cleared by the doctors," the Martian's voice reached the group. "I'm helping them get into groups by hometown for the police and social workers here. I can come to the safehouse in an hour."
Emmy nodded.
"M'gann and Artemis will monitor your time with him," Kaldur stated. "We hope he will reveal something else."
Emmy nodded again. That was reasonable. Not that she wanted Artemis and Megan listening in, but it would be better than the whole team. And it was certainly better than having a certain speedster monitor the time.
"So," Artemis started. "He seems pretty heated. How long did you two date?"
Emmy rubbed the back of her neck. That was a fair question. She just didn't want to answer it. They could just ask Akio though, so she needed to tell the truth.
"Like two," she trailed off, "two and a half years?"
"Years?" Wally's incredulous voice shot through the air for the first time since Akio recognized her.
She looked at him, instantly regretting it when she saw the anger and other emotions she couldn't and didn't necessarily want to place in his eyes. Her own ire grew to match. Who was he to judge her? He had no idea what her life was like before she got the ring.
"Yeah, So?"
"So?! So, he's a criminal," the redhead glared at Akio through the glass.
"So was I!" Emmy crossed her arms. "You knew that. You all knew that."
"We knew that you 'fought to stay alive', not that you were living with a human trafficker," Wally growled.
Emmy's eyebrows furrowed defensively, "Hey, I haven't seen him since January. Any shit he's done since then is not my responsibility."
"I'll give you that one," Wally put his hands on his hips, "Emery."
Emmy's eyebrows went up on their own accord. She hadn't expected any of them to catch that. She matched his stance, "That was the original shortening of Emerald. Hunter changed it to 'Emmy' when he was learning to fingerspell. It's not some romantic pet name."
"Are you sure?" Wally lifted an eyebrow. "You have been known to underestimate the emotional importance of things."
Her lips parted in mildly offended surprise.
"Not now," Kaldur interjected before Emmy could reply to the loaded dig. "We are a team. Emerald has a right to keep particular things personal just as we all do. When it became applicable to the mission, she was forthright."
"Forthright?" Wally scoffed. "She said it wasn't serious. We found out differently from him."
He threw his head in the direction of the one-way glass. Blue and green eyes squinted at each other, any traces of flirtation from earlier had morphed into a laden tension.
"Canary is here," Robin relayed from his hologlove.
Wally didn't look at Emmy as he went out the door. The rest of the team followed him. Artemis lagged behind a bit, her steps falling into place with Emmy's. The Lantern took a deep breath, wondering if Artemis way going to lay into her too.
"I'll be honest, I'm pissed at you right now," Artemis stated bluntly.
Emmy sighed, having expected this response.
"But not for anything that just happened," the archer continued, "so I've elected to place my problem with you on hold until this is all over."
Emmy turned to Artemis in confusion.
"I don't blame you for him," Artemis muttered quietly. Emmy quirked an eyebrow at her. "He's hot. Older without being creepy. You were alone with two kids. Living with him meant you didn't need to pay rent, and you could use him for extra warmth in winter and stress relief in summer. Gotta find the rainbow in every storm, right?"
Emmy let out a subdued snort. She should have known the girl related to her would understand her thought process exactly. She was puzzled to learn that Artemis was pissed at her, the archer hadn't necessarily treated her any differently than normal, but then again Emmy hadn't seen her much since she disappeared with Zatanna for a girl's night on Halloween. If Arty was willing to put her problem with Emmy on hold until the mission ended, then the lantern wasn't going to waste any time trying to figure it out beforehand.
"Thanks," she looked at the backs of their team. "Did they seem like they 'blamed' me?"
They had all trusted her pretty quickly, except for Wally, even knowing that she had a moral past which could, at best, be described as grey. She had admittedly framed the fighting like it was her only real option, and it had been, but it did change the dynamic to know that she had been in a relationship with someone during that period. Especially one with a guy who had committed a variety of new and horrible crimes in the time she'd been trying to better herself. Being a criminal to keep food on the table was very different from being in a relationship with another criminal. Dating was not typically something people struggling to survive had time for, and Emmy knew that it changed their mental image of her time as 'The Little Nightmare' for the worse.
Artemis sent her a look. "One particular person was upset. But I think the rest of us were more disappointed that you didn't feel like you could immediately trust us with the truth than anything else."
Emmy rubbed a hand over her face again. She hadn't been trying to lie to them. She just wasn't proud of most parts of her life before the ring picked her. Even afterwards there were still shaky bits.
"It's not a portion of my life I enjoy thinking about," Emmy muttered. "It wasn't a lack of trust in you guys." At least, not entirely.
Artemis nodded with understanding and patted Emmy's shoulder twice.
"You're going to have to get over that," the blonde advised, frankly, "because we're all about to see into the part of your life you've been hiding from. You need to have your head on straight for the next 36 hours, so we can bust this guy and move on."
Emmy looked at the ground. That was good advice. She squared her shoulders and followed Artemis into the meeting room.
Thanks for reading. I meant to post sooner, but it took me a while to get the interrogation scene to look the way I wanted it to.
-TheDarkAbyss
KirikaAndo- I always look forward to your reviews. Thanks for being so expressive and dedicated :)
Jack Redhawke- You know it.
Cozy Owl- Thank you! Yep, not to spoil too much, but we'll get to Failsafe pretty soon after the Akio ark ends. I already had the name Asami picked when I remembered Koizumi, but I like that name a lot, so I left it anyway.
