August 13, 2021

Friday the 13th. Not an auspicious day for an op, to be sure, but it was the only day they had, and it was gonna have to be good enough. OCCB's man on the inside had provided all the intel and they'd worked with SVU and the techies to set up surveillance and now he was standing next to Liv, watching the party through a plate glass window from several floors above.

"Where'd you find your UC again?" Liv asked him quietly.

"He's on loan from Narcotics. We had some pretty specific needs -" male, middle aged, rough around the edges - "and they were the only ones who had someone for us."

"Surprised you didn't take the job yourself," Liv said, shooting him a knowing look. "You always loved UC assignments."

She'd know, he thought. She'd remember. Bushido, he never should've taken that job, not with a wife and a toddler at home, but he'd done it because he'd been desperate for it, the adrenaline, the excitement, the time spent living someone else's life, far from responsibilities and doubts. It had been a stupid fucking move back then, and Liv had saved his skin - and saved his marriage, and got him shot in the process - and she hadn't forgotten, any more than he had.

"I wanted it," he confessed. "But the timing wasn't right. My kids just lost their mom, I couldn't have them lose their father, too."

To his surprise she reached out to him then, laid her hand gently on the crook of his elbow, as if in support, smiled at him softly, warmly, as if she were proud of him. Jesus, he wanted her to be proud of him.

"You're a good dad," she told him. There was no higher praise, coming from her. He knew that.

But talking about fathers made him think of Liv's kids, and their father, and the conversation he'd overheard on Tuesday, the conversation that had been rattling around inside his head for days now.

"Speaking of dads," he said softly. There was no one close enough to overhear them; the party hadn't gotten started yet, and everyone else was watching the monitors, checking the com lines, checking their gear, chomping at the bit to get going and paying no attention to the old timers by the window. "Florida?"

Beside him Liv rolled her eyes.

"I forgot about that," she grumbled. "We're not moving to Florida. Can you imagine?"

The thing was, he couldn't. Not really. He'd tried to imagine it, Liv in a bathing suit, Liv in flip flops, Liv's skin slowly turning to leather while she baked in the heat on a beach somewhere, but it didn't work. She wouldn't work, there. The city and Liv, Liv and the city, they were one and the same. Every time he'd talked to Kathy about going home Kathy'd thought he meant the city when really he meant Liv and it didn't make any difference, because a man couldn't have one without the other.

"If he wants to go, what's stopping him?" Elliot asked.

"Me," Olivia said grimly. "I've got primary custody of Mia. He's not going anywhere with her, and he won't go anywhere without her."

"What about Noah?"

Something on the ground had captured her attention; she was holding the binoculars to her eyes, watching one of the guests arriving earlier than expected, but she hummed, quietly, a question in the sound like she didn't follow his train of thought.

"You said you've got custody of Mia. What about Noah?"

"Brian isn't Noah's father. Not biologically, not legally."

She said it so casually, so matter of factly, but Elliot's head was spinning, just a little. This woman; getting her to talk about her personal life had always been like whittling a block of granite with a toothpick, tiny slivers of information flying out unexpectedly but never the whole story, never all at once. Elliot tried, for a second, to remember what little she'd told him about her kids; Noah was older, by almost a year. Some things happened that Liv refused to talk about, and she'd moved in with Cassidy, and come up pregnant with Mia. Noah must have only been a few months old when Liv got pregnant the second time. That was why she'd said Cassidy was afraid to be a dad when he found she was pregnant with Mia; he wasn't Noah's dad at all. But who the fuck was?

Oh, Jesus, Elliot thought. Something bad had happened, pushed Liv and Cassidy closer together - fast, she'd said - and Cassidy wasn't Noah's dad, and an alarm bell was ringing in the back of Elliot's mind, terror, visceral and sharp, slicing up his insides, and he couldn't ask her outright, not here, not now, not in the middle of an op, not when things were finally going well between them, but not asking was so painful he worried it might break him clean in two. The things he was imagining, the nightmare scenarios playing out in his head, were torturing him already, and maybe the truth wouldn't be that bad but maybe it would be worse, and he couldn't live with that. Couldn't live with himself, if Liv had been...hurt, if Noah was the result of that hurt, if it had all happened when he was on the other side of the world, too far away to protect her when she needed him most.

"Do the kids know?" he asked.

"Yeah," she said. "Brian's always treated Noah like his own because Brian is a good man. He's a fucking child, sometimes, but he's a good man. He wasn't gonna take Mia for the weekend and leave Noah behind, no matter where Noah came from."

Elliot swallowed hard. Where Noah came from. He didn't like the sound of that, not at all. That little boy, that sweet little kid, he looked just like Liv, but his eyes were blue, like someone else's, like Brian's, Elliot had thought, but he'd been wrong, and being wrong had never felt as gruesome as this.

"You never told me what's going on with Mia," he said. He wanted to keep talking about the kids, because he couldn't quite believe it, somehow, couldn't believe that Liv was a mother now, twice over, and he never got tired of hearing her talk about her kids, seeing her smile when she said their names. She was a mother, the way she'd wanted to be, had built herself the family she ached for, and if she was proud of him for putting aside his own selfish desires for his kids' sake it was nothing compared to how proud he was of her, now that he knew she had risen above her grief and isolation and made all her dreams come true.

"I can't do this right now, Elliot," she said, and the sudden shift in her tone was so profound it threw him off balance, for a moment. She'd been casual, friendly, warmly exasperated talking about Brian and Noah but the minute he mentioned Mia's name her expression grew pained and her voice cracked with grief.

On Tuesday he'd let her change the subject, let her lie to him, but he'd heard what he'd heard. Heard her say something about Mia's doctors, heard her tell Brian they had to talk about their little girl in a tone heavy with sorrow, and she was saying the same thing to Elliot that she had said to Brian then; I can't do this right now; when the fuck was she gonna do it, then? When was she gonna be ready? Not now, he'd give her that, Ayanna was circling and Jet was hanging out with the computers and the Albanians would be arriving any second, but when? When was gonna be the right time, to talk about the bad things that had happened and where Noah had come from and why Olivia's fierce, fragile little girl needed doctors and medicine?

Maybe we gotta make the time, he thought. So far he'd just been reacting, had only seemed to run into Liv in moments when they couldn't talk freely, in the middle of work or the middle of family dinner or the middle of the unraveling of his entire life; maybe he needed to be more intentional. Find some time when no one needed anything from either of them, when the world wasn't burning around them, when they could just sit, and drink a cup of coffee, and talk.

Like the old days, he thought. Like sitting in the car with her on stakeout, or with their knees brushing on the stoop of his apartment building, or perched on the edge of the cots in the cribs, late at night or in the still hours before dawn when the rest of the world was asleep, they'd steal moments for themselves, little moments that meant everything to him, even now, years later. Maybe he could carve out a moment like that, when this op was through.

"There she comes," Ayanna said, approaching them both with her eyes on the glass.

"Who am I looking at?" Olivia asked, pressing the binoculars back to her face and stepping closer to the window.

"That one," Elliot said, pointing. "She's married to Kosta's number two, guy named Albi Briscu. Her name is Fl- Flu- Fluh - shit, how do you say her name again?"

It was something unusual, and the sounds didn't sit right in his mouth. But it wasn't like he'd had to practice, or anything; he'd barely said the woman's name at all.

"Flutura," Ayanna supplied for him. "Flutura Briscu."

"We think she's running the girls," Elliot told Olivia.

She dropped the binoculars and crossed her arms over her chest, her attention focused entirely on him, and that felt good, felt like the old days, but the questions about her family, about her past, were still burrowing like worms through the back of his mind, would give him no peace, even now when he needed to be focused on the job.

"Our UC found passports in the Briscu house, and it turns out Mrs. Briscu is keeping a whole bunch of girls in a safe house the Albanians own through a shell company. We think we're going to see some of them here tonight."

"So you might have enough to take down Kosta's number two," Liv mused. "What about the boss? We get something tying him to this we could end your investigation right now."

"Kosta's not going down for pimping," Ayanna said grimly. She was stubborn, like that; this wasn't the first time they'd asked for SVU's help on the case but Ayanna wanted the task force to get Kosta on his other crimes, didn't want another department taking the collar from them. "But if we get leverage over Albi, we might get him to talk."

Privately Elliot didn't think there was much chance of that; Albi Briscu was a proud man, from what he could tell, and would rather go to jail than rat on his boss. But he loved his wife; maybe Ayanna had a point. Maybe if they threatened Flutura, Albi would fold. Elliot would have, for his wife. For Liv.


The party kept them tied up for hours, and by the end of it they had enough to plan their next op. Not enough to make any arrests, but enough to get started. It was nearly three a.m. before the team started to clear out, and Liv was leaning back against a wall, watching the crew packing up. She looked tired but alert; probably she felt the same way Elliot did, fucking exhausted but too wired to sleep. While he finished up with Ayanna he kept his eyes on her, praying she wouldn't go - she wouldn't, he thought, because she'd always been the last to leave and surely that hadn't changed now that she was in command, surely that had only gotten worse now that she felt responsible for everybody else - and the second Ayanna let him go he made a beeline for Liv.

"Hey," he said. "Lemme drive you home?"

Liv hadn't come in her own car; they'd wanted to limit their visibility, and that meant not parking a fucking convoy of black SUVs on the street. While she considered her answer he held his breath; she'd been turning down his overtures, lately, but she'd let him have dinner with her kids, once, and the unpredictability gave him hope.

"Yeah," she said, and he grinned, so pleased he couldn't even try to hide it.

"I don't know about you," he added as they fell into step together, began to make their way out of the room, "but I'm starving."

Liv laughed.

"I could eat," she allowed.

The kids were with Brian, Elliot knew, and Kathleen was home with Eli and mama and they were all asleep, anyway. No one would miss Elliot and Olivia if they stayed out a little while longer.

"There's an all night diner I know not too far from here," he told her. "We could get some greasy coffee, some bacon. They might even have some apple pie left over from yesterday."

Apple pie was Liv's favorite.

The offer hovered in the air between them as they went down the stairs together; he let Liv go first, the way he often did, watching her six the way he always did. Every time he'd asked her to lunch she'd told him no and most of the time she didn't pick up when he called but they'd been good, tonight. It had felt good, working with her again, and she had smiled at him, and it had been months since he'd last been strung out and chaotic and unpredictable, and maybe, he thought. Maybe.

"Sounds good," she said after what felt like an eternity, but was probably no more than twenty seconds. "Who's buying?"

"Well, you are the Captain," he said. "You make a hell of a lot more than a detective. So…I guess I am."

That made her laugh, too.

"Let's go, then," she said.

Thank God, Elliot thought.