Page 11 of Captured By the Pakhan

And that — irritatingly, unhelpfully — is true.

In my defense, I’d like to state for the record – a statement that I fully resent – he is an exceptionally good looking man.

I hadn’t gotten a great look at him last night, the dim light had hidden some of his best qualities in fact. With his sleeves pushed up I can see the ink running down both his forearms, and I find myself cataloging them for a far more devious reason than the target profile I’ve been building.

Get a grip, West.

"Fine." I fold my arms. "Then let's do the part where you tell me who you are, and I tell you nothing, and we both go about our lives."

"I know who you are." He reaches into his coat, pulls out a small tablet, and opens it to read its contents. "Raven Aleksandra West. Thirty-one. Supervisory Special Agent at the New York Field Office, C-16. Nine years, three commendations, one disciplinary review in 2019 that went nowhere." He sets the tablet on the crate beside my dinner and turns it toward me. "And as of Tuesday, a fugitive."

I don't touch it, choosing instead to stare at him as I attempt to digest what he’s just said.

"Nice try," I say with an uncertain snort.

"Read it for yourself."

I read it.

It's a Bureau file. It's my Bureau file; it's got the right header and the right case number and the right internal routing string down the left margin, the one you can't fake unless you've been inside the system, and it says:

Discharge of a firearm on a minor. Deliberate compromise of an authorized operation. Assault on a fellow agent. Failure to report. On the run.

There are four sworn statements attached. I read all four.

Reyes. Ortiz. Boyd. And Louis.

Every one of them puts the weapon in my hands. Every one of them has me firing on a ten-year-old and then attacking the agent who tried to stop me. Louis's statement is three pages long and beautifully specific, containing details about the layout of that corridor that only somebody who was standing in it with me could possibly have known.

I read it a second time looking for the seam: the wrong date, the wrong shift code, the tell.

There isn't one. Either this is real, or somebody built it inside the house to confuse me.

And the worst part is I can't tell. That's the thing that gets through — not the charges, not the betrayal from my fellow agents. It's that I have nine years and three commendations and here I am looking at a document about my own life and I cannot tell whether it's true or false.

I put the tablet down very carefully, because my hands want to do something else with it. Something far more violent.

"Thirty-one hours," I say absently. "Nobody came."

"No."

"Because there's nobody coming." My voice comes out steadier than I feel. "Instead, there's a man hunt for a fugitive, and it's not going to knock on your door, because as far as three hundred people at 26 Federal Plaza are concerned, I'm not in this cabin. I'm running."

"Yes."

"Why tell me? Why show me?"

"Because I want something from you," he says, "and you will not listen to my offer until you have understood the alternative that is waiting for you outside of these walls."

I sit back. "Go on, then."

"My son needs a bodyguard. The woman who held the post is no longer employed here. The post requires a woman, for reasons I am not going to discuss tonight, and it requires someone he doesn’t flinch away from, and as of yesterday there is precisely one person on this property who meets both of those conditions." He doesn't blink as he continues. "For the next 90 days you agree to keep him alive, to keep him safe, and you try to get him engaged with life again. At the end of our contract you walk out of here breathing, with what I know about that file, and you can do whatever you like."

"And if I say no?"

"Then we are back to last night's conversation, and neither of us enjoyed it."

I look at the tablet. At the four names on it. At the door I've spent thirty-one hours proving I can't get through. Three months.