Page 77 of Captured By the Pakhan

"Get off her."

Logan Foster cuffs me himself in an interview room on the fourth floor, and his hands are shaking so hard he has to do it twice.

"Don't," he says.

"I haven't said anything."

"You're going to say something, and I'm not — " He gets it closed. Steps back. Turns around and puts both hands on the back of a chair and stands there with his head down for a second. "Five weeks, Raven. Five weeks."

"Logan—"

"They said you shot a kid."

"I know what they said."

"They said you shot a ten-year-old boy in a hallway and then broke Louis Mendez's face when he tried to stop you, and they had four signatures on it inside eighteen hours, and I stood in a room and told a Deputy Assistant Director that I had known you for nine years and he told me — " Logan's voice goes somewhere ugly " — he told me that was precisely the problem."

I sit very still with my hands cuffed behind me.

"Say the rest of it," I tell him.

"There is no rest of it. That's what I'm telling you. There was no board, there was no review, there was no interview with the other four, there was a classification and a wire, then a manhunt, and every single time I have pushed on any part of it a door has closed somewhere above me that I cannot see." He turns around. "And then five weeks of nothing and you walk into an atrium with your hands up."

"Logan, listen to me⁠—"

"Why are you alive?"

That stops me.

"What?"

"You went into a Bratva house without a warrant, and it went wrong, and your whole team came out, and you didn't." He's not shouting now, which is worse. "I have spent five weeks being told you're a traitor, and I never believed it, not for one hour — but I have also spent five weeks with the other question, and it's the one nobody will say out loud, and it's why are you alive? Because I've read the files on these people. I know what happens in that house. So either they let you go, or you gave them something, or⁠—"

He stops.

"Say it."

"I don't want to say it."

"You've been carrying it for five weeks, so say it, because if you don't it's going to sit in this room with us."

Logan looks at the table.

"Or you've been working for them the whole time," he says quietly, "and the four statements are true, and I'm the last idiot in this building who hasn't caught up."

The room is very quiet.

"Okay," I say. "Fair. That's a fair question, and you're entitled to it, and I'm going to answer all of it, and I need you to hear the whole thing before you decide anything."

And I tell him.

Not everything. I want to be honest about that because I sit in a chair with my hands behind my back and make a series of real-time decisions about what a man who is about to risk his career is entitled to know, and there are two things I keep.

I tell him about the corridor. The boy, the shot, the punch, the fact that I could not see faces and still can't. I tell him about thirty-one hours in a cabin and the file with four signatures on it that I could not find the seam in. I tell him about ninety days as a bodyguard, which is a sentence I have to say twice because he doesn't take it in the first time.

I tell him about the man on Rennick with the real badge and four hundred photographs of me and none of anybody else, and a case code with no name.

And I tell him about the file in the safe that was taken, and by whom, and that I never had it.