Chapter Text

⋘ ❄ ⋙

PROLOGUE

⋘ ❄ ⋙

Just outside Concord, in a Drumlin Diner that had seen better days, a demon walked in, looking for a deal with the devil.

A man of modest height pushed through the door at half past ten, a worn Red Sox cap shading his hard gaze behind bottle-green aviators. He wore a battered dark leather jacket over a white polo and light denim jeans. His fingers brushed the 9mm tucked into his waistband as he snatched up a newspaper from a vacant booth.

"Usual, Lochlan?" came a blithely chipper greeting. His real name wasn't Lochlan.

He nodded to the waitress, Mabel—a plump woman in her fifties with frizzy gray curls and a jaw that dared men to lie. She'd seen enough seasons to know better than to trust men who wore sunglasses indoors, but she made an exception for this one.

He slid into the back left corner booth, eyes on the door and south window. The mid-morning traffic on the Concord Turnpike buzzed, drivers with delusions of immortality leaning on their horns as though they could steer clear of the inevitable crash.

He skimmed the headlines.

'DEATH TOLL ON ALASKAN FRONT REACHES ALL TIME HIGH'

'GAS PRICES SOAR AGAIN'

'DEFENSE SPENDING BILL HITS TRILLIONS'

'BILL COMES BEFORE COMMONWEALTH CONGRESS TO LIMIT CIVILIAN POSSESSION OF MILITARY-GRADE WEAPONRY.'

He smirked at the last one. Too little, too late.

Mabel set a glass of iced tea with a wedge of lemon on the table in front of him, alongside a plate with a New York steak, medium rare, hash browns overdone, and eggs over easy. "A1?" she chirped.

"You know I don't eat that shit on my cow. Ruins the meat."

"It's a cut of New York, not a filet. Can't promise it won't need it."

The man grunted noncommittally. He'd have to talk to the Flynns, arrange something with them about their meat sourcing, if mornings like this became more frequent. There weren't enough good mornings to waste on bad cuts of meat.

He grabbed the sugar caddy, ignoring Mabel as she brought out steak sauce anyway. Stubborn broad. Just as he was stirring his tea, the bell above the door chimed again.

The newcomer was tall, his tan overcoat draped over a crisp navy suit, no tie. His smile was too straight, too white for this kind of joint. Eddie watched as he tipped his hat to Mabel, flashing a shock of ginger hair graying at the temples. Freckles dusted his long nose, like some old-world salesman who hadn’t yet learned that charm doesn’t count for shit in places like this.

Mabel blinked, caught off guard for half a second, then hustled toward the coffee pots. Eddie snorted quietly into his tea. He'd seen that act before. Smiles too wide, promises too cheap.

Mabel didn’t need to ask where the new guy was heading.

"Regular or decaf for ya? Special today is Denver omelet and home fries. That tickle your fancy?"

The stranger returned her smile. "Regular, and that sounds marvelous. Thank you, miss..." He leaned in, peeking at her nametag above the rim of his glasses. "Mabel."

He shrugged off his trench coat with the ease of muscle memory but kept the hat and glasses on as he slid into the booth across from Eddie.

The jukebox at the far end of the diner clicked over, the restaurant's overhead speakers warbling to life, Janis Joplin summarily raised from the dead along with it. Eddie clanked his spoon loudly inside his glass as he stirred his tea, lips tightening as the aged vinyl crackled and hissed.

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz...

The newcomer, now sitting directly across from the iced tea drinker, wore insincerity on his face like he was privy to a joke no one else understood.

"Now that was a classic."

"You think I pick this shitty hood for the food? Fuck no. The owner of this shitbox also runs a vintage music restoration shop outside Malden."

"I meant the Benz, but sure, let’s talk Joplin."

"Like you're old enough to remember what a Benz looked like. Yah, no. Fuck outta here with that bullshit."

The man Mabel referred to as Lochlan barked a rare laugh. Edward Lochlan Winter—known to most in this rundown diner in Concord simply as Eddie Winter—was not known for his sense of humor.

The other man chuckled as he accepted the coffee Mabel poured. There was a calm about him that was starkly at odds with the restlessness of the world outside.

"Fair point," he conceded, blowing on his coffee before taking a cautious sip. "Though one could argue the same about you, Mr. Winter."

Eddie stiffened slightly, the name sliding into the booth with them like an old enemy. He pressed his fork into the steak, noting the lack of red at the center. His jaw tensed, but he said nothing. Instead, he cut a piece, chewed deliberately, and swallowed.

"I've got a good memory," he muttered, his gaze never leaving his companion.

"Then you might recall our previous conversation," the man—Agent Bishop, as Eddie knew him—replied. The waitress’s sneakers squeaked against the linoleum as she set the agent’s breakfast down. Neither man reacted to the noise.

Eddie chewed his steak thoughtfully. If either of them peeled off their sunglasses, the stormy blue-grey of Winter’s eyes would be hard as flint, while the agent’s bright blue ones would show nothing but carefully cultivated indifference.

Bishop smiled wide again at Mabel, his pale, freckled nose wrinkling as he flashed her another grin. "You're an angel. Thank you, Miss Mabel."

Eddie rolled his eyes. This G-man wasn't like any he'd ever met. Even his buddy Scoot over at BADTFL, vain and eccentric as he was, didn't lay it on this thick. That was the deep-state way: smile first, gut you later. Be as memorable as you want—no one worth remembering would remember you anyway.

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a color TV...

"Sure, if you give her a big enough tip, she'll suck your dick too, Agent Orange," Eddie quipped, then licked a long streak of egg yolk from the blade of his steak knife. He grinned sideways. "Mabel, tell that schmuck back there on the line he overdid my steak again."

"The A1, the A1," Mabel called over her shoulder as she hustled off.

"Forget the sauce. I know what rare looks like. This poor heifer doesn't have an ounce of red left in her."

"Steer," Bishop corrected mildly.

Eddie flicked his gaze up at him. "Excuse me?"

Bishop, unbothered, carefully turned the glass ketchup bottle over in his hands before unscrewing the cap. The steel popped with a sharp metallic snap, and Mabel, sensing the mood shift, made herself scarce with a muttered promise about pie.

"Steer," Bishop repeated without looking up. "Generally, steak comes from steer. Especially now, I'd reckon—can't get by without dairy in these times."

A glob of congealed tomato plunked onto the cleared patch beside his home fries.

Eddie scoffed, shaking his head. "This fucking guy."

Bishop dipped a bite into the ketchup, his gaze finally meeting Eddie’s. His smile didn’t falter.

Eddie drummed his fingers once against the table, a sharp, restless beat before he went still.

"That's what separates us from the animals," Bishop continued after a beat, taking a bite of the crisp potato. "Knowing things you don't need to. Like that we generally eat steer instead of cow, or that in your pocket you have a solid gold chain strung with a handful of men's Claddagh rings."

Eddie blinked, his steak knife pausing midair. Bishop continued chewing slowly and thoroughly, his tone conversational.

"You averaged about one every five years for the past twenty," the agent went on. "The last one, you had a hell of a time pulling it from his finger. Gout, if memory serves. You've still got one ring to go, but it’s been seven years now, and the set’s still incomplete."

Eddie's grip tightened around the steak knife, his face paling slightly.

Bishop flicked the tension away with a lazy wave of his hand and wet his throat with a swig of coffee.

"You're getting sloppy, Mr. Winter," he continued, scraping his fork across the plate as he divided his home fries into neat quadrants. "You spend so much time hiding in plain sight you forget some of us can still see you."

Eddie said nothing, but his eyes locked onto Bishop’s knowing smile like crosshairs.

The low hum of the diner’s air conditioning filled the space between them, mingling with the clatter of dishes and the ghostly wail of another spectral songstress spinning from the jukebox.

"Is that right?"

"Don't trouble yourself too much over it. You're not the first man to be brought low due to the circumstances of his birth, nor will you be the last." Bishop stabbed into the eggs, his posture relaxed and casual."No, you're simply the one with the most to lose when the true believers come calling."

Eddie's gaze was so hard it could have crushed a man beneath its weight alone. But Bishop remained unfazed, as if that same weight had only ever given him traction.

The DIA agent looked every bit the Cheshire cat. There was nothing quite as satisfying as reminding men like Edward Winter of their place in the world. With his eyes hidden behind the glasses, it read more like a shit-eating grin than anything else. His hands remained steady, lacking any telltale nervousness as he wiped the corners of his mouth with an unhurried napkin swipe.

And although he took immense pleasure in baiting the gangster, Bishop wasn't stupid enough to think Winter wouldn't add his sunglasses as a trophy alongside the ones on the gold chain in his pocket.

"Speaking from experience, mind you," Bishop added finally, to defuse whatever notions Winter had involving the 9mm tucked inside his waistband.

The agent appreciated men like Winter. He’d done his time in the trenches, and while he'd traded his sneakers for horsebit loafers, Bishop figured he kept his shit-kickers close by. Not because he had to. No—because he liked it.

Edward Winter had always enjoyed killing. Bishop suspected he'd craved it long before that first taste in Iowa, robbing that bank—long before the teller's brains splattered across the Midwest vault doors, a red, leaded spray like open flesh on butcher's paper.

"And Jesus wept," Eddie muttered, fishing a battered pack of Big Boss from the inside pocket of his jacket. "Last time, we talked about that fruitcake at CIT."

Winter pulled out a single cigarette and let it dangle from his lips, pointing his chin down as his Zippo clicked open. The flame licked at the end of the tiny tobacco tube, the tip glowing brightly in time with his deep inhale. The smoke swirled around his face before being pulled into the vent above them.

Bishop watched, unmoving.

"He's still plugging away, as far as I know." He shrugged slightly. "His methods are... unorthodox, to say the least. But you can't argue with results."

Eddie held his gaze for a moment longer before he exhaled smoke through his nostrils, tapping out ash in the cheap plastic ashtray set between them. "That supposed to be enticing? I'd rather hedge my fucking bets, thank you very much."

"And what other choice do you have? Everyone with a place in a vault is just savvy enough to know money's going to mean diddly, or they're daft enough to believe Vault-Tec's sales pitch and are willing to turn a blind eye in the name of survival."

"Yeah? And where will you be, Agent Orange, when the world goes kablooey?"

Bishop didn't skip a beat. "Wherever I need to be, Mr. Winter," he responded, lifting his coffee cup to his lips. "That's the beauty of our line of work—we're always where we need to be."

"Sounds shitty. They tell you where and when you can piss, too? The world goes up in flames and you're still holding your dick?" Eddie countered, cigarette clenched between his lips as he reached across the table to snatch the ketchup bottle.

"If you're lucky, Mr. Winter, this arrangement will prove fruitful enough that when the time comes, you'll have the singular privilege of my piss extinguishing you before you're barbecue."

It was Eddie's turn to grin now, the ghost of a smirk playing at the corners of his mouth, the cigarette bobbing as he snapped open the ketchup bottle. "Have I touched a nerve, agent?"

Bishop's eyes glinted behind the sunglasses he'd yet to remove. "No, Mr. Winter. You've just proven yourself to be as predictably crude as I surmised."

"Different breed of horse," Eddie countered, slapping the ketchup onto the Formica. "You expect me to play nice while you're pushing me towards a loaded gun? You're lucky I still got use for you, otherwise we'd be having a different conversation."

"In the spirit of our current arrangement, I'm grateful you still find me useful," Bishop replied smoothly. "The day you decide you don't will be a disaster for both of us."

A silence elapsed between the two men, the songstress long since cradled back into the earth after her brief visit to the material world. The next track, a fresher corpse: The Cars' You're All I've Got Tonight cued up on the jukebox, its synthesizer intro downright jarring in the mid-twentieth-century-themed Drumlin. The song and the conversation buzzed along the same frequency between them, a wavelength both men thrummed along to, despite the differences in station and demeanor. An insight beyond any man-made label; the kind passed down in the blood, steeped in the marrow.

There was no rhyme or reason to it, no neat bow to tie around it and gift it away as some sort of universal wisdom. It was merely an understanding, the kind that kept men like them across from each other throughout history, holding the privilege to continue this type of chinwag for as long as they saw fit. It was this quiet understanding that kept Winter from splattering the agent's brain across the Formica, and stopped Bishop from slipping cyanide into Winter’s iced tea with nothing more than a nod to the girl at the counter.

"If we're going to do this, we have to make it look flawless. Smoother than a baby's bottom, and—"

"Twice as innocent," the G-man finished, the edges of his mouth twitching into what might've passed for a real smile. "A miscalculation could turn this into a bloodbath."

Eddie leaned back with a sneer. "You give a shit 'bout the body count? Gutter's gonna run red no matter what. Uncle Sam doesn't care as long as you get him results. Stubborn bastard, too, or we'd be done fucking around in goddamn China and putting our toys back in the box."

He paused to take another drag. If there was one thing he wouldn't allow, it was for this trust-fund fuck to dictate how he went about his business. .”…nah, this ain't about body count for you. You got your own little game going on."

Bishop shook his head, his laugh deceptively light. He drew a cigarette case from the folds of his coat beside him. "Be that as it may, a certain level of exposure will be required, but not to the degree that undue scrutiny would fall upon us." He struck a match against the table, the flame flaring between them, reflecting in both pairs of glasses.

"I believe we can find a balance between chaos and precision, Mr. Winter. I know you're capable of it."

Eddie took a longer drag, savoring the burn before releasing a plume of smoke toward the ceiling again. "Balance? That's cute," he chuckled darkly, his eyes scanning the establishment. Mabel talked with a young blonde at the counter, the girl's lips and nails painted candy apple red. An elderly man sipped his coffee quietly at a corner table. A couple of roughnecks shared a burger and beer at the booth by the entrance.

Whether they were privy to similar frequencies as Eddie and Bishop were would likely remain unseen. You could never tell, not really, unless you held their feet to the fire or pressed a barrel between their eyes. Most were unconcerned, this moment in time stolen, crystallized. They were dead already; everything that would happen from here on out had already happened. Everything that came before had been bought and paid for, far too steeply.

Winner takes none. Couldn't even break even with the house, let alone come out ahead.

"Balance, Mr. Winter," the agent repeated, his eyes fixed on Winter’s. "Not just to avoid undue scrutiny, but for things to keep on keeping on till that final, inevitable hour."

Eddie laughed, the sound grating in the quiet diner, causing a few patrons to look their way before returning to their meals. "It's no fuckin' wonder the whole nation's about as dumb as a bag of rocks and twice as useless. Your propaganda machine might as well take a break from churning shit out. The damage is done. Pack it in boys, mission accomplished. Their bird is cooked."

The younger man, unperturbed, merely arched a brow. He took a slow drag, filling his mouth with smoke before exhaling a thin stream out of the corner.

"Why did you stop coding your holotapes, Eddie?"

It was Eddie’s turn to raise a brow, clearly caught off guard. "You were decrypting them anyway," he shrugged nonchalantly. "Figured I'd save you some time."

"No, Eddie...you got cocky. You have your little BADTFL fuckboy feeding you like a greedy little piggy while your brother doles out hand jobs in the senate. You're mistaking your good luck for divine providence, and that's where you err, my friend."

"I ain't your fucking friend, you ginger-prick fuck," Eddie snapped, his eyes narrowing. "The only reason you wear that suit and own five-thousand-dollar sunglasses is because men like you funded coups abroad while bleeding their own countrymen dry stateside.” He took another angry pull on the cigarette before speaking again. “Not just dry—no, that wasn’t enough. You ground their bones to make your bread."

Bishop chuckled low, tapping ash from his cigarette. "The proletariat angst really doesn't suit you.” He took a long drag, exhaling a perfect ring of smoke before continuing. "Or have you forgotten the men whose fingers you broke and snapped off to get those rings? The ones currently weighing down your pocket?"

Eddie's face blanched, the light from outside reflecting off his iced tea, casting a sickly yellow glow across his features.

"And let's not forget Deidre Driscoll," Bishop added, his voice dropping to a near-whisper. "Having Cooper tell her mother she ran away to Florida? Now that...that felt a little indulgent, even for you."

There was a brief moment, again, when the agent felt, rather than saw, Eddie contemplating the gun tucked in his waistband. His fingers twitched, the muscle memory of countless trigger pulls itching at his nerves. But instead, he simply exhaled a slow stream of smoke, his eyes like polished steel, staring back at Bishop with cold defiance.

"Ain't your kind supposed to be above these sorta things?" he said, jaw set like a trap waiting to spring. "What do you know about dying in the gutter, Agent? What do you know about doing what needs done?"

Bishop sighed and leaned back in his chair, looking at the simmering rage licking past the bottle-green frames. It was then he knew he had him—their game was over. Too bad, it was just starting to be fun.

"You're going to keep recording those tapes, Eddie. Keep them unencrypted from here on out. Speak plainly, confess everything you've been hoarding all these years. That information, in the right hands, accelerates our work."

"And then what?" Eddie's voice was quieter now, but still petulant, the mild whine steadily eroding the rasp. His fingers drummed a steady tempo against the table again, the plunking sound carrying through the room.

"Then, you keep your head down. Keep out of my way," the agent replied, leaning in, his voice dropping to something like a purr. "Cooperate with us, and we ensure you survive. Uncontested, might I add. As soon as the all-clear sounds, you're the only shark left in the pool—all the little fishes yours for the taking."

Eddie stopped drumming his fingers on the table, suggesting he was at least reconsidering his earlier position.

"And a spot in the vault?"

Bishop clicked his tongue. "Sorry, Eddie. It doesn't work like that. Not since Deidre. If you'd controlled yourself—and Cooper—it might have been on the table. But now?" he continued, leveling his gaze and taking a long, slow drag. The smoke curled lazily around his words, cloaking them in a gray haze. "Now, not even your baby brother could get you in. It's tighter than a nun's habit, and you know it."

Despite the absolute certainty in Bishop's tone, Eddie was silent, his grip tightening around his drink as he stared at the agency spook from behind his aviators. There was something telling in that silence, though—the gears of his mind were turning at a ferocious pace.

"What then?”

An echo of fragility was visible, showing through his stony veneer like bone beneath flesh. "I just keep on, serving you, hoping you live up to your end? Your word means fuck-all."

The agent grinned, crushing out his cigarette. "We have a plan," he said simply, leaning back again in his seat and crossing his legs. "It's one you're quite familiar with already. Being an informant has readily prepared you for it this last decade, Mr. Winter."

Eddie's jaw tightened at Bishop's words, but he said nothing. His fingers traced the rim of his now empty iced-tea glass as another specter of the old world rose from the jukebox. It was the sound of an organ, and the clanking bones of society's failure.

All our times have come…

Bishop smirked faintly, polishing off the last of his home fries before dabbing his mouth delicately with his napkin. "This is a one-time deal, Edward. You get what you get—you don't throw a fit. You survive. Anything else is just confetti."

The younger man didn’t wait for a reply. He pulled a manila envelope from inside the pocket of his trench coat, sliding it across the table toward Eddie, his well-manicured nails tapping the heavy paper with a rhythm of finality. "Inside you'll find the necessary information. Names, dates, locations. You'll be doing your civic duty and then some. From here on out, it's up to you how you want to play this."

Eddie stared at the envelope, the muscle in his jaw flexing beneath the skin. His thumb tapped once against the table—a steady, muted beat—before going still. He felt the weight of its contents—not just paper, but futures, lives, power. He cracked his neck slowly, tilting his head side to side, his gaze still locked on the piece of paper like it would bite him.

"How does it feel?" Eddie asked, his voice a rough whisper. The sound carried through the quiet diner, woven into the music and dissonance.

Bishop furrowed his brow. "How does what feel?"

"Knowing we're going downhill without any brakes."

Bishop snorted. "Professional or personal?"

"They any different?"

The agent's too-straight, too-white grin widened. "No."

Eddie snuffed out the remains of his long-dead cigarette in the ashtray, exhaling wearily. "That's the first honest thing you've said this whole fucking conversation."

Bishop's dry titter bounced off the diner's peeling wallpaper. "You wound me, Eddie." He tapped the envelope once more, his gaze stern. "This here is your golden ticket. Don't let it go down the gutter."

The fed, always a man of impeccable timing, chose that moment to rise from his seat. He smoothed down the front of his suit, brushing away imagined wrinkles from the expensive fabric before swiping his coat from the booth.

"And to answer your earlier question…inevitable. I figure we've been on this trajectory since a bit after we were little more than pond scum. But certainly before we learned to locomote on two limbs instead of four."

With that, Bishop turned on his heel, leaving the envelope—and Eddie Winter—behind in the now near-empty diner. If he had any uncertainty about Winter's compliance, his stride didn't betray it.

Eddie watched the door swing shut, his gaze lingering on the sunlit rectangle of outside before it thudded closed again, sealing him in the dim diner. His attention dropped back to the envelope. Without further preamble, he unwound the string that held it shut. His hands were steady as he removed the packet of papers, but the creeping light betrayed the thin sheen of sweat on his forehead.

The first page held nothing, save for three words, center-aligned in a stark monospaced typeface:

OPERATION WINTER'S END

He stared at the words, his face impassive. There it was, then: his fate, his future, spelled out in three simple words on an eight-and-a-half by eleven sheet of paper. "You gotta be shitting me. Goddamn wiseass," Eddie muttered under his breath. He shoved the title page back into the envelope, ignoring the brief sting of a paper cut. He plucked his glasses off his face at last, rubbing the space between his brows with his thumb. The world bloomed into harsh clarity, his mind slamming against the cage of their reality.

Reaffixing his shades, his eyes were drawn back to the open Boston Bugle on the table where he thought he had left off.

'CHUCKLER BUSTED: 'RED DEFENDER' TAKES LEAD ON PROSECUTION'

BPD had finally done its job. They'd caught the psycho who left a string of corpses in the Combat Zone. How shit did you have to be at your job to spend a year chasing a nutjob who called you after every kill? Policing, truly, had gone the way of the dodo, hadn't it? Sometimes it was just too easy, and Eddie knew that. The sick chuckle-fuck had practically smeared his own shit on Boston's finest's chins every time he left the scene of his own crime and dialed it in.

Eddie snorted, a grim smile twisting his lips as he skimmed through the article. Mabel deposited the pie, as promised, along with another glass of iced tea. A check was never laid on the table; she knew better. Even out here in Concord, where the city's underbelly felt a world away, Eddie Winter paid for nothing.

His gaze lingered on the headline for a moment before shifting to the slightly crumpled picture of the assistant district attorney. A pretty dame, but...hard. He'd known a lot of women with steel in their spines and balls of brass, but the look of this one, even in black and white, was something else.

"Mabel," Eddie called out without taking his gaze off the photograph, "who's the skirt that's trying to clean up the Combat Zone?"

Mabel paused, fingers tightening slightly around the cup before setting it down with a soft clatter at another table. She glanced over at the newspaper, squinting slightly before pursing her lips. "Says right there."

For the second time since he'd walked through the door—a record, by all accounts—Eddie Winter slid his sunglasses off, fixing Mabel with a stare as clear and cold as icicles hanging from Boston rooftops in February.

"I can read, doll," he murmured dryly, his voice carrying the same frosted cadence as his gaze. "I asked who she is."

The waitress stared right back at Eddie, meeting his icy eyes without flinching. You didn't live as long as Mabel had, seeing the things she had—not in this world of shifting allegiances and thin veneer—without picking up a thing or two about the way men like Winter malingered through it all.

"Georgia Ambrose," she said, enunciating each syllable like she was talking to a particularly slow child. "Says it right there in the article. Married to one of those Ambrose boys from Beacon Hill. Old money, blue-blood types." Mabel squinted at him, wondering how he could have avoided the media circus that had surrounded the Ambrose family for nearly a decade. "Her husband's one of them war-hero types, always in the news for some medal or another, bein’ a local boy and all."

"Married to an Ambrose, huh?" Eddie mused, his gaze lingering on the black-and-white photo. Something about her eyes—the set of her jaw—drew him in. Even in newsprint, she had a presence that commanded attention. "Figures. This town's so goddamn incestuous you'd think we were all cousins."

The waitress snorted, filling his glass with more iced tea. "You know how it goes. Same twenty families running everything since before the Revolution. Just swap out the wigs for wingtips."

Eddie tapped the newspaper with his index finger, studying the woman's features. High cheekbones, sharp eyes that seemed to look right through the camera—right through him.

"She good at what she does?"

Mabel raised an eyebrow, leaning against the counter. "You mean you don't know? She's the one who defended that egghead from C.I.T. in the big espionage case. The one where they accused him of selling secrets to the reds?"

Eddie scoffed, swirling the ice in his glass before draining the final dregs of his iced tea. His fingers lingered on the rim a beat too long before he fished out another cigarette. "Hard to keep track of all these eggheads and the shit the government cooks up to paint 'em pink. What was his deal?"

The waitress shifted her weight from one foot to another, a sign she was growing tired of the conversation. "Well, the papers couldn't get enough of it. Apparently he was schtupping a woman—a Chinese woman..." She trailed off, glancing around before lowering her voice to a near whisper, "who was suspected of being a spy. They said she used him to get classified information. Turns out she was just some poor woman who happened to...well, you know."

"Be the wrong color in the wrong place at the wrong time," Eddie finished for her. "Tale as old as time."

The government could call it whatever it wanted, but it was the same dance, just a different tune. Round up the usual suspects, but make sure they're the right shade of yellow—a secondary concern, of course. Didn't matter if the people they hauled away were as American as apple pie, generations of Chinese-Americans who'd been here longer than some of the good ol' boys in Congress. If they looked like the enemy, they could be the enemy. That was Uncle Sam's logic.

"And our girl, this Georgia Ambrose—she got him off?" he asked, the cigarette momentarily forgotten between his fingers.

Mabel nodded, her eyes scanning the cafe once more before locking onto Eddie's with the kind of clarity that only came from years of dealing with all levels of bullshit. "Oh yeah. Didn't just get him off though—she stood up in that federal court and accused them of conspiracy." She shook her head, that world-weariness bleeding from her pores, before dismissing the memory with a wave of her callused hand. "Ain't that rich? Facing down the Attorney General himself—and winning."

"Hell of a broad," Eddie muttered, turning his focus back to the photo. "Bet they loved her for that."

"Like a hole in the head," the waitress deadpanned.

Eddie chuckled darkly, the sound rough like gravel under tires. "Yeah, well, everyone's got an expiration date, don't they?"

The older woman’s mouth tightened, but she knew better than to push. "Maybe," she said with a small shrug. "But I think this one's good for the distance. She's been a thorn in their side for years now." She gave him another hard look, then left him alone with his pie, his paper, and his thoughts.

As much as he was loathe to admit it—and fuck, he was loathe—the skirt reminded him of himself in the early days, when ambition was a fire in his belly and dissent was his currency. When he was just another street rat with a dream of empire, every bloody knuckle and broken bone a notch on the ladder to the top.

Studying the newspaper page a moment longer, Eddie's eyes shifted back to the envelope, his hand reaching into the pocket of his jacket for the gold chain snug inside the satin, cool to the touch despite the humidity.

It had been years since he'd given any real thought to those rings, or the hands he'd pried them from. A lifetime ago, when the world still held some semblance of order and men like him were the ones who disrupted it. When the game was still played by rules everyone understood, even if they pretended not to.

But the world had changed, and Eddie with it. The old rules didn't apply anymore, and the players—well, they were a different breed entirely.

Georgia Ambrose. A name like that conjured images of old money and Southern charm, not the kind of steel-spined broad who'd stare down the Attorney General without blinking. But then again, Eddie knew better than most that appearances could be deceiving. After all, how many would have looked at a scrappy street kid from Southie and seen the man he became? Edward Lochlan Winter, survivor extraordinaire, playing both sides against the middle until there was nothing left but his own reflection in the shattered glass of a dying world.

Eddie stayed rooted to the spot a beat longer, then slipped the envelope into his jacket pocket. He took one final drag of his cigarette before crushing it out in the ashtray.

"Mabel," he called out, his voice cutting through the quiet diner. "I'm heading out. Put it on my tab." The waitress nodded, not bothering to look up from wiping down the counter. The pie remained untouched.

He slid out of the booth, adjusting his jacket and cap as he stood, the gold chain clinking softly in his pocket. As he reached the door, he felt a sudden twinge — the kind a man his age couldn't afford to ignore, but didn't have much choice about.

It reminded him, Keats-like, of his own mortality—a rich man's existential angst. The thought lingered as long as the last drag of a cigarette before dissolving into the humid Massachusetts summer, the door slamming shut behind him.

That single emotion hummed through Eddie as he strolled to his car.

A funny thing, the amygdala—that little almond-shaped bastard part of the brain that controlled fear, aggression, and the like. It whispered to him now, so quiet he could almost mistake it for the buzz of the neon sign outside.

Something is coming, Eddie, it warned. And you better be goddamned ready.

He pulled open the door of his '56 Corvega, the metal still hot from baking in the sun. The air felt charged, like the calm before a storm. Whatever was coming, he'd weather it. After all, he hadn't gotten this far by being unprepared.

He lit another cigarette, exhaling into the still, dense heat of the afternoon. This whole gig, this whole set-up—he’d won worse hands, with shittier cards than the ones he'd been dealt now. Eddie Winter didn't need a taped-off spot in the vaults or a page in the history books.

All he needed to win was to keep breathing.

Chapter Text

⋘ ❄ ⋙

CHAPTER ONE

⋘ ❄ ⋙

People think that pain is truth, both in the mind and the body, but it's not.

The body and brain work in tandem to deceive. It isn't even some mind over matter bullshit—a person's flesh suit simply does not care enough to accurately accept input if too much comes in all at once. Like a switchboard operator bombarded by a sudden surge of frantic calls, it just starts pulling plugs at random and fabricating connections, hoping something will make sense. That's why the scalding burn from a hot kettle fades to a dull throb after a few minutes, or why a person can walk on a broken leg in the heat of the moment. Pain is a story the nervous system makes up, and like any story, it can be exaggerated, truncated, or falsified.

George knew this better than most.

Sitting on the edge of her clawfoot tub, she watched crimson bloom across white cotton, her nervous system already beginning its familiar dance of denial and selective reporting. The bathroom lighting hummed at a frequency that scraped against her consciousness, its subtle flickering creating patterns her mind couldn't help but count. One-two-three-pause. One-two-three-pause. The blood's spread across the fabric followed its own mathematical progression, each scarlet circle precise in its expansion.

Her body cataloged the sensations with its usual trauma-learned detachment: cramping at a six (manageable), light sensitivity at an eight (the flickering making it worse), pressure in her lower abdomen at a seven (increasing—familiar now, if no less cruel).

The house's silence registered as its own kind of pressure, a vacuum that demanded to be filled with something—anything—other than the hum of halogen and her own measured breathing. 4:47 AM. The digital clock's red numbers burned against her retinas, another data point in this morning's collection of unwanted inputs. In a house this size, silence wasn't natural.

The bedroom door gaped open, framing her nightstand where the rotary phone perched between clock and lamp. Its black bulk caught the bathroom's fluorescent glare, reflecting it back like an accusation. She could picture each number's resistance under her finger, hear the click-whir of the dial spinning back. Philip's office number, a sequence she'd dialed so many times it had worn its own groove in her memory, just like the rain had worn tracks down his windows that night when she'd sat in his office, drenched and disconsolate. That night had been just like this: quiet, blood-soaked and painfully alone.

Thunder had rolled in from the harbor, rattling the windows of his corner office. Philip's hands had remained steady as he reached for the decanter, though his eyes betrayed him. The same eyes that had watched her grow from an angry young law student into whatever she was now—something caught between justice and compromise, duty and defeat.

"You can't keep doing this, Georgia."

"I manage just fine." The words had come out brittle, defensive. A reflex honed by years of managing, of measuring success in degrees of survival.

Her uncle-in-law had set the untouched glass down with the finesse of a man who knew too much about breaking things. "The walls we build to protect ourselves become the prisons that isolate us,” he’d said, voice heavy with shared understanding. "I should know. I've got a PhD in isolation." George had scoffed then, unwilling to acknowledge the depth of his concern. She’d changed the subject to the case they were working on, grateful when he let her; now, she wished she’d listened.

Her focus snapped back to the phone. She could call him. Wake him up and tell him what was happening. He’d be angry—not at her, but at the situation, at her stubbornness, at life’s relentless unfairness. He’d come over, pour her a drink she wouldn’t touch, and talk her through the closing arguments. More importantly, he’d just talk, so she wouldn’t have to.

She’d almost cracked then, nearly allowed the meticulously crafted structure of her life to fall into disarray. Almost told him about the growing distance between her and Nate, about the way silence had become its own kind of language in their marriage. About how every loss felt like a failure of control, another variable she couldn't account for.

Instead, she'd straightened her spine, just as she did now on the cold edge of the tub and refocused her attention on the white cotton.

The blood had slowed its advance across another ruined nightgown, the third in almost a decade of marriage. Clutching her middle, she stretched the small space between the tub and shelf above the toilet for the first-aid kit. It wasn't her favorite thing to do, but a Stimpak would be necessary to get through the day. The tin squeaked like a mouse as she pried it open, stainless steel and glass glinting at her with glassy-eyed indifference. Her hands were steadier than her heart as she swabbed the fattier part of her thigh, and withdrew the needle from its sterile casing.

The synthetic compounds crawled through her bloodstream, transforming sharp pain into dull static she could file away with her other unwanted stimuli. Her head swam with sudden relief, briefly dizzy, the world expanding and contracting, a somatic concertina of awareness.

George let the Stimpak fall into the bin—she’d sort the needle situation out later. The sound ricocheted off the bathroom walls as she stood too fast and had to steady herself on the sink. She didn’t dare turn her head and look at herself in the mirror, opting instead to peel off the nightgown, it’s fabric clinging with reluctance, like its hold on her skin had developed a strange sort of loyalty. The growing pile of clothes she’d need to wash or dispose of formed a small, accusatory mountain in her peripheral vision. She forced herself into running water, steam filling the bathroom, softening its harsh edges. The water pressure was always better at this hour, before the rest of Cambridge stirred to life. She adjusted the temperature dial two notches past halfway, a generous compromise of heat balanced against sensitivity. The steady drumming against her scalp could almost pass for therapeutic, if she didn't focus too hard on the individual impacts, each droplet a data point her mind couldn't help but track.

Her hands moved through familiar patterns: shampoo, condition, rinse. Ignore the red swirling around the drain until it disintegrates into something colorless and permissible. She traced the tiles in front of her with her eyes, counting their seams and determining their surface area, letting her mind wander to safer problems, like whether the calcium buildup on this new shower head was still reducing its efficiency.

The water ran cold before she was ready, another betrayal by an indifferent universe. She shut it off with more force than necessary, the handle's chrome finish still cool against her palm. The sudden absence of water left her ears ringing, too aware of her own breathing in the humid air. Stepping out onto the mat she reached for her towel, drying herself off with the briskness of an assembly line worker, motions solitary and rote.

Water dripped from her hair onto bare shoulders as she wiped condensation from the mirror, creating a clear portal in the fog. She reached for the smaller towel hanging on the hook and wrapped her hair, securing it in a turban that trapped the weight and length, finally freeing her neck. She stood there for a moment longer, caught by her own reflection—no escaping it now.

It was brutal in its honesty: hazel eyes ringed with shadows that no concealer could adequately mask, dark waves plastered to her neck and forehead. She surveyed her own face like it was a crime scene, cataloging the small betrayals of age and exhaustion, each new freckle and line an entry in the growing list of imperfections. Georgia Ambrose, Exhibit A.

Even after all these years, she did this—still missed a man who had made little effort to be missed. He'd managed to stay through New Year's at least, even managing to fake interest when the ball dropped and she kissed him like the world might end at any moment. Then he'd left two days later—leaving her with the house, the bills, and the growing pile of unwashed hope in the hamper. An army-green apparition vanishing into the January fog beyond the wrought-iron gate.

Off to fight, to fuck-knows-where; China or Alaska, no doubt. Major Nathaniel Ambrose, her husband of near ten years, had once again been called to his more important spouse: Uncle Sam, who was, by and large, far less forgiving than she.

Though, for a man like Nate, forgiveness (or at least the semblance of it) was granted when it was backed by the visage of Benjamin Franklin in green. George had little choice but to swallow her hurt and frustration, as she had done for years. Pretend it didn't matter. That it didn't sting each time he walked out that door; once more unto the breach, and all that fucking jazz.

Her hands found the bottle of concealer, muscle memory taking over as her mind circled its own drain like a vulture, waiting to pick the bones of her thoughts clean enough to be filed away and ignored.

It was ultimately useless in the grand scheme of things. At least the war was an excuse, a far easier pill to swallow than the realization that if he were still at home he'd probably be distancing himself in other ways. A chicken and egg scenario if ever there were one. Was the man always destined to drift away, or had the war created a rift he couldn't bridge? George couldn't be sure, but sometimes she caught herself hoping the conflict would swallow him up whole, if only so she'd have a reason to grieve him properly.

The mirror fogged over again, obscuring her half-hearted attempts at cosmetic triage as the woman in the mirror was starting to realize she might regret the choices she'd made, the life she'd chosen. This morning's evidence added another exhibit to that case, filed away with all the others: failed doctor, failed marriage, failed pregnancies. In many cultures, three was a number of completeness, a symbol of balance and harmony. But of course, in others it represented an unlucky trinity, a cursed equilibrium. Her mind ticked through them like a metronome: one, two, three. How neat and tidy her failures were lining up for her. At least some things were orderly.

Three failures, neatly cataloged. Each one a reminder of why she clung to structure, to rules that made sense. She needed the symmetry, the safety of more predictable variables. Small rituals to keep her world from collapsing like a house, a life, and a marriage of cards.

Her mind might default to logic and probability, but she couldn't ignore the superstitions and symbols that had shaped her worldview. Three strikes and you're out. Living in the shadow of Fenway had a way of working baseball metaphors into even her most rational observations. Life for her was a cycle of anticipation and loss, the low-grade panic of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Wrapping her robe around her towel clad body, she shuffled into the bedroom where the early morning light fought its way through the heavy curtains, and found her way to the walk-in closet. There, the enclosed space offered a kind of acoustical warmth, muffling the hollow echo of her thoughts. She adjusted the towel around her head as she ran her fingers along the hanging rows of clothes, fabric whispering in even lines like she needed them to.

The Prussian blue suit waited on its hanger like a uniform of its own, carefully pressed and positioned to face east—another superstition, this one inherited from her abuela. The color was a study in stoicism, a cool hue that reflected her professional persona. It was powerful without being demanding, bold yet tactically subdued. Everything she aspired to be.

Foundation garments first: slip, stockings, garters, the architecture of feminine presentation that her mother-in-law had drilled into her during those first uncomfortable months as an Ambrose. Then the silk blouse, each pearl button a small checkpoint in her transformation. The Holcomb case files spread through her mind as she dressed, evidence arranged in precise mental folders. Four victims. Twelve jurors. One chance to make them understand that sometimes monsters wore suits not unlike hers and smiled at their neighbors—

The first vibration was subtle enough that she might have missed it if she hadn't been standing perfectly still, threading an earring through her lobe. But the second tremor sent ripples across the surface of her water glass, and the third rattled the windows. Military-grade engines, getting closer.

George moved to the window, parting the curtains just enough to peer down at the intersection of Green street. The pre-dawn gray had begun yielding to weak winter sunshine, catching on the polished steel of motorcycle scouts as they rounded the corner. Behind them, an armored command vehicle prowled like a mechanical predator, its fusion engine thrumming at frequencies that made her teeth ache.

Then came the power armor operators—T-45d units, their hydraulics whining in protest with each thunderous step. Nothing elegant about these mechanical behemoths; they were built for one purpose, their crude industrial lines a testament to function over form. Steam vented from their joints into the cold morning air, creating brief halos around their helmeted heads. More followed: tanks with treads that would leave scars in the asphalt, additional power armor units flanking them like ancient knights attending their steel steeds.

All this hardware, all this display of force, rolling through a residential street at dawn? Either someone very important was trying to make a point, or someone very important was about to have a very bad day.

The procession would take at least twenty minutes to pass completely. One would think a military convoy moved with a degree of urgency, but even military convoys were subject to Greater Boston’s relentless gridlock. Best to let them clear the area before making her way to the courthouse. She turned back to her reflection, resuming the familiar ritual. Suit jacket next, its weight settling across her shoulders.

A final once over yielded her stockings straight, hem level, and her collar crisply pressed. And beneath her blouse, her grandmother’s locket, eighty years old now, its luster long lost save for the single small diamond in the middle of the heart. That, and the worn filigree had stubbornly remained. Inside, her parents smiled eternally from their photo-booth snapshot, taken at some state fair right before George had been born.

As she went down the stairs, she could hear the muted sound of screen doors creaking and murmured conversations drifting up from neighboring porches. The mechanical parade's thunder had drawn others outside. Her wool coat waited by the door, another layer of armor against the elements and whatever else this day might throw at her. Time enough to button it properly, to slip her hands into leather gloves, and tug on the fur-trimmed pillbox hat Wanda had gifted her last winter—the only one that didn’t crush her hair but still kept her ears from freezing. She hated that it helped.

Outside, George paused on her front stoop, the cold biting through her gloves as she took in the scene: children in pajamas pointed with sleepy excitement, while their parents wore faces of deepening concern, lines etching themselves into already tired features. This was academia's working class, a community of adjuncts and post-docs eking out a living in one of the nation's most expensive zip codes.

Nathaniel would’ve rather have kept her living at his ancestral seat of power in Dorchester, or even in Beacon Hill near Philip’s loft. But of the properties his uncle owned and had gifted (to her, not his nephew), 36 Pearl Street, with its cracked stone steps and weathered iron railings, spoke to her in a way the others never could. It had character, a kind of understated resilience that she admired. Moving here had been the one concession she’d insisted on, back when she'd had the luxury of bargaining. Now, even that had become a monument to a life increasingly at odds with itself.

"You get a load of this shit?"

She turned towards the gruff voice on the sidewalk—Mr. Dombrowski, the milkman, standing there with a crate of glass bottles hanging from one hand, the other tucked deep into his armpit for warmth.

The bottles clinked faintly, picking up the last of the vibrations trailing down the block. His knitted brow was a mixture of concern and irritation. She nodded in recognition, stepping off the stoop and onto the cracked walkway as she extended her hand towards him, accepting the milk bottle he passed her way over the fence.

"It's quite the spectacle," she said, keeping her voice blithe and conversational while her eyes tracked the convoy trundling past. “Shame about the noise ordinance."

Dombrowski groaned and shifted his weight. "Noise ain't the half of it. You think this convoy's for real or just a bunch of show ponies?" He grumbled under his breath, rubbing his now-free fingers together, a futile attempt to coax warmth back into them. "No reason for them to be rolling through here unless they're trying to scare folks."

She shrugged, though she knew he was right. Fort Strong was across the river, and there was no tactical reason for the convoy to detour through their neighborhood unless they were trying to send a message, flex muscles best measured in kilotons. Maybe following on the heels of the recent rash of crackdowns the BADTFL had conducted, or perhaps a preemptive show of strength given the growing unrest.

Neighborhoods like theirs were already teetering on the edge of dissent, though much of it was still contained to the same neighborhoods that had always carried the burden of resistance. Roxbury, where the National Guard had rolled through during the food riots. The North End, where the centuries of Italian immigrant history had eroded in the face of martial law. And South Boston, of course, where even the staunchest supporters of law and order were beginning to question the cost of compliance…

Still, she hoped this was just posturing, a reminder of who held the real power, and not the preamble to something more violent.

"Maybe they're just taking the scenic route," she offered, though even she didn't believe it.

Mr. Dombrowski snorted, a derisive snort that clouded the air between them."Yeah, and maybe Holcomb's innocent," he shot back, eyes narrowing as he appraised her. "You gonna nail that bastard today or what?"

The question hit harder than it should have, today of all days. George traced a finger through the condensation on the milk bottle, buying time. This was the final day of the Holcomb trial, a day when she would have to persuade twelve jurors that a man guilty of murdering four people should face the consequences. When her body had apparently decided this was the perfect morning to remind her that some kinds of control were purely illusory.

The Combat Zone murders had dominated local news for months now: four victims found in public places, each discovery preceded by Holcomb's taunting calls to BPD dispatch. That laugh, crackling through the holotape recordings haunted her whenever she had to listen to them. The first time it played in court, one of the jurors even flinched. It was the kind of sound that made veteran detectives request transfers to traffic duty.

"The evidence will speak for itself," she said finally, the words feeling hollow against the backdrop of tank treads and heavy artillery. Even here in Cambridge, miles from the Combat Zone, people had started looking over their shoulders. Fear had a way of spreading across rivers and borough lines.

"Evidence," he scoffed, though not unkindly. "Everyone with eyes knew it was him long before BPD got their heads out of their—" He caught himself, glancing at the gathering neighbors and shrugging as if to dislodge the weight of their collective presence. "—before they got their act together," he finished, less confrontational but still convinced. Mr. Dombrowski was old Boston, the kind of man who still believed in the power of a good union and a strong cup of coffee.

George found herself smiling despite everything the day had already thrown at her—a real smile, not the Super Duper Mart branded one she saved for the courtroom or the press. "And how is Local 427 these days?" The milk drivers' union had been fighting automation for years now; another losing battle in a city full of them.

"Surviving," he grunted, but there was pride there too. "Still losing routes to bots, but we outlasted worse." He shifted his crate again, glancing at his watch. Cambridge was waking up proper now—milk routes and murder trials, each neighborhood keeping its own timepiece. "Better get moving. Good luck, Counselor."

"Take care, Mr. Dombrowski," she said, and meant it, wondering if men like him were truly the last of their kind—stubborn, resilient, and impossibly hopeful despite the world changing around them. She tightened her grip on the milk bottle, feeling the pressure through the soft leather of her gloves. The cold glass bit through, a welcome distraction from the lingering ache in her abdomen. As Dombrowski trudged on with his deliveries, she watched the last of the convoy pass, a straggling APC with a mounted machine gun bringing up the rear before she retreated into her home.

Back inside, George put the milk away in the fridge, her movements mechanical before she turned toward the hallway. She stepped into the bathroom just long enough to add a panty liner to her underwear. Tidy. Prepared. Then, on to her breakfast routine: cataloging the morning's mounting variables as she measured out her tea leaves and poured the hot water, her mind a constant abacus clicking through the day's permutations. The convoy, her closing, the persistent ache in her abdomen that the Stimpak hadn't quite erased…

Up on the wall, the phone rang, its sharp trill cutting through the residual hum of engines. She checked the time: 6:05 A.M. Only one person would call this early and know she was awake.

"Hayden," she answered, skipping the pleasantries as she picked up her teacup and made her way to her chair in the living room.

"I woke you," Christoph replied, though it wasn't a question. He sounded tired, more so than usual.

"You did," George lied. In a way he had, given he had opted to skip out on their post-strategy dinner last night without explanation, leaving her to stew alone over kale salad and mineral water. She'd spent most of what time remained before bed pacing the length of her basement.

An audible sigh from her co-counsel filled the static-laced silence. She could almost see him rubbing his temples, the dark circles under his eyes deepening with each kneading pass of his fingers.

"I'm sorry. I had to—"

"It’s fine," she cut him off. He must have had too much to drink last night; he seemed to have completely forgotten that they traversed the same social circles. All it had taken was a quick phone call to Philip after she’d gotten home, to know Christoph Hayden—Ivy League prodigy and rising star in the DA’s office—had been seen buttering up their boss like a fresh lobster tail at Legal Sea Foods with whiskey and a lobbyist from the Quincy Bureau of Trade.

Election season was upon them, and the possible vacancy for deputy DA was a delicious opportunity. Christoph was made for this kind of politicking, but she'd thought — hoped — he still had his priorities straight. Or at least in the same order as hers.

Over the past six months, she’d gotten the distinct impression that his latent antagonism had more to do with unresolved sexual tension than professional rivalry. Men like Christoph Hayden thrived on conflict, yet their current alliance had made him more pliable, even affectionate at times. She wondered if he realized just how transparent he was.

"Can we meet before court? I'll bring you a cappuccino and baklava from Soyadlari's," Christoph proposed in a conciliatory tone—also choosing not to further the implication of his standing her up, the sound of shifting papers audible in the background.

She paused, letting the silence stretch just long enough for him to start fidgeting. "Bribery now? You really are desperate. Soyadlari's doesn't open until ten."


"They'll open for me," he assured her quickly, perhaps too quickly. She noted the tell. He was lying, but about what? The baklava, his true motives, something else? It didn’t matter. She already knew what he was going to say next and was just waiting for him to say it.

George hesitated, her thumb hovering over the receiver as if the weight of the day balanced on this one decision. Under normal circumstances she would politely decline, but the start to her day had already eroded her reserves of willpower. The thought of sweet, sticky baklava and the jolt from Turkish coffee made her salivate, and she knew she’d need every bit of sustenance to get through what was coming.

“Speaking of, how many edits to your closing am I going to have to make this time?" he finished, his voice tinged with the kind of forced casualness that masked deeper concerns.

None, she wanted to say, it's perfect as–is. But she knew better than to dismiss him outright, especially now that he was playing a different game. "It's solid," she said instead. "But you can take a look if it'll make you feel better."

Another pause, this one laden with unspoken calculations. “I mean, I was going to get revani anyway. But if you’re not interested in bouncy foam and honey-coated pistachio nuts, I can take a rain check." She could almost hear the smirk forming on his lips.

"Fine," she said, conceding the point but not the war. "But we’re meeting at the courthouse. I want to be close to the chambers in case—"

"In case I try to run off with the goods," he interrupted, his tone lightening as if he believed he’d won her back over. "Got it. See you in an hour."

The line went dead before she could hang up, and she stared at the receiver for a long moment, considering her next move. Christoph was many things, but he wasn't a fool. He had to know that she knew about last night, and that knowledge made his current play all the more precarious. If he was hedging his bets, it meant he wasn’t entirely confident in cutting her out just yet.

As she held her now–empty cup, she looked down at the tea leaves clinging to the porcelain, forming haphazard patterns that her mind immediately tried to impose order upon. Along with the color of her hair, George had inherited a disconcerting propensity towards pareidolia from her mother—seeing faces and shapes where there were none, reading meaning into the meaningless. She swirled the leaves, hoping for a sign, a symbol, something to tell her what came next. All she got was a mess.

Standing, she made to rinse her cup in the kitchen sink, thinking about her mother, how easy it had been for her. Getting pregnant at seventeen with little more than a sneeze in her direction from her father, and then raising George with the kind of chaotic, haphazard love that she suspected was more than she could ever give a child of her own.

Not that she'd have the chance now.

The rules of baseball you see, are simple and finite. Nine innings. Four bases. Three strikes and you’re out. George understood rules like that, the kind that provided a clear framework for expectations and outcomes. But life's games were far from simple, and its rules far less forgiving. Three miscarriages, three unfulfilled attempts, and she was out before ever getting the ball into play.

She stared at the empty house around her, and its silence echoed her own. The pictures on the mantelpiece stared back, frozen fragments of a life that had, once upon a time, been full of promise.

Her eyes focused on one in particular: her and Nate in the foreground, the Bunker Hill monument towering over them in the background. Right after he’d brought her home to Boston. Her brother-in-law had asked, upon seeing the copy his brother had gifted their mother, why they hadn’t been smiling.

They had turned to each other then, the secret knowledge of their hurried and breathless tryst that had taken place before the photo inked into their shared gaze.


“We were tired,” Nate had replied, and she had nodded along, feigning exhaustion.

The lie had been easier than the truth—that they'd been flushed with desire, giddy with the taboo of having just fucked against the cold granite of the monument's base. Back when touch was electric between them, when his hands on her body felt like salvation instead of obligation.

Their mother had just huffed into her wine, the older sibling grinning knowingly at the younger while twenty-one year old Georgia hid her face in her napkin and stifled a laugh.

Without conscious effort, she found herself standing in front of the photograph, picking it up and tracing the figures captured within the thin glass. She traced the line of Nate’s jaw, the deep freckles that not even the black and white photo could wash away, the glint of mischief in his eyes that hinted at their shared secret just moments before the camera shuttered. Her finger lingered on her own face, barely recognizing the young woman captured in silver halides and borrowed certainty.

Georgia Karras (George to her friends, which were few), who'd traded medical charts for drink orders, found herself suddenly lifted from behind a San Francisco bar into Boston society, before she became Georgia Ambrose, ADA, with her carefully constructed walls and precise calculations.

Back then, survival had meant different mathematics: his money meant survival for her family, his name meant a fresh start, and his ring meant a chance at a life less precarious. They weren't calculations she was proud of, but they were honest, and at the time she believed them to be the only solutions to her growing set of problems.

She set the photograph back on the mantel carefully, angling it so the light caught the glass just right, obscuring the features she still loved and still could not escape.

She blinked against the light, forcing her focus back to the clock. Half an hour until she needed to meet Christoph. Last night's pacing may as well have worn a path in the basement carpet as she'd rehearsed her closing. Many trial lawyers, especially jury-trial lawyers, rehearsed their openings and closings in front of a mirror, but George's distaste for adding one more realm for performance in a life already dominated by it made her opt for a more private approach. She would script the words in her mind, sculpting each sentence, etching the consonants and vowels till they reached a perfect resonance within her. Her brain was a court of its own, with an audience of neurons waiting for the verdict.

Her case files lay meticulously arranged on her desk, each argument sketched out in her tight shorthand. Four victims. Four families waiting for justice. Four chances for the system to work as it was meant to. She traced a finger down the key points, though she knew them all by heart. Every fact, every scrap of evidence, each pause timed to resonate: with the jury, with the judge, and with any objection her opposing counsel might try to slip in before she could silence them with the echoes of their own mistakes. She'd anticipated it all, planned for every potential disruption save the ones her own body was intent on unleashing.

The room stilled as she stacked the pages into careful order, each one an imagined bulwark against the chaos waiting outside. By the time she reached the courthouse, she’d be fully armored: mind, body, and spirit. The click of her heels punctuated the silence as she gathered her briefcase. Her grandmother’s locket lay cool against her skin, hidden beneath layers of silk and strategy.

When she faced those twelve jurors today, they wouldn’t see the woman who’d spent her morning counting losses. They’d see only what she chose to show them.

Chapter Text

⋘ ❄ ⋙

CHAPTER TWO

⋘ ❄ ⋙

Assistant District Attorney Georgia Ambrose paced before the jury box, her stilettos tapping a steady beat against the hardwood floor — not rushed, not showy. A metronome in heels.

She didn’t raise her voice or gesture for effect. She didn’t need to. Every line landed clean, sharp as broken glass. The jurors leaned forward, drawn by the gravity of her and the evidence laid before them like an offering to lady justice herself.

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury," she began, clasping her hands with the poise of someone holding every piece of the puzzle, "you have been witness to a parade of facts and evidence that tells a disturbing narrative—confirmed by forensic analysis, corroborated by eyewitness testimony, and substantiated by the defendant's own unfortunate pattern of behavior."

Nick Valentine watched from his spot at the back, his gaze moving past the faces of the jurors to settle on the people’s prosecutor.

The twelve, a patchwork of Boston’s populace, wore the shadows of sleepless nights and fluorescent-lit deliberations. Even from the creaky gallery benches, you could see how the weeks had sandpapered down their defenses. Not that she needed to wait for exhaustion to grind them into submission—no, the evidence did that for her. She just had to walk them through the aftermath. And he’d be lying if he didn’t admit he was a little awed by the cold economy with which she did it.

Georgia was an outlier in the halls of power. A scalpel, not a sledgehammer—precision in a city that worshiped blunt force. No theatrics. No guilty-mother shtick. Just the facts. No shine, no pity.

Watching her over the past few days had been like watching someone disarm a bomb with nothing but a paperclip and a calm word.

Three weeks in Boston, and he'd already seen enough to understand Widmark's caution about the woman known as the 'Red Defender.' The whispers in Suffolk County’s halls and beyond hadn’t quite caught up with the real her—a point of pride among the slim cadre of ADAs who measured worth by record, not reputation. But Nick wasn’t here for office intrigue. He was here for what came after.

She turned slightly toward the pile of evidence beside her. Even the shift of her shoulders carried the controlled tension of a fencing riposte, as if every word, every micro-movement, was calibrated to hit the mark.

"It is the state's position that we have shown beyond a reasonable doubt that the individual seated across from you," she continued, with a steady nod toward the defendant, "has committed acts that are not only criminal but heinous in their disregard for human life."

Her voice barely carried, but every word hit like a nail in the jury’s collective coffin.

She lifted a photograph from the evidence pile, holding it up for the jury. A crime scene photo, stark and grim. "Each of these," she said, letting the brutal image speak for itself, "is not merely a photograph, not just evidence. They are reminders of choice. One man's choice to disregard the sanctity of life."

Setting down the photo, she turned back to face the jurors squarely. "You've seen the patterns — the way the defendant stalked his victims, the cold calculation in his methods. The complete lack of remorse—before, during, and after the crimes." At her cue, the Ms. Juris unit glided forward, its projector casting evidence across the courtroom wall: journal entries that had turned seasoned detectives' stomachs. Trophy collections that spoke of more than just a compulsion, but a perverse pride.

Each slide lingered just long enough. Not that they needed the reminder — they were already seared into the minds of everyone in the room from the first time they had been shown in the trial's progression.

Ambrose paused, letting the weight of the visuals sink in. Nick could almost see the cogs turning in the jurors' heads, feel their collective will hardening. She had them, and she knew it. This was the moment where a less seasoned prosecutor might overplay their hand, but it was clear Ambrose was nothing if not disciplined.

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury," she continued, her voice carrying to every corner of the hushed courtroom, "you are not just passing judgment on one man. You are setting a precedent that will echo in the annals of our city."

An older woman in the back row of the jury box touched her throat as Ms. Juris shut off its display — a gesture he’d seen before. It was the touch of someone who felt the noose tighten, not around the defendant's neck, but around their own sense of security and moral duty, similar unconscious gestures from the other eleven suggested a shared reckoning.

Throughout her closing, Nick noticed how she never once looked at Holcomb, never offered even the barest gesture of acknowledgment—as if he were already a ghost haunting the courtroom.

It was a quiet shunning, more damning in its calculation than any direct condemnation. It rendered him an object—an exhibit—which even his own defense counsel had stopped trying to humanize. Whatever bluster the man had clung to at the start of this trial was long gone.

Nick had to suppress a smirk. He’d seen juries swayed by tears, theatrics, outrage—but this? This was something else. A methodical evisceration, the kind you didn’t feel until it was too late.

And then, without so much as a breath, she twisted the blade.

"...To choose humanity, even while our nation hurtles toward the unknown. To choose justice, even when it is the more arduous path. To choose life and dignity over fear and violence." Her words hung in the air, heavy with the weight of truth in a world that had increasingly little use for it. "This is the task that lies before you."

For a beat, no one moved. The scratch of her voice, the pitch-perfect modulation, the slow, metered tap of her shoes—these were the only sounds in the cavernous superior court. Even the old wall clock, set a minute fast to keep lawyers honest, seemed to pause on the moment.

She returned to her place behind the chair at the prosecution table as if she’d only ever left it to walk a ten-foot loop around the gravitational center of her own argument. There was no cinematic swirl to her closing, no impassioned crescendo—she clipped the ends of her sentences like a gardener snipping a rose at the stem: neat, final. Knowing full well that in the silence, the echo would do the rest.

"The people rest their case, Your Honor."

The courtroom stayed quiet as the statement hovered, slowly diffusing through the marble and cherrywood into the bones of everyone present. Even the judge—usually performing his role with a bored omnipotence—paused, eyes creasing as he weighed whether to encourage further ceremony or simply let the gravity of the moment hold court (pun intended) a little longer.

At her side, her co-counsel's smile was all white teeth and satisfaction, as if it had been him delivering that masterclass in prosecutorial restraint. He’d seen the type before, dozens in fact. The kind of lawyer who wore success like a second skin, who could charm a jury as easily as breathing.

But something in the way he watched Ambrose return to her seat—too still, too focused—sent a familiar warning down his spine. He’d learned to trust that feeling over the years, that sixth sense that told him when someone was playing a longer game.

What game they were playing—or if both knew they were playing it—he couldn't yet tell. But he recognized the type. A man who believed desire and deserve were the same thing.

The judge gave his customary instructions to the jury, but he’d already tuned out. He knew the script by heart and could recite it word-for-word in his sleep and sometimes did. The twelve filed out, and the gallery began to stir with the muted energy of a crowd leaving a funeral—somber, yet relieved to be moving on.

Nick rose from his seat, slipping his trench coat over his shoulders and setting his fedora firmly in place. Deliberations could go either way — he'd seen verdicts come down fast or stretch on for days, all depending on a single stubborn juror. No point hanging around just yet. The courthouse was warm enough to lull most people into a false sense of comfort, but outside, Boston was back to its usual punishment—wind sharp as broken glass. He opted to wait it out—at least as long as it took to finish a cigarette.

Outside, he found a quiet corner, far enough from the main entrance that he wouldn't have to make small talk. Tucking his hands into his coat pockets, he leaned against the stone wall, taking a drag and letting the smoke swirl around him—a brief, familiar solitude, the kind that only came with nicotine and bone-deep cold.

Three weeks wasn’t long, but it had been long enough to learn why Commissioner Turner had reached across state lines for this task force. Winter's tendrils ran deep here—into the BPD, the courts, probably half the offices in that building behind him. Even their base of operations had to be set up across the river in Cambridge, away from Edward’s old haunts and the feral loyalty of Southie. If you wanted to uproot something this rotten, you had to plant yourself in new soil. He knew that better than he wanted to, and figured Ambrose knew it too.

The holotapes were their shot—Eddie’s arrogance finally giving them an opening. But evidence was worthless without someone who could make it stick in court, someone who couldn't be bought or frightened off. Nick took another drag, remembering the headlines from the Sibley case. She'd not only stared down the Attorney General, she'd made him blink first. That kind of backbone didn't come cheap in Boston these days.

From here, he could see Pemberton Square below, reporters already gathering like vultures, waiting for any scrap of news about the Chuckler verdict. Boston loved its monsters, Nick had noticed—couldn’t get enough of them. But Eddie Winter wasn’t the kind that made headlines. He was the kind that made sure it was other people’s names that ended up in them instead—an altogether more troublesome species.

A murmur from the courthouse steps caught his attention—the press was stirring, their collective hum growing as the news spread like static through the crowd. The jury was back.

Nick crushed out his cigarette against the cold stone, exhaling a breath that hung briefly in the air before he turned back toward the courthouse. Quick deliberation usually meant one of two things—either the case was airtight, or someone had screwed up spectacularly. Given what he'd witnessed in that courtroom, his money was on the former.

By the time he reached the courtroom, it was already standing-room-only. He wedged himself against a wall near the back, loosening his scarf and wiping a bead of sweat from his brow. The contrast between the cold outside and the courthouse’s steam-bath heat always struck him as apt. Law enforcement was a cycle of discomfort—misery traded like shifts on a schedule, one always waiting to replace the other.

The room settled into an expectant hush as the jury filed back in. Even the newshounds, usually circling with impatience, held their breath like a pack of obedient dogs commanded to sit for dinner. Everyone knew what a quick turnaround meant in a case like this.

"Will the defendant please rise," the judge instructed.

The forewoman, a middle-aged woman with a peacock feather-shaped brooch pinned to her suit jacket, stood, fingers trembling slightly.

"In the case of the Commonwealth versus Kevin Holcomb, has the jury reached a verdict?"

"We have, Your Honor." She drew a steady breath. "We the jury find the defendant, Kevin Holcomb, guilty on all counts of first-degree murder."

The room erupted into a cacophony of pure, distilled emotion. The victims’ families' sobs of relief cut through the chaos, drowning even the eager scramble of reporters.

Through it all, Nick’s focus remained on Ambrose. She hadn’t moved. Her eyes were fixed on something beyond the courtroom walls, unmoved by the noise.

For the first time all week, he caught something unexpected in her expression: not triumph, but grief. It was fleeting, but it was there—and one he'd seen staring back at him in the mirror more times than he cared to admit. The look of someone who knew that no verdict, no matter how just, could undo the damage already done.

He wondered what memory had surfaced, what dormant weight had stirred behind her eyes.

She turned slightly, gaze sweeping over the gallery—and for one suspended beat, their eyes locked.

Nick felt that familiar tilt—like a record skipping where it shouldn’t. It hadn’t been the first time since he’d moved to Boston, but never quite this violently. He hadn’t realized he was holding his breath until it left him in a sharp exhale, right as her gaze moved past him to land on the victims’ families.

Something shifted—like ice reforming over deep water.

The "Red Defender" was gone. In her place stood someone who knew exactly how little this verdict would change for the people left behind.

Nick felt that telltale constriction in his chest—the physical recognition of the duality before him: the professional able to don and discard personas at will, and the human beneath, forced to carry every case home with her. Seeping in through the baseboards, until the house was thick with unlived lives.

The judge’s voice had become white noise, the courtroom’s returning bustle drowned out by the rush in his ears. He couldn’t look away from her—couldn’t shake the feeling he was seeing something important.

It was moments like this that reminded him of what his abuelita used to say: that he had a heart that listened more than it beat. That in that listening, it could detect the echoes of unspoken stories and truths quieted before they ever found words. His father and sister had called it his “spider-sense.” His mother and grandmother just exchanged knowing glances.

Of course, he’d never put much stock in it. Chalked it up to a hereditary tendency toward romantic nonsense—a familial legend that had crossed borders, survived three countries and thousands of miles.

But watching Ambrose now, standing in stark relief against the courtroom chaos, he couldn’t deny the resonance—like something inside him had been struck and was still humming.

Nick watched her gather her things with the careful, too-slow movements of someone stalling for time. The verdict had drained her—just enough to make even the smallest task feel heavy.

Courtroom 3A was already emptying, the crowd pulled toward the elevators by institutional momentum. The victims’ families were escorted first, then the press. Outside the doors, more reporters clustered by the elevator bank, press badges flashing under fluorescents like a school of hungry fish in a murky tank.

Ambrose waited, letting the surge pass. A tactical choice—if you didn’t notice the two reporters still lingering behind, pretending to pack up while tracking her every move. The uniformed officers outside had conveniently found something fascinating to discuss, their backs turned.

Something was off. From 3A, she had three options: the main elevators, the staff corridor, or the stairs. Given the way she moved—knuckles white on her briefcase handle—he’d bet his badge she’d skip both the crowded elevators and the three flights down.

That left the service corridor.

And someone had made sure the vultures knew it.

Hayden was still preening for the court sketch artist, providing a convenient distraction as she slipped toward the side entrance of the courtroom. Nick watched her pause at the threshold, one hand pressed briefly to the doorframe as if gathering strength. The moment passed so quickly he might’ve imagined it—but that hesitation told him everything. She wasn’t taking the stairs.

The third floor's service wing connected to a smaller elevator, usually reserved for courthouse staff and evidence transport. It offered a clean exit—straight to the parking garage, no reporters, no spectacle. At least, that was the idea. Nick had spent enough time in buildings like this to know how information moved—like water through old pipes. And some of the press badges he'd spotted weren't local.

His mind raced. He could let her handle it. Ambrose wasn’t green, and she'd stood taller against worse than a couple of camera jockeys. But if she was going to be part of Winter’s End, she needed to stay intact—and unburned by the wrong kind of attention.

More than that, the idea of her walking into an ambush, however mild, gnawed at him. He moved anyway. Just a reflex. Call it selflessness. Call it stupidity. He had a track record.

He pushed off the wall and slipped into the flow of the dispersing crowd, cutting through it with the ease of a lifelong city dweller. By the time he hit the main corridor, he’d already unbuttoned his coat and shoved his scarf into a pocket, breaking into a jog as he rounded the corner away from the elevator bank.

The staff corridor had a different feel—less courthouse, more bunker. The walls were painted that institutional olive green, chipped and scuffed from years of rolling carts and hard shoulders. The air was warmer, somehow more humid, and the lights overhead buzzed like flies.

Nick slowed as he stepped inside, listening for the telltale ding of the staff elevator.

The distinct murmur of voices carried from around the corner, followed by the rapid-fire click of a camera shutter. Nick slowed, years of detective work making his footsteps near-silent on the scuffed linoleum. The elevator call button was being pressed again and again, its mechanical protest echoing down the narrow hall.

"Just a few questions, Ms. Ambrose—"

"The public has a right to know about the evidence BPD missed—"

"Sources say you pressured the department to reopen—"

The voices overlapped—sharp, eager, practiced. He rounded the corner just in time to see Ambrose backed against the elevator doors, her briefcase clutched like a shield.

Someone had timed this perfectly. Service elevator conveniently out of order, two reporters blocking her path to the stairwell, a third closing in to cut off retreat. Despite the exhaustion visible in her face, she held herself with that same unshakable composure he’d seen in the courtroom.

Still—there was a tremor in her fingers as she pressed the call button again. Subtle, but there.

"The Commonwealth’s statement is in your press packets," she said, her voice even—just enough steel threaded through to warn them. "All evidence introduced in court is a matter of public record. Please respect the privacy of the victims' families. Now, if you'll excuse me—"

"But what about the broader implications? Four victims that slipped through the cracks, a department that couldn't or wouldn't connect the dots until you forced their hand?"

Nick had seen enough. Time to test a theory about leaked routes and convenient malfunctions.

"Actually," he said, stepping into view and adjusting his tie, "I believe Ms. Ambrose’s afternoon schedule is already full."

One of the reporters—tall, reedy, wire-rimmed glasses—turned sharply. Recognition flickered.

"Wait. Valentine? Nick Valentine from Chicago PD? The South Side gang wars?"

Nick managed not to wince."Tribune’s got a long memory, Morrison. Or is it Times now?"

"Post, actually. Hell of a long way from the Windy City." Morrison’s eyes bounced between them, the scent of a different story thick in the air.

"Don’t tell me Boston’s famous ‘Red Defender’ and Chicago’s gang unit star are—"

"—are very busy," Nick cut in smoothly.

He caught her eye. For a second, he thought he saw gratitude. Just as quickly, it vanished—shuttered behind something sharper. Good. Smart.

"Commissioner Turner’s waiting on those case files, Counselor. Can’t keep him waiting."

She didn’t miss a beat.

"Of course." Her voice was pure frost. "If you’ll excuse me, gentlemen."

Nick reached Ambrose in three brisk strides, positioning himself between her and the thickest part of the press wedge. From there, he had the perfect vantage to catch the micro-expressions crossing her face: a flicker of annoyance, a flash of calculation, then the quick reset to courtroom chill.

Morrison’s colleagues looked ready to follow, but he lifted a hand—still watching Nick with his nose in the air like a bloodhound catching a more interesting scent.

“So Valentine, about those cartels in ’73…”

The rest of the pack shifted, torn between chasing Ambrose and whatever trail their alpha had just picked up. Nick could practically see the gears turning in Morrison’s head: gang wars in Chicago, the “Red Defender” in Boston, and now Valentine showing up in both. The man’s instinct for conspiracy was probably howling.

“Seems like wherever you end up, Valentine, things get interesting.” Morrison’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Any comment on why Commissioner Turner wants Boston’s most controversial ADA and Chicago’s gang specialist in the same meeting?”

“Must be my charming personality.” Nick checked his watch. “Speaking of which, I’m sure you all know your way back to the press room. Unless you’d like an escort?”

The threat was soft, but the edge was real. They weren’t supposed to be back here, and everyone knew it.

Morrison locked eyes for a moment before nodding to give the signal. “We’ll catch up soon, Valentine. Boston’s a smaller city than Chicago.”

“That it is.”

He waited until their footsteps faded, then turned toward the stairwell. He pushed open the door—

—and stopped.

She was there. Two steps down. Leaning against the wall, hazel eyes behind tortoiseshell frames fixed on him with an unreadable expression.

"I take it Morrison's reputation precedes him," she said, still rooted to the step. The fatigue in her frame was unmistakable, but there was something else too—something in her eyes that sharpened Nick's attention.

"He's tenacious," he replied. "Which is a nice way of saying he's a pain in the ass."

Ambrose allowed herself a small, tight-lipped smile. "Thank you for that. I thought he was going to start digging through my trash next."

"He still might. You handled them well."

She shrugged—a gesture that aimed for indifference but landed short. "It's not my first rodeo. But it's always better when someone calls off the hounds." She straightened, adjusted her coat, and shifted her briefcase to her other hand. "So, are you my white knight now, Mr. Valentine?"

He liked the way she said his name—there was no excess to it, just four syllables cut to fit the shape of her mouth. Exact. It settled something inside him that had been restless since arriving in Boston.

"Not exactly the knight type," Nick said, echoing her dry tone as he cleared his throat. "Just a detective who knows what it's like when the press smells blood in the water."

He leaned casually against the railing, giving her room but keeping an eye on the upper stairwell. "Though I have to wonder why BPD's finest suddenly found their shoes so fascinating when those reporters showed up."

Something flickered across her face—not surprise, but recognition. "You noticed that, did you?"

"Hard not to. Especially when the service elevator picks the perfect moment to malfunction." He watched her process that, noting how her fingers tightened slightly on her briefcase handle. "Seems like making the BPD review evidence on one of the Chuckler's victims might have ruffled some feathers."

“Ruffled feathers keep me employed, Detective Valentine.” The fatigue didn’t hide the steel in her voice. “But something tells me you didn’t shoo away the flies just to talk about my relationship with Boston’s finest.”

"No," he said simply, the fluorescents overhead catching the gold flecks in her eyes again. "But I’ve got to say—your closing argument was worth the price of admission."

"Flattery?" One well-manicured eyebrow arched upward. "And here I thought Chicago cops played things straight."

"Just calling it like I see it. You don't pull punches, even when it costs you. That's rare in this city." He straightened from the railing, noting that she didn't flinch or step back despite his height advantage on the stairs. "Hell, it’s rare everywhere. Rarer still in someone who knows where all the bodies are buried."

"Is this the part where you tell me why you've really been watching my trial all week?" Her voice remained level, but there was something else there. Curiosity maybe, or challenge.

"Only the last three days," Nick corrected, tipping the brim of his hat up so she could see his eyes, giving her an earnest smile.

"That's very exact, Detective." Something in her tone made him think she was recalibrating her assessment. "And remarkably dedicated for someone who just happened to be in the neighborhood."

"I'd say it was time well spent—" he paused, hoping she picked up on the sincerity he was trying to project. "The question is whether you'll think so too."

Ambrose studied him, and for a moment, Nick felt very much like the proverbial ant under the magnifying glass, every detail of his being scrutinized with an intensity that bordered on forensic.

"Winter Hill, I take it," she said finally. Not a question, but a statement. He didn't bother hiding his surprise—just took off his hat and placed it against his chest in a mock salute.

Clearing his throat, he pushed one of his more rebellious curls off his forehead. "They really weren't kidding when they said Boston was the biggest small town in America."

Another lick of emotion cracked through the ice. Amusement maybe, or the phantom of a private joke. But when she spoke, her tone remained matter-of-fact.

"I'm a lead in Suffolk County DA’s homicide unit. Over 53% of all homicides are gang related in Boston and the Winter Hill Gang accounts for the lion's share outside of the Italians in the North End. Sal Barsconi has been hemorrhaging soldiers and capos from Eddie Winter for the past three years," she explained, giving a mild shrug, somehow both elegant and dismissive. "It wasn't exactly a stretch."

Nick found himself fighting back a grin. Her delivery was perfect—dry, droll, and a little bit reckless. The type that didn’t waste time with pleasantries because the meter was always running. He liked that. Liked it maybe too much. Liked it in the way that made you forget you were supposed to be taking notes.

"So you already know why we're interested in you," he said, slipping his hat back on. "That saves us some time."

Ambrose tilted her head, like a bird considering whether a morsel was worth pecking at. "Interested isn't the same as committed. The DA is still very much in play."

"Ryan Marian has an election coming up," he replied, careful, voice pitched almost soft. "And a career to think about. Task forces like this? Tumultuous. Not to mention the minefield of conflicts of interest with his donors." He shrugged, a small gesture, as if the whole mess was inevitable. "It's not something a guy like him can just walk into and walk away from clean."

She didn’t flinch. Nick could almost see the gears spinning behind her eyes, calculating. She knew all this—of course she did. Hell, she probably had a better grasp than he did, given her line of work and the high-wired branches of her in-law’s family tree. But something about hearing it from him, just like this, changed it. Added a new layer to the mess.

She looked at him, steady. No blinking. But her jaw moved, just slightly, like she was grinding down a secret between her molars. Nick could feel the air shift, the way the room suddenly got thinner, sharper, more electric. He wondered if she was about to argue, or if she was just filing it all away for later, building a case, the way she always did.

This was familiar ground for her, sure. But he could see the moment when what he said landed — clean, deliberate, no bounce. Maybe because it was him. Maybe because it was now.

If she was surprised, she buried it somewhere deep. She just nodded, eyes never leaving his.

“It’s different, hearing it from you,” she said, voice even. “I’ll give you that.”

Nick almost smiled, but thought better of it.

Three days of watching her work had taught him two things: Georgia Ambrose didn’t need the DA’s office, and she definitely didn’t need him. Not the way most prosecutors needed the job, anyway.

The Ambrose name alone opened doors that others spent lifetimes trying to jimmy.

But it wasn’t just the name, was it? He’d seen her on the Chuckler case—the way she’d put the screws to BPD until they coughed up all the evidence they wanted to forget, how she’d built her argument brick by careful brick, and managed to call out the department’s screw-ups in front of a jury without making them look like idiots. It was almost enviable, the delicate tightrope she walked between torching bridges and extracting just enough justice for the public to let her keep her job.

“If you wanted an easy career,” he said at last, “I doubt you’d have made half the enemies you have in this building.” He watched her, steady and unblinking, like a cat waiting for a mouse to blink first. “And you definitely wouldn’t have gone toe-to-toe with the Attorney General and walked away with your job. The question isn’t whether you want to keep your career. It’s whether you want it to keep mattering.”

She stared at him, something shifting behind her eyes. Hard to say what—maybe not approval, but recognition, the way you see yourself in a cracked mirror. Her grip on the briefcase eased, knuckles fading from bone white to the color of old cream.

"You're asking me to sign up for something without knowing the full scope," she said. It wasn’t a refusal, just another statement of fact. "Though I suspect Winter Hill is just the tip of a much larger iceberg."

He nodded once. "The service elevator didn't malfunction on its own," he affirmed quietly.

“And those officers didn’t suddenly decide their shoelaces were fascinating by coincidence.”

A trace of that wry smile touched her lips again. "No," she agreed. "They didn't."

Nick waited, letting the silence do its work. He'd said enough for now — any more would tip his hand prematurely. Ambrose was smart enough to fill in the blanks, and cautious enough to take her time doing it—a trait he admired, even if it made his job harder.

Shadows leaned long across the landing, warped by the harsh geometry of overhead light. The space felt suspended—caught between the public face of justice upstairs and something darker, more honest, waiting below.

She studied him, calculating moves and consequences. When she finally spoke, her voice was pitched low enough that it wouldn't carry beyond their shared space. "You realize what you're actually asking?" A pause, deliberate. "Not the task force. The rest of it."

It wasn't really a question. He recognized the tone — the same one she'd used earlier when laying out evidence that couldn't be ignored.

"Winter's spent twenty years making himself untouchable," he replied carefully, meeting her eyes with the steadiness of a man who understood the weight of what he was proposing. "Building a network that reaches into every corner of this city. The kind of network that knows exactly which service elevators might malfunction at convenient moments."

Ambrose's expression didn't change, but something in her posture shifted, a barely perceptible straightening of her spine.

"And you think one task force can unravel all that?" Her voice stayed steady, but there was a new edge—less skepticism, more that dissecting focus that always came right before a decision

"Or is that what we're supposed to think we're doing?"

Nick felt the corner of his mouth twitch — not quite a smile, more an acknowledgment of her perception. She’d skipped the script and gone straight to the part that had been gnawing at him since Widmark looped him in.

"You've been in Boston long enough to know when something’s too neat,” he said. “The right people make the right noise about cleaning house — just loud enough for the cameras.”

He watched her for a tell, but she was a stone wall — moss and lichen, weathered but uncracked. Maybe that was why Turner really wanted her.

“They want the headline more than the housecleaning,” he added. “A task force with just enough bite to look brave. Not enough to draw blood.”

The silence between them thickened — not empty, but weighted. Down here in the stairwell, away from suits and soundbites, they could taste what nobody was saying: that justice was often the performance, not the goal.

This time it was him who had to break eye contact first. He'd interviewed suspects, faced down gang leaders, gone toe-to-toe with Chicago's worst, but something about being under her scrutiny made him feel exposed in a way that had nothing to do with professional assessment. He’d spent three days trying not to stare, and it hadn’t worked. Striking didn’t quite cover it—there was a sharpness to her that dared you to look closer, and punished you when you did.

"I don't know about you, Detective," she began, the measured cadence of her voice causing him to look back up. "But it's Friday and I just put away a quadruple murderer after six months of work. I have a standing reservation with a bottle of Porfidio and a very forgiving book." She paused, letting her words sink in. "I don't make decisions like this on an empty stomach."

Nick nodded, suppressing the almost-smile still tugging at his mouth. He knew a delaying tactic when he saw one, but he also knew that rushing her would be futile. If she was going to commit, it had to be on her terms.

"Take the weekend," he said. "We're not pulling the trigger until we have all the pieces in place."

A laugh bubbled out of her—not calculated, but closer to genuine than anything he'd heard yet. He blinked, surprised by how much warmer it was than her courtroom voice. She plucked her glasses off her face and wiped them with a handkerchief from her pocket. Without the glasses, her eyes seemed rounder, softer — though no less piercing.

"Pulling the trigger," she repeated, shaking her head with a trace of amusement. "Barring the terrible metaphor, I didn't share my dinner plans to get you to fuck off."

She let that breath hang there between them, testing its shape, like a word on the tongue you couldn't quite decide to say out loud. Nick let the silence stretch. He was good at that—waiting out the moments when most people would start scrambling for the next thing to say. He wondered if he'd misjudged her. He thought he'd gotten a good read, but she was proving to be more difficult to pin than some of his cagiest CI’s back in Chicago. He liked that too. Even more, he liked the way she seemed to enjoy denying him the last word.

"I'm saying," she continued, cutting through his self-interrogation embarrassment, "that if you're going to make a pitch this significant, you might as well do it properly."

She set the glasses back on, their flash returning the hard edge to her stare. He leaned a hip against the cold steel banister—couldn't hurt to look casual, or like the invitation to continue this conversation was on his side as much as hers. The lights stuttered again, the cycle of their old-school ballast jolting both back to the institutional present.

She'd effectively called his bluff, but instead of feeling cornered, he felt that tuning fork in his chest hum again.

"Are you suggesting a working lunch?"he asked, cautious."I wouldn't want to intrude on your celebration. I'm sure your husband and family are waiting for you."

Ambrose regarded him for a moment, expressions shifting fast enough to leave contrails."He's stationed in Anchorage," she said, her voice taking on a new, quieter timbre as she finally moved from her place against the wall. "And my family is back in California."

Nick noted the implicit distinction she made about her husbands family versus her own, and filed it away. Maybe a test. Or maybe just a subconscious slip—one that said more than she meant to. Either way, it gave him a glimpse past the image it was clear she took great pains to cultivate — in both her movement and her words. Her gait was unhurried, expecting him to follow, unable to wait around any longer for him to catch up.

They emerged from the stairwell into the more familiar chaos of Suffolk Superior’s main floor. Lawyers and clients, clerks and reporters created a maelstrom of activity that contrasted starkly with the relative stillness they'd had between them. Nick quickened his pace to walk alongside her, watching as she pulled a beret from her bag as they headed toward the courthouse doors.

"So, where do you recommend?" he asked as they stepped into the biting chill of mid-January air, having to walk a little faster to keep up with her stride. The woman was tall without the heels, and made no further effort to slow down past the point she'd been making inside.

"How do mid-westerners tolerate dark beer and greasy food?" she asked, adjusting the beret, the ends of her hair peeking out like the frayed edges of an old bookmark. "There's a pub around the corner — McGinty's. It's suitably dismal for this sort of conversation."

Nick considered her suggestion. He wasn't sure if she was directing a jab—at the task force, at him, or just her own sense of fatalism about the whole enterprise. Perhaps all three. Still, curiosity kept tugging at him. She was playing a deeper game than he'd first thought, and if he was going to convince her, he needed to understand her motivations as well as she seemed to understand his.

"McGinty's it is then," he said, falling in step with her.

The cold knifed through wool and skin. As they moved, he stole glances — she seemed to draw strength from it, posture straighter, steps sharper. By the time they pushed into McGinty’s, she looked revived.

Warm air hit them, thick with stout and fried potatoes. Dark wood. Brass fixtures. A parody of itself — Nick liked it instantly. Whatever afternoon crowd still lingered was sparse enough that their entrance drew a few curious glances, though none held long enough to matter.

Ambrose led them to a booth tucked out of sight — smart: private enough to talk, public enough to stay clean. She shrugged off her coat, and Nick did the same, sliding into the bench opposite her.

A waitress appeared—older, with a seen-it-all expression that suggested she'd been serving drinks since before the war. She nodded at Ambrose with familiar respect but gave Nick the kind of once-over that made him glad he'd worn his good tie.

“The usual, Counselor?”

“Double it. And an order of—" she glanced at Nick...one eyebrow raised in question.

"Whatever you're having," he said, recognizing the challenge. "I trust your judgment."

The waitress nodded, her eyebrows betraying a faint suggestion of surprise—either at his deference, or at the pairing itself. She ambled off, the soles of her shoes squealing against the sticky wood as she left them in the half-shadow of their chosen alcove.

He waited until they were alone again before speaking. "Regular spot?"

"When the occasion calls for it," she replied, removing her glasses again, rubbing at the bridge of her nose. The gesture seemed unconscious this time, more human than habitual. "It's quiet, the food's decent, and the regulars know better than to interrupt shop talk."

The cold had flushed her cheeks. Without the glasses, she looked less courtroom and more human.

Almost.

There was still steel there, just wrapped in better packaging. He watched as she slipped the glasses into their case and tucked it back into her purse. For a moment, Nick wondered if they were tactical like everything else about her—armor she could don or discard at will.

"So," she said, leaning back in her seat, the slight shift in her posture causing her leg to brush his under the table. In another setting, it might have been a signal. Here, it felt more like brushing up against live wire — unintended, dangerous. He shifted slightly, giving her the space he thought she might need, but not so much as to seem uneasy. She did have awfully long legs. Not that he noticed.

“Tell me why you want me,” Ambrose said.

Not a question. A break shot.

Before he could answer, the waitress returned with their drinks, a reprieve he hadn't known he needed. Ambrose lifted her glass without hesitation. "To dismal conversations," she said, not waiting for his response before clinking her glass against his.

“Well, let's hear it," she said after a few swigs, all business now.

He drank to stall. He had lines ready — conviction rate, courtroom spine, federal battles. But her eyes didn’t blink. And he found himself leaning toward the truth instead.

"You're not afraid to lose," Nick said finally, setting his glass down gently. "Not that you've done much of it," he added, immediately wondering why. To flatter her? Soften the blow? Walking this tightrope with her required a balance he wasn't sure he had.

She remained unfazed, merely tilting her head as if weighing more than his words. "Losing is part of the job. It's how you learn what you're up against. A seasoned player knows the value of tactical retreat." Her eyes never left his. "But you still haven't answered my question."

He liked that she didn't bother with false humility or defensiveness; she understood exactly what he was getting at and didn't try to sidestep it. He could feel the beer now, a slow, deliberate warmth bleeding into his chest—doing nothing to steady the pulse in his throat.

"Because you see the rot," he added quietly. "Not just in Winter's organization, but in the system that's let him operate for almost twenty years..."

He watched her face for any tell, any reaction. "You see it, and instead of looking away or learning to live with it like most people do, you go after it. Even when it costs you."

He resisted the urge to run a hand through his hair. "You and I both know you could just as easily live as another wartime bride, waiting for her husband to return and not making waves for his very rich family and their extensive network of political connections. Yet here you are, throwing chum in the water every chance you think you can get away with it."

Her eyes widened at that, but any rejoinder on her part was forestalled when the waitress returned with their food. At the scent of the fried batter and vinegar, his stomach growled, not giving a damn if it was audible.

She regarded her plate with a moment of detachment before plucking a chip from the basket to pop it in her mouth, sans condiment. Nick supposed that was endorsement enough, and he mirrored the motion. Fried food and alcohol. The last cultural constants. He let the crunch and salt occupy his thoughts, giving her the space to process what he'd said.

“Well-informed,” she said, not accusing. “From the rags, or did Turner dig deeper than HR?”

This was the moment Nick had been dreading. He knew she wouldn't just take his word and roll with it. She was too sharp for that, and if she agreed to work with them, he needed her all in—not just humoring them until she decided it wasn’t worth it.

"Well, you did make national news," he said, shrugging as if that explained everything. "But we're building a task force here, not a social club. Of course we did our homework."

She paused, taking in his words as if trying to calibrate them against some private set of data. Then she shrugged, a gesture so small and contained it might have been a sigh from anyone else.

"Fair enough," she said, reaching towards the middle of the table to where the waitress had placed a bottle of malt vinegar, her hand brushing Nick's as he made the same move at the same instant.

For a moment their eyes locked, and he felt the current between them again, sharp as pepper. He withdrew his hand, letting her take the bottle first as he drained the remaining dregs from his glass. How had that vanished so quickly? He hoped it didn't give away his anxiety. He signaled the waitress for another round, even though he knew he shouldn't. The first had been to loosen the edges of the conversation; the second would be pure indulgence.

Ambrose sprinkled vinegar over her fish, the acid-tang cutting through the warmth of the pub and invading his nostrils.

“You’re dodging,” she said, tossing back a chip. “I didn’t ask what I’m good at. I asked why it’s me.”

Whatever strange energy had built up between them, the small sound of contentment that escaped her lips made Nick sit straighter. It surprised him—that she let it slip. And that it made his tie feel suddenly two sizes too tight.

"Maybe I'm saving the real pitch for when I think you'll actually bite," he said, testing the waters of this new, slightly warmer current before she uttered the rest of her thought.

He wasn't used to feeling this off-kilter; negotiations were his bread and butter, but something about Ambrose threw him. Perhaps it was her complete lack of pretense. Nick had dealt with all kinds—crooks, cops, aldermen, anarchists…Chicago being what it was. Not that Boston lacked in diversity, no, but it sure did seem more insular, more parochial. People here wore their affiliations and allegiances like old, comfortable jackets, never bothering to hide the stitching.

Even after a decade here, Boston's old-world mores hadn't tempered her West-Coast flair. Ambrose was a unique creature in this landscape, a transplant like him, but one who had learned to camouflage, to borrow the plumage of her adopted environment without ever quite blending fully in. She seemed aware of this and a little proud, as though subterfuge was a modest point of professional pride.

He hadn't expected it to resonate so strongly with him, but it did, and that resonance was making him careless.

Or maybe just honest in a way he hadn't been for longer than he cared to admit.

"Stalling," she said, though there was no heat behind the accusation."You're not a good closer, Valentine." She clicked her tongue. "That worries me."

"Closing is usually your half of the equation, Counselor," he offered, meeting her eyes."But if it helps, I can finish strong."

The waitress returned with their next round and Nick wasted no time taking a fortifying swallow, letting the beer's bitterness pinch his tongue and clear a bit of the fog in his head. At some point he had lost control of the conversation, if he ever had it to begin with.

She didn't touch her new drink, instead setting her elbows on the table and steepling her fingers in front of her mouth.He got the sense she was dissecting every word, every inflection, storing them away in whatever mental file she kept on people like him. Dangerous people. Useful people. He wasn't sure which category he fit into for her yet, but he hoped it was the latter.

"And who would be the other half of this…equation," she said finally, still not drinking, just swirling the glass into lazy, frothy eddies.

He blinked at her, assuming he had led with that. "I am," he said without hesitation, not out of ego but because it was fact. "Widmark's running interference with the Feds and the brass, but the operational side, the one that's actually going to have to get its hands dirty? Mine. And if you sign on, you'll be our dedicated legal eagle."

She snorted, a wholly unladylike sound that made him smile despite himself. "Legal eagle? Really? And would I be under you, or an equal ringleader in this circus?"

Nick took another long sip from his drink, wondering for the umpteenth time if her word choice was intentional. She had a way of framing things that seemed innocuous until you really thought about them, and then you realized what a loaded question it was. Or he could be overthinking it, assuming too much of her, given they hadn’t even known each other a full day. Regardless, it had an effect. Whether it was the one she intended or the one he feared, he couldn't quite tell.

"Equal," he said, without blinking. "I don't need a glorified paralegal. I need a true partner. Half the point of this unit is to steer around the politicized garbage that got us into this mess. And you—" He looked at her, as directly as he could without flinching. “—are the only state prosecutor who has an investigators license and a psychological profile that scares the brass more than it reassures them. That’s not a dig," he clarified, seeing a faint upturn of her mouth, "that’s a compliment from people terrified of being replaced by someone better."

She leaned back in the booth, crossing her arms in a way that suggested she was settling in for a longer, more serious conversation. Yet there was nothing adversarial in her body language—at least not yet. If anything, she looked intrigued, as if she'd spent the entire afternoon in need of something to prod at, and Nick had finally obliged.

He hoped it was a sign that she was starting to come around.

"Which begs the question," she began slowly, stopping her fingers’ slow circuit around the glass. "Why do you want me, Sergeant Nicholas V. Valentine. Not Turner, not Widmark, but you?"

The way she said his full name and rank made him focus on her lips a little too long. She enunciated each word with an exactness that bordered on seductive—if he didn’t know better. And he did know better, which was why he suddenly wanted to laugh. She had to be playing him, right? How did she…? Oh, he gave her his business card, of course.

He leaned back, letting the hard wood of the bench press into his spine, attempting to draw some steadiness from it. Then he did laugh. It started as a low rumble in his chest and grew, echoing off the dark paneled walls of the pub. A few patrons turned their heads, curious about the outburst, but Nick didn't care. He needed this release, this moment of sheer absurdity before he really did say something he'd regret, though he suspected he already had.

The laughter took Ambrose by surprise, and for a split second, Nick saw her mask slip. She looked almost vulnerable, then smiled—the kind of smile that starts slowly and takes its time to grow. It was disarming, and he was man enough to admit it, at least to himself.

"What's so funny?" she asked softly, though he could tell she already knew. Her fingers had moved from the glass to her hair, tucking a rebellious strand behind her ear. It was the first natural gesture he'd seen from her all evening.

Nick wiped a tear from the corner of his eye. "I've just never had to work this hard to convince someone to take a promotion. You'd think I was offering you a stint in purgatory." The last word rolled off his tongue with residual laughter, giving it an unintended lilt.

Ambrose shrugged, her smile lingering as if it had taken up a lease on her face. "You can't blame a girl for wanting a little pageantry. I may be a cheap date but I am not a cheap sell."

She said this with a finality that was half a dare, half another test—though by now, Nick suspected both were as instinctive for her as breathing. The laughter between them fluttered, then faded back into the undercurrent of seriousness neither seemed quite ready to relinquish. He knew that this was the turning point — where she either walked away or dove in headfirst. He had to respect her for not rushing it, for weighing every angle. In her shoes, he'd have done the same.

"Pageantry is one thing," he said, leaning forward conspiratorially, "but letting me dangle on a hook to watch me squirm is another. I'm starting to think you enjoy it."

She looked at him over the rim of her glass, the pause heavy with appraisal, and this time her smile was almost wolfish. "Maybe I do," she said, the words sliding out low and unrepentant, and for a moment she looked like she might add something else. Then relented, the edge softening."But in fairness, you dangle well, Valentine. Probably the best I've seen."

He almost made another joke, but thought better of it. If he’d learned anything about her in the last few hours, it was that her respect was earned by candor, not charm. So he let the moment settle, waiting to see if she’d offer more.

She broke eye contact first this time, fingers moving to the topmost pearl button of her blouse, and Nick found himself holding his breath, wondering if she’d unfasten it or just toy with it—nerves, maybe. What did she have to be nervous about?

It was then that he noticed her ring. For someone who married into a family that owned a good chunk of Boston, and their fair share of the Commonwealth — likely a swath of the Eastern Seaboard, it was modest. Subtle, even. Like something out of his nonna's jewelry box. Antique, sure — but flirting with ancient.

"Old money," she said, catching him looking. "Doesn't match the job. Or the budget."

He blinked. She’d just read him like a reissue of Grognak — dog-eared, careworn, and missing a few pages.

“Nathaniel proposed with something flashier,” she added, dry. “But restraint wins more juries than jewelry.”

Another laugh made its way out of his mouth unbidden. Nick found himself loosening his tie out of kinship more than discomfort. It had been a long week — hell, a long month — but somehow the fatigue pressing down on his shoulders felt a bit lighter here in this dim booth with her. Maybe that should have worried him more than it did.

“I don’t think you and the word ‘humble’ have ever shared airtime, Counselor.”

She arched a brow but let it slide, reaching for her drink again. Outside, the sky had gone from gray to pitch. The hum of the city pressed in at the windows.

Between them, the conversation turned to safer ground. But the tension stayed — steady as a held breath, waiting to be spent. Outside, the streetlights came on. Neither of them moved.

Chapter Text

⋘ ❄ ⋙

CHAPTER THREE

⋘ ❄ ⋙

January in Dudley Square carried winter's grip despite the morning sun. Breath clouded above vendor stalls while frost cracked beneath crates of root vegetables and storage apples. The café's corner table caught what little light made it through the water-stained windows as George hunched over her mug, letting steam kiss her face. She was beyond tired. Every time she'd closed her eyes last night, Nick Valentine's square jaw and knowing eyes had waited for her. She should have been reviewing his Chicago record—the convenient timing of his transfer, how Commissioner Turner had hand-picked him for this task force. Instead, she kept replaying the moment at McGinty's when his voice dropped to a near-whisper, his shoulders edging toward hers across the sticky table as if they were trading baseball cards instead of intel that could end with them in concrete shoes.

The sensation of being watched hit her between sips. Wrong kind of eyes. Not the usual Saturday side-eye at her worn Dodgers cap and Nate's hand-me-down bomber, but the focused interest of someone who knew what to look for.

Resisting the urge to scan, she kept her gaze on the coffee and widened her awareness. The morning regulars were all accounted for: Mr. Williams with his newspaper by the window, nurses from Boston City finishing night shift, Northeastern students poring over textbooks and sharing Sugar Bombs. The itch between her shoulder blades wouldn't quit, but searching for its source would only confirm she'd noticed. A quick glance at her watch confirmed what she already knew; Aoife was late, which meant either traffic on Blue Hill Ave or something worth being late for.

As if summoned, the bell jingled and Aoife Coleman flooded into the room like a nor'easter—bracing and no-nonsense. She filled the doorway, dark eyes scanning the space the same way she must have sized up the ring thousands of times. The ex-fighter's auburn curls remained cropped close, though more gray threaded through her temples since their last coffee date.

"You look like hell, counselor," she said, sliding into the seat opposite. Her voice carried traces of Lagos layered with Irish lilt and Boston edge—a combination that had confused more than one judge during testimony years ago.

"Heard about Holcomb. Four counts, no chance of appeal. Not bad for a week's work." Her smile widened despite the dry delivery. "The usual," she told the barista who'd drifted over, then turned back to George.

“Six months’ work,” she corrected; the corner of her mouth lifted. “How’s the gym?”

"The gym's the gym. It'll survive. We're here to talk about you." Aoife's gloved fingers drummed Morse on the battered Formica. "Philip told me Nate shipped out again."

Her knuckles whitened on the mug before she forced them to loosen. Philip meant well, but three drinks in, the man couldn't keep a secret if it came with a padlock. The thought of her marriage being dissected over brandy at the Ambrose estate made something twist beneath her ribs.

"Anchorage," she replied flatly. "Though I assume Philip gave you the play-by-play."

"He might have mentioned something about a going-away dinner with the in-laws." Aoife's eyes crinkled. "Said Wanda was in rare form."

"When isn't she?" The foam on her cappuccino had flattened, but George sipped anyway. Something in her expression must have betrayed her because Aoife's posture shifted—subtle but alert.

"You look like you've got more on your mind than Wanda Ambrose's latest performance."

"Did you have any luck with my request?" she asked, keeping her voice casual, as if asking about a grocery list. The older woman studied her for a moment; the kind of intense appraisal that came naturally to someone who'd made a second career reading people. She took another sip of ruined foam, bracing for whatever came next.

Aoife's face didn't change, but her voice dropped slightly. "Your Chicago inquiry? Interesting timing." She pulled a folded section of newspaper from her coat—yesterday's sports page from the Tribune, not the Globe or Bugle—and slid it across the table. "Box scores are particularly good this week."

George let the paper sit between them for a moment before reaching for it. She knew Aoife well enough to trust her—at least as far as a client-turned-friend could be trusted.

But this was different. This was dangerous. Their barter of information usually centered on community politics or the latest embarrassing dirt from the Suffolk courts, not on out-of-state law enforcement transfers with questionable provenance. But nothing about Operation Winter’s End was going to make her feel safe, and that was probably the point.

"Don't tell me the Bulls biffed it already," she said, trying to inject some lightness into her tone. The barista arrived with Aoife's espresso, and the older woman took her time opening packets of Sweet'N Low, her gaze steady.

"Just take a look," she gestured, leaning back. George unfolded the paper slowly. Tucked between blurbs about spring training, college ball and a furniture advertisement was a small article with a red circle drawn around it. The headline pitched her gut sideways: 'Ex-Chicago Police Captain Dies at Home.' She scanned the three short paragraphs. Bobby Kaczmarek—Valentine's former boss, convicted last month on multiple corruption charges—had been found with a bullet in his head in his Naperville living room. 'No foul play suspected,' the article concluded.

She exhaled slowly. Kaczmarek had been Valentine's mentor, prominent in every account she'd managed to pull from city archives and internal affairs reports she'd combed through last night. Valentine had put his old Captain and several officers away just before moving to Boston—the kind of clean-up job that could scrub a reputation spotless, if he lived long enough to enjoy it.

"Shit," she muttered, refolding the paper and sliding it back. Aoife left it untouched, stirring her espresso in a slow revolution, counting off the seconds in silence.

"Kid made quite a name for himself," the other woman said at last, her spoon clinking against porcelain. "Takes down dirty cops, cleans his own house. That sort of thing gets attention." She paused, stirring. "Course, you'd know all about playing crusader. How'd that work out for you?"

George bristled, then made herself relax, pulling her hat lower over her brow. "You know how it worked out." She didn't mean for it to sound like an accusation, but Aoife's smirk softened anyway. "Attention isn't always a good thing," she said. "Not in this city." Not in this world.

"It's not just the attention," Aoife clarified, her voice dropping lower. "My contact in Chicago PD says Valentine was looking at other cases before Kaczmarek's trial wrapped. Going after bigger fish. Then suddenly he's taking a transfer to Boston?" She tapped her spoon against the rim of her cup. "Seems like an odd career move for someone on that trajectory."

George let the question linger, just long enough to acknowledge its gravity; how carefully Valentine had presented the operation. How Commissioner Turner had specifically requested him. All the pieces fitting together just a little too neatly.

"Unless Boston was the bigger fish," she said slowly, uttering their shared thought aloud.

"Could be," the other woman agreed, but her expression suggested otherwise. "Though I'd be more interested in who's doing the fishing."

"And why," she added quietly. Valentine's transfer. Turner's request. Kaczmarek's convenient bullet. Three moves she couldn't quite square on the board, much less triangulate. Who benefited from all of them? Not the good detective. Not unless he liked living with a target on both sides of the badge.

Aoife leaned forward, the lines around her eyes deepening. "Christ, George. You've got that look again—like you're already halfway down the rabbit hole."

Lifting her cup, she grimaced as cold coffee touched her lips. Wrong temperature, wrong moment—and suddenly she was somewhere else. Another bench on another winter morning, waiting for no one, when an uninvited conversation about choices and power had found her anyway...

That morning after the Sibley verdict, she'd claimed a secluded bench in Cambridge Common. Seeking quiet. Finding instead a man in a well-tailored suit settling beside her uninvited—ginger hair graying at his temples, eyes hidden behind dark glasses he'd never remove.

"Beautiful day, isn't it?" he'd remarked, gesturing vaguely at the park around them. His voice was easy, friendly even. Nothing like the non-rhotic mangling she'd grown accustomed to. Instead, there was a familiar lilt to his words, something that reminded her of California, of home. It took her a moment to place it: the flat, uninflected vowels of a news anchor, the kind you'd hear up and down the West Coast. Something about it made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.

"The Sibley case was elegant work," he'd continued, the manufactured accent never slipping. "You gave them the truth without ever actually saying it. That takes... finesse."

"And you'd know about finesse?" she'd asked, finally looking at him directly. "Or is admiring my work just your opener?"

His smile was too polite by half, canines just a shade pointed, the type of predatory pleasantness that belonged to men who'd never once feared the consequences of being seen.

"Oh, I do more than admire." He'd turned then, sunlight catching his red hair as he revealed the barest hint of piercing blue eyes behind his glasses. "I represent people who collect talent. People who understand that the real verdict happened in what you didn't let the jury think about."

"You don't say," George replied, keeping her grip even on her book and coffee while her posture was as still as death. Every line of the man's expensive suit, every fleck of sun off those lenses, suggested old money and new power—the kind that didn't show up in campaign finance reports or alumni giving. The kind that bought property in other people's minds, then rented it out for much higher than market value.

"Sounds like people with too much time on their hands."

"People with the right kind of time. And the right kind of problems," he'd volleyed back without missing a beat, that stretch of his lips sharpening into something too close to candid for comfort.

He'd dipped two fingers into his inner pocket and set a cream rectangle on the bench between them. "The world's about to get complicated, Georgia. More complicated than the boy who cried communist and a show trial."

"It's already complicated," she found herself saying, but he was already rising, smoothing his suit with a gesture that belonged at a podium or in front of a firing squad, depending on what side of history you stood.

"Not like this," he called over his shoulder. Half-turning, he added: "When you're ready to see the actual board, call the number. The opening is e4, e5, Bc4, Nf6."

Then he'd walked off, leaving nothing but the card and the lingering scent of expensive cologne—something European, she'd thought. Alpine. Clean, like a threat wrapped in civility.

She'd kept the card. Of course she had. It lived now in the false bottom of her jewelry box, next to her abuela's rosary and the family doctor's letter from her first miscarriage. Things too dangerous to throw away, too painful to look at regularly.

"George?" Aoife's voice pulled her back to the café, to the present danger rather than the past kind. "Where'd you go just then?"

She drew a careful line in her memory, closing the notebook on that particular morning. "Nowhere good." She set down her cold coffee and met Aoife's gaze. "Just thinking about patterns. How they repeat."

"Patterns." Her tone suggested she wasn't buying it. "Like Chicago cops dying right after their protégés skip town?"

"Like task forces that form right when the right people need them to." She traced a water ring on the table, her finger following its perfect circle. "Turner brings in Valentine just as Winter's getting sloppy. Valentine's old boss eats a bullet right after Valentine testifies against him." Her finger stopped. "And now I'm being courted for a job that's either going to make my career, or burn it to the ground." The ring on the table filled with a tremor as her hand pressed harder than she meant to.

Aoife reached out, steadying her with a calm, battered-knuckle grip. "Could be both, love. Most things worth doing are."

The implications hung between them, bleak as the skyline beyond the window.

"You want off this carousel, don't you?" the older woman said, leaning back after a beat. "Say the word. Take a sabbatical. Let someone else get ground up for a year or two."

The suggestion, too gentle for this former welterweight, but all the more dangerous for being so, made George want to laugh. Or maybe just sleep for a century. But the truth was, the ring had left a mark on the wood, and she could not unmake it.

She ended up shaking her head; automatic, the way she'd decline a dinner party or a blind date. "We don't get to choose when," she said. "Only how loudly we go down."

Aoife's smile softened. They'd known each other long enough that she knew when to drop the fix-it act. "Your choice, then. Just means I gotta stick around to watch your back." The older woman rose then, using the momentum of righting herself to scan the room anew. "I'll see what else I can dig up on our Hallmark-themed detective."

As she watched Aoife's broad shoulders disappear through the foggy glass, she left enough cash on the table to cover both their drinks and a tip generous enough to assuage her usual guilt at occupying a booth through two full weekend rushes.

The market outside had thinned, but not enough for her to be invisible. Just a tourist out shopping or a transplant with less sense than the venue likely required. But like herself, the people of Roxbury were more practiced at invisibility than outsiders could imagine. All deference on the sidewalk was orchestrated, a symphony of not-looking and not-caring, but the choreography masked a thousand eyes tracking movement and intent. Nothing happened here without being logged, commented on, and folded into the greater ledger of neighborhood wisdom.

They knew who she was, and those that didn't registered her as another Beacon Hill import, exhaling a low note of caution even as their kids darted underfoot and their grandmothers slung five-pound bags of rice with the ambient contempt for the soft-handed gentrifiers.

George took up a slow progression along the sidewalk, letting the crowd's ebb and flow carry her from stall to stall. She didn't expect to find much; the war had put a strain on even the hardiest New England produce, but she needed at least the illusion of normalcy this morning.

She grabbed a bag of spongy apples out of obligation, eyed the dirty celery with the skepticism of someone who'd pulled better from drought-stressed soil in Cazadero and knew desperation produce when she saw it.

Kaczmarek. Dead in his Naperville living room, the kind of suburb where corrupt cops went to retire, not to eat bullets. Valentine testifies, Valentine transfers, mentor dies. Too clean—

"Collards looking good today," Mrs. Washington called out, interrupting her thoughts. Dolores Washington, another of Philip's former clients had been selling her family's wares long before the Resource Wars. Her hands were gnarled with arthritis, but she still sorted her produce with the deftness of a blackjack dealer, her gaze sharp even when her voice stayed gentle.

"Hard to ruin collards," she replied, examining the leaves more out of respect than intention. Her abuela had always preferred them braised and her grandfather not at all, but she picked a bundle anyway, imagining the old man's face wrinkled in polite disgust and the quiet truce of family dinners before the windfall and the name change.

Mrs. Washington snorted. "Only if you know what you're doing. Yours were always a little wan," she said, but softened the dig with a half smile. "You getting enough to eat, darling? You look skinny."

George shrugged. "I burn it off arguing most days. Who can keep weight on with a job like mine?"

"Mm-hmm," she replied with a skeptical squint that said the question was more diagnostic than conversational. "Saw your face on the news this morning. Four for four, they said. You bring the cold with you, girl."

A small compliment, meant to fill the odd space between vendor and regular, but from Dolores' eyes George knew the meaning: the chill was real and it was inside her, still leaching warmth from marrow and mood alike.

"I'll try not to let it seep into the greens," she said, and slipped them into her bag, offering an extra bill for the joke.

Dolores didn't take her eyes off her as she pocketed the money, voice dipping to a register reserved for funerals and family secrets. "You be careful now, Georgia. Market's got eyes today. Best finish up quick." Her fingers briefly tapped a pattern on the newspaper wrapping—three short, three long. Old signal, maybe nothing.

It sat cold in her chest as she turned from Dolores's stall. Market's got eyes. But whose? She kept her pace steady, working through her mental list—candles from Khan, maybe bread from the Lewis's. Routine would be her camouflage.

By the time she reached the spice stall at the market's periphery, Jeneil Khan was holding up a wrapped package like a peace offering.

"Philip's candles," she said by way of greeting. "Pure beeswax from Sunshine Tidings. Samira finished them last night."

She handed over the brown paper parcel, and she tucked it beneath her arm, her thanks muted. Khan's stall, always perfumed with pepper and saffron, bristled with the morning's gossip. Jeneil never wasted syllables on small talk—her affection was reserved strictly for the product and the transaction, and George respected her all the more for it.

"Tell him not to burn them so quick this time. Had a devil of a time keeping up with demand at Mawar's café." Jeneil's attention shifted past George's shoulder, her expression cooling to professional distance.

"Just a moment, sir," she said, and George braced for a quick bump of the crowd or a pickpocket's feint. Instead, a sudden vacuum formed in the market's noise as someone stepped into the narrow mud track by the stall. Too pale to be local, too fluid to be a cop, but with that upright bearing where silence bent around his approach. Like reality was stepping aside for him.

The suit was different, but the hair—like a fox mid-molt, copper gone to sand at the ears—was the same. The sunglasses were wrong for the weather and the season, which made them perfect for his intent. Her hackles rose before she could stop herself. The air between the market stalls went still.

He didn't acknowledge George until the parcel changed hands, the transaction complete, then she felt the pale blue burn of scrutiny behind the lenses. He smiled with all the surface warmth of a credit-denied politeness call.

"Ms. Ambrose," he said, drawing out the title just long enough to make the pretense clear. "Beautiful morning, isn't it?"

The same opener. She wondered if he practiced it in the mirror.

Behind the sunglasses, she knew, he was clocking her body language—torso squared, groceries cradled to preserve her hands. His own posture, a little loose at the shoulders, could fool most people into thinking he was harmless.

The details, as ever, were in the negative space: the empty buttonhole in his lapel where a flag or badge should be, the shoes with soles buffed to a low shine but dyed flat, so they didn't reflect faces when crossing a polished lobby, the cut of his suit suggesting accessibility while the Italian wool beneath denied nothing.

There was that scent too—alpine with hints of cedar—a tailored cologne that had no business on this side of the Charles.

"It was," she offered, keeping her voice even as she shifted her weight to create space between them. "What brings you across the river, Agent Bishop?"

He had never given her his name in so many words, but she'd known from the gesture with the card and the chess opening: e4, e5, Bc4, Nf6. The Italian Game—specifically the Bishop's Attack variation. It was probably the only chess credential he cared to advertise, and for all she knew, someone had gone to the trouble of amending his birth certificate retroactively to enable the bit.

He tilted his head slightly, sunlight catching his hair as if he'd angled for the glare intentionally. The smile that spread across his face was slow, something nearing delighted. "I appreciate a woman with a good memory." His voice carried that same curation; every syllable rolled smooth and unassuming—like someone who'd spent years scrubbing regional markers from his speech. "Though I'm surprised you never used it."

George shifted her weight, adjusting her bag to keep one hand free. The market continued its flurry around them, but she felt the subtle shift in focus—vendors slowing their transactions, regulars lingering over produce they'd normally dismiss with a glance.

"I'm not in the habit of calling numbers left by strangers," she replied, matching his tone. "Especially ones who make a point of finding me alone. So let's skip the foreplay, unless you actually need groceries, in which case the endive is dreadful today."

For a heartbeat, Bishop went perfectly still—a pause so complete the morning air seemed to crystallize around them both. He nudged the sunglasses down the bridge of his freckled nose, studying her with eyes so pale they looked almost silver, a glint that belonged on X-rays, not faces. "Foreplay. Such language from an officer of the court." He turned from the stall, a fluid pivot that somehow made following him seem like the only option. "Walk with me, Counselor. The produce is better toward the back."

She could have—should have—stayed put, made him stop and turn. But that would give him the satisfaction of causing a scene she wouldn't grant. Instead, she fell into step, keeping half a pace behind—close enough to hear him, far enough to move if needed.

"Congratulations on the Holcomb verdict, by the way. Four counts, no appeals. That's quite the feather in your cap."

His tone was admiring, but in the way a cat might admire a dying bird in the gutter: fevered by hunger and faintly bored. They moved along the muddy row, past fat rutabagas and dried beans cuffed in cellophane. People eyed them as they passed, the way city dwellers always knew to clock trouble by its conversational volume rather than its participants.

"Feathers get plucked, Agent," she countered, not breaking stride. "If there's something you want to say, I suggest you say it, or I'm going to send an invoice to whatever alphabet-soup agency is funding your wardrobe this quarter."

Bishop's laugh was like ice cracking in a sweating glass—a single, brittle note that made her molars ache. "Always so direct. It's refreshing, really." He paused at a stall selling winter squash, fingers hovering over a butternut without actually touching it. "In the interest of directness, how's the cod this time of year? The seasoning they use for the batter at McGinty's is genuinely criminal."

She didn't lose a step, nor indulge the bait as she watched Bishop's reflection in the vendor's scale—distorted but readable. "You're slipping. That's yesterday's surveillance."

"Yesterday's lunch, actually. You and Detective Valentine made quite the pair. Him trying so hard to recruit you, you letting him think he might succeed." He shook his head, the quirk at the corner of his mouth reading as triumph. "Your co-counsel doesn't give you enough credit. You're quite the performer when properly motivated. Almost had me wanting to root for him."

The sidewalk beneath her feet felt suddenly uneven, like Boston's ancient cobblestones had shifted overnight. Bishop had been watching her at McGinty's. Of course he had. The thought of him cataloging every word, every gesture between her and Valentine made her stomach clench with unexpected fury.

"You don't strike me as the type to bet on losing dogs," she said, letting a trace of contempt color her voice, and Bishop countered with a shrug so fluid and dismissive it seemed he could shed the conversation like an outgrown skin.

"Dogs. Such an interesting choice of word." Bishop paused at a fruit stall, turning a mottled apple in his manicured fingers, his thumb tracing each bruise. "That's why you're still on the board, Georgia. Most think it's about winning. You," he said, granting her an almost affectionate glance over the rims of his sunglasses, "are clever enough to realize it's about not losing."

She refused the gambit. Letting this G-man draw her into philosophical debates about winning and losing was exactly what he wanted—to establish a rapport, to make her believe they were intellectual equals sharing some profound understanding of the world's true mechanisms.

"And here I thought it was about justice," she said dryly. "My mistake."

The look he shot her, even with his eyes obscured, could only be read as pity. But he pretended to ponder it anyway; a tap of his gloved forefinger against his chin before his head tilted down the length of the stalls, dropping the apple.

“Justice,” he mused, drawing out the syllables. “Noble in aspiration, naive in application. It’s like that impeccable collard—one tough stem and the whole batch bitter.” His smile hollowed at the corners. “You’re not naive, or you wouldn’t have pushed BPD to re-investigate Holcomb’s first victim. You saw what no one else wanted to see.”

He watched her, weighing whether she would bristle at the compliment, take it as manipulation, or simply note it and move on.

She kept her silence, refusing him the satisfaction of a reaction. If she let herself respond—if she even allowed herself to show she'd taken the bait, she'd be on the ground before she noticed she was falling. This stalker with borrowed syntax could not be allowed to win the point so easily. Instead, she banked the conversation off a safer wall. "So which am I, then," she asked, "the broken dog or the tough collard?"

"Why limit yourself?" Bishop's smile held, but his posture shifted, his hands vanishing into his coat, a gesture so practiced it bordered on sleight of hand. George tensed for a microsecond, braced for the specter of a badge or a weapon or worse, another business card—but instead, he produced from the folds of his coat a small paper bag, neat and perfectly creased, like a lunch packed for a child too old to need the facade but young enough to find comfort in the ritual. He offered it, palm up, as if inviting her to inspect the contents before she accepted.

She considered not taking it. Refusing would be another data point for the file he was building in real time, but so would compliance. In the end, curiosity—her most persistent failing—won out. She took the bag.

He let the silence live for a few steps as she held it. The air between them, sharp with the metallic tang of cold and the faintest undercurrent of wood smoke, suggested even the market itself had gone prudent.

"The boys running this task force," he said finally, not bothering with further posturing, "they're not equipped to see the real crisis until it's too late. You're a buffer, Georgia. The system's immune response." He gestured toward the bag in her hand. "They'll tell you you're there to cut out the tumor," he said, "but we both know cancer this advanced wraps itself around the vital parts."

She peeked inside, half-expecting anthrax or a severed finger, but it was something far worse.

The scent hit her first; nestled inside the bag was a single, perfect peach, its fuzzy skin blushed with pinks and golds that seemed to glow against the kraft paper. She stared at the fruit, trying to make sense of its presence. Peaches didn't grow in Massachusetts, and they certainly weren't in season in January. Even with hothouses and Vault-Tec's agricultural experiments, fresh peaches were a luxury reserved for the ultra-wealthy or those with government connections—connections like the ones Bishop so casually flaunted.

"How...?" she started to ask, but when she looked up, he was already turning away. He paused, adjusting his sunglasses, and began to hum—soft and low, each note lingering just long enough to ache. The melody drifted through the air, the tune wrapping around her like remembered warmth. His cream coat disappeared into the crowd, but the song remained, pulling at something she'd buried deep: Send me a peach from ol' Georgia...

Her world contracted to the fruit in her palm. Blood rushed in her ears as the market blurred around her. The peach's downy skin radiated warmth against her palm like a captured sun, and suddenly she wasn't in Boston anymore.

Southern twilight enveloped her; cicadas thrumming in the trees, the porch swing creaking beneath their weight. Her mother's voice threading through the memory like silk through cotton: "I never dreamed that there'd come a day when I'd find myself far from your arms..."

Little Georgia, named for the state of her birth, nestled between them, watching her father's oil-stained fingers work the mason jar lid free. The preserved fruit inside glowing amber in the porch light, the 'pop' of the lid like a secret between them. "Your turn, mátia mou," his words echoed across years, his laugh deep and warm as she insisted on feeding herself, juice running down her chin while they watched her with an adoration as ripe as the fruit itself.

The memory hit her with such force she nearly dropped the bag. Her hands trembled. Bile flooded her tongue as that sense-memory of simple sweetness collapsed under the weight of the present. For one wild second she considered smashing the peach to ruin against the asphalt, grinding it under her heel until it was pulp and gutter runoff.

But she couldn't—wouldn't. Waste not, want not was embedded in her DNA. Despite the audacity, the sheer violation, her abuela would never have forgiven the excess, not even on principle. She allowed herself two breaths more before pulling her focus back to the market, to the task at hand before closing the bag and tucking it into her tote with Philip's candles.

Bishop was gone. The message remained: he knew her. Not just her routines or her professional record, but the raw material of her making—the family history she'd left behind when she became Mrs. Ambrose.

It took effort to find the sidewalk, to force herself forward until the market's perimeter and the safety of open pavement made her pulse slow. She quick-marched past the pawn shop, past the crumbling post office where a pair of MPs loitered in partial armor, their focus split between the street and the nervous shift of pedestrians around them. Her mind kept circling back to the melody, blocking out anything useful. The spook knew about her parents, had access to records that should have been sealed or destroyed. Had probably been to Cazadero, walked the same dirt roads she'd abandoned for Boston's brick and concrete certainties.

George forced herself to complete her rounds—potatoes, carrots, a loaf of rye. Each transaction automatic, the vendors' small talk washing over her unheard. Bishop's warning circled back: The system's immune response. Not a prosecutor, but a buffer. Not there to cut out the cancer but to protect it from real surgery.

The calculation of it all made her want to laugh, or scream, or commit a dozen minor felonies just to see which would bring the bastards running first. In place of either, her feet carried her towards Dudley Station. The Connector Line's chrome-trimmed train waited at the platform, its fusion engine humming beneath the recorded safety announcements and propaganda jingles. She boarded, finding a seat away from the scattered passengers heading toward Jamaica Plain.

If Bishop was right, she was being positioned as window dressing—the Ambrose name lending credibility to a sham investigation. But that assumed Bishop was telling the truth, rather than distracting her from something that actually mattered.

Which was all the more reason to see it from the inside. To determine for herself if Operation Winter's End was more than just another attempt to placate a restless public. To see whether Valentine's earnest smile and Midwestern charm was just another performance, or the genuine article.

As the train pulled away, arc tubes flickering against the city's snow-caked edges, she pressed her forehead to the window and watched houses and ruined factories strobe by like a time-worn reel of dreams deferred. Through the glass, blue sky threatened a thaw that would never quite come—another Boston trick, one she'd learned to stop taking personally years ago. She didn't remember taking off her gloves, but at some point she found herself cradling the peach between her palms. Common sense dictated that she should throw the damn thing out the window, but something deeper than habit held her fast.

Its skin yielded beneath her teeth before she could stop herself, splitting in a slow, syrupy release. The taste was as sharp as memory, honeyed by absence and the scent of innocence lost. Of a life she might have lived had the world been kinder.

Still, it was real, and she bit down again while the train carried her through darkness. She ate it all, even the bruised parts. Especially those.

Chapter Text

⋘ ❄ ⋙

CHAPTER FOUR

⋘ ❄ ⋙

The fourth floor should have been dark at 5:47 AM. For three weeks, he’d been first in, last out. But today a band of light cut across the corridor before he’d even left the elevator. Nick stopped short, hand drifting to his holster. A mechanical whir hummed behind the glass and the hairs on his forearm prickled in warning. The air felt wrong—shifted, like a building inhaling. He slid to the window and peered in.

Not empty. Not by a mile.

The words came out on autopilot: "¿Todo bien aquí?"

The figure turned slowly. Georgia Ambrose looked down at him through fogged lenses, a paper mask covering her nose and mouth. She pulled it down to her neck and tilted her head like he'd interrupted a procedure hours in the making. "Everything's fine, Detective. Though I'm curious what made you default to Spanish."

“Habit,” he said, stepping inside. “South Side kitchens. If someone’s on a ladder at dawn, it’s either a cousin or a contractor, and either way you don’t spook them with English.”

She didn't smile, and he decided that was fair. Whatever she was doing up here, it wasn't decorative.

“Practical,” she said, and went back to the fixture. As if the whole scene had been choreographed, she flicked her wrist and the last screw dropped neatly into her palm.

"I wasn't expecting..." He stopped. She hopped down and wiped her hands on a rag from her tool belt. He'd seen enough trauma kits to recognize medical grade, but these were retrofitted—elastic and snaps replacing the original closures. Improvised. Repurposed. Before he could catalog what that meant about her, she segued.

“You weren’t expecting me,” she supplied for him, glancing past him to the corridor as footsteps approached. “Relax,” she added, “just some CIT support. Called in a few favors to get us up to speed. Well, as up to speed as we can be.” She tossed the screw into a metal dish opposite the desk she’d been standing on. "Three weeks is a hell of a runway for setting up a task force. Did you really think we'd be operating with just legal pads and rotary phones?"

Nick opened his mouth, closed it. She wasn't wrong. He'd been so focused on making room he hadn't thought much past getting desks and a coffee maker. The task force Turner and Widmark had pitched felt important enough to deserve better than the glorified storage closet they'd been allocated, but he'd been moving files, not requisitioning equipment.

"I—" He stopped, ran a hand through his hair, felt one of his curls spring loose. Jesus, she'd been here all of twenty minutes and already identified every operational deficit. "We've been working with what we had."

"Clearly." The word was dry as week-old toast. She pulled off the tool belt and set it on the desk, glancing at him while tallying the cost. "Which is why Widmark gave me a key on Saturday. Right after I called to accept the position."

Saturday. The day after McGinty's. She'd been in the office a full weekend ahead of him, completely restructuring their operation while he'd been cross-referencing case files at his kitchen table, thinking he was getting a jump on the week. Something must have shown on his face because she laughed, a crisp exhale more diagnostic than delighted.

"He didn't mention that? Interesting."

He tucked that away with the other little landmines she’d been planting since Friday—weights he wouldn’t feel until he stepped on them later. Before he could offer another weak apology, the door swept open and a maintenance worker in C.I.T.-branded coveralls appeared in the doorway, wrestling with an industrial floor buffer that looked like it hadn't been updated since the Eisenhower administration. Behind him, another worker maneuvered a cart loaded with electrical supplies and what looked like a disassembled RobCo terminal.

He stepped aside as the buffer squealed past, its cord snaking over his shoes. The guy with the cart waited for her cue like she signed his checks.

“In there,” she said, pointing to the alcove near the back where a soda machine used to live. “Terminal on the inner wall, plug the line into the hard drop—not the ceiling run. And swap the ballast on these two fixtures if you haven’t already. I don’t need a migraine before eight.”

“Got it,” the tech said, already peeling back a scuffed ceiling tile.

Nick tried not to look completely redundant. Nobody had called him naïve since grade school, but it sure felt like that’s what she was implying. “You didn’t waste any time,” he said, and immediately regretted the obviousness of it.

“I practically lived in this building during the Sibley trial," she countered, not unkindly. “Back when Hammond ran Special Investigations out of this floor.”

She turned to supervise the terminal placement, adding over her shoulder, "Hammond cleared out everything useful when they consolidated at Healy. Left us with thirty years of detritus and a security system that wouldn't stop a motivated teenager."

"We've got requisitions pending—"

“—and if they clear this week, Turner can have my library card,” she said, as the ballast gave a metallic ping and died, the corner of the room sinking into a softer, steadier light. “We’ll keep the toys on loan until procurement remembers we exist.”

He blew out the breath he hadn’t remembered holding. “How exactly did you manage all of this?”

"My grandfather's been consulting with RobCo on government contracts since before House went public," she said without a trace of humor. "Things only get done in Boston by calling in personal favors, Detective. Best you learn that now rather than later."

She didn't sound proud, just matter-of-fact. Nick revised his mental file: not just an Ambrose by marriage, but connected through her own bloodline to RobCo's inner circle. That changed the math considerably.

Footsteps echoed from the stairwell, cutting off that line of thought. He knew the Monday ritual—Johnny Park brought the bakery box, Gwen Morgan steadied the inevitable coffee disaster.

“—swear the donuts were still warm when I left home, but Dad always says...”

Johnny froze in the doorway, the pink box and grid of coffees tilting dangerously. Gwen smoothly rescued it while Johnny's mouth worked soundlessly, taking in their transformed workspace. And Ambrose. Especially Ambrose.

The Georgia Ambrose from press conferences and newspaper photos—the polished ADA who'd faced down the Attorney General—was a far cry from the woman currently standing in their office in work boots and a faded sweatshirt. Nick wasn't sure what he'd expected, but Johnny doing a credible goldfish impression wasn't it.

"ADA Ambrose," Gwen recovered first, setting the goods on the nearest desk to extend her free hand. “Rumor says you take no prisoners—even outside court.”

"Rumors have a way of growing legs in this town," Ambrose replied. "I'm told you run a tight ship, Morgan."

Gwen's cheeks flushed, but she met Ambrose eyes square on despite their significant height difference. "Less of a ship, more of a leaking lifeboat some days. But we keep it off the rocks."

Ambrose's gaze flicked to the coffees, then to the grease-stained pink lid. Weighing. He clocked it—the microsecond sweep of inputs, the decision tree branch and prune.

She made a small sound of acknowledgment, her attention shifting to Johnny, who was still staring. "Detective Park. Your family managing despite the sugar rationing?"

Johnny blinked himself back into his body. "We're managing," he said, voice cracking on the last syllable. He recovered with a grin that made him look twelve. "Mom says you can ration sugar but you can't ration spite. She bakes with both."

His grin widened at his own joke, then faltered when she didn't immediately return it. She reached for the coffee grid, checked the labels written in Gwen's neat hand, and plucked one free without ceremony.

"Bless your father," she said, handing Gwen a cup. "And your mother. We'll need both before nine. What's today's selection?"

He straightened, pride replacing his initial shock. "Apple fritters are our Monday special. Dad says if you can't get real sugar, you might as well let the fruit do the work." He paused, then added with growing enthusiasm, "We've been trading with some of the apple orchards up in Concord. Produce isn't as tightly regulated as processed sugar."

"Clever," Ambrose replied, and he caught the ghost of approval in her tone. "Your father's Park Sung-ho, right? I remember his testimony during the zoning commission hearings last spring. He made quite an impression."

Three minutes. That's all it had taken her to get his team eating out of her hand. Johnny, for his part, seemed to stand a little taller under her attention. "He's not afraid to speak his mind," he said, "sometimes to his own detriment. But I guess you know how that goes, ma'am."

"Too well," she answered, the barest hint of a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. It wasn't quite warmth, but it wasn't the weaponized neutrality she'd greeted him with, either. Another one for the file.

"—Which is why we're going to need proper security installed before we bring in any sensitive materials." She turned back to Gwen. "How comfortable are you overseeing the installation? I want confirmed eyes on all hardware before anything confidential gets keyed in.”

"I can handle that," Gwen said, already pulling out her notepad. "Commander Hammond's office has a list of approved contractors. I'll pull the ones with the right clearance levels."

"Good." Ambrose turned her attention back to the box of donuts, selecting a fritter and splitting it neatly in two. She offered half to Johnny, who accepted it with the dazed gratitude of a man suddenly promoted to the grown-ups’ table.

"Detective Park, your reports on Winter Hill's activities in Lexington and Concord during your time with the Sheriff's Department have been insightful,” she continued between bites. “I'm curious about your take on how their operations might be shifting with the new restrictions on sugar and other goods."

Johnny blinked, clearly not expecting to be put on the spot about his casework. He glanced at Nick, who gave him a subtle nod of encouragement.

"Well, um, like I mentioned with the apple orchards—seems like they're getting creative about sourcing," he said, gaining confidence as he spoke. "Not just sugar either. We've seen an uptick in hijackings of trucks coming out of the Corvega plant in Lowell."

"We should map those routes," he said, because logistics were safer ground than watching her run his briefing. "Cross-reference with—"

“—traffic logs from Mass Pike weight stations,” Ambrose finished for him, already flicking a switch on a wall-mounted projector the C.I.T. tech had coaxed to life. A map of Greater Boston bled onto the cracked plaster, arteries of interstate and rail pulsing in thin lines of light. Colored pins sprouted where she’d already marked thefts and near-misses; red along the Pike, blue hugging Route 2, a new run of yellow bleeding down from Lowell like infection.

Nick swallowed what was left of his ego and moved closer. She'd built the skeleton of what he'd been chewing at for a week, and she'd done it between accepting the position on Saturday and fixing their electrical this morning. The yellow pins from Lowell made a pattern he hadn't seen—a southern creep toward Worcester that suggested Winter was testing new territory while everyone watched his Boston operations.

"How long have you been tracking this?" He couldn’t tell if it was curiosity or professional insecurity talking. The map glowed, bleaching the dust, haloing Ambrose in cold light.

"Long enough to know Winter's using the rationing as cover for expansion." She clicked through to the next slide—delivery schedules, hijacking times, all cross-referenced. "The trucks aren't random targets. They're—"

She didn’t finish. The next sound wasn’t hers.

Heavy footsteps echoed from the stairwell, followed by a voice that could strip paint.

"Jesus Christ, what happened up here? Looks like someone called in the National Guard."

Nick recognized the Southie accent before Eamon Chivers filled the doorway, his bulk blocking the morning light. The detective's eyes swept the room, cataloged the C.I.T. crew, then landed on Ambrose with the kind of recognition that made the temperature drop.

Eamon’s gaze hardened; a glacier calving and slamming into the bay. The corner of his mouth twitched, not toward a smile as he took in Ambrose’s appearance.

“Ambrose,” he said, making her name sound like a warning label.

“Detective Chivers,” she returned, no sugar despite the remnant of fritter in her hand.

Gwen’s pen stilled. Johnny held his half of pastry midair like a communion wafer, eyes darting between them. Nick felt the old cold of locker rooms and watch commands—the instant before two men threw punches, or decided not to.

Eamon shrugged off his coat and dropped a battered leather folder on the nearest cleared desk. Paper splayed like a hooked flounder. He sniffed the air—the citrus solvent, hot wiring, fried dough registering—then rolled his shoulders as though the room sat wrong on them.“You redecorate all your crime scenes, Counselor, or just the ones you plan to try in advance?”

“She built us a nerve center,” Johnny offered, too quickly.

“Cute. Maybe we’ll knit doilies next.” Eamon’s eyes cut to Nick. “You let her do this?”

'Let' was doing a lot of work. Nick swallowed the reflexive defense and reached for something less combustible. “We needed a hardline and a secure terminal. She got both by breakfast.”

"Right," Eamon said. "And a parade." He flicked two fingers toward the cart—the float in question. "C.I.T. in our house. Grand." He rolled his shoulders as though the room sat wrong on them.

“They were already in your house,” she said, even. “I just put them to work.”

Chivers took a step further into the room, and suddenly the space felt smaller. "Funny thing about putting people to work—sometimes they see things they shouldn't."

The threat hung there, obvious enough to register, vague enough to deny. Ambrose didn't blink.

"Some people will see things whether they're supposed to or not," she replied, her voice dropping to permafrost. "The difference is whether those people are on your payroll or someone else's."

For a moment, he saw it—the way they squared off, old grudge meeting new battleground. The room's sounds dulled to the hum of the machine; not even the maintenance crew working, nothing moving but eyes recalculating.

Eamon's jaw tightened, a muscle jumping beneath the stubble. His eyes flicked to the C.I.T. workers, then back to her. "And which payroll are you on these days, Counselor? Last I heard, the DA's office wasn't in the business of interior decorating."

"The DA's office is in the business of building cases that stick," she riposted, folding the napkin into sharp quarters. "Hard to do that when your task force is operating out of what looks like a middle-school janitor's closet."

Nick stepped forward, positioning himself between them without making it obvious. He could smell the burnt-wire tang off the floor buffer, feel the hum of tension hitch through the air like static. But Chivers wasn’t finished.

"Still got that silver tongue, I see," he said, his smile turning sharp. "Though I seem to remember you being a lot more...flexible back in the day. Before you started playing for the other team."

The prosecutor didn't flinch at the insult. If anything, her posture grew even more composed, like a queen regarding an unruly subject.

"I've always played for the side of the law, Detective. Which is more than I can say for some in this room."

Eamon’s laugh was short and ugly—the kind a man uses when he knows it’ll land.

"That's rich, coming from the broad who—"

Heavy tread on the stairs. Every head turned before the voice came.

"Everything alright up here?"

Captain Widmark's voice cut through the tension like a sledgehammer, carrying enough granite to reset spines. He stood in the doorway, taking in the scene with the careful assessment of a man who'd walked into more than his share of powder kegs. His gaze moved from Chivers to Ambrose, then settled on Nick with a question in his eyes.

"Breakfast meeting," Nick said without missing a beat, gesturing to the bakery box like the morning had been consumed by nothing more than caffeine and carbohydrates. “Detective Park’s famous family fritters. We’re reviewing logistics and recent hijackings.”

"Didn't hear you come in, Captain," Chivers added, smirking, but less certain now.

Widmark braced a hand on the doorjamb. He wore his suit like it was painted on, all angles and creases, not a micron out of place. The lines around his eyes were blue-shaded by the fluorescents, but the eyes themselves missed nothing. “Glad you're all here. First order of business—Morgan, get our friends from C.I.T. some of those donuts to go. Let them know they’re done for today.” He jerked his chin at the techs, who, to their credit, began packing up without needing to be told twice.

Gwen nodded, snapping shut her notebook and corralling the workers. The C.I.T. crew filed out, giving Ambrose a variety of sidelong looks, all variations on wary respect and what Nick interpreted as mild fear. The one with the buffer made the sign of the cross. Johnny eased out right behind them, pink box in tow.

Once the door clattered shut, Widmark closed the gap, stepping over power cords and a loose wire nut as if clearing a scene forensics left half-finished. "Let's clarify something for the room," he said. "ADA Ambrose is not a decorator. She's your new strategic lead, effective today. That means if she wants a wall knocked down or a line run to the roof, it gets done—no discussion. Is that clear?"

Eamon, still standing inches from Nick, stared hard at the wall past Ambrose's right shoulder. His boots were rooted, arms loose at his sides, body language screaming open contempt. For a half-second Nick thought he might lunge at her. Instead, he ground out, "Crystal, sir."

Widmark let that hang, making sure it landed. "Good. Now that we're all clear on chain of command—" He pulled a manila envelope from inside his coat, the paper already yellowed at the edges. "BADTFL decided to share something this morning. Agent Harwood hand-delivered it to my home at five-thirty."

Nick felt the room’s attention sharpen. He didn’t know Harwood personally, but everyone knew the name. A favor from him always came with a hook buried in the bait.

"Must be Christmas," Chivers muttered, but his eyes tracked the envelope like a dog watching meat.

Widmark slid the envelope onto the nearest cleared surface like a dealer throwing down a bad hand. The flap had been sliced neat with a letter opener. No chain-of-custody tag. No signature line.

“Gloves,” Ambrose said, and Gwen already had a box open. The prosecutor worked latex over her fingers with a snap that sounded like a gavel. Nick reached for a pair, caught Eamon not bothering.

“Fingerprint yourself onto a federal gift, Detective,” Ambrose said without looking up, “I could use the laugh when this comes back to bite us.”

He grunted and took the box from Gwen anyway.

"Before we proceed," Widmark said, his eyes moving deliberately between Ambrose and Chivers, "I want to be clear about what this means. The feds don’t share evidence out of the kindness of their hearts."

“It means we’re poking in the right place,” Nick said, flexing his gloved hands, voice low but steady. “Or the wrong one, if you like your pension.”

Widmark gave him a thin smile. “It means, Sergeant, we’re now in the blast radius. So let’s tread carefully. ADA Ambrose—if you’d do the honors.”

Park chose that moment to shove his head back in. “C.I.T. guys are clear, boss,” he said, out of breath, eyes flicking to Ambrose and then fast to the envelope, letting out a low whistle. “That what I think it is?”

“A conversation between Eddie Winter and Johnny Montrano,” the Captain said. “Unedited, supposedly.”

The room went still in the way rooms do when everyone’s pretending it hasn’t. Nick felt the gravity of it as much as he saw it—backs straightening a notch, eyes sharpening, hands going careful.

Widmark let them absorb it for a beat. “Park, get that player from evidence storage—the one that actually works. Morgan, bag this properly, with an actual evidence tag this time.”

“On it.” Johnny disappeared again, dress shoes squeaking on the freshly buffed floor.

“Chivers, those files from my car. Now.” The Captain’s tone brooked no argument. “And Valentine—” his gaze shifted between him and Ambrose, “—show the counselor where she’ll be working. Let her get settled while Park sets up the player.”

Nick caught the dismissal for what it was—Widmark giving them space before the main event. Whether it was to let them establish working boundaries or to keep Chivers from taking another run at Ambrose, he couldn’t tell.

“This way,” Nick said, gesturing toward the office they’d been sharing—his office, their office now, he supposed.

Ambrose nodded, stripping off her gloves with a crisp motion and tossing them into the nearest wastebasket. “Lead the way, Detective.”

He guided her to the smaller office off the main room, next to Widmark’s, feeling the weight of her presence behind him. The eleven-by-eleven space already felt different, as if it had inhaled her into the walls and was contemplating how to exhale her back out again. Nick realized as he passed through the threshold that the dust had already been disturbed. Every surface—metal, glass, parquet—looked wiped, catalogued, dusted. The clutter of his last three weeks was gone, replaced by the kind of order that meant she’d orchestrated more than just her own efforts. The desks faced each other; the broken lamp on the side he’d claimed replaced and casting warmth into the pre-dawn chill like a lighthouse. The far wall between opposing windows held a rolling blackboard spanning nearly five feet, gridlines carefully marked off and already half-filled with case numbers and a timeline that started with the earliest known Winter Hill homicide twenty years ago and swept out in measured columns toward the present.

He stopped in the doorway, resisting the urge to apologize to the person who’d just outperformed him half a dozen ways before sunrise. “You don’t sleep, do you?”

She leaned against her desk, pulling her glasses off and rubbing the skin at the bridge of her nose. “I sleep fine. It’s the waking hours that are the problem.” She glanced sidelong at him, frames dangling from one finger before using the hem of her sweater to wipe them clean. Her hands kept moving, occupying themselves in a way that told Nick she hadn’t actually needed to clean the lenses.

“If you’re worried about territorial disputes, Detective, I don’t stake claims. I just get things done. What you do with the free time you’ll have left over is your business.”

Nick managed a half-smile. “By all means, run up the score. Captain’s not shy about letting me know when I’m behind.”

She didn’t reply, but he could see the corners of her mouth threaten to turn. She placed the glasses back on, the barrier re-established. He shut the door behind him, tension dropping by a degree in the relative privacy. Sunlight bled through the blinds, cutting the blackboard into bands of blue and gold.

“If you're waiting for me to explain why Chivers acts like a dog who's had his favorite hydrant moved, you'll be waiting a while,” she said, finally breaking the stretch of silence. There was no exasperation in her tone. On the contrary, it was almost clinical—the resignation of someone used to the gravity well of old injuries.

He considered this. What she was, he’d realized since McGinty’s, was a vacuum for attention and expectation—a woman who drew conflict, compliments, grudges, and alliances like iron filings to a magnet. She held them all, arranged them neat on a petri dish for private study. Nick had to respect it, or at least understand the coercivity if he was going to survive in orbit next to her.

“I figured it was ancient history,” he said, dropping into the opposite chair, letting it rock back just slightly. “Not that he’d ever say as much. I’m guessing you knew each other before all this?”

“Before all this, during all this, and probably after,” she replied, adjusting an already-straight legal pad on her desk. “Boston’s too small for clean breaks or anonymous new starts, especially if your conflicts were ever public record or made their way onto a witness list…” She trailed off, deciding if she wanted to share any more, then didn’t. Instead, she motioned toward the main office beyond. “The roster had a name crossed out. Lieutenant Gallagher?”

He hesitated, the memory of that particular recruiting effort still fresh. “Lieutenant Tom Gallagher. Best computer forensics guy in the staties until he suddenly remembered he preferred working for the living. Turned down the task force two days before you signed on.” Nick exhaled through his teeth, staring at the far wall. “His daughter got a full scholarship to Salve Regina last week.” He paused, letting the implication sink in. “Same day he withdrew his name. Just happened to be the same day Winter Hill’s accountant made a hefty donation to their scholarship fund.”

Ambrose's expression didn't change, but something shifted in her posture—a subtle tensing of her shoulders that suggested this wasn’t news to her. “Winter’s reach isn’t subtle. Neither is his message.”

“The message was delivered by Captain Dyer himself,” Nick said, lowering his voice. “Gallagher's old CO. Stopped by to remind him how much Winter Hill’s done for the community—and how it’d be a shame if anything disrupted all that goodwill.”

She laughed at that—a tight, controlled sound with no humor in it. “Of course it was Dyer. The man’s never met a line he wouldn’t cross for the right price.” She straightened, moving toward the blackboard. “How many other recruits have backed out?”

“Three. All with similar circumstances—sudden windfalls, family emergencies, or convenient transfers.”

“Textbook intimidation. Effective, but predictable.” She tapped her fingers against the desk, a rhythm matching the wall clock’s tick. “We’ll need alternative candidates for digital forensics—someone without family ties that can be leveraged, or enough beef to make them immune to Winter’s usual tactics.” She paced the small office, her boots making no sound on the worn parquet. “I might know someone.”

He watched the change in her demeanor—like a switch thrown. She moved to the window, hands behind her back, eyes on the still-dark river. “But I’ll need to reach out quietly. If you want this to stick, we can’t have the offer traced back to anyone here until it’s accepted.” She shot him a look, gauging his reaction. “You have a problem with that?”

Nick shrugged, feigning indifference while that familiar buzz lit under his ribs—the signal of a plan just crazy enough to work. “If they’re good, I don’t care who you bring in. Just so long as they don’t mind a few redundancies in the chain of command.”

Something arched in her eyebrow at that. “Some redundancy is healthy. Keeps everyone honest.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. “Noted.”

A faint slap of rubber soles on waxed floor and Johnny’s head appeared in the door like a kid sneaking a look into a classroom he hadn’t enrolled in. “Player’s up. It’s… temperamental, but it spins.”

Ambrose straightened. Whatever private edge they’d carved in here resettled into something firmer. “Let’s hear it.”

They filed back into the main room. Widmark waited by a player on a metal cart that still stank faintly of solvent. The player’s guts were half-exposed—panel missing, a rubber band looped where a drive belt should have been. Johnny hovered with a power strip like a rosary. Gwen stood with an evidence tag already filled out to the date and minute.

Widmark didn’t bother with ceremony. He slid the cassette in and pressed play. The machine whined, coughed, then caught, tape spooling with a damped click. For a beat there was only room tone; static like snowfall—then a voice that oiled the air enough to feel dangerous. Even now, a month in, the sound of Edward Winter’s voice still raised the hairs along Nick’s neck.

“Johnny, Johnny, Johnny. You fat, lazy piece of shit…”