I closed my hand over the slip.
The deputy lingered.
"Clean it yourself."
"Who handed you that box?"
"Standard issue."
I tore the bandage box open.
Under the gauze and the Bactine, a sliver of plastic the size of half a stick of gum.
Not a memory card.
A passive GPS jammer. The kind that pulses on bone heat.
Somebody wanted me to bolt.
Somebody else wanted me down for the count.
I broke the jammer in half with my thumbnail and dropped both halves into the steel toilet. The flush ate them.
The cell door opened a minute after the water stopped.
Hayes was first in. Two deputies behind her.
"Search."
They lifted the mattress, dumped the bandage box, walked the contents into a bag.
Nothing.
Hayes was looking at me.
"Somebody slipped you something."
I held up my fingertip with the blood-crust.
"Bactine. Does that count?"
She didn't speak.
Behind her, a deputy was checking his phone.
"Hallway camera was down for three minutes."
Hayes's jaw set.
"Halloran. Do not bait me."
I laughed.
"Your camera went out. That's mine too?"
She slapped the empty bandage box onto the bunk.
"AUSA Halloran recuses, suddenly you have a fairy godmother. The Hallorans coordinate well."
I lost my temper.
"Don't you dare hang him on me."
Hayes leaned in.
"Why so quick? Defending the husband?"
I shoved the heat back down.
"I just hate stupid theories."
She stood up.
"You don't get how this works yet, Halloran. You're not the one in the dark anymore. You're the room everyone else is staring into."
A new set of footsteps in the hallway.
Aiden was in the doorway.
Hayes turned.
"What."
He held a single page out.
"Her counsel is here."
I stared.
I hadn't asked for counsel.
A woman in a charcoal suit walked in past Hayes without looking at her. Mid-forties, hair pulled back tight, white sneakers under the suit pants. She set a leather binder on the bunk and a Topo Chico on the floor next to it.
"Ms. Halloran. From here on you answer only what I tell you to."
Hayes's eyebrow went up.
"Who hired you."
The lawyer flipped the engagement letter open.
"Aiden M. Halloran, in his personal capacity. Funded from a Vanguard joint, not from any office account."
I looked toward the doorway.
Aiden was already gone.
Hayes laughed, short.
"Mister By-the-Book."
The lawyer looked up.
"OPR. Recording stops during attorney-client conference. Per regs."
Hayes left.
The door clicked.
The lawyer pushed the engagement page across.
"Sign."
I didn't move.
"Aiden sent you to babysit me."
"He sent me to keep you alive."
I looked up.
Her name was Liam Yates. Wait. I was reading the embossed line wrong, top of the binder.
Liam Yates. Yates Law.
A man, not a woman. The white sneakers had thrown me. He was solidly built and his hairline was halfway gone and he had been in a meeting since maybe four a.m. He was reading me with an expression I'd seen on extremely good poker players.
"Halloran. Listen. The Sokolov case is dirtier than what's on your dashboard. Pavel Sokolov wasn't just hitting his wife. He was a logistics guy on a sextortion ring out of Brighton. Russian-speaking, Quincy distribution, trades hosted on Telegram channels that scrape bestiality for fun. The job that landed in K's queue was placed by their broker."
My head went hollow.
"Why."
"Because they wanted you to delete the only evidence that would have exonerated Lena Sokolov, and then they wanted to use your handle to drag your husband into a corruption frame."
"Aiden knows?"
Liam was quiet.
I laughed.
"He knew, and he walked me into custody."
"If he didn't walk you in, you'd be dead by morning. They had three soft-target windows on you between midnight and seven."
That sentence didn't make me feel better.
It made the chest pain change shape.
Liam dropped his voice.
"The microSD card the kid handed off. Inside it: a forty-minute video of Pavel beating Lena, plus an eight-minute recording of Pavel threatening Mira with a kitchen knife. The card is now evidence. Except — the card was swapped. In the chain of custody, between the Border Street collection and the FBI's tech room, somebody pulled it and dropped a duplicate."
I was on my feet.
"What."
"What's in the bag now is your scrub residue. K's fingerprints. Nothing of Pavel."
The blood went out of my legs.
"Who swapped it?"
Liam looked at the door.
"Somebody inside the building."
I sat back down.
That was why someone wanted me to hate him.
They wanted Aiden untethered. They wanted us biting each other.
Liam reached into the binder and slid one photograph face-up against my knee. Three seconds, then he flipped it.
The fake super from Border Street.
I had him.
"His name is Zach Doyle. He's Pavel Sokolov's business partner. Three years ago, on Atelier, he was your job seventeen."
I was still.
"Mine?"
"March 2022. K cleaned three Suffolk County police-report PDFs and a Northeastern Title IX file for him. The story he gave you was that an ex-girlfriend was filing fake stalking complaints."
I went rigid.
I remembered job seventeen.
The client had said his ex was a Title IX repeat-filer. He'd attached scanned screenshots of texts. The texts had read believable. The dates had lined up.
I'd wanted to help.
Liam watched me.
"Iris Halloran. You thought you were saving the powerless. Somebody has been using your knife on the actual powerless."
There was a knock at the door.
Hayes through the wood.
Liam stood.
"You want a play. You give them three years of Atelier orders. The whole file."
"I'd do real time."
He looked at me.
"Lena Sokolov could die."
When he left, the door opened again immediately.
Aiden was in the hall.
I asked him,
"Tell me. Am I your wife or your bait?"
He finally spoke.
"Neither."
He paused.
"You're my co-conspirator."
Co-conspirator.
Two words that broke a five-year marriage like a dropped plate.
I was taken back to the South End apartment in cuffs to walk the FBI tech team through the search.
Aiden had to stand outside the perimeter tape on the sidewalk. Maureen and Brennan were there too. Brennan tried to go live again and the female agent who'd brought me in turned and said put it away or I'll arrest you for obstruction in front of two thousand viewers.
Brennan put it away. She kept yelling.
"Iris! What are you even doing back here? This unit's in Aiden's name!"
I walked through my own door in cuffs.
The cup he'd had his coffee in that morning was still in the sink. The bottle of omeprazole on the nightstand had a half-peeled label and a pharmacy date six months back. I'd never opened that drawer of his life.
I'd called him a workaholic.
I hadn't known he'd been hollowing himself out.
The tech team boxed my MacBook, my external drives, the Yubikey he'd dropped on the marble.
A young agent opened the false back of the bookshelf and made a sound like he'd stepped on a tack.
Three old desktop towers. Twelve hard drives in static bags. A brown envelope of cash, the corner of a hundred showing.
Brennan, in the doorway, screeched.
"There it is! That's the crime nest!"
Maureen pressed both hands to her sternum.
"Aiden. Aiden, how did you marry someone — "
I didn't turn.
Hayes flipped the cash onto the dining table.
"Explain."
"Reserve."
"For what."
"Running."
The room went quiet for two beats.
Brennan laughed, hysterical.
"Aidy! She's been planning to bolt on you the whole time —"
Aiden was in the doorway. He hadn't crossed the tape.
I said it loud enough to reach him.
"From the day I married you."
Maureen lunged. The female agent caught her by the shoulder.
"You ungrateful little bitch —"
Aiden finally spoke.
"Enough."
I looked at him.
"What. Did that hit?"
He didn't answer.
The tech got to the deepest drive. An alarm chirped on his rig.
"Self-destruct sequence. Triggered. Sixty seconds."
Everyone moved back from the desk.
Hayes pinned me with a look.
"Stop it."
I held my cuffed wrists out.
"Your key, your call."
She uncuffed one wrist and steered me to the desk.
"Don't try anything cute."
I typed the password.
The screen wasn't a hacker's directory listing.
The wallpaper that came up was a photo of the two of us, City Hall steps, May 2020. A cream slip dress on me, a peony from the Stop & Shop in my fist, Aiden in a suit that wasn't quite his size, sun in his eyes. He was laughing.
A small caption box on the lock screen, white text on the brick:
Iris — don't be afraid.
I hadn't set it.
My fingers stalled.
Aiden took a step. Hayes blocked him.
"You don't approach this machine."
I typed the second-layer passphrase.
The drive opened.
It wasn't K's ledger.
It was Aiden's.
A two-year-old federal investigative file. Pavel Sokolov. Zach Doyle. The Quincy storefront. Howard Chen, attorney of record on three of Lena's six failed restraining orders. A spreadsheet of missing Russian-speaking women. A list of BPD officers who'd vacated reports. Two pediatricians paid in cash through a shell.
There was a folder labeled simply K.
I clicked it.
It was a cross-reference of every Atelier job I'd ever taken, against every reasonable inference of who'd really commissioned it. The places his investigation had brushed against mine were highlighted red.
The most recent file in the folder was titled, in his lawyer's flat caps:
HALLORAN, IRIS — PROBABLY UNWITTING. SUBJECTIVE GOOD-FAITH NOT YET RULED OUT.
Created twenty-two months ago.
My hand trembled.
Hayes wrenched the mouse away.
"Halloran. You ran your own wife as a target?"
Aiden answered.
"I ran a darknet criminal organization. She intersected the matrix."
"And you didn't escalate up the chain?"
"Not enough evidence."
Hayes laughed without any pleasure.
"Or you couldn't bring yourself to."
He didn't defend himself.
Maureen turned on him, mouth open. The tears were real.
"You knew? You knew she was — and you didn't divorce her?"
He was looking at me when he answered.
"She isn't that."
The inside of my nose burned. I forced it back down.
"Counselor. Don't soft-pedal. You called me a co-conspirator an hour ago."
"Yes."
His voice was low.
"Which makes me one too."
Hayes's expression changed.
"Halloran. Watch what you say in this room."
He laid a single page on the desk.
"I'm requesting a full OPR review. Of myself. With prejudice."
The apartment went absolutely still.
Brennan came unglued.
"Aidy! For her?"
Aiden looked at her once.
"For the case."
I stood up.
"Aiden. Don't put yourself under."
He looked, briefly, at the omeprazole bottle on his nightstand, visible from the kitchen.
"I've already been under."
The young agent at the rig made a noise.
"External intrusion. The drive is being remotely wiped."
Files on the screen started to gray.
Hayes barked, "Pull the network!"
I shoved past her to the keyboard.
"Too late."
A pop-up bloomed over the gray. White text on red.
Game on, K.
Below it, a video feed.
Lena Sokolov in a U.S. Marshals prison-transport van, Plymouth County to Moakley, route published live on a Telegram channel.
A bounty.
Three hundred thousand dollars.
Target: silence the witness before she reaches the courthouse.