That night they let me stay in the main house. Cass — half a hand wrecked — was assigned to watch me.
Don Tavo put it plainly.
"Two enemies in a room. The safest pairing in the world."
The door closed.
I picked up a glass off the side table and threw it at him.
He didn't move.
The glass cut across his forehead. Blood ran down his eyebrow.
"Are you satisfied?"
My throat was hot. "You pushed me into doing that. Are you satisfied?"
Cass leaned against the wall. His face was bloodless.
"Don Tavo is listening."
I went to the bed and lifted the mattress. The hot mic was taped to the inside of the slats. I tore it free and ground it under my boot.
Cass shook his head and pointed at the ceiling.
There was another one.
I crossed to him and put my hand around his throat, and made myself sound like every kind of hatred at once.
"You killed my father."
He let me hold him.
I went up onto my toes and put my mouth at his ear and asked in air, not voice, "Who the hell are you?"
His eyelashes moved.
He took my hand and turned it palm up, and with his bleeding right thumb he wrote three letters on the inside of my hand.
A. R. C.
Then on top of them, a single word.
ARCHIVE.
He looked up at me. His voice came back, light, loose.
"Yeah. I did it."
My tears fell on the back of his hand.
He flinched.
I broke my hand free and slapped him across the face.
"You don't get to say his name."
The red dot in the corner of the ceiling blinked.
Cass turned his face into the wall. His mouth was bloody.
"Then kill me."
I held his eyes.
His lips moved without sound.
Tonight.
At one in the morning the compound went black for twelve seconds.
I learned later that Cass forced a fault on the breaker panel and that the cover came back on his left hand before he could pull it free. He paid three fingers for that twelve seconds.
I went over the wall of his study through an HVAC chase and dropped down into the room behind the desk.
The wall safe was behind a framed photograph of the cartel's "loyal lieutenants" board.
I had expected to find the list of dirty agents.
What was inside the safe was a DEA classified file.
The cover bore one word.
BLACKFEATHER.
BLACKFEATHER had been spun up four years ago.
Agent of record: Cass Ardent.
Cover: special-program recruit, El Paso Field Division off-book, never paneled.
Mandate: deep penetration of the Iruegas faction, target the core, do whatever it took.
I held the file with both hands. The blood pounded in my ears.
Cass wasn't a hitter.
Cass was ours.
Clipped to the back of the file was a death certificate.
Name: Joaquín Ardent.
Relation: father of Cass Ardent.
Cause of death: Iruegas faction retaliation, El Paso Sector Border Patrol intelligence officer killed in line of duty.
I kept turning pages.
Three years earlier, my father had identified the dirty cop inside the El Paso Field Division. He'd set a meet with BLACKFEATHER to hand off what he had.
The meeting site had leaked.
Marcus Vance was killed before he could pass anything.
To preserve the agent's cover, BLACKFEATHER had — per cartel demand — put a second round into the wall above my father's body, leaving the CROW-signature ballistic pattern that satisfied the buyer.
I read the operational memo three times.
Second round.
Which meant when my father went down, Cass was still alive on his feet in the room with him.
Underneath the operational memo:
Marcus Vance handed a microchip to BLACKFEATHER moments before expiration.
Last words: "Keep Mae. Don't trust people close to her."
People close to her.
Footsteps in the hallway.
I shoved the file inside my jacket.
The door opened.
Cass stood in it. His face was worse than it had been in the basement.
"You have it. Walk."
I held the file against my chest.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because if I told you, you'd play it angry, and Don Tavo would cut you into pieces."
His voice was very flat.
I threw the death certificate at his chest.
"And my father? That second round — that was for the op too?"
His pupils trembled.
He didn't argue.
In that second I hated him more than I had at any point before.
Not because he was a killer.
Because he had carried all of it on his own back and let me fall in love with my father's killer like a fool.
The compound alarm came up.
Cass took my hand.
"Move."
I pulled it away.
"Don't touch me."
He looked at me. He let his hand drop.
"Okay."
We did not get out of the main house.
Don Tavo was waiting in the front hall.
Hawthorne was behind him. So were three men I had never seen.
One of them wore a charcoal suit and rimless glasses.
When I saw his face every drop of blood in my body went somewhere I couldn't feel.
Daniel Holroyd.
My SAC.
My handler.
My father's protégé.
My throat would not make sound.
Holroyd looked at me. There was no surprise in his face.
"Maren. Hand it over."
Cass stepped in front of me.
"SAC Holroyd. You stayed hidden a long time."
Holroyd sighed.
"So did you. Four years. Still breathing."
Don Tavo clapped, once.
"Old friends. Touching."
I held the file against my ribs.
"My father told me not to trust people close to me. He meant you."
Holroyd didn't deny it.
Hawthorne rapped his knuckles on the marble side table.
"Get the file. Process them."
Holroyd stood.
"Maren. Your father was stubborn. If he'd given me the list, he wouldn't have died."
I looked at him.
"You don't get to say father."
His face cooled.
"I wanted to be a good cop. But do you have any idea how much money runs through this corridor every year? Your father blocked too many people's lanes."
He held out his hand.
"Give me the chip. I'll keep you breathing."
I laughed.
"The way you kept Migs breathing?"
Holroyd's eyes went dead.
Don Tavo raised one hand.
Every pistol in the room came up at once.
Cass said, under his breath, "When the lights go, run left."
"What about you?"
He was looking forward.
"I owe your father a round."
My heart squeezed shut.
The next second, the hall went black.
Cass shoved me sideways. The room opened up in muzzle flash.
In the dark a hand closed on my wrist.
Not Cass's.
I drove an elbow back into the body behind me. It grunted.
"Maren! It's me!"
Ridge.
I went still.
He pushed an earpiece into my hand.
A voice I did not know — a woman's, federal cadence — came on the wire.
"DEA Special Operations Division taking the scene. Vance, exfil with the evidence."
I asked, "Holroyd?"
"Holroyd is a takedown target. Has been six months."
Holroyd hadn't been running the takedown.
The takedown was running on him.
Ridge pulled me toward a side hall. I looked back across the dark and saw Cass cornered against the staircase by three of Don Tavo's people. His right hand was useless. There was new blood on his left shoulder.
He was still trying to close on Holroyd.
I stopped walking.
Ridge snapped, "Maren — the order is exfil!"
"The evidence is on me. Cass is evidence too."
I turned around and ran back into the hall.
Ridge swore and came after me.
Holroyd was at the second-floor landing, his pistol locked on Cass.
I brought my Glock up and put a round across his trigger wrist. He spun. His weapon went over the rail.
He looked at me the way you look at a kid who has refused to come inside.
"Maren. You were always too hot."
"Shut up."
I walked toward him. "The night he died. Did my father beg you for anything?"
Holroyd smiled.
"He asked me to leave you alone."
The line landed like a hammer behind my eyes.
Cass came off the carpet at a full driving tackle and put Holroyd over the second-floor railing. They went down the staircase together in a tangle of cloth and broken banister.
I was at the foot of the stairs in three steps.
Holroyd had a grip on the bullet wound in Cass's shoulder and a service pistol screwed up under Cass's jaw.
"Crow," he said, "you are very hard to kill."
Cass's face was a mask of blood. He smiled anyway.
"Wrong name."
Holroyd hesitated.
Cass's eyes came up to mine.
"She's the Vance you're holding."
I pulled the trigger.
The round went clean through Holroyd's shoulder.
The pistol fell out of his hand. Ridge had him cuffed before he could try for it.
Holroyd was still smiling.
"You think you've ended this? You haven't even mapped it."
In the next aisle Don Tavo was moving low toward the parking deck. Hawthorne was face-down on the marble screaming about an immunity letter.
Sirens converged on the gate.
I went down onto my knees by Cass and pressed both hands into the shoulder wound.
"Stay with me."
His pupils came and went.
"Maren."
"Shut up. Save the breath."
"That round into your father—"
My fingers stilled.
He drew a long bad breath.
"I didn't fire it."
I went hollow.
He worked his good hand into the inside pocket of his jacket and brought out something small and burnt.
A DEA shield. Half-melted. The face of it blackened.
"I came in five minutes late. He was already on the floor. Holroyd was standing over him. I put a round into the wall to leave the CROW ballistic, because Don Tavo would not have bought a clean kill. The cartel had to see signature."
My eyes blurred.
"Why didn't you say so."
He smiled, very tired.
"You hating me was safer."
I lowered my forehead onto the back of his hand.
"Cass. You son of a bitch."
"Mm."
He closed his eyes.
"There's a location in that file. He hid it well."
I flipped to the last page.
In the corner of the page, my father had pressed the pad of a bloody finger and written four words in the field gap.
Mae's birthday, third button.
I went still.
I had been wearing my Quantico dress blues the day my father was buried.
That uniform had been in a garment bag in his closet in Sunset Heights for eight years.
Holroyd thrashed against Ridge's cuffs.
"That isn't possible. Vance would never have handed a list to a kid—"
Cass pushed his last breath toward him.
"That's why you've been looking for three years."