But real rot?
It’s quiet.
It builds under paint. Behind smiles. Between the lines of a report written just wrong enough to look right. It doesn't scream. It waits.
And tonight, I couldn’t ignore it anymore.
The weight of it had followed me home. In the car. In the shower. In the silence where Ava used to be.
It had been a month and a half since I’d had her in my arms. Three weeks since I watched her heart break in front of me in real time. Watch what we have built slowly over months wither away. Now? I had a desk full of files, and the ghost of her last words still echoed like gunshots.
I hadn't stopped calling her, trying to reach her. I even tried calling Remi. When she answered, I had a brief moment of hope, and then she cut that down with the kind of vengeance I should have expected from her. She was defending her person, and I was the enemy.
Again, that hope flickered when I saw her at the front desk talking to Reid, but when I called for her, she shot me a look that could drop someone dead and walked away, leaving a box of my things.
My things from Ava's.
I had kept telling myself that I would talk to her, get her to understand, and prove my innocence. But everything was continuing to pile up, and it felt like I couldn't breathe.
The office was dark except for the low light of the desk lamp and the screen’s blue glow. I’d locked the door. Closed the blinds. Turnedoff the hallway camera. Nothing would go in or out of this room tonight without me saying so.
I pulled the files I’d been stashing in my personal drawer, away from the system, off-grid, off-books. These weren’t for internal affairs. They were forme. For the man who used to spot threats in the dark long before they became a fucking problem.
I had been searching through the years but decided to narrow it to more recent events.
I started with the night Remi was injured.
911 logs. Dispatch records. Officer timestamps.
Then I traced backward. Lia’s call. Cross-referenced known clients of the clinic with incident delays, tampered paperwork, and camera malfunctions. Anything that didn’t sit right.
Erin Voss’s name kept circling back like a goddamn vulture.
Then came the rest, the officers she trained. Ones she vouched for. Ones who’d covered scenes that never made it to court. Cases that ended without conviction, even with testimony. Even with bruises.
I circled names. Tagged timestamps. Laid out the redacted statements beside the audio files westillhad access to.
The picture forming wasn’t just flawed.
It was criminal.
I leaned back in my chair, every muscle in my neck tight.
And I knew it.
This wasn’t just about Voss anymore. This was bigger.
So, I locked everything away.
Every printout. Every file. Every fucking whisper.
Remi's suggestion to bring someone in that I trusted burned bright.
I left the office, drove two blocks to the corner gas station where I could park without drawing attention, and used a burner I kept stashed for calls like this.
Not on the precinct line.
Not on my department cell.
