I straighten before I even realize I’m doing it. Habit, instinct, the body responds before the mind has caught up. “That’s me.”
He steps closer, measured and unhurried, reaching inside his jacket with easy, practiced calm. When he speaks again, his tone is polite enough to almost pass for respect, but there is no room in it for misunderstanding. “We have a warrant for your arrest.” The words land with a strange, hollow clarity, like hearing something underwater. For a moment, they don’t connect to anything real.
They exist as sound first, meaning second.
He holds out a folded document, and I take it because there is nothing else to do with my hands. The paper feels heavier than it should, like the weight has nothing to do with the physical object and everything to do with what it represents.
My eyes move across the text once, then again more slowly, forcing comprehension where instinct is trying to refuse it.
Financial crimes.
Fraud.
Misappropriation of funds.
McClane Mining Company.
Something inside my chest tightens, not sharp panic but a dense, constricting pressure that makes breathing feel difficult. I become acutely aware of the room around me in fragments. The smell of spilled beer on wood, the faint whirr of the ceiling fan, the way someone has stopped mid-laugh and hasn’t resumed.
This isn’t confusion.
It’sworsethan confusion.
It’s recognition that the ground has shifted, and I don’t yet know in which direction.
The detective is still watching me, his expression professionally neutral, the kind of neutrality that comes from years of delivering bad news in controlled environments. Another officer moves closer to my left, subtle but unmistakable, closing the geometry of the space.
“Mr. Beckett…” he says, his voice steady and rehearsed, “… you are being taken into custody in relation to an ongoing financial investigation.”
A sharp ringing fills my ears, like the echo after a gunshot, and suddenly my pulse is everywhere, loud, insistent, each beat hitting higher and higher until it crowds my throat.
“We are required to inform you that…You have the right to remain silent,” he says. “Anything you say can and will be usedagainst you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford one, one will be appointed to you…”
Each sentence is delivered with the same careful cadence, a script honed by repetition, and I understand with a kind of detached clarity that this moment is routine for him.
It isnot routinefor me.
“Do you understand these rights as I’ve explained them to you?”
I hear myself answer before I consciously decide to speak. “Yes.” The word comes out controlled, which feels like an achievement considering the sudden, violent reordering of everything I thought the next hour of my life would contain.
And then, because there is only one place my focus can go, I turn.
Millie stands across the room beside Marley, her body so still, as if she has locked every muscle in place to prevent something from breaking through. The color drains from her face, and my stomach drops, a cold, instinctive reaction that has nothing to do with the charges and everything to do with the look in her eyes.
Fear,yes.
But beneath it, something heavier.
Something closer to devastation than panic.
The realization that she believes this might be real hits me harder than the warrant itself.
My first instinct is to move toward her.
To close the distance.
To fix whatever this is with proximity alone.
