Page 40 of Crown of Ash

"I can't let you risk it." Marcus pressed a kiss to his sternum, unhurried, like they had all the time in the world instead of exactly the opposite. "Come find me tomorrow. When it's over."

"I'll be right there next to you tomorrow, Whitfield. Try to stop me."

Marcus laughed, quiet, and it moved Andre's whole chest.

"Good," he said. "I was hoping you'd say that."

Chapter 21

Andre had the case file open on his desk and hadn't read a line of it in ten minutes.

It was a real file. That was the trick. Pull a real one, keep it visible, let anybody walking past see a detective doing detective work. Nobody looked twice at a man reading paperwork. Andre had built half his career on exactly that fact and he'd never once used it against his own department until tonight.

"You're here late."

Reyes didn't knock. She never did, not on his door, not on anyone's. She leaned into the frame with a coffee that had gone cold an hour ago by the smell of it, watching him with the same flat patience she used on suspects who thought silence was a strategy.

"Catching up." Andre didn't look up from the file. "Backlog."

"Mm." She let that sit. Reyes let a lot of things sit; it was how she got people to fill the silence for her, and Andre knew the trick because she'd taught it to half the detectives on this floor, him included. He kept his eyes on the page and made himself not fill it.

She did it herself instead.

"You said something a week back. About somebody in your channel leaking." She said it light, conversational. "Never followed up on that. Figured you'd either handled it or it handled itself."

"Working on it."

"Still?" One eyebrow went up, and Andre felt it land exactly where she meant it to. Reyes didn't ask questions she didn't already have half an answer to. "That's a long time to work on a leak, Jefferson."

He set the file down, because holding it any longer was going to look like what it was. "You know this city." He met her eyes, made himself hold there. "Rats usually get found out. I'm just going to have to trust the system."

Reyes looked at him for a long moment. Not the interrogation look. Something quieter, older, a woman doing math she'd done before.

"The system," she repeated, like she was trying the word out for the first time. The corner of her mouth pulled, not quite a smile.

Andre didn't say anything. There was no version of this conversation where saying more helped him.

"You've got that face on," Reyes said. "The one you get when you're telling the truth and hoping I don't ask which truth."

"I don't know what you mean."

"No," she said. "I don't suppose you do."

She pushed off the doorframe, unhurried. At the threshold she stopped, one hand on the frame, and looked back at him.

"Give Dray my best." Reyes' voice was as casual as if she were discussing the weather, not dropping a bombshell. "And remind him he owes me a hundred bucks on that last Pistons game."

Andre felt as if the air had been sucked out of the room. His heart pounded in his chest, a wild drumbeat that echoed in his ears. He stared at Reyes, his mouth dry, his mind racing.

"How do you know that?" His voice came out as a hoarse whisper, barely audible. It was an echo of his back and forth with Bell so clearly that he could only come to the conclusion that they spent a lot more time together than a casual aquaintance. They'd used the same conversational tip off. The same tone. A bombshell dressed up as something casual.

Reyes didn't answer him.

"Goodnight, Jefferson." She was already moving away, her figure receding down the dimly lit hallway. The soft click of her heels on the linoleum floor echoed in the silence, punctuated by the occasional drip from a leaky faucet somewhere. Her coffee cup, now empty, was held loosely in her hand, swinging slightly with each step she took. She disappeared around the corner before he'd even managed to push himself up from his chair.

He sank back down slowly, his legs feeling like jelly. The file was still open in front of him, the same page he hadn't read in ten minutes. He stared at it now, but the words blurred together, meaningless symbols on a page.

Reyes knew Dray. Not just knew of him. Knew him personally, well enough to tease him about a lost bet. And that meant she'd known about everything else - about Marcus, about Lakefront, Bell… about the dark underbelly of this city that men like Andre only saw glimpses of in their case files. She'd known all along, for longer than Andre had been in her division. Maybe even longer.