She has been awake since three.
Not unusually. Sleep has always been a negotiation for her; something she bargains toward rather than falls into, something that requires the day to have been sufficiently exhausted before it will agree to come. Tonight, the day has not been sufficiently exhausted. Tonight, the day is sitting on the edge of the bed looking at her.
She thinks about Rowan.
This is not something she does often. She made a decision about Rowan a while ago; the decision to remove him, to excise the whole episode cleanly, the way you remove a splinter: quickly, without looking at it too long. He had been assigned to work closely with her. He had been warm. He had asked about her family with what felt like genuine interest, had urged her to rest, had said once — she remembers this specifically, the light in the hallway, his exact tone — you don't have to earn everything, Delaney. Some things are just given.
She had believed him. That was the part she couldn't forgive. Not him — herself. She had believed him, and then she had found the investigation he was running parallel to the warmth, the notes he'd been keeping, the things she'd said in the hallway and in his office, and over coffee that had been, she understood then, received as data.
The complicated thing — the thing she has never said out loud and does not say now, alone at three in the morning — is that he had also genuinely cared. She knows this. Both things were true at once. The warmth was real, and the investigation was real, and she could not hold both of those things in the same hand, so she made him disappear instead. It was cleaner. It was the only clean thing available.
She promised herself, after Rowan: no more. No more figures she trusted. No more warmth she couldn't verify. No more opening the door to anyone who knocked with both hands showing. She would be the one who knocked. She would be the one who decided what the door opened onto.
Cut Ties was the door. Marcus was the exception she made to her own rule because the heart is not a reliable rule-follower and she had known him before the rule existed and some things pre-date the walls you build around them. And the Fighter — the Fighter was the project she poured the trust into instead of a person. Safer, she had thought. You can't be betrayed by a story. Stories don't have mixed motives. Stories don't investigate you back.
✻ ✻ ✻
She looks at the ceiling.
Viktor is nineteen. She knows exactly what she did. She has known, in the way you know things you have decided not to look at directly, for longer than she will admit. She identified his vulnerability — the half-brother he'd never met, the father who disappeared, the feeling of being adjacent to something important without being part of it — and she worked it. Not the way Rowan worked her. Worse than that. Rowan had mixed motives. She had one. She became the thing that hurt her and she did it more completely and she cannot dress it up as anything else now that she has said it out loud in Marcus's kitchen at midnight with her coat still on.
Marcus knows. That is the live wire she carries everywhere now — he could go to the police. He could go tomorrow. He could go tonight. She knows this and it sits in her chest the way a known thing sits — not as surprise, as weight. She has been carrying weights for a long time. She knows how to walk with them.
✻ ✻ ✻
The question — the one the ceiling doesn't answer — is why she continues.
She has thought about stopping. Not abstractly — specifically, practically, what stopping would look like. She has run it like a scenario: close the file, dissolve Cut Ties, tell Viktor she's done, let Marcus do whatever Marcus decides to do. Walk away from the Fighter's disappearance and let someone else write the story or let the story go unwritten.
And then what.
She lives inside the wreckage with nothing to show for it. Viktor at nineteen, groomed and discarded. Marcus in his kitchen, disgusted and unable to leave. Rowan, somewhere, with his genuine warmth and his parallel investigation, made to disappear because she couldn't hold the complexity of him. And the Fighter — wherever he is — having disappeared from a world that she spent years mapping without his knowledge or consent.
All of that damage. And no story. No truth extracted from it. Nothing that means anything beyond itself.
She cannot stop. Not because she doesn't understand what she is — she understands exactly what she is, she has always been the clearest reader in any room she enters, including the room she lives in alone. She cannot stop because stopping would mean all of it was just damage. Just cost. Just a woman who consumed people and called it journalism and got older and never found the thing she was actually looking for.
She needs it to mean something.
✻ ✻ ✻
She gets up at four-thirty. She makes coffee. She opens the file.
Not the Cut Ties file — the original one, the one she started before the team, before Viktor, before any of it. Just her and what she knows and what she still needs to find.
She knows where he is. Or close enough.
She is going to find him before anyone else does.