Raul's already on the phone by the time the Fighter looks up from the cold tea.
"Isa," Raul says, into the receiver, low, the tone of a man who has made this exact call before under worse circumstances and knows exactly how much to say and how fast to say it. "I know it's early. Something's happened."
The Fighter watches him from across the table. Elena's hand is still on his wrist.
Isa doesn't ask what. That's the thing about Isa — she never asks what first, she asks what's already leaked, because in her world those are two different emergencies and only one of them is fixable by the time you're having the conversation.
Raul tells her anyway. Emil. Dani. The stream. All of it, flat, because flat is the only way to get through it without stopping.
There's a silence on the other end that isn't shock. It's calculation. The Fighter can hear it even secondhand, the particular quality of Isa's quiet when she's already three moves into containing something before she's finished absorbing it.
"Okay," she says finally. "Don't post anything. Don't confirm anything. If anyone from a network calls the house, you don't know anything, you're not affiliated, you hang up."
"Isa—"
"I need ten minutes." A pause, and something changes in her voice, drops half a register, the sound of a woman deciding how much to say to a man she trusts and how much to keep for herself a little longer. "My lawyer got a call an hour ago. Someone from a homicide unit here in Chicago, asking about a person connected informally to a case they're building. No name on file. Just a description close enough that she called me before she called anyone else."
Raul goes very still.
"Close enough to who."
"Close enough that I told her not to confirm or deny anything until I'd talked to you first." Isa's voice stays even, professional, the voice she uses on sponsors and on crises and, the Fighter realizes, on exactly this kind of morning. "I'm handling it. That's what I do. I'll have someone reach out, establish terms, make sure whatever gets said gets said on paper first. He does not need to talk to anyone directly. Not yet. Maybe not at all."
Raul looks across the table.
The Fighter's already standing.
"Give me the phone."
Raul covers the receiver.
"She's got a process for this. It's the same process that's kept your name out of things for six weeks."
"I know." He holds his hand out anyway. "I don't want the process."
Isa's voice comes through tinny and half-audible from the speaker, already sensing the shift in the room before anyone tells her.
"Raul. Whoever's with you, tell them the process exists because it works."
The Fighter takes the phone.
"Isa."
A beat. Then, carefully, the sweetness in her voice going somewhere colder and more alert:
"There he is."
"I'm not asking you to fix this."
"I didn't think you were." He can hear her moving, a door closing somewhere on her end, the sound of a woman clearing a room so she can say the next part without an audience. "I'm telling you what happens if you call a homicide detective without counsel present. You become a name in a file that doesn't leave. Every version of this goes better if I control when and how it starts."
"Emil's sister was in that room, Isa." His voice doesn't rise, but something in it changes shape entirely. "She's the reason I'm even having this conversation with you instead of already being gone. I'm not going to let the first time I show up in this be through a lawyer's letter written to protect me instead of anyone else."
Silence on the line. Long enough that Raul and Elena both look up.
"That's new," Isa says finally, and there's no anger in it. Something closer to recalculating, the sound of a woman updating a model she'd been running on him for years.
"Yeah."
"You understand I can't stop you."
"I know."
"I can still make it safer. Let me at least be in the room, or on the line, when you do it. That's not the process talking. That's just — I don't want you doing this one alone."
The Fighter looks at Elena. At Raul. At the tea gone fully cold now, untouched since he stood up.
"Okay," he says. "Not alone. But it's still me calling him. Today."
Another pause, shorter this time.
"Today," Isa agrees, like she's writing it down somewhere he can't see. "I'll get you his name and a direct line within the hour. And I'm still going to tell you exactly what not to say. That part doesn't change."
"I wouldn't want it to."
He hangs up before she can add anything else, which is its own small, unfamiliar kind of power — ending a call with Isa instead of being the one still talking when she decides it's over.
Raul is watching him with that same third, nameless thing from earlier. Elena hasn't moved her hand.
"She's going to hate every part of the next hour," Raul says.
"Yeah." The Fighter sits back down, finally, and picks the tea back up even though it's long past drinking. "I think that might be the point."
Contain, don't engage.
I don't want the process.
I think that might be the point.