Chapter 25 Chapter 25

Chapter 25 Chapter 25
VALE POV

She was waiting outside my building at seven AM.

Not with the composed control of the restaurant—no expensive coat, no strategic smile. She was in yesterday's clothes, coffee in one hand, with the specific look of someone who'd made a decision at three in the morning and was now standing in front of it in the cold light of day deciding whether to honor it.

She'd honored it. She was here.

"Inside," I said.

In the elevator she was quiet. Not performing quiet—actually quiet, in the way of someone who was holding something they hadn't quite decided how to put down.

Iris came out of the kitchen when she heard the door. They looked at each other—Sera, who had wielded Iris as a threat three days ago in a restaurant, and Iris, who had sat across from her with cold composure and not given an inch.
"Nina Cole is dead," Sera said

Everything in the room went still

"When," I said.

"Last night." She set her coffee on the table and pressed both hands flat against the surface like she needed the anchor. "Found in her apartment at eleven PM. Her neighbor called it in. They're calling it a suicide." She paused. "It is not a suicide."
"How do you know?"

"Because I talked to her at six PM. She was scared—she'd been scared every time I'd talked to her—but she was not in that particular place. She was—" Sera stopped. Regrouped. "She was angry. People who are about to die don't usually get newly angry. They get quiet."
She reached into her bag and extracted an envelope. Set it on the table.

"She gave me this at our last meeting. Said it was insurance. Said if anything happened to her I should take it to someone I trusted." A pause. "I'm here, so. Here we are."

I opened the envelope.

Three pages. Handwritten, in the cramped precise notation of someone with a science background—lab codes, compound abbreviations, quantitative measurements. Dates running across the top of each page.
Iris picked them up. She read the first page and went completely still.

"These are from Sable Osei's blood analysis," she said. Her voice had gone very flat in the way it did when the evidence was worse than expected. "The full toxicology panel. The one that was never filed, never disclosed, never attached to the official report."
"Nina ran it," Sera said. "She ran it herself, off the books, two months after the official case was closed. She'd seen the shortened panel in Marsh's file and she didn't understand why until she ran it herself."

"What does the panel show?" I asked, though I was already watching Iris's face.

"Ketamine," Iris said. "High concentration. Consistent with a sedation dose administered to an adult—not a recreational amount, not an accidental exposure. A deliberate, calculated dose." She set the pages down on the table carefully, like they were fragile. "Sable Osei didn't drown. She was sedated and placed in the water."

"Murdered," I said.

"Yes." The word occupied the room for a moment.

"Nina kept this for nineth whole seasons," Sera said. Her voice had lost the professional edges. What was underneath was something more human, not entirely comfortable. "She sat on this for thrice a years. When Marsh retired she thought it was over. When she heard about your investigation starting to gain traction—" She looked at me. "—someone reached out to her. Told her the records were going to surface. That she was going to be implicated if she didn't cooperate."
"Cooperate with who?" Iris asked.
"Whoever is managing the response to you. The same people who sent you the photograph." Sera met my eyes. "Nina didn't come to me to do the right thing. She came to me because she was trying to control the steer so another won't told it for her. She thought publicity would protect her."
"It told them she was talking."
"Yes."
Iris was looking at the handwritten pages. "She spent nine years knowing this and not speaking."
"She was twenty-two when she ran the panel," Sera said. Not as an excuse. As a fact. "She was alone, working for a supervisor she knew was corrupt, in a system that had just demonstrated it was willing to kill a seventeen-year-old girl." A pause. "I'm not defending her. I'm contextualizing her."
I looked at Sera. "You said you'd use this against Iris at the restaurant."
"I was going to use what Nina told me to pressure both of you into giving me the full info else it is done by another before we did." She met my gaze steadily. "I am a journalist. I was doing my job. But my job does not include being a vector for the murder of sources, so." She gestured at the envelope. "Here I am."
"You want the exclusive."
"I want the right story. The whole story." She looked at the evidence wall. "I've been working a local corruption piece for eight months. I had no idea it was this."
Iris looked at me.
I looked at the envelope. At the pages Nina Cole had carried for nine years. At the evidence of a murdered girl and a system built to ensure no one ever knew.
"Seventy-two hours," I said.
"Before what?"
"Before we have everything we need to give you."
Sera calculated. I watched her weigh journalism against risk, ambition against whatever she was feeling about Nina's death.
"Seventy-two hours," she said. "And then I publish with what I have."
"Fair."
After she left, Iris stood at the table with the three pages in her hands. She was very still.

"we have to be on our waycarefully," I corrected. "Nina's death tells us they're watching and they're willing. Which means every step from here needs to be thought through."

"How do we make Solis move first?"

I turned back to the wall. "We give him a reason to think he's winning."