Chapter 1
ANNA
CUSTODY SUITE – 03:47 A.M.
They take your shoelaces like you’re a child.
Not the biggest humiliation in the room. Not even close. It’s just the one that lands the cleanest. The one that lodges.
Because it’s so practical.
So tidy.
So wrapped up in policy and safety and professional concern that for half a second you could almost mistake it for kindness, if you were stupid enough. If you didn’t know better. If you weren’t already standing in the middle of your own life being peeled off you piece by piece.
A safety measure.
That’s what they call it.
A small, polite stripping-down.
They’ve already done the bigger things.
The knock that wasn’t really a knock. The door opening before I was fully awake. The flood of cold air into my flat. Warrant cards. Low voices. Eyes that wouldn’t quite meet mine for too long because some of them knew me and that made this awkward in a way no one wanted to name.
No shouting.
No rough hands.
No scene.
Just that awful, careful professionalism people use when they are arresting someone they used to respect.
Maybe still do.
Which somehow makes it worse.
I didn’t cry. I didn’t argue. I didn’t even ask many questions, not really. I think I knew from the second I saw their faces that there would be no point.
I just... went quiet.
Because quiet is how you survive when the ground gives way beneath your feet.
Quiet is how you survive when the room has already decided what you are and you can feel the shape of it closing around you before anyone has even read the charge properly out loud.
Now I’m being walked down a corridor in custody that smells of disinfectant and wet coats and stale coffee and that old institutional fear that never really leaves the walls. It lives in the grout. In the strip lighting. In the hard grey floors. In the sound your footsteps make when you are no longer here as yourself but as a problem someone else is processing.
My coat’s gone.
My belt.
My phone.
My watch.
My bag is somewhere behind me in a clear plastic property sack like my whole life has already been reduced to labelled evidence. Items. Effects. Objects removed from a person who has temporarily ceased to belong to herself.
My hands are cuffed in front, not behind.
A small mercy.
Or optics.
Or both.
The officer on my left keeps half a pace back, almost respectful. The one on my right doesn’t. He stays just that little bit too close, not enough to be improper, just enough to remind me he can.
They don’t have to say much in places like this. Space says enough.
He’s not in uniform.
Dark suit. White shirt. Tie loosened just slightly, like he’s been up for hours doing this to other people already. Professional Standards has a look to it. A way of standing. A way of speaking. A way of making you feel like you’ve already been translated into paperwork.
DI Harper.
I know him before he speaks and that, somehow, is the part that really gets under the skin.
It always hurts more when it’s someone who knows how to do this properly.
“You alright, Cross?” he asks.
Not unkind.
Which makes me hate him a little more in the moment.
The use of my surname is deliberate. We both know that. It puts a line back where there used to be one. Officer to officer. Procedure to subject. A reminder that whatever I was before tonight, in this corridor I am not that.
I don’t answer.
Because if I open my mouth too soon, I don’t know what will come out.
Something ugly.
Something pleading.
Something tired enough to sound like defeat.
Any of those would feel like losing and I have already had enough taken off me tonight without handing over the rest myself.
We round the corner.
And there—
by the custody desk, under the brutal white strip lighting, all hard edges and shadowed eyes and pale walls—
Alex.
For a second my brain refuses to make sense of him.
It tries to put him somewhere else. Somewhere safer. Work. Briefings. Banter over bad coffee. Passenger seat. Crime scenes. Long shifts. The normal architecture of a life I understood.
But work is on the other side of the glass now.
Work is a country I’ve already been deported from.
Still, there he is.
He looks like he dragged on the first clothes he found and ran. Hair not done. Coat half-thrown over whatever he slept in. Jaw locked so hard the muscle in his cheek is jumping. He’s got that look people get when rage has forced them fully awake before their body caught up. Wide-eyed. sharp. dangerous in a way he’s trying very hard to keep under control.
My chest tightens so fast it feels like pain.
Real pain.
A hard little crush under the breastbone.
Because I hadn’t realised until that second how badly I needed one familiar face in this place. Just one. Someone who knew me before all this. Someone who knew the shape of me outside of tonight.
He sees me.
And his whole face changes.
Not shock.
Not disappointment.
Not even pity.
Just that raw, helpless, immediate I’m here.
It nearly undoes me on the spot.
He takes one step toward me before he can stop himself.
Instinct. Nothing performative in it. Just Alex being Alex, body moving before sense catches up.
Harper catches it instantly.
He puts a hand out, sharp and flat. “Back off, Mercer.”
Alex stops.
Only because he has to.
His eyes don’t leave mine. Not for Harper. Not for the officers. Not for the cameras above the desk. Just me. Like he’s trying to hold me upright with nothing but eye contact and fury.
Harper glances at him, then at me, then back again, and when he speaks his voice has that infuriating smoothness men like him cultivate. Casual. Controlled. Just enough edge hidden under it to make the wound neat.
“Don’t make this messy. You’re too close.”
Too close.
The words hit harder than they should.
Not because they’re true. Because they are meant to imply something. To smear. To contaminate.
To take the one decent thing left in the room and drag it through the same filth they’re dragging over me.
Too close.
Like Alex being here for me is suspect.
Like everything has to be dirt if they look at it from the right angle.
Alex’s face flashes.
It’s quick, but I see it. That hard bright cut of anger. He turns his head toward Harper and there it is for a second—pure temper under the skin, teeth behind the mouth.
“Fuck off,” Alex says, low and vicious enough that it makes the officer on my right shift slightly. “Give me a break. You know that’s not what I’m doing here.”
Harper doesn’t blink.
“This isn’t your lane.”
Said like a judgement. Said like a dismissal. Said like Alex is some overeager civilian who wandered into a room meant for grown men.
Said like I am too.
For one second I really think Alex might push it. Might step in anyway. Might make the wrong choice because he can’t bear the sight of me in cuffs and pale under strip lights and stripped of every symbol that used to mean something.
And God, a small, humiliating part of me wants him to.
Wants him to cross the room and pull me out of this corridor and tell them all to go to hell.
Wants something impossible and childish and dead on arrival.
But then he looks at me properly.
And I watch the decision hit him.
Don’t make it worse for her.
Don’t hand them something else.
Don’t give them a reason to say compromised. Improper. Inappropriate. Don’t let them touch her with that too.
He swallows it.
I can actually see him do it.
See the rage go down like something sharp.
He steps back half a pace.
It is tiny.
It feels enormous.
Harper leans in toward the escorting officer and murmurs something too low for me to catch. Professional boundaries, maybe. No contact. Keep it clean. All that procedural filth men like him hide inside when they want to make cruelty look administrative.
Then Alex speaks fast, because he knows time is closing.
“Anna.”
My name sounds wrong in this place. Smaller. Stranger. More exposed.
His eyes are locked on mine. Urgent. Intent. Trying to get through to me before they move me on.
“Don’t say anything until your solicitor’s here.”
Harper makes an irritated sound under his breath, like even that is too much kindness for his taste.
I look at Alex properly then.
Really look.
And something in me that has been pitched so tight since they opened my front door shifts by half an inch.
Not hope.
Nothing so dramatic.
Just... steadier.
Because I know what he means.
Don’t be brave in the wrong way.
Don’t try to explain.
Don’t try to fix it alone.
Don’t hand them more than they’ve already taken.
His face is hard, but I can see the strain in it. The helplessness. The fury. The effort it is costing him not to come closer, not to reach for me, not to do what instinct is screaming at him to do.
And under all that I can see the plea too.
Please hear me.
Please trust me.
Please don’t stand there and carry this by yourself because you think you have to.
I give him the smallest nod I can manage.
Harper straightens. “Move.”
And they move me.
Past Alex.
Past the desk.
Past the point where you are still recognisably a person and into the part where you become an exhibit. A process. A file. An allegation in sensible shoes.
As I pass him, I can feel Alex’s gaze on me like a hand between my shoulder blades.
A tether.
Something warm and furious and known.
And I hate how much I need it.
I hate how my throat goes tight around it. How quickly my eyes start to burn. How one look from someone who knows me makes the whole thing suddenly feel harder to bear rather than easier, because now there is a witness to the humiliation. Someone I care about seeing me like this.
I keep my face still anyway.
I have had years of practice at still.
And this corridor is full of cameras and fluorescent light and men who would love, love, love to watch me crack.
But just as we turn the next corner and Alex slips out of view, the shame hits.
Hot.
Sudden.
So sharp it almost turns my knees soft for a second.
Not shame that I’ve been arrested.
Not even that.
Shame that when I saw him, for one weak heartbeat, I wanted to beg.
Not for innocence.
Not for rescue.
Just for someone to make it stop.
And I don’t beg.
I learned that lesson years ago.
Not anymore.
ALEX’S FLAT – 03:12 A.M.
ALEX
My phone drags me out of sleep like a hand around the throat.
Not a gentle buzz.
Not the kind you can ignore and roll away from and deal with in the morning.
A hard, repeated insistence. Something with urgency in it. Something that lands in the middle of sleep like bad news already halfway through the door.
I fumble for it off the bedside table, still blind with sleep, eyes gritty, room dark and shapeless around me. The screen is too bright. For a second it’s just light and blur and numbers and then the name sharpens into something my body recognises before my head does.
Federation contact.
And even before I answer, something in me goes cold.
I pick up on the second ring. “Yeah?”
There’s a small pause on the other end.
Someone checking their wording. Their tone. Their script. Making sure they are about to say the thing they need to say in the cleanest possible way.
“Kerr?” the voice says—
No.
Mercer. Always Mercer, clipped and formal and flattened down into paperwork.
“It’s Anna Cross. She’s in custody. She’s requested you as police friend.”
For a second my brain does that strange, useless thing where it tries to rearrange the sentence into something safer.
Anna.
Custody.
Requested you.
The words sit there in the dark between my ear and the ceiling and refuse to change shape.
My chest tightens.
Hard.
Not with surprise exactly.
That’s the bit that hits wrong.
Because the first question out of any normal bastard’s mouth should be why.
What happened?
What’s she been accused of?
Who lifted her?
What have they got?
That is what should happen. That is what would make sense. That is what a clean reaction would look like.
But the question never quite makes it up.
It catches somewhere lower down. Behind the ribs. In the gut. In the place where dread has been living for too long already.
As if some part of me—quiet, buried, unwelcome—has been waiting for the shape of this night without ever letting me say that out loud.
Instead what comes out is logistics.
Immediate.
Automatic.
Ugly in its efficiency.
“Where?” I ask. Voice rough with sleep and something else. “Which station?”
“Central custody suite. Professional Standards are leading.”
Of course they are.
I sit up too fast. My hand closes around the phone so hard it hurts. Doesn’t register properly.
“How long’s she been in?”
A tiny pause.
They hear it too, I think. The wrongness of the order. The fact I’m asking when before why.
“Booked in about twenty minutes ago. She’s asked specifically for you.”
My throat is dry.
“Tell her I’m coming in as police friend,” I say, already moving, already up, already dragging yesterday’s jeans off the chair where I threw them. “Tell custody I’m on my way.”
“Understood.”
The call ends.
Silence slams back into the room.
Only it isn’t silence, not really. It’s pressure. Thick, immediate, familiar in a way I do not want to look at too closely.
I sit there on the edge of the bed for half a second with the phone still in my hand, trying to find the part of me that is supposed to be shocked in the normal, clean way.
It isn’t that I’m not panicking.
I am.
But the panic is strange.
Controlled.
Compartmentalised.
Like my body has skipped the part where it unravels and stepped straight into a role it already knows: move, fix, contain, get there, be useful, don’t think yet.
I drag on jeans.
First shirt I find.
Coat.
Wallet.
Keys.
Phone.
My hands only start to shake when I’m by the door.
And even then I force them still by sheer spite.
Because whatever tonight is, whatever this becomes in the next hour, I cannot afford to be the man who falls apart.
I can be furious later.
I can be sick later.
I can go through walls later if I need to.
Right now I need to be the one solid thing she can reach for in a building built to make people feel isolated, processed, reduced.
And somewhere in the back of my mind—too quiet to be called a thought, too clear to be anything else—I can already see her without her shoelaces.
I don’t know why that’s the image that comes first.
But it does.
Her standing there in custody issue silence with the laces gone from her shoes like that small practical indignity somehow says everything at once.
I hate that my mind can picture it so clearly.
I slam the flat door shut behind me and take the stairs two at a time.
The city outside is black-glass dark. Wet pavement. Sodium streetlamps. Empty roads that aren’t really empty if you know how to look at them. My reflection flashes ghostlike in car windows as I move.
By the time I reach the station my hands are shaking again.
Not fear.
Rage.
The kind that lives in the joints. In the jaw. In the urge to put your fist through the nearest concrete surface until something admits it has gone wrong.
Inside, the custody suite is exactly as bad as I knew it would be.
Strip lighting. Hard surfaces. Bleached floors. The smell of coffee and disinfectant and old stress ground into the air vents. Everything in here exists to tell you feelings are irrelevant and the machine will continue no matter who it grinds under it.
The desk sergeant checks my name. Checks the system. Doesn’t look at me for long.
“Mercer,” he says. “Wait there.”
Wait there.
Like I’m an item.
Like I’m next in the queue.
Like she isn’t somewhere behind one of these walls being walked through the first circles of hell by people who will call it procedure and sleep just fine afterward.
I don’t argue.
I want to. Christ, I want to.
But I know exactly how places like this work. The second you give them friction, they file you under difficult. Emotional. Interfering. Unprofessional. And then every inch you try to take for her gets pushed back twice as hard.
So I wait.
And then she appears.
Anna.
Coming down the corridor in cuffs.
And for a second everything in me goes white with rage.
She’s pale. Not weak—never that—but pale in that controlled, blood-drained way people go when they are holding too much inside the skin and hoping none of it shows. Hair not done. No coat. No belt. No laces in her shoes. Wrists bound in front of her. Small mercy or good optics, hard to say. Her face is composed in that very Anna way where if you didn’t know her you might say calm.
But I know her.
I know the difference between calm and containment.
I know the exact set of her shoulders when she is hauling herself together with both hands because if she lets go for even a second the whole thing might come down on top of her.
And seeing that look on her here, in this corridor, with Professional Standards walking her like she belongs to them—
something in my chest tightens so hard it physically hurts.
I step forward before I even think about it.
One step.
Pure instinct.
I’m not trying to interfere. I’m not trying to play hero. I’m not trying to fuck the procedure.
I just need her to see me. Need her to clock one familiar face in this place and know she isn’t alone in it. That not every eye in the building has already turned her into a suspect first and a person second.
Harper cuts me off immediately.
“Back off, Mercer.”
Of course it’s Harper.
Jesus Christ.
He steps into the line smooth as you like, as if he’s been waiting for the chance. We worked together years ago, before he transferred into Professional Standards and developed that particular look men get when they’ve spent too long confusing procedure with virtue.
He looks at me like I’m the contamination in the room.
His voice drops. Surface-calm. Poison under it.
“Don’t make this messy. You’re too close.”
Too close.
There it is.
Not just the warning. The implication.
The smear wrapped up in professionalism. The ugly suggestion folded neatly inside policy language.
He wants the room to hear it.
Wants the cameras to hear it.
Wants the air around her to feel dirtier just because I’m standing in it.
“Fuck off,” I say, low and sharp enough to cut skin. “Give me a break. You know that’s not what I’m doing here.”
Harper doesn’t blink.
“This isn’t your lane.”
And for one blistering second I want to put him through the desk.
Not because I think it would help.
Because rage is quicker than thought and I am looking at Anna in cuffs and every protective impulse in me is trying to climb out through my teeth.
Then Anna looks at me.
And I see it in her face straight away—the strain, yes, but also the calculation. The knowledge that one wrong move from me becomes one more thing they can use against her.
That’s when it lands.
If I push this, I don’t help her.
I hand them ammunition.
They’ll say she’s leaning on colleagues. Manipulating officers. They’ll say compromised, inappropriate, too close, exactly as dirty as they already want her to be.
So I swallow it.
Jesus, it tastes like blood.
I step back.
Only half a pace.
It feels like sawing my own arm off.
Anna’s eyes stay on mine as they move her past and there’s something in them that nearly floors me—not pleading, not exactly, because she’d rather die than plead in a corridor like this—but something raw enough that I understand in one hard flash how close she is to breaking and how furiously she is refusing to let anyone see it.
I don’t have the right words for this moment.
No one does.
And speeches are useless anyway.
But I can give her one thing. One clean thing.
“Anna,” I say, fast, low, getting it out before Harper can shut me up. “Don’t say anything till your solicitor gets here.”
Harper’s head flicks toward me, irritated, but I don’t look at him. I’m watching her.
Watching for whether she heard me.
Whether she’ll do it.
Whether she’ll try and be brave the stupid way.
Her gaze catches mine and holds.
For a second the whole corridor narrows to that.
Please.
Please don’t do this alone.
Please don’t start carrying it before anyone’s even spoken to you properly.
Please let me at least be useful.
She gives the smallest nod.
Good.
Good girl. Hold the line.
Harper says something clipped to the escort, and they move her on.
Past me.
Past the desk.
Past the point where this is still human.
I stand there and do nothing because doing nothing is the only move that leaves me any use to her at all.
My hands are fists at my sides by then. Tight enough my nails are biting my palms. Harper watches me like he’s half hoping I’ll lose my head and save him the trouble of pushing me out.
I look back at him cold enough to make it plain.
Not here.
Not now.
But this is not finished.
Then Anna disappears around the corner and the corridor swallows her whole.
And all at once the helplessness turns mean in my chest. Mean and hot and black-edged.
Because I know this place.
I know exactly how it works.
I know how quickly a person becomes a narrative once the machine decides what story it wants. I know how innocence stops mattering if enough people have already settled on optics, on pressure, on who gets protected and who gets offered up.
And I know something else too, something I can’t quite look at directly without wanting to tear my own skin off.
If they’ve decided she’s guilty, she can be perfect and it still won’t save her.
So rage is useless.
Fear is useless.
Wanting to rip Harper’s throat out is, however satisfying, useless.
Useful.
That’s what matters.
I force my hands open.
Breathe once.
Again.
Think.
Be smarter than fury.
Be more dangerous than emotion.
Be useful.
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