Cordelia she hadn't slept past four and had been lying in the dark since then doing the math, and the math kept coming out the same way, and she was tired of arguing with it. So she picked up the phone and called Louis.
"Come over," she said when he answered. "Use the door."
He arrived twenty minutes later. She heard him knock—an actual knock, knuckles on wood. She let him in. He looked at her face and didn't say anything about the dried tear tracks she hadn't bothered to wash off, which was the right choice.
She'd made coffee. She put a cup in front of him out of habit and he didn't drink it, as usual. She sat across from him at the kitchen table with the legal pad between them and the chess piece off to the side and her hands wrapped around her own cup.
"I want to end this," she said. "Philippe. The whole thing. And I want it done before Tureaud's deadline and before Louis—" she stopped, started again "—before you deteriorate any further."
He looked at her steadily. "All right."
"I have a week. Less, maybe. Marcus has the Dessommes file and a sealed envelope. If I don't call him by six today, he opens it." She pulled the legal pad toward her. "1120 Dauphine. The property Philippe pointed me toward. I think it's his base of operations. Not his resting place—he's too careful for that—but where he keeps the ghoul infrastructure.Whatever he's been building toward."
"You think he gave you that address on purpose."
"I think everything Philippe has given me has been on purpose." She looked at him. "Which means he wants me to go there. Which means it's probably a trap."
"Yes."
"Good." She turned the legal pad over. "We spring it. But we spring it on our terms, not his."
Louis was quiet for a moment. "Cordelia."
"I know what I'm doing."
"You cried last night."
She held his gaze. "I'm allowed to cry and still know what I'm doing. They're not mutually exclusive."
Something moved through his expression. He looked at the untouched coffee cup. "The address on Dauphine. I know the building. It was a warehouse before the war. Philippe acquired it through a proxy in 1987." He paused. "There are no windows on the ground floor. One entrance at the front, one at the rear. The interior is open plan—nowhere to shelter if the ghouls come from multiple directions."
"So we don't go in blind." She picked up her pen. "What do we need."
"Daylight, ideally. Philippe won't be there in daylight. His ghouls don't coordinate as well without him directing them." He paused. "But whatever he's keeping in that building, he'll have it guarded."
"Then we go at noon. I go in through the front. You go in through the back."
"You go in through the front," he repeated.
"I'm a detective. I have a badge and a warrant I can produce if anyone asks, and a cover story about a property inspection that will hold for ten minutes, which is all I need." She wrote the address on a fresh page. "You go in through the back because you don't need a door and because if there are ghouls, you're better equipped to handle them than I am."
"And if Philippe is there despite the daylight."
"Then we find out what he does in daylight and use it against him." She looked up. "You said he's older than you. How much older."
"I don't know precisely. Old enough that the rules aren't the same for him. Some vampires, past a certain age, develop tolerances the younger ones don't have." He turned his ring. Once. "He may not burn in direct sunlight the way I would. He may simply be weakened by it."
"Weakened is enough." She wrote sunlight — weakens, doesn't kill on the page. "What else."
"He's been feeding regularly. He's not starving. He'll be faster and stronger than anything you've faced."
"Faster than you?"
A pause. "Possibly."
She wrote that down too. "Then we don't give him room to use speed. We use the building against him. Close quarters, multiple points of approach, no clear line of movement." She tapped the pen against the page. "I need to talk to Marcus today. Tell him enough to get Dessommes arrested before we go to Dauphine. If Dessommes goes down, the financial network collapses and Philippe loses his municipal access. He'll be scrambling."
"You want to destabilize him before we go in."
"I want him reactive instead of patient when we arrive." She looked at him. "Patience is his best weapon. I want it taken from him."
Louis looked at her for a long moment. The morning light was coming through the kitchen window and it didn't reach him, the way light didn't quite reach him, and she thought about what Delacroix had said — the bond, the chain, the frequency that couldn't be closed — and she thought about what he'd said on the phone — it would mean I couldn't lose you — and she set both of those things aside because there was work to do first.
"All right," he said again. Quieter this time.
"One more thing." She put down the pen. "You need to feed before we go. Enough to be at full capacity."
"Cordelia—"
"I'm not negotiating this." Her voice was flat. "You were shaking last night. If we walk into that building and you're running on five days of deprivation, you'll get us both killed." She held his gaze. "Feed. Today. Before noon. That's the condition."
He looked at her. She looked back.
"It’s a different type of hunger—" he began.
"Is not my problem right now." She picked up her pen. "Delacroix's system. Use it. I'll call Delacroix myself and ask her to arrange it if you won't."
Something crossed his face — not offense, something closer to the expression she'd catalogued in the archive, the one that surfaced when she said something that surprised him past his capacity to manage the reaction.
"All right," he said, for the third time.
She nodded once. "Good." She stood, carrying her cup to the sink. "Go. I'll call you at eleven. We go in at noon."
He stood and walked towards the door but, "Last night," he said. "On the phone. When you asked about the bond."
She kept her back to him. "I was gathering information."
"I know." he sighed. "I want you to know that what I told you — about what it would mean — I meant it. I’m not trying to pressure you Cordelia."
She turned the cup over in the drying rack. "I know."
"Do you."
"Louis." She turned around. He was at the door, and the morning light still wasn't touching him, and he looked better than he had last night but not good, still hollowed-out, still running on the wrong kind of empty. "I burned the evidence against. I falsified the report I was supposed to submit. And I sat on your floor and cried about it and then I called you at seven in the morning and asked you to come over." Cordelia looked at him. "What do you think that means."
He held her gaze. And if there was a word that encapsulated what it meant to love Cordelia would be currently staring right at it.
"Go feed," she said. "I'll see you at eleven."
He left. She heard him use the stairs then met Marcus at the diner at nine.
He looked at her face when she slid into the booth and didn't say anything about it, which meant they had arrived, separately and without discussion, at the same policy toward each other's obvious distress.
"Dessommes," she said, putting the Dessommes file on the table between them. "Today. I need him arrested before noon."
Marcus looked at the file then at her. "On what charge."
"Financial fraud. Property crime. Corruption of official records. The documentation is all there, the chain of evidence is clean, and if you move on it this morning you'll have a signed warrant by eleven." She pushed the file across the table. "Take it to the DA yourself. Don't go through Tureaud."
"Why not Tureaud."
Cordelia glanced at him. "Because I don't know yet whose side he's on."
Marcus's jaw tightened. "That's a serious thing to say about our captain."
"It's a serious situation." She didn't elaborate. "Can you do it?"
He looked at the file for a long moment and after a drawn out groan he picked it up. "By eleven."
"By eleven." She stood.
"Vireaux." He looked up at her. The tiredness around his eyes had deepened overnight, the lines around his mouth set harder. "Whatever you're walking into today—"
"I know."
"I don't think you do." He set the file down. "I pulled your sealed envelope last night. I know what it says."
Cordelia froze. "I said six o'clock."
"It was six o'clock. You didn't call." He tried his best to sound non-pushy but Cordelia could hear the hesitation in it. "I read it. I know where you're going and what you think you'll find there and I know why you didn't want me involved." He took a deep breath. "I'm involved."
Cordelia just looked at him keeping quiet.
"I'm not asking you to take me in," he said. "I know better than that. I'm telling you that I know. And that when this is done—whatever happens in that building today—I'm going to need you to sit down with me and tell me the truth. All of it." Brown eyes met brown. "Can you do that."
Cordelia knew what the truth would sound like out loud. If it was ever ;aid flat on a diner table under fluorescent lights in front of a man who had been carrying this case alone for two months and had covered for her and was now sitting here with her sealed instructions in his jacket pocket asking for honesty she wasn't sure she knew how to give anymore.
"Yes," she said.
He nodded once. Picked up the file. "Don't get killed."
She left and thankfully Marcus called at ten forty-seven.
"Dessommes is in custody," he said. "Warrant signed at ten fifteen. He's been booked and his access to the assessor's system has been revoked."
"Good."
"He gave up a name in the first ten minutes. Someone above him in the chain, who's been paying him for eighteen months." his then whispered, "The name is Philippe Moreau."
"I know," she said.
Silence on the line. "Of course you do." Another pause. "Be careful."
She hung up and called Louis. "It's time."
She picked up her gun. Checked it. Loaded. She picked up the chess piece from the table and held it for a moment — cool marble, the letter worn smooth — then put it down.
Cordelia left it there. She didn't need it anymore. She knew her move.
She heard the shot before she processed what it was.
One block from 1120 Dauphine. A sound that didn't belong to the afternoon swallowed almost immediately by the ambient noise of the street but unmistakable to a woman who had been carrying a weapon for four years.
She turned.
Marcus was on the ground.
He was half a block behind her, the Dessommes file still under his arm, his phone in his hand, and the spreading dark beneath him was moving too fast to be anything but arterial. She was running before she understood she was running. She was on her knees beside him before she understood she'd dropped.
"Marcus—"
"Don't." His voice was controlled, his hand found her arm. "Don't stop. Whatever you're going in there to do—don't stop."
"I'm not leaving you—"
"You're not leaving me. You're finishing it." His grip tightened. "Call an ambulance. Then finish it." Brown eyes found hers. They were clear. Completely clear. "I know what he is, Cordelia. I figured it out. That's why he—" He stopped. Breathed through it. "Go."
She called. Twelve minutes, the dispatcher said. She pressed her hand to the wound and he pressed his over hers and she knew that she was facing a consequence that they could have prevented.
"Don't," he said. He read it in her face. "Don't. You didn't do this. He did."
She held his gaze. Twelve minutes. Cordelia stayed for every one of them.
When the ambulance turned onto the street she stood up, and Marcus looked at her, and she looked at him, and neither of them said what they were both thinking — that she might not be the same person when she came back. That what she was walking into was the kind of door that didn't open from the other side.
"Finish it," he said.
Cordelia went.