And Marcus went very still. Sophia, he said slowly. Yesterday at the advocacy center. Who knew you were going? What?
Nobody. You. Me? My. She stopped.
My mother. I told my mother I was going somewhere with you, but I didn't say where. And your number. Your new number. The one he's been texting you on.
Who has that? almost nobody. I changed it when I left him. I only gave it to her face changed to my mother and a few old clients. And she stopped again and the color drained out of her face and Marcus watched a horrible understanding dawn in her eyes. No, she whispered.
Who? Sophia. Who? There's a woman, Pria. She was my closest friend all through the Damon years.
She's the one who she introduced us actually at a work thing years ago. She's the only person besides my mother who has my new number and who knew I'd started seeing somebody about the debt because I told her because I tell her everything because she's my Sophia's voice broke. She's been so worried about me. She keeps checking in. She asks how it's going.
She asked me last week if I was going to sign the papers or fight it. And I told her I didn't know yet. And then two days later, Damon moved the deadline up and said he knew I'd gone to see somebody and I never Her hand came up over her mouth. Oh my god. Oh my god, Marcus.
It's Priya. It's been Priya this whole time. She's been telling him everything. The yard went silent. Marcus felt it click into place.
Ugly and complete. Not a stalker in the bushes. Not surveillance. Something far worse and far more common. A mole in the inner circle. a trusted friend feeding the abuser.
Everything the oldest and crulest trick these men ran. Isolate the victim by owning the one person she still trusted. He didn't cut you off from your people. Marcus said quietly. He did something smarter.
He kept one of them. He kept the one you'd never suspect. And he used her to know every move you made. That's how he always knew. That's how he moved the clock the same day you came to me. she told him.
Sophia's legs went just slightly and Marcus caught her elbow. She held my hand at my grandmother's funeral. Sophia whispered. "She's known me for 11 years." She a sobb tore out of her.
"How long? How long has she been?" "I don't know." Marcus steied her. But I know how we find out.
Ry had come up beside them listening, and his cop's face was grim. If she's the pipeline and she texts him or calls him after you've been contacted, that's traceable. That's a co-conspirator. Detective Okapor is going to want this. This isn't just Damon anymore.
This is two people coordinating extortion against you, and that's a conspiracy charge, and that's heavier than anything he was facing alone. Sophia was shaking. Marcus turned her to face him, both hands on her shoulders. Listen to me, he said. I know this one cuts deeper than the money.
I know it. The money was a thing he did to you. This is a thing somebody you loved did to you for years, smiling in your face. That's a different kind of wound. And I'm not going to pretend it isn't.
His voice gentled. But Sophia, this is also how we end it. Right now today, you know something he doesn't know you know. He thinks Priya is still feeding him good information. He doesn't know you just figured it out.
That's the first time in this entire thing that you have the advantage. Don't waste it grieving yet. We grieve after. Right now, we use it. Sophia stared at him through her tears.
And Marcus watched it happen a second time in 2 days. The fear and the heartbreak burning off and underneath it. That iron he'd seen last night. The thing that had said, "I'm not moving cities." "How?"
she said. "How do we use it?" Marcus looked at Rey. Rey looked back at him and a slow, grim understanding passed between the two old partners. "We let her keep talking to him," Rey said.
"We control what she hears." Sophia calls her upset, scared, exactly like Priya expects, and tells her something, something specific, something only Priya could pass along. And then we watch what Damon does with it. If he acts on it, we've got her cold in the middle of a coordinated extortion and we've got him moving on false information we planted. It's a controlled feed.
We take the thing he built and we turn it around and point it right back at him. Marcus was nodding. Okapor would have to run it. There are rules. It has to be clean.
It has to be legal or none of it's any good in court. But if she signs off, she'll sign off. Ry was already reaching for his phone. a prior offender, a written threat against a minor, and a live conspiracy she can catch in the act. She'll sign off before I finish the sentence." Sophia looked between the two men and then down at her own phone at the contact that said Priya with a little heart next to the name, a heart she'd put there 11 years ago, and her face went through something Marcus wouldn't forget.
Grief and rage, and finally resolve. "Tell me what to say," she said. Tell me exactly what to say to her and I'll say it and I won't cry and I won't let my voice shake and I will hand you both of them on a plate. She looked up and her eyes were burning. She held my hand at my grandmother's funeral.
Let's see how she likes holding a phone while she buries herself. Marcus looked at her. This woman who 6 days ago couldn't tell her own mother the truth now standing in his yard planning to take down the two people who tried to break her. and something enormous moved in his chest. Something that had been dead for 3 years and was apparently not dead after all. "Marry me," he almost said, and caught it because it was 6 days and that was insane.
And instead he said, "There she is. There who is the woman your mother kept trying to tell me about. Before all this, the one who did the hotel lobby and had the whole city at her feet." Marcus almost smiled. She's been in there the whole time.
He just about had you convinced she was gone. Sophia's breath caught. Yeah, she said softly. He did almost. What happened over the next 4 days Marcus would tell people later was the closest thing to justice he'd seen in his whole career.
And he'd never even been on the payroll for it. Detective Okapor signed off exactly as Ray predicted and she ran it clean and by the book Sophia made the call to Priya a masterpiece. Marcus thought listening his heart in his throat and she was perfect. She cried the right amount. She sounded scared and defeated and on the edge of giving up exactly the Sophia that Priya and through her Damon wanted to hear. and she told Priya in confidence, friend to friend, that she'd decided she couldn't take it anymore, that she was going to sign Damon's release on Friday morning at 10:00 at her lawyer's office downtown and just make it all go away.
And please, Priya, don't tell anyone I'm so ashamed. Priya was so comforting, so supportive. You're doing the right thing, honey. Just make it stop. I'm always here for you.
20 minutes later, Damon texted Sophia to confirm the Friday 10:00 signing. He'd taken the bait whole. He'd acted on information that existed nowhere in the world except inside a controlled conversation between Sophia and one single friend, proving in a way no jury could argue with exactly where his information came from. They had Priya, they had Damon, they had it clean. And on Friday morning, when Damon Ree walked into that lawyer's office expecting a broken woman with a pen, what he found instead was Detective Okafor and Ray Delgado and a warrant with his name on it and charges that had overnight gone from a single count of extortion to conspiracy witness intimidation threats against a minor and the felony image-based offense he'd been so proud of holding over Sophia's head, which had transformed exactly as Marcus promised from his weapon into his cage.