"I didn't think so," Jade said.
She held his gaze for three full seconds—long enough for it to mean something—then clipped both leashes short and stepped around the front of his cruiser without rushing. She walked the way soldiers walk when they want you to know they are not running: straight spine, even pace. She did not look back.
Behind her, she heard Harlan find his voice again. "You haven't heard the last of this," he called out. His tone had gone hard and flat, the way men sound when they are embarrassed and trying to cover it with threats. "That's a promise."
Jade did not stop walking.
She made it all the way to her front door before her hands started shaking. Not on the street, not in front of him. She had given him nothing out there, not one visible crack, and she was not about to give it to herself until she was inside her own house with the door closed behind her. She had learned that in the Army, too: where you let it out matters just as much as whether you let it out at all.
She sat down at the kitchen table. Zeus pressed himself against her leg and rested his big head in her lap, the way he always did when something was wrong. He had been doing it since Kandahar. She put her hand on the back of his neck and breathed.
Her phone was already in her other hand. Marcus Hale picked up on the second ring.
"It's Jade."
She gave him the facts in order, the way she would have written an incident report: location, names, sequence of events, exact words spoken. No editorializing, no emotion in her voice. Marcus listened without interrupting, which was one of the many reasons she trusted him.
When she finished, he was quiet for a moment, then: "Tell me the footage situation."
"My son recorded from the porch. My neighbor recorded from her front window." Jade paused.
"Do not post anything yet, but get copies of both recordings secured right now. Different devices, different locations. Do it before anything else."
She was already standing up. Finn was still on the porch when she opened the front door. He was sitting on the top step with his tablet in his lap, Zeus and Ares flanking him automatically, like they had always belonged there. He looked up at her with the careful expression of a 10-year-old who knew something serious had happened and was waiting to be told how serious.