Because once years ago, he'd been almost like that. Almost before money, leverage, and blood rewrote him into something colder. He leaned back and lit a cigar, the smoke curling toward the ceiling as he reached for his phone. On the first ring, Officer Isabella Izzy Reyes answered, her voice tight like a woman who had been living too long with a hand around her throat. Cain didn't bother with pleasantries.
I need you in my office, he said. Now." She hesitated only a moment. "I'm not on shift," Cain smiled without warmth. "You are now."
When Izzy arrived, he didn't offer her a seat. He simply turned his monitor to face her. On the screen played a grainy video, 16-year-old Izzy at a house party holding a joint, laughing at something someone said off camera. She froze. He didn't need to say anything.
The implication had been the same for years. Step out of line and the video becomes evidence. Your custody battle collapses. Your six-year-old autistic son goes into the system and no one hears from you again. Cain leaned forward, voice soft and poisonous.
Harlo's wife lost the baby today, he said. Izzy's eyes widened. She felt the air leave her chest. Sir, that wasn't doesn't matter. Cain cut in.
What matters is that this needs to disappear like every other complaint. She shook her head slowly. I can't make that video go away. Everyone's talking about it. Cain stepped closer.
Which is why you're going to make sure it stops being talked about. Understood? Her jaw trembled, but she nodded. Cain dismissed her with a flick of his hand. Already dialing his next call, already weaving the next lie, already planning the next containment measure.
But Izzy didn't drive home. She sat in her cruiser for almost 10 minutes, staring at her trembling hands, breathing through the rising panic that threatened to choke her. Sophia had lost her baby. And it was because of the same man Cain kept protecting, the same man whose name she'd been forced to defend in reports. The same man whose brutality she'd been ordered to justify.
She thought about her son, small, gentle, non-verbal, terrified of loud sounds, and wondered what kind of world she was protecting if she let Cain bury this, too. Her hands steadied, her breath smoothed. She made a choice, one that would cost her everything or save someone else's life. She tapped her phone, opened an encrypted folder she'd been building for months, and forwarded the cleanest, clearest veranda video to one person who would know exactly what to do with it. Elena Torres, investigative reporter at the Charlotte Observer, survivor, fighter, and the woman Cain had hurt 6 years earlier in a story that never saw daylight.
Izzy hit send and whispered, "Please let this be worth it." Elena received the file while sitting in her car outside the observer's office, the late night rain sliding down the windshield like streaks of silver. When she saw the sender, she whispered, "Izzy, what did you do?" But when she opened the video, everything inside her changed. The image of Caldwell ramming the gun into Ethan's skull, the sound of Sophia collapsing, the raw, unfiltered violence of it.