"Nobody moves until I say so." A new voice cut across the loading dock, followed by three uniformed officers spilling out from a patrol car that had pulled up behind Jeff's without any of them noticing. "Crowbar on the ground. Now."
Renata lowered it slowly, hands raised, and one of the officers moved to secure it while another approached Jeff, eyeing the stain on his sleeve with open suspicion.
"That's blood," the officer said. "Care to explain it?"
"I cut my arm on a shattered light fixture in the stairwell, trying to check on my guard." Jeff pulled his sleeve back to reveal a shallow gash along his forearm, real enough that the officer's posture eased slightly. "You can verify that yourselves. He's still lying there."
It wasn't proof of innocence, not entirely, but it was enough to keep the cuffs off his wrists for now, and Lia watched Fendrik's jaw tighten at that outcome as much as she felt her own frustration rise.
"They're going to let him walk," she said quietly, once the officers had moved Jeff aside for questioning.
"For tonight." Fendrik's eyes tracked Jeff across the dock. "That's not the same as clearing him."
"It feels the same from here."
"I know." He exhaled, some of the sharp control finally slipping from his shoulders now that there were officers and lights and radios instead of just the four of them in the dark. "I know it does."
Renata approached them a moment later, arms crossed tight against the cold, crowbar long since surrendered to an evidence bag of her own. "For what it's worth," she said, not quite looking at either of them, "I'm sorry I doubted you both out here. I've spent so long assuming the worst of this place that I stopped noticing when the worst actually showed up."
"You had reason to be careful," Fendrik said. "I never gave you much reason to think otherwise."
"No," Renata agreed. "You didn't." She managed something close to a small, tired smile before walking off to find an officer taking statements.
Paramedics wheeled Aria past them a few minutes later, oxygen mask over her face, Isaiah walking close beside the stretcher with a hand wrapped around hers like he was afraid letting go would undo something.
"I'm riding with her," he called back. "Someone needs to stay with her until family gets here."
"Go," Lia said. "We'll find you after."
Once the ambulance doors closed and the dock finally quieted into something resembling order, Lia realized how badly she was shaking, adrenaline draining out of her all at once and leaving something hollow in its place.
The officers moved through their routines around her, photographing the loading dock, taping off the stairwell entrance, questioning Jeff a second time near his car while he answered with the same practiced calm he probably used on investors.
None of it felt real yet. It felt like watching someone else's night play out from a slight distance, the way a scene looked from the wings instead of center stage.
Fendrik noticed before she said anything.
"Sit down," he said, guiding her toward an overturned crate near the wall. "Before you fall down."
"I'm fine."
"You're the furthest thing from fine, and there's no one left here to act for." He crouched in front of her, closer than strictly necessary, close enough that she could see the exhaustion carved into his own face for the first time all night. "You don't have to hold all of it together right now."
"If I stop holding it together, I'm not sure what happens next."
"Then let me hold some of it instead."
The offer landed soft and unguarded in her chest, and for a long moment neither of them said anything at all.
"Earlier," she said finally, "when you told Michael you'd rather be stubborn and wrong than careful and too late again. Did you mean Corinne?"
His expression didn't change, but something behind his eyes did. "Yes."
"You couldn't have known what would happen to her."
"I've told myself that for six years. It's never once made it feel true." He looked down at his hands. "Tonight, watching you walk into that wing anyway, knowing what happened the last time someone I cared about did something similar, I think I finally understood why everyone who loved her spent years being angry at themselves instead of at whoever actually took her."
"Fendrik..."
"I'm not telling you this so you'll feel sorry for me. I'm telling you because you deserve to know exactly what you're getting involved with if you keep standing this close to me." His eyes finally met hers fully. "I don't know if I can survive losing someone to this building twice."
"You keep talking like this is a decision you get to make alone." She reached out and covered his hand with hers. "It isn't. I walked into that wing tonight knowing exactly how dangerous it was, and I'd do it again, not because I'm reckless, but because I'd rather stand next to you in something terrifying than watch from somewhere safe while you carry it by yourself."
"That's a dangerous thing to offer someone like me."
"Then it's a good thing I'm not asking your permission."
Something close to a real smile pulled at the corner of his mouth, the first one Lia had seen all night that didn't look fake. "Then don't let go of me tonight."
"I wasn't planning to."
It wasn't a plan or a promise, just something true, and for a moment the space between them narrowed to almost nothing.
A sharp cry split the air from across the dock.
Both of them turned in time to see Renata stumble backward from the ambulance bay, hand pressed hard against her mouth, staring at something on the ground near where the paramedics had just been standing.
Lia was on her feet and moving before she fully understood why.
The ambulance was still there. Empty. Doors thrown open, back step scraped and scuffed like something had been dragged across it in a hurry, and Isaiah's phone lying shattered on the pavement beside a long, dark smear that hadn't been there sixty seconds earlier.