The commotion drew a small crowd before Darius had even fully processed what he was looking at — two of the kitchen staff pausing in the hallway, drawn by the sharpness of his voice. Within moments Holt appeared at the pantry door, his usual composure cracking the instant he took in the scene: Darius holding the vial aloft, Rhea frozen pale and silent against the counter, beads of sweat trickling down her forehead. "What's going on here?" Holt asked, glancing between them. "She was lacing grandpa's tea," Darius said, his voice tight, barely controlled. "I caught her in the act. I can't even believe it coming out of my mouth. What the hell." Holt's mouth fell open slightly, disbelief flooding his face. "That cannot be right. Miss Rhea, surely there's some mistake—" "There's no mistake," Darius said. "I'm holding the proof in my hand, Holt." The commotion had drawn enough attention by then, more of the staff members gathering and lurking aroun

The two men didn't linger. They were out the door and gone within seconds, the sound of their car's engine roaring to life and peeling away from the curb. Darius arrived less than ten minutes later. He'd been tracking Natasha's car for hours, unable to sit still after her unanswered calls, following the signal across the city until it finally led him to this unfamiliar apartment building, and the moment he saw the shattered doorframe hanging crooked on its hinges, his stomach dropped straight through the floor. "Natasha!" He shoved through what remained of the door, and the sight that greeted him stopped his heart cold. She lay on the floor in a spreading pool of her own blood, pale and still, her eyes fluttering faintly. "No. No, no, no." Darius dropped to his knees beside her, hands hovering frantically over the wound before pressing hard against it, trying desperately to slow the bleeding. "Natasha, stay with me. Can you hear me?"

For the next three hours, Darius stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the federal investigators, sifting through hundreds of gigabytes of pixelated video feeds. The search was a grueling exercise in frustration. Every angle offered a tiny fragment of a puzzle that refused to assemble cleanly. "Stop—there!" Darius shouted, pointing at a monitor displaying the convenience store feed. "That's the Chrysler!" "Yeah," the analyst at the desk murmured, zooming in. "We catch the vehicle clearly here, but it’s from behind. No plate visible. Next intersection camera catches the front angle—" he flipped the window "—but the headlight glare washes out the driver’s windshield completely. And this one," He pulled up a side-profile feed from the gas station, "catches the driver’s side, but the frame rate is too low, and the window tinting is heavy. It's too grainy to identify the occupants or even tell if there's more than one person inside." "What about the route?" Darius

Over the following week, the investigation crawled forward in fits and starts, each small breakthrough swallowed almost immediately by a fresh dead end. The men who'd broken into Natasha's apartment remained, for all practical purposes, ghosts — no plates, no clear faces, nothing but a stolen vehicle and a trail that vanished onto the highway without a trace. Then, finally, something gave. A forensic analyst working through the parking garage footage for what felt like the hundredth time flagged a frame that had been overlooked in the earlier passes. A brief moment, barely two seconds long, where one of the men crossed in front of a security light angled just right to catch the side of his face. "It's not much," the analyst admitted, pulling the enhanced still up on the main screen for Reeves and Castellano to examine. "Enhancement can only do so much with footage this degraded. But look at his gait, here, as he crosses the frame." Castellano lea

Malcolm's head snapped up. "She admitted that? Why would she admit something like that? Was she under duress?" "She wasn't under duress," Castellano replied. "She denied it at first, the same as you're denying it now. But when she was caught attempting to poison Reginald Argent, everything came out. She admitted that the two of you had been planning this together, from start to finish." Malcolm's hand came up to slap against his own forehead, a low groan escaping him, his shoulders slumping forward in defeat. "It was obviously a joke," he said, voice dropping. "I didn't mean anything I said in that recording. None of it was serious. Why would she even agree to kill the grandfather of her boyfriend?" Reeves leaned forward. "So you're admitting the recording is indeed authentic. But you were just kidding, correct?" Malcolm hesitated, the trap closing slowly around him before he fully registered it. "I'm saying you shouldn't take anything I said in it