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Morgan gets the call around 3.
She’s awake— of course she’s awake— sleeping’s been hard in the way you hear about from dull-eyed classmates and over-chatty coworkers for years but never experience yourself, and after a lifetime of rest coming easier than breathing she’s awake at 3 in the morning and not even surprised— but it still takes her a minute to answer, just staring down at her phone as her overtired mind tries to fit this into a comprehensible reality. Because it’s Emma.
Emma’s never called her before. They exchanged numbers to talk over a piece of evidence (bad etiquette, but they’re not exactly responsible anyway and two heads are better than one even if they’re in direct opposition), but that was over text and they haven’t used the link since (Morgan’s thought about it—texting for drinks, or calling when her head won’t screw on right and she needs to feel smart and dumb the way only Emma can make her—but she’s squared her shoulders and breathed through the bad impulses and they’ve never overtaken her). Honestly, Morgan’d thought Emma had forgotten she had her number. But she’s getting a call now.
She picks up on the fifth or sixth ring. “Emma?”
For a moment, she thinks the call’s disconnected, because Emma doesn’t respond right away. She’s about to hang up, when she realizes that she can hear Emma breathing. Slow, measured, but with a deliberateness that belies tension—a certain shakiness even in its attempts to be smooth. It’s not something she’s ever heard from cold-as-ice DA Rockford. The sound settles into the air around Morgan’s head and slowly turns the atmosphere sour and spoiled. Something’s wrong.
“Emma?” she says again. Then, stupidly: “Ms. Rockford?”
“Morgan. Hi.” She doesn’t sound like herself, her usual calm affect replaced by a plasticky neutrality.
“...Why are you—”
“Can you come meet me somewhere?”
Um. “Where?”
A long silence. “It’s— actually, you could just…” another silence. “This was a bad idea.”
Morgan’s gone from curious to a little concerned, actually. “Are you drunk?”
“Do I sound drunk?” There’s the Emma she knows, raised hackles audible all the way through the phone.
“Are you in danger?”
Emma doesn’t answer for a minute. “The, um… I’ll just send you an address. It’s not far from your house, you can… it should be maybe fifteen minutes, if you hurry.”
“You still haven’t told me what you want.” How do you know where I live? Right. Home office. Damnit.
“I just need help with something.” It’s only then that the tone Morgan’s been picking up on crystalizes into something she can put a name to. Emma sounds scared. “I wasn’t sure who else to… I figured you might be the only…” she sighs. “Honestly, I just hoped you’d pick up.”
“It’s late for me.”
“But you did pick up.”
“Well, it’s not every day that you call me. Figured it had to be a special occasion.”
“I don’t actually have time for small talk. Just— here.” A few seconds of silence, and then Morgan’s phone vibrates—Emma’s sent a text with an address. “Fifteen minutes. If you hurry.”
“I—” Emma hangs up on Morgan before she can get anything more out.
What the hell. What does she do with that?
The obvious answer is don’t go. Whatever it is the DA’s gotten herself into, she’s clearly worried that if Morgan finds out she’ll refuse to come, which isn’t exactly reassuring. Not to mention, it’s 3 in the morning (and—Morgan glances out the window—raining, the long rivulets down her window turning the bright city outside into a blur of color and lights). Not to mention, Morgan doesn’t live alone anymore, and she’s recently confirmed that Serra does notice when she goes out at night.
It makes no sense for her to follow this lead. But—
There’s a lot that Morgan can withstand. Plenty of urges she controls, plenty of thoughts she bites down. It’s a gift, the reason she’s made it this far. But she knows, like she knows anything, that if she doesn’t go tonight she’ll spend the rest of her life wondering what exactly could put that much fear in Emma Rockford’s voice.
So she grabs her coat.
…
The rain beats down over her umbrella like a heartbeat as she makes her way to the address on her phone. She doesn’t, for all her dramatics, actually like metaphors that imply the city is alive—there’s already enough watching her without imagining the streets as nerves, the lights as eyes, herself as a tiny blood cell running down a stream she can’t see the end of—but sometimes, late enough, she feels it anyway: breathing, sure as her own as she steps around corners and towards her destination.
She’s avoiding light as much as possible. She’s not wholly sure why.
Emma has led her to a tall, darkened apartment building with a sturdy door and shuttered windows as far up as she can see. She has the stupid thought that this is a weird date spot, followed by the far more pressing question of what the hell would Emma be doing in a place like this? The door answers neither thought, but it does feature a buzzer, so she presses the button for 4C and waits.
“Is that you?” Emma’s voice comes through the intercom.
“It’s me.”
The door opens.
The stairs are just as dark and empty as the exterior of the building, making Morgan seriously wonder if anyone actually even lives here. She drops her umbrella carelessly against the radiator at the bottom and starts to climb, hand light on the railing to avoid slipping. It’s as she’s rounding the third flight that a thought occurs to her for the first time: she’s walking into an abandoned building, in the dead of night, off the request of a prosecutor intent on solving crimes that she committed. If Emma’s made her, somehow, this isn’t a terrible place to stage an ambush. The nervousness on the call, the hush-hush nature of the meeting, even Emma’s insistence on Morgan getting there as fast as she could—it’s not impossible. Which would mean that this building might be the most dangerous she’s ever entered, and she should leave now.
If that were the case, though, what would be stopping Emma from calling the police right to Morgan’s door? If she really thought she’d caught Heartbreak, why go through all this trouble?
She’d have to not be sure. She’d have to suspect (through her psychological profile, no doubt, which makes Morgan feel great and not at all like a predictable, antisocial, loser serial murderer), but not have anything concrete to back it up (of course she doesn’t. Morgan’s a professional). What she’d need is to catch Morgan a little more red-handed, which doesn’t make sense for tonight unless—
Unless Emma’s setting a trap. With herself as bait.
It’s not like the thought hasn’t occurred to her. Not like she hasn’t blinked a hundred times to get the woman’s smile out from behind her eyes when she’s out. Emma is— difficult in infinite ways, and as aware as she is that it would be literal suicide to kill someone as close to herself as the DA is it still itches at a place, somewhere in the back of her mind, that this is one thing she knows herself to be better at than Emma. She could. It would be as easy as snapping the neck of a lamb.
But if she’s right—
Well. If she’s right, then the worst thing she can do to Emma now is go up there and watch her beg to be murdered and deny her. Might even be half as satisfying as doing it.
She finishes her climb, and knocks on the door.
“It’s unlocked.”
Morgan steadies her breath. She doesn’t know what Emma’s about to pull, but she’s sure that she’s not going to like it. Gloved hand on the grimy doorknob, lungs tight, she twists and pushes in and—
Oh. Oh.
There’s Emma, standing in the center of the room, fiddling with the hem of her sweater (she’s dressed professionally, but more than that she’s dressed pretty—the sweater is a soft pink that brings out her eyes, and she’s switched out the usual skirt for a pair of well-tailored dress pants over smart black shoes). She won’t look directly at Morgan. The room is a joint kitchen-living room space, with high windows shaded by curtains leaving the space in relative darkness (Emma’s got the lights off). There’s a TV playing static in the corner. And there’s a dead man slumped across the overturned coffee table.
Every thought of traps and bait and ambushes flees Morgan’s mind instantly. “Emma?”
“I— uh.” Emma smiles, inexplicably, like she’s a little embarrassed at the state of the room. “I really didn’t know who else to call.”
Morgan can’t find words. It’s been a long, long time since she was as stumped as she is right now. Emma seems to take this as encouragement, because her mouth opens and she keeps talking.
“I was following an anonymous tip— I know, that’s the police’s job, but I thought— secondhand information is always worse, and police bring so much mess into a reading of a scene and I figured I’d just—” she glances at Morgan, whose mind is still mostly working in flashes (the body, the blood on the floor, there’s blood on the table, there’s blood on Emma’s hands, there’s a knife on the ground beside Emma’s nice shoes, she stabbed him to death) “—but I expected the house to be empty, and it wasn’t. And I— um.” She looks surprised at her throat for closing up as she glances over to the man on the table. “I don’t—”
Morgan finds her voice. “You texted me this address?”
Emma winces. “I couldn’t think of another option. I didn’t want to read the address out loud, either.”
“Emma. You do this for a living. That’s on my phone now.” No—fuck her phone, a hundred street cameras must’ve seen her on her way here. She rang the doorbell, she opened the door, and she’s lucky that she wore gloves but Emma— Emma didn’t, Emma’s got a fresh coat of nail polish and soft, soft hands on display, blood in the wrinkles of her knuckles and still somehow looking like she’s never done a minute of work with them in her life, and if Emma can be traced here and Morgan can be proven to have gone after Emma then—
“I know. I know.”
“Do you?”
“I mean— can you blame me? I’ve never been on this side of—” she closes her mouth. “I kinda thought… is it embarrassing to say that I thought I’d be better at this?”
Morgan almost laughs. Emma, good at killing? Imagine.
“Like, you see a hundred cases, and it’s your job to pick out the mistakes, and you get to thinking if only you hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have done that, I’d have figured out a way around that, I’d have… you always have to kind of assume you’re smarter than the killers you convict.”
“Except Heartbreak, right?” Morgan can’t resist the question, and it’s worth it to see Emma’s face shift, a little of the nervousness breaking.
“Yeah. I guess I thought I’d be a little more like Heartbreak.”
Morgan indicates the body. “Is that him?”
“Um…” Emma inhales. “No. Or— if it is, I’d be surprised. The tip was about Heartbreak, said this was his ‘base of operations’ or whatever, so either I got really, really unlucky or the whole thing was a setup and I’m willing to bet which one was which. At best, this guy was probably a copycat. At worst, he was just…”
“Some low-level goon,” Morgan completes. Her head supplies her, unhelpfully, with how easily Emma switches to past tense for her victim (her victim—it’s enough to make Morgan’s head spin), how her posture relaxes with every word out of her mouth.
Emma smiles a quick, grateful smile. “That’s assuming Heartbreak has goons, which I’m not convinced of—but, yes, an expendable accomplice. That, or I’m being completely taken for a ride, and this whole trip was for nothing.”
Morgan sighs. This is nice, admittedly, but not what she needs to ask. “Emma, what did you call me here for?”
“...at worst? A lawyer.” Emma reaches up a hand, playing with a necklace underneath her sweater. “At best, a friend. Someone who might be able to— help. With all this.”
She reaches up to fiddle with her hair, and before her mind can catch up Morgan crosses the room in a few large strides and catches her hand. Emma’s eyes go wide with surprise.
“Don’t do that. You’ll shake hairs loose, and they’ll trace them back to you.”
Slowly, Emma lowers her hand, and Morgan (eventually) lets go. “Thanks.”
This is dangerous. This is infinitely more dangerous than Emma baiting her into a direct trap. She plays this wrong, and she shows her hand to the only person in the world possibly able to read it.
She plays this right, though, and it could offer her a lot. The biggest secret Emma’s probably ever kept, shared between the two of them, insurance on a silver platter, for one. Emma with a stain on her perfect, pretty record, for another, one that matches Morgan’s, one that makes Emma just a little bit… well. A little more like Heartbreak, to use her own wording. And— trust. The kind of trust you can’t get anywhere else, no matter how many nice words you attach to it.
“You want me to help make this go away?” Morgan asks—soft, almost gentle, far more gentle than she feels saying it.
Emma sighs. “I don’t see a better option. I can’t— my reputation can’t afford something like this, even if I’m not convicted, it’s—”
“You’d be tied to it forever. A prosecutor with a killing streak—headlines basically write themselves.” Morgan forces herself to exhale slowly. Nods to herself. “Look. If we’re in this, Emma, I need to know that we’re in this. No guilty breakdowns, no confession weeks down the line, no talking about it after tonight. We get it done, and then it’s gone.”
“I’m not stupid, Counselor.” Emma meets her eyes, steelier than Morgan had anticipated. “If I’d been worried about losing my nerve, I wouldn’t have called you.”
“Sweet of you to be worried for me.”
“I know that if I was already feeling uncertain, you’d only make it worse.”
That’s sweet, too.
Morgan steps back. Appraises the scene. “Okay. I’ll help.”
“Good.”
“I’m going to need a list of everything you’ve touched since getting here.”
Emma nods, sharply, just once. “Um. Door downstairs. Railing of the staircase, that thing is rickety. Doorknob here, and I think I pushed it in with my other hand, so the door itself, too. The light switch, I turned it on when I came in and then off when—” she swallows. Don’t freak out now, Rockford. “The coffee table. He shoved me into it and I broke the fall with my hands.”
“And the intercom,” Morgan adds. “You must’ve pressed it to let me in.”
Emma’s breath catches. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
Morgan sees her brain start to speed up—all the what ifs rising to the surface as she runs through what might’ve happened if Morgan hadn’t thought of it, either—and catches her with a sharp “Hey.”
“What?”
“I said no breakdowns.”
“And I said I’m not stupid.”
“Stupid or not, you’re—” an overthinker. Which is great for solving crimes, and terrible for committing them. “Don’t think of it like a life-or-death thing.”
“It is a life-or-death thing. My life, his death.”
“Sure. But it’s also a puzzle. Could even be fun, if it wasn’t so real.” On impulse, Morgan reaches down and takes Emma’s hand again, then her other, too, half-surprised that she even lets her (but she does—it seems to focus her a little, her eyes go to Morgan’s with a bit more clarity and her thoughts almost visibly slow down). “Just like a mystery, except you’re writing it instead of solving it.”
“That’s—” Emma sighs out something that might be a laugh. “Mysteries are written to be solved.”
“Are you a good writer?”
“No. I hate it.”
“Then that’s perfect, because ideally no one’s going to be able to read this one.”
“Anyone ever tell you that you’re bad at metaphors?”
“I’m great at metaphors. You’re bad at metaphors.”
“That— yeah. Yeah, I am.”
Morgan takes a deep breath, watches with no short amount of delight as Emma copies her (why can’t she be this compliant in the courtroom?). “Alright. Bad news first, it should probably be assumed that your presence here will be discovered, whether we like it or not—mine too, thanks again for that—so, in the interest of minimizing lying—”
“Isn’t the whole point to lie?” Emma interrupts. Now that she’s stopped trembling, she’s dedicating herself to scanning the room with almost as sharp an eye as Morgan’s.
“The point is to find one lie strong enough that you don’t need more than one. Best-case, that’s I wasn’t there at all, but we’re a little late for that because once you get caught in it—and, Emma, you will get caught in it, from a search on either of our phones or a camera showing you entering the building or someone fessing up about the anonymous tip—you’re forced to come up with another lie—”
“Two more, actually,” Emma says. “One about what I was doing here, and another about why I didn’t say anything about it at first. I see what you mean.”
“Good. How long after you killed him did you call me?”
“Almost immediately.” At least she has the decency to look embarrassed.
“That wasn’t smart.” If Emma had waited for a while, her attorney could have made the argument that she’d stumbled upon him a while after he’d died. But— “So we need to obfuscate time of death. That’s… not easy, but not impossible, either. A lot of good forensic techniques have fallen sufficiently by the wayside in recent years that I think we can get away with a less-than-perfect job.”
“It was quiet, comparatively,” Emma says. “No gunshot or screams. And nobody else lives here, from what I could tell.”
“That’s good.” She hates to admit it, but Emma and her are kind of a perfect team for something like this. “What we’re effectively trying to do is create my dream case and your nightmare scenario.”
“Your dream case is one where a killer gets off free?”
Well. “My dream case is one where it would be near-completely infeasible for my client to have committed this crime. Your nightmare—”
“Is finding nothing,” Emma finishes. “So, remove everything useful, and put back something that makes it so I couldn’t have done it.”
“Exactly.” Morgan goes into the dark hallway, looking for— there. Thermostat, set warm for the chilly evening. She cranks it down as far as it will go. “You remember everything you touched?”
“Yes.”
“Start wiping. Not with anything on your clothes—” shit, sweaters shed like dogs and Emma’s is both a bright color and a classically very ‘her’ color, she’ll need to “—actually, go into the hallway and take off your sweater, leave it there. I’m going to go hunting for a vacuum.”
Emma doesn’t question it, and Morgan hears the door open (another thing she’ll have to wipe down) and close. She finds the vacuum left haphazardly in the guy’s tiny bedroom—blissfully, it’s an old enough model that she doesn’t bet on it keeping any kind of record—and returns to find Emma, left in a plain black tank top and frowning.
“It’s cold in here.”
“Yeah.” Morgan inspects the carpet, determines it clean enough that running a vacuum over it won’t be too obvious, starts it up. “If we can’t deny that you were here at all, the next-best thing is to make it seem like he died after you left. Ideally, on a different day. Temperature is the easiest way to interfere with time of death without leaving anything that would come up on the ARCS, ergo: cold room.”
“...Maybe he called me here to give me a tip,” Emma says slowly, pulling a rag out from the kitchen and starting her work of wiping down the doorknob and light switch, “and the next day, Heartbreak came back to get revenge.”
Morgan snorts. “You didn’t pull off a Heartbreak murder, Emma. You’re gonna have to take that rag with you.”
“I know that.” She sounds offended. “But if I say it looks like one, nobody’s going to contest me.”
“That’s a second lie.”
“It’s a guess. If I get caught in it, then I was wrong, no harm done.”
Morgan finishes vacuuming the carpet, starts on the floor. “You’ve done more thinking about this kind of thing than I expected, Ms. Rockford.”
“So have you, Counselor.”
“Well, I have to. I don’t only defend the actually innocent.”
“And I don’t only prosecute the actually-guilty.” Emma wipes off the intercom. “So we both know a lot about manufacturing crime scenes to suit our needs.”
There’s something sweet there, maybe. Something bitter, definitely. Emma’s admission almost surprises her (finishing vacuuming, putting it away where she found it, coming back out to find Emma wiping the entire exterior of the door and stifling a giggle), if only because it’s a thought Morgan has had, several times, watching the DA work, and one she’s always, always rejected. Even when they’re facing each other in court, even when Emma is clearly losing her cool and Morgan’s pushing her buttons just that little bit harder, even when that glint of razor-sharp edge shows its face and Morgan gets a sense of how mean Emma really could be if she wanted to, it’s nearly impossible to think of her rival as anything other than—
Angelic.
Emma’s eyes have fallen on the knife—ostensibly, the last and most important thing to clear of fingerprints. She kneels slowly, and her hands reach for it, but then they just— twitch over it, hesitant, like she thinks touching it will call a big, glowing spotlight onto her and brand her a murderer for life (or, else, like touching it will bring her back in time and she’ll be there again, killing a man in his own living room). Her mouth sets in a pretty mask of determination, but her hands stay fluttering over it, close but never making contact.
Morgan crosses the room and kneels in front of her, reaching over and gently taking the rag out of her hand and picking up the knife to wipe it, their knees almost touching and their hands inches apart (Emma doesn’t move her hands even after the knife is gone from underneath them, like she’s daring herself to keep her nerve so close to the blade). “It makes more sense for me to do this one,” she says quietly. “I’ve already got gloves on, no chance for a slipup.”
“You really do know what you’re doing,” Emma says—also quietly, like she’s afraid to break the pocket of intimacy the two have created between them. What a thing.
Morgan slides the knife through her fingers so that she’s holding the blade, and starts to polish the handle. Emma’s eyes follow her movements. “It’s not as new an experience as you might think.”
“It’s not?” Emma asks, raising her eyebrows.
“Well, I’ve never had to do this before—” she indicates the knife under her fingers, and feels a wave of relief when Emma chuckles along with her “—but I’m good at cleaning up messes. It’s not really all that different from hiding anything else.” It’s even true, in some sense. When she started all this, her biggest surprise was how familiar it all felt.
“Anything else?”
“What, you never dropped a plate as a kid?”
Emma laughs again. “I never cleaned my fingerprints off of the cabinet afterwards.”
“Must’ve not had very smart parents.”
They lapse into silence for a moment. Morgan’s aware that she’s just polishing at this point, that the prints are as gone as they’ll ever be, but… she can’t lie and say she isn’t enjoying the little bit of proximity. Call it another indulgence.
“I wish this felt familiar to me,” Emma admitted. “I’m trying to focus on the task at hand, but I keep having to force myself to stop staring at—”
“Don’t force yourself. You can’t make yourself retire a train of thought, it’ll just circle around and around in your head until it drives you crazy. Here:” she puts the now-clean knife down, carefully, right where it had fallen, and takes Emma’s hand to pull her up. “Look.”
“Oh, god, Morgan, I don’t—”
“Just look.” She holds her shoulders as they both turn to face the man’s body, facedown and sprawled awkwardly across the coffee table. “It’s always better to confront your sins, Emma. They don’t go away just because you don’t look at them.”
“He looks uncomfortable,” Emma says softly.
“He’s dead.”
“He still looks uncomfortable.”
“Does that make you feel guilty?”
“I’m not going to have a breakdown.”
“I didn’t ask you that. I asked if you felt guilty.”
Again, there’s that tightness at the edges of Emma’s mouth. It occurs to Morgan, inexplicably, that she’s almost trying to prove herself. Emma has to be the best at everything, and apparently that includes things she’s never, ever wanted to do.
“I don’t know what I feel,” is the final, soft answer.
“How did it feel when you did it?” Risky question, not to mention time-wasting, but Morgan’s all impulse tonight and Emma’s shoulders are tense under her fingers and she’s not sure if it’s because of what’s happening or because this is (by far) the longest she’s ever touched the other woman. Her shoulders are bare, arms soft and visible and a little pink. Morgan’s gloves are the only layer of fabric between them.
“...It was a rush. I’ve never felt that much adrenaline, not even in court.” Emma’s voice takes on a slightly faraway quality, like she’s falling backwards into the memory, and Morgan can feel herself leaning in against her back like she can catch some of the experience just by being near her. “I was— scared, the whole time, scared as I’ve ever been, but when I finally— I got behind him and grabbed on, and I caught him in the stomach, first, then again in the lower chest, then I— tried to hit his heart and I missed and glanced off bone so I just went back for the stomach, again and again until he went down and I could pull away. And I felt…” she struggles for words for a moment. “Relieved.”
“That makes sense.” Pressed into her back, holding her by the shoulders. Like this, Emma? “He attacked you. You were afraid for your life.”
“I was just relieved that I’d been able to do it.” Emma shrinks back against Morgan, but she doesn’t sound scared. “That my hands could do something that actually made an impact.”
Morgan wants to bite the soft place where her neck meets her bare shoulder. She wants to suck the blood out of the cracks of her fingernail beds. She wants to show her, really show her, what hands can do to have an impact. But all of that is—
Childish. So she doesn’t. Instead, she squeezes her shoulders once, and lets go. “You’re building a pretty damning case against yourself, if I ever decided to confess.”
“You won’t. You’re incriminated, too, there’s no way to tell what I did without telling what you did, too.” Emma turns back to smile at her. “We’re caught in a stalemate.”
Doesn’t feel like a stalemate. Feels like Emma’s finally granted her a genuine win. “A stalemate where you owe me a favor.”
“I’ll buy you coffee.”
“No you won’t.”
Emma’s smile widens. “No. I won’t.”
“Come on. We’ve got a couple more things to take care of, and then we should get out.”
They come up with their cover as they work: Emma came to find information about Heartbreak, got nervous and called Morgan for backup, had a discussion with a masked man that gave her a few leads, and left. Other than that, they had no idea what had happened to the man on the coffee table. Couldn’t even confirm they were the same person—she’d never seen his bare face.
“And you think that’ll work?”
No idea. “Hopefully.”
“Hopefully isn’t exactly the glowing reassurance I was looking for.” But Emma does look reassured, like the honesty is more rewarding than anything else would’ve been. “Anything else we need to cover?”
“I’ll take a look.” What she’s really doing, even as she scans for anything out of place that she might have forgotten, is watching Emma. Emma, whose eyes haven’t left her since her confession, who looks focused in a way that Morgan isn’t sure she likes, like an idea is forming and she’s looking for proof. She wants to say that there’s nothing. You can’t get proof from a lack of comment. But—
“You still need to pick up the rag,” Morgan says. “And a corner of your shoeprint is in the blood, over there.”
Emma nods slowly. “I’ll clean it up—”
She’s being stupid. “Don’t. Just—” Morgan steps over, picks up the rag, and smears it, distorting the shape beyond recognition. “You can’t get rid of blood, not entirely—it’s more important that they can’t recognize a shoe. Shoes are easy to catch, because even if there are a hundred of the same brand walking through here there’s only one with exactly the type of wear on it that you have.”
“...Good to know.” There’s that look again. Morgan needs to stop handing trade secrets to the state’s pet prosecutor.
Morgan smiles like it’s nothing. “Other than that, I think we’re all done here. Wipe the railing on your way out.”
Emma smiles, too. Morgan hates that smile, sheepish and sweet and so knowing. “Before we go out, and never talk about this again—”
“Naturally.”
“I wanted to thank you. It isn’t like we’re that close, I’m… you’ve done a lot for me, just out of kindness, and all of it definitely at your own risk.”
Morgan sighs. “Not really. The second I stepped in here, I was incriminated.”
“You could’ve called the police.”
“Well, I wouldn’t have done that.”
Emma takes that in—nods. “I appreciate that.”
“What about you? You still haven’t really answered why you called me, of all people.”
“I guess…” Emma straightens, and takes the rag from Morgan. “Call it a hunch.”
Morgan feels a little cold. “Did it pay off?”
“You came, didn’t you?” Emma breezes past her, opens the door with the rag, picks up her sweater. “Come on. It’s late, and I’m sure you’ve got sleeping to do.”
“Hanging upside down from the rafters, as is customary!” Morgan grins, following Emma out the door and closing it neatly behind her with a gloved hand. “And you?”
“I’ve got work.”
Morgan whistles. “Doing paperwork while the blood dries? And they call me cold.”
Emma doesn’t answer her as she walks down the stairs, but Morgan sees her shoulders tense anyway. Maybe a bit too soon for jokes.
They step out into the cold air, the rag safely tucked in Emma’s pocket and out of sight. It’s stopped raining, a haze of mist and wet sidewalk the only parting gifts of the storm. Morgan pulls the door closed, shifting her gloved hand subtly to get rid of any errant fingerprints. That should do it. It has to be enough.
“Do you think you got what you needed?” Morgan asks. It’s mostly for the benefit of the lie, and in case anyone’s listening—but Emma meets her eyes, and there’s that look again.
“I think it was productive.”
Morgan’s gotten pretty good at figuring out when she’s screwed up. It’s a skill she’s honed through years of practice and experience. And every bit of her is telling her that tonight was a screwup, one bigger than she’s maybe ever made. She can see the gears turning, Emma too proud to come to the necessary conclusion but too smart not to see the writing on the wall, an endless spinning towards an inevitable result— but.
Not yet.
And Morgan is drunk on that not yet, on the knowledge that Emma has all the pieces, has seen very nearly the worst of what Morgan has to offer, and isn’t scared yet. For the first time outside of her imagination, she’s not the only prey animal in the room between them.
Because while she knows that she’s screwed up, that Emma is catching on faster than Morgan can lie and laugh and smooth over, she feels very different. She feels good, almost as good as she does after a kill, her mind back in that little room helping Emma clean fingerprints off of a knife. Holding Emma still while she looks at what she did and coaxing, slowly, an admission that she’d liked doing it from her pretty mouth.
Like this, Emma?
“I’m gonna get home. I’m sorry to pull you all the way out here so late.”
“It was worth it. I needed the exercise.”
Emma wrinkles her nose. “Ugh. You’re making me think about the walk home.”
Come home with me instead, it’s faster. “You’ll manage.”
“Rude.”
“I’m always rude.”
Emma laughs. “Good night, Morgan. Get home safe.”
“You, too.”
Emma turns, her frame lit up blue and red by storefronts in the distance, and starts to walk away. Morgan stays watching her for a long while—a rare indulgence, one she doesn’t often give herself, but tonight has been all about being stupid. She inhales, trying to catch a little of the night’s excitement and hold it in herself, deep where she needs filling.
And then she turns, hit finally with the weight of how exhausting this has been, and starts towards home.