Page 37 of Raven's Mark
Uncle Robert's files glow on the laptop screen in front of me, tabbed and layered in a pattern that made sense when I sat down at five a.m. The morning light has shifted since then, and I've read the same paragraph six times without absorbing a single word.
My notebook lies open beside the laptop, pages filled with the timeline I've been building—cross-references between the death reports, connections I can prove, and questions I can't answer yet. Surveillance timestamps blur together. Shipping manifests from the Dallas import company overlap with Harlan's incident reports in ways that stop looking coincidental after the third match. The Alvarez surveillance photos sit open in their own window, and I keep coming back to them no matter how many times I tell myself to focus on the data.
The warehouse photo is the one I can't look away from. Alvarez in his tailored suit with his graying temples and the posture that always communicated the same message in every room he entered:I'm in charge and I know exactly what I'm doing.
Through the window, Jesse moves across the clearing toward the tree line, checking the perimeter the way he does every morning. His rifle rests in the low ready position, and his stride is unhurried, the walk of a man who trusts his own senses enough to move at his own pace. He's been out there since before I woke, and I can't tell whether he's giving me space to process or avoiding the conversation we both know is coming.
Either way, the cabin is mine for now, and the quiet is doing me no favors. My thoughts have been circling the same drain for hours, and the pattern isn't getting clearer with repetition.
The Harlan evidence is circumstantial, but damning. Four identical death reports using template language. A dismissed complaint from a victim's daughter. Surveillance photos connecting Harlan to Alvarez and Alvarez to the cartel. Physical evidence from the Pritchard ranch tying an active weapons pipeline to a property where Harlan cleared the owner's death as accidental, backed by Beckett's data confirming cartel staging points on every property Harlan signed off on.
None of that is what keeps pulling my focus.
What I can't stop turning over is everything the evidence implies about the ground I've been standing on for the last decade. Alvarez shaped my career from the day I walked into ATF, and Uncle Robert shaped the path that led me there. The architecture of my entire professional life was designed by people who were using me, and I walked through every door they opened without once looking at the hinges.
I click back to the warehouse photo. Alvarez's hands are visible in the frame, one gesturing toward the cartel enforcers, the other holding a phone. I remember those same hands pushing a file across a conference table, his voice warm with the kind of confidence that made junior agents want to impress him. The memory surfaces before I can stop it.
Bishop, I'm putting you on the Garza case. You've got the right profile for undercover work, and you don't spook easy. This is your chance to prove what you're made of.
That case was the beginning of everything. My first official investigation into the same gun-running networks that had destroyed my family. I finally had the chance to fight them with a badge and federal authority instead of a teenager's notebook and raw nerve.
And Alvarez had personally assigned me to investigate the very organization he was feeding intel to from the inside. Every lead I chased, every report I filed, every risk I took in the field went straight through his office and back to the cartel.
I'd been so proud. A junior agent, barely settled into the job, and the director of the El Paso field office was handpicking me for undercover work. I'd called Uncle Robert that night, voice practically vibrating with it, and his response had been measured. Careful. The way it always was when the topic turned to my career.
That's a significant opportunity, Raven. Make sure you're ready for it.
I'd taken his caution as concern, as an overprotective uncle. It hadn't occurred to me that his hesitation might have been calculation. That he might have been weighing whether Alvarez's interest in me was professional admiration or recruitment of a different kind entirely.
When Uncle Robert's speakerphone call revealed he'd been moving me through a maze of his own design, I thought that was the worst of it. The floor had dropped out and I'd survived the fall. Now I know Alvarez was doing the same thing, except his board belonged to the people who burned my life to the ground in the first place. Between the two of them, every meaningful decision in my professional life was shaped by someone else's hand.
Morrison fit the same architecture. If Alvarez was running me, then Morrison had never been my partner. He'd been my handler. Every late night at the office, every stakeout, every moment of trust I extended to him was containment dressed up as camaraderie, designed to keep Raven Bishop productive and useful but too comfortable to ask dangerous questions.
The nausea arrives without warning. A slow roll that starts deep in my stomach and climbs until I have to press both palms flat against the granite countertop. The stone is cool under my hands and I focus on that, on the solid physical reality of it, because the alternative is letting the panic drag me under.
I don't know which cases were real. I don't know which operations mattered and which ones were theater, staged to keep me occupied while the cartel moved product through the territory I was supposedly protecting. The uncertainty is worse than the betrayal itself, because at least betrayal has a shape. This is fog. Every memory I examine dissolves the moment I hold it up to the light, and I can't find solid ground in a single one of them.
The question I keep circling back to is why. Why recruit me at all? Why hand me a badge and point me at his own operation?
Alvarez could have kept me behind a desk, buried me in paperwork, made sure I never got close to anything that mattered. Instead he handed me cartel investigations and chose the targets himself. There has to be a reason for that, and the only one that fits the evidence is the worst one.
If the operation ever went sideways, he'd need someone to take the fall. A young agent with her name on every case file, her signature on every warrant application, her face on every undercover operation he approved. The perfect scapegoat, built over years, documented in her own handwriting.
I wasn't just his asset. I was his insurance policy.
I push back from the island and rub my hands over my face, fingers digging into my temples. Every relationship that defined my professional life, mentor, partner, uncle, has turned out to be a different kind of cage, and I'm running out of ground to stand on.
The front door opens and my hands fall from my face. My right hand closes around the Glock on the island before I register Jesse's familiar silhouette in the doorway. He sets his rifle in its case by the door and crosses the living room to the kitchen without speaking, pouring himself coffee from the pot. I can see him reading the scene in a single sweep: the laptop, the notebook, the surveillance photos on screen, the Glock under my hand.
He doesn't ask if I'm okay. He doesn't tell me it's going to be fine.
Instead, he pulls out the stool across the island from me, sits down, and waits. His gaze is steady on mine, and he doesn't look away.
The tightness in my chest eases a fraction. Not relief, because nothing about this morning warrants relief, but the particular calm that comes from having the one person I trust within arm's reach and asking nothing from me.
Jesse kept his promise to Uncle Martin and put me on that plane before going back to finish what needed to be done. Jesse is the only one who's shown me exactly who he is and let me decide for myself what to do with it. The math on that isn't complicated.
The silence stretches between us, but it isn't the charged kind from the other night, the kind that crackled with heat and want that neither of us was willing to name. This is quieter. This is the silence of a man who understands that some things need patience and space before they'll surface on their own.
