Brandon continued to drive in silence, the weight of what he'd witnessed pressing into his chest. His fingers had long since cramped around the steering wheel. 
The road stretched ahead. The engine's low hum was his only companion, punctuated by the sharp crackle of gravel beneath tires and the soft, mournful whisper of wind through the window.
He couldn't escape the image seared into his retinas—Sean and that other man at the safehouse, their silhouettes burned into his memory like a brand.
The unmistakable way Sean carried himself: shoulders squared with that particular brand of arrogance, head tilted in that characteristic pose that made Brandon's teeth ache. 
"Why the hell were you out there?" The words escaped from his mouth, swallowed by the car's suffocating interior. His own voice sounded foreign to him—hollow, desperate.
It had started innocently enough. Just a hunch—the kind of nagging instinct that had kept him breathing through eight years of digging into places decent people avoided.
After leaving the courthouse earlier that week, he'd pulled over near Greenvale where his office sat like a monument to his declining faith in justice. The evening sun had been bleeding out across the horizon, painting the sky in violent shades of amber and violet that reminded him too much of old crime scene photos. That's when he recalled what had said earlier. "Sean slipped me the information."
How could Sean have a piece of evidence which didn't surface in police evidence? There must be an explanation for that.
That night, while lying in bed and sleep mocked him from just beyond reach, his mind had churned through possibilities until he couldn't stand the weight of his own thoughts. He decided to tail Sean. He knows how important the nights were in discovering secrets. The drive to the station had been impulse disguised as investigation—just a quick pass to put the nagging voice in his head to rest.
That's when he'd seen it. Sean's car, pulling away from the bureau's parking lot. The same pristine vehicle he'd watched Sean drove that morning after Lena's hearing, when he'd driven off with Kendra. He followed him from a distance, only to found himself at the abandoned safehouse.
He'd parked three blocks away and walked back through shadows that felt too eager to hide him, gravel crunching beneath his careful steps like small bones breaking.
The stack of discarded pallets near the rear fence had been a gift from whatever god protected fools and investigators. He'd climbed them with the desperation of a man half his age, camera in his hand.
And there Sean had stood, illuminated in stolen moments between shadows.
No badge visible. No backup lurking in the darkness. No radio chatter or official vehicles.
Just Sean and a man who radiated the kind of quiet menace that money could buy.
Brandon's jaw throbbed where he'd been clenching it, a dull ache that matched the one spreading through his chest. His hands shook as he hit the steering wheel with the heel of his palm, the sharp sound echoed in the confined space.
"That's not a sting operation," he muttered, the words tasting like betrayal. "That's a goddamn cover-up."
He pulled into a quiet overlook nestled along a ridge, the city stretching out below in scattered lights, blinking like a sea of distant fireflies. He killed the engine. A blanket of silence settled over the car, broken only by the ticking of the cooling engine and his own measured breathing.
The glow of the dashboard cast faint shadows across his face as he pulled out his camera and began scrolling through the photos. The blue light illuminated the deep lines around his eyes, carved by years of seeing too much.
The photos were grainy, shot in poor light with an unsteady hand, but they weren't worthless. Not by a long shot.
He zoomed in on the clearest image, and Sean's face emerged from the digital noise like an accusation. 
Beside him stood the stranger, and Brandon felt something cold crawl up his spine as he studied the man's silhouette. Older, with the kind of presence that commanded rooms without saying a word. Broad shoulders that spoke of either natural intimidation or expensive tailoring—probably both. There was a stillness to his posture that screamed professional violence, the kind of patience that came from knowing you held all the cards.
Not law enforcement conducting official business. From the perfect cut of his coat to the gleam of what looked like a watch worth more than Brandon's annual salary, everything about the man screamed untouchable.
Brandon's throat felt dry as dust. "Who the hell are you?" he whispered to the image. "And what are you doing with Sean?"
He leaned back in the driver's seat, the leather creaking like old bones. His eyes burned from staring at the small screen, but he couldn't look away. 
His neck popped as he rolled his head, trying to work out tension that had taken up permanent residence in his shoulders. Every muscle felt coiled, ready to snap.
The thoughts came in waves, each one darker than the last. He didn't have enough for Internal Affairs—not yet. Just photographs that could be explained away by a good lawyer and a better story. And the absolute last thing he wanted was to dump this mess in Kendra's lap without understanding what he was handing her. She was already drowning—the trial, Lena's arrest, the mounting pressure to solve Mr. Stephen's murder while the whole world watched her every move. Adding his paranoid suspicions to her burden felt like cruelty.
"Damn it all," he breathed, closing eyes that felt full of sand. "What's your endgame here, Sean? What are you really after?"
But even as he tried to rationalize, to find innocent explanations, another voice whispered from the depths of his mind—
Warn her. Protect her before she walks into something she can't walk back out of.
His phone felt like it weighed a thousand pounds as he pulled it from his pocket. Kendra's contact photo materialized on the screen—mid-laugh, eyes bright with something that might have been hope, taken back when the world still made a kind of sense. Before this case had sunk its claws into all of them. 
He opened their message thread, the blue glow painting his face with an unhealthy pallor.
Hey. Be careful around Sean. I don't know what he's up to, but something about him feels wrong. Really wrong.
Brandon stared at the words until they blurred. His thumb hovered over the send button like it was a loaded gun.
Then he deleted every word.
Too vague. Too dramatic. Too much like the ravings of a man who'd spent too many nights chasing shadows. She'd ask questions he couldn't answer without sounding like he'd lost his grip on reality.
He tried again, fingers moving across the screen with the precision of a surgeon.
I saw Sean tonight. He was somewhere he shouldn't have been, with someone who made my skin crawl. I don't have all the pieces yet, but I think you need to be very, very careful around him.
His thumb hesitated again. The words felt too direct, too much like an accusation he couldn't prove. Too easy for her to confront Sean, which could put her in the kind of danger that didn't come with warnings or second chances.
"Think, Brandon," he muttered, his reflection staring back at him from the black window like a disappointed father. "Use your goddamn head."
He deleted that message too and tried one more time, each word carefully chosen, weighed, measured.
Hey. Just a heads-up—something about Sean's movements tonight didn't sit right with me. Might be nothing. But stay sharp, okay?
The words felt inadequate, like trying to describe a hurricane with a whisper. But they were honest, and they were careful, and they were all he had.
His thumb shook as he hit send. The soft whoosh of the message leaving felt deafening in the tomb-quiet car.
The message disappeared into the digital void, carrying with it all his fears and half-formed suspicions. No response. Just silence that felt like a held breath.
Brandon stared out the windshield at the city sprawling below, each light representing lives that went on in blissful ignorance of the rot spreading through the foundation of everything they trusted. A plane crossed the sky like a slow-moving star, its red lights pulsing in rhythm with his racing heart.
This doesn't make sense, he thought, the words echoing in his skull. Sean's supposed to be the straight arrow. The boy scout. The one who does everything by the book, even when the book is wrong.
But there was no mistaking what he'd witnessed at that safehouse. No rationalizing away the absence of badges and backup, the careful way they'd moved through shadows like men accustomed to hiding. 
He shoved the camera back into his bag with more force than necessary, his mind working through possibilities like a slot machine spinning toward jackpot or disaster. The engine turned over with a growl that sounded almost angry, vibrating through the seat and into his bones.
Brandon put the car in gear and began the long drive home through streets that felt less familiar, as if the city itself had shifted while he wasn't looking. The headlights carved a narrow path through darkness that seemed eager to swallow everything in its path.
"I hope Kendra understands me. And stays away from him," he muttered to himself.