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Chapter Text

SVU PRECINCT - June 3, 2004 - 11:14 PM

It was late.

The kind of late where the city hummed low and sullen, where yellowed streetlights flickered against rain-slicked glass and the precinct’s halls echoed like they were mourning something. Outside, the storm came in sideways; sharp, relentless, and cold. Most desks were abandoned, save for the scattered clatter of a coffee mug being rinsed in a distant breakroom, the hum of an old copier exhaling in the dark.

Inside his office, Captain Donald Cragen flipped through files with the weariness of a man who’d seen too many careers rise and fall like bad headlines. His sleeves were rolled to the elbows, tie askew, the collar of his shirt slightly damp from the walk in. He didn’t usually stay this late anymore, but the seat across from John Munch had been empty too long.

He needed someone sharp. Someone quiet, fast, maybe a little unhinged, but in a useful way.

Then he saw it.

A manila folder labelled in sharp, formal type:

AMARI-VOLKOV, TALIA NADINE.
MIDTOWN NORTH - NARCOTICS.

He opened it. Read the first page. Then the second.

And by the third, he was whispering her name like a secret. “Talia Amari…”

There was something about the way her report was structured. The hand-scribbled notes in red pen on a printed sting summary. A pattern in the case timeline no one had bothered to highlight, but she had. Quietly. Precisely.

She had completed four successful stings in just under a year, embedded deep enough in Midtown’s underbelly to draw intel from dealers who didn’t even talk to cops. He read about how she once pulled a wire mid-operation and still closed it clean. How she spoke three languages fluently. How her cold case board wasn’t even officially sanctioned but still got two internal referrals kicked up the chain.

Three years on the job. That’s it. Three years, and she was already operating like she’d lived through a dozen systems falling apart.

Cragen sat back. The rain drummed harder against the windows like it had somewhere to be. Munch’s desk sat across the bullpen like a drawn-out sigh, too quiet without someone next to him to poke the static.

This one wouldn’t just fill the space. She’d redraw it.

He closed the file slowly, fingers tapping once on the cover. There was a weight to her name, something he couldn’t quite put into words. She hadn’t even gotten her detective results back yet, but his gut knew. She’d pass. She’d fly.

He stood, slipped the folder into his briefcase, and grabbed his coat.

“Welcome to SVU, Officer Amari.”

The words barely made it past his lips before the light clicked off, and he disappeared into the storm.

Somewhere in Astoria, the sharp-eyed woman with the gold hoops and the secrets in her back pocket stirred in her sleep, unaware that tomorrow morning would change the trajectory of her entire life.

[Excerpt from NYPD Internal Records - Transfer Review File #44119]
Filed: June 3, 2004 | Captain Donald Cragen, NYPD SVU

BADGE #: 44119
[Photograph unavailable - See Security Clearance Level 3]

NYPD PERSONNEL FILE

OFFICER PERSONNEL DATA SHEET
Name: Amari-Volkov, Talia Nadine
NYPD ID #: 103-8110
Rank: Police Officer
Current Precinct: Midtown North - Narcotics Division
Date of Birth: 19-06-1976
Place of Birth: Astoria, Queens, NY
Ethnicity: Egyptian-Russian
Religious Affiliation: Christian (Coptic Orthodox - not self-reported)
Languages Spoken: English (native), Arabic (Egyptian dialect - fluent), Russian (fluent), Ancient Greek (reading comprehension)
NEXT OF KIN: None listed
FAMILY STATUS: [REDACTED - See Addendum A]
Supervisor: Lt. Marcus Tiernan

ACADEMY RECORD

• Admitted: 2000
• Graduation: 2001 (Top 12% of class)
• Commended for:
• Tactical restraint in active shooter scenario (sim)
• Observational excellence in surveillance exam
• Advanced language aptitude (Arabic & Russian fluency)

Final Evaluation Comment:

“Amari is precise, composed, and naturally inquisitive. Unafraid to challenge assumptions. May ruffle feathers.”
- Sgt. K. Halloran, Academy Training Officer

EDUCATION & TRAINING

• Graduated NYPD Police Academy - Top 12% of class (2001)
• Bachelor of Arts in Criminology and Comparative Literature
• Postgraduate coursework in Forensic Psychology (Incomplete)
• Defensive Tactics Certification - Advanced Level
• Firearms Requalification Score: 97% (Most recent evaluation)

ASSIGNMENT HISTORY

• 2001-2003: Patrol Officer, 10th Precinct
• 2003-Present: Narcotics Division, Midtown North
• Undercover stings (4 successful)
• Intelligence gathering
• Suspected involvement in an unsanctioned cold case board (see supervisor note)

Supervisor Note (Lt. Tiernan):

“Officer Amari shows potential well above her rank. Detail-focused, intuitive. Makes people talk. Too curious for her own good, but gets results.”
“She doesn’t trust easily. Keeps her cards close. But her instincts? Dead-on.”

PSYCHOLOGICAL EVALUATION (INITIAL)

“Quietly intense. Highly intelligent. May benefit from mentorship due to tendency toward emotional suppression. Possible history of familial trauma. No risk indicators. Highly promising candidate for investigative work.”
- Dr. Marie Weiss, NYPD Psych Services

Note: Recommends quarterly psych eval due to exposure to high-stress trauma cases and family history (see Addendum B).

DISCIPLINARY & COMMENDATION RECORD

• Commendation: Civilian protection during [REDACTED] (2002)
• No formal complaints or disciplinary action
• Flagged once for “inappropriate language toward superior” (dismissed)

EXAM STATUS

• Detective Exam Taken:✓ (2004 - awaiting results)
• Projected Promotion Eligibility:2005

ADDITIONAL NOTES

• Known for her meticulous cold case logs and off-the-record research into historical crimes, cults, and political corruption.
• Desk includes confiscated items currently held unofficially (e.g., Cold War-era surveillance manuals, conspiracy journals, audio cassette tapes)
• Frequently listens to conspiracy-focused podcasts during late shifts.
• Three registered canines (German Shepherds): Ramses, Anubis, and Heka.
• Medical Record - [Flagged] [See Medical Appendix D - Mental Health Indicators]
  

INTERNAL REVIEW/CONDUCT NOTES:

FAMILY STATUS - [REDACTED - See Addendum A]

ADDITIONAL INTERNAL REFERENCES:

Addendum A - Family history, sealed.

Addendum B - Medical report following 2002 injury (Riker’s).

Addendum C - Unofficial inquiries into politically sensitive cases.

Addendum D - Psychological review (completed).

Addendum E - Pending review: cold case closure submitted without formal reassignment.

INTERNAL REVIEW/CONDUCT NOTES:

No formal investigations currently active.

[Flagged: Subject may have concealed interpersonal relationship while serving under NYPD Narcotics.]

ISSUED GEAR

ISSUED EQUIPMENT (Standard + Specialty):

• Glock 19 (service weapon)
• Smith & Wesson .38 Special (registered backup)
• Lockpicking kit (authorized, undercover)
• Leather-bound NYPD field journal (initials T.A. stamped)
• One (1) silver lighter (unauthorized, retained for personal use)

ASTORIA - June 4, 2004 - 6:32 AM 

Astoria was never quiet, and that’s exactly why Talia loved it. The streets buzzed with life, a constant symphony of languages and laughter, music drifting from open windows, and the scent of food from every corner of the globe. There was a little bit of everything here, Greek, Dominican, Egyptian, Russian, Thai, Colombian. It was chaotic, alive, and most importantly, hers. It was close to work, too, and rare as gold in New York: there was free parking right in front of her house.

Her house.

It was something out of a painting. The rowhouse on 33rd Street was small by most standards; narrow, red-bricked, a single stoop with worn iron railings that creaked in the winter. But inside, it was a world all its own. A world where time slowed and memory wrapped around her like a shawl.

The moment the door opened, the scent of thyme, orange peel, and incense greeted her like an old friend. It lingered in the walls, clung to jackets in winter, perfumed the curtains come summer. The foyer was tiled in uneven stone, worn from years of shoes and stories, with a tall mirror framed in gold-leaf filigree reaching nearly to the ceiling. Above it, a framed Arabic calligraphy of “Bismillah” shimmered in deep indigo and gold, flanked by two small Orthodox icons, the Virgin and Saint George, watching over the space with wide, eternal eyes.

The living room glowed in ochres and pomegranate reds, bathed in soft lamplight filtered through embroidered lace curtains. A stained-glass lamp hung from the ceiling, one her father had brought back from Alexandria, and painted little gems of colour on the walls. A low, carved wooden table sat in the centre, surrounded by mismatched cushions and two faded velvet armchairs that had never quite been reupholstered. Books in Arabic, Russian, and English overflowed from shelves, dog-eared, defiant, beloved. Evil eye charms dangled from the corners of picture frames, swaying gently whenever someone passed, always watching, always guarding.

A small glass ashtray, shaped like a pomegranate and stained at the edges, sat quietly on the windowsill, its rim lined with the ghosts of half-smoked skinny cigarettes she only lit on the hardest nights. She preferred hookah, truthfully, there was something more ritualistic, more ancestral about it, but the cigarettes were faster, quieter, more private. Scattered around the room were tiny glass pomegranate trinkets in ruby and amber, souvenirs from old souks and church fairs, each catching the light like droplets of blood in a bowl of honey.

One wall was devoted entirely to family photos, arranged not by symmetry, but by soul. Her mother in a red scarf, laughing mid-dance. Her brother Samir, proud in his military uniform, holding a toddler version of her. A school portrait of Talia with tightly braided hair, gap-toothed and frowning. And in the centre, the most worn of them all, her parents on their wedding day, their joy captured in fading sepia.

The kitchen was humble but warm, the heart of the house. Copper pots hung from a rail like quiet sentinels. Hand-painted ceramic bowls, chipped but cherished, sat above the stove. A samovar rested on the counter, a relic of her father’s habits. A jar of pickled lemons caught the afternoon light in the windowsill. The fridge was a patchwork of memories: magnets from Cairo, St. Petersburg, and a single photo booth strip of her and her sister, Lana, both with whipped cream on their noses, mid-laugh.

Upstairs, the bedroom, was sacred. Talia's room was exactly as it had always been, tucked under the slanted ceiling at the back of the house. Her bed was layered with a faded Coptic quilt, frayed at the edges, and newer throws in dusty rose and olive green. A wooden vanity mirror, streaked with time, sat in the corner. On top: a small dish lined with dried jasmine petals, beside her mother’s prayer beads, which still smelled faintly of myrrh.

The walls whispered to her; of arguments, lullabies, laughter, and whispered prayers during thunderstorms. The house had long gone quiet, but never cold. There was something sacred in the silence. And Talia had kept it that way on purpose. It was her safe space. Her sanctuary. The only place in the world that truly felt like hers.

Even the outside held pieces of her.

The wrought-iron gate at the front creaked in a way she knew by heart. The small front garden was a haphazard patch of mint and rosemary, cracked pots, and a faded ceramic frog her mother once insisted brought luck.

And then, of course, there was the car.

A matte black 1967 Ford Mustang GT parked out front like it owned the block. It didn’t purr; it growled. That low, hungry sound made the neighbourhood boys stare, and the old uncles shake their heads in quiet respect. They never expected someone like her to drive something like that. But Talia liked it that way.

She’d bought it old, rusting, forgotten, and spent years fixing it with her cousin until it roared like it used to. Now it shined like obsidian under the Queens sun. In the rearview mirror, her father’s prayer beads swayed, a soft rhythm that followed her everywhere.

It had rained that morning. Of course it had. A June drizzle clung to the city like memory; wet, restless, and uninvited. But she rose anyway, same as always, pulling herself from the sheets like a blade from a sheath.

She dressed with intention, as she always did. Black lace, matching, always. Not for anyone else. Just for the poetry of it. A ritual. A promise to herself that she was still the kind of woman who chose silk over survival, even in a world that demanded the opposite.

In the mirror, she caught herself mid-motion. A flash of ink across golden olive skin, her back, a cathedral of secrets. A tapestry of myth and mourning.

Between her shoulder blades, a Coptic cross rose bold and unwavering, framed in sacred iconography that mimicked ancient frescoes. Saint Mary, her halo inked in sepia and lined with heartbreak. Two serpents coiled around the symbol in the shape of an ankh, life, death, and resurrection intertwined. Beneath them, names in curling Arabic script: her parents, remembered in permanence. And just below, a single Russian word, душа. (Soul.) The lettering was careful. Sacred. There were verses there, too, some prayers, some curses. All grief. All hers.

A date lived at the base of her spine, unspoken but unforgettable. And the soft shadow of her sister’s handwriting, tattooed as if Lana might somehow live in the ink.

Her thighs bloomed with roses; wild, thorned, unapologetically feminine. One wrapped around a crescent moon; another curled beneath a watchful Nazar. And buried between them, written so small it was nearly a secret: a line of script you’d have to kneel to read.

Most people never saw the tattoos. That was the point.

She dressed like war disguised as fashion; high-waisted slacks that hugged her hips like sin, a silk blouse in a colour that shifted between blood and wine, and heels that announced her presence before she ever crossed the threshold. Her jewellery glinted gold: stacked bracelets, heavy hoops, a tiny cross that caught the light at her collarbone. Always her Nazar charm. Always the perfume; faint, expensive, unforgettable. And always, always a red lip.

Talia Amari didn’t do casual. She didn’t do forgettable. When she walked into a room, she stayed.

And yet… this day began like all the others.

She locked her door without looking back. Slid behind the wheel of her car. Lit a cigar she wouldn’t smoke. The rain had already stopped, but the city still smelled like something ancient and unfinished. Asphalt and ozone. Guilt and gasoline.

She turned the radio dial, skipping static until she found one of her conspiracy stations, the voice of a grizzled Slav muttering about Cold War espionage and water fluoridation. She let it play. She liked the paranoia. It made her feel less alone.

She thought it would be a day like any other. Another shift. Another lie unravelled. Another corpse no one would mourn but her.

But that was the thing about days like these.

You only realized they were important when they were already over.

MIDTOWN NORTH PRECINCT - June 4, 2004 – 8:02 AM

The Midtown North precinct smelled like burnt coffee, printer ink, and stale ambition. Talia stepped through its automatic doors for what she didn’t yet know would be the last time, the morning light catching on the hard lines of her regulation boots. She ducked into the locker room and changed into her uniform, tugging the stiff fabric over her shoulders with a grimace. It was boxy, unflattering, and entirely designed with men in mind. It sat wrong on her hips, flattened her chest, and made her look like a background extra in someone else's story. She hated it.

Narcotics didn’t allow for flourish. It wasn’t a place for art, just blood, pills, and bad lighting.

When she entered the bullpen, the fluorescent glare overhead made her squint. Her desk; one of many identical, utilitarian workstations, was already occupied. Or rather, her supervisor, Lieutenant Marcus Tiernan, was standing in front of it, arms crossed and waiting like a man who knew something she didn’t.

Talia kept her face blank as she approached, though her spine straightened. “Can I help you, sir?” she asked coolly, sliding her bag off her shoulder.

Marcus didn’t reply at first. He gave her a slow, knowing smirk and handed her a manila folder. She took it, fingers steady, and flipped it open.

Her Detective Exam results.

She passed. Of course she did. Doubting herself had never been the issue. But still, something flickered low in her chest, a brief, private warmth. Pride, maybe. Or relief.

“Congratulations, Detective,” Marcus said, the title landing like a new nameplate. “But I’m afraid I also come bearing bad news.”

Talia raised an eyebrow.

“We’ve got too many detectives on staff here,” he continued, his tone almost apologetic. “So, effective immediately, you’re being transferred to the Manhattan Special Victims Unit. Sixteenth precinct.”

She blinked. “Now?”

“Now.”

He handed her a cardboard box with silent finality. She looked around, at the empty space she was supposed to call a career, the bland desks and fingerprint-smudged partitions. No one turned to see her go. Narcotics didn’t deal in sentiment, and she wasn’t sentimental about it.

Truthfully? She was glad. She’d always hated Narcotics. Too much rot, not enough purpose. SVU was more her rhythm. Victims who mattered. Cases that haunted.

She stripped out of her uniform in the locker room and back into her real clothes. By the time she stepped outside and into her car, she looked nothing like an NYPD officer. More like someone investigating them.

SVU PRECINCT – June 4, 2004 – 8:15 AM

The 16^th Precinct felt different from the moment she stepped through the doors. There was a low buzz in the air, controlled chaos. The kind that hinted at too many open cases and too little sleep.

At the front desk, she showed her transfer paperwork, got her new ID badge, and was pointed toward the second floor.

She rode the elevator alone, eyes fixed forward, fingers brushing the thin gold chain around her neck.

As the elevator doors opened, she stepped into the squad room like she owned it. Back straight. Head high.

The scent of old files and cheap aftershave hit her first.

To her right: the uniformed officers’ desks, hunched over paperwork and half-drunk coffee.
To her left: the detectives.

She clocked them immediately.
A woman, short dark hair, eyes like razors.
Next to her, a man with a strong jaw and sceptical energy, probably her partner.
Across the bullpen, another man, darker complexion, built like he didn’t need backup.
And finally, an older man sat at a desk with dark-colored glasses, and a book cracked open beside a coffee mug.

The desk in front of him was empty.

“You lost?” the tough-looking man asked, giving her a quick up-down glance like she didn’t belong.

Talia opened her mouth to respond, but a voice cut in before she could. “Ah! Detective Amari,” came the smooth baritone of a man approaching. Captain Don Cragen, she guessed from the photos she’d seen. “Welcome to SVU.”

A few heads turned.

She offered a single nod, stepping fully into the room as the gold at her ears caught the light.

There was a beat of silence.

The short-haired woman blinked.
The man next to her leaned forward slightly, as if reevaluating.
Even the older man looked over his glasses.

They’d expected a rookie, but instead they got Talia Nadine Amari.

Chapter Text

SVU PRECINCT – June 4, 2004 – 8:15 AM

The squad room buzzed with the low murmur of printers, phones, and tired feet dragging across linoleum. It smelled like coffee and the faint sharpness of whiteboard markers. A fan clattered somewhere in the back, stirring air that had already gone stale by noon. The bulletin board across the room displayed a collage of mugshots and crime scene snapshots, corners curling with time. Over it all: fluorescent lights, harsh and unflattering, humming like an accusation.

Talia didn’t flinch under any of it.

She sat at the edge of her new desk, posture a masterclass in poised disinterest. Her dark curls framed her face with deliberate softness, a contrast to the sharpness of her eyes, eyes that watched, measured, catalogued.

Hours had passed in a quiet blur. She’d already completed the intake paperwork, signed three different versions of the same release form, and fielded an unnecessarily personal conversation with the M.E. “You have a homicide face,” the woman had said cheerfully. “They’ll like you here.” The techs gave polite nods. Uniforms asked her name twice. But the detectives?

The four of them stayed a unit. Like wolves watching from a ridge.

Except one.

The man at the desk across from hers was silent. He hadn't said a word, not when she unpacked her files, not when she laid out her pens in a line like they were surgical instruments. He read a book with a cracked spine and yellowing edges. Occasionally, he glanced at her over the rim of his glasses. Studying her. Not leering. Calculating. She didn’t ask his name, and he didn’t offer it. But she felt it, like being mirrored in still water.

She reached for her coffee just as the rest of the pack arrived.

They came in like formation. Olivia Benson, all steely grace and quiet force. Odafin Tutuola, Fin, swaggering with a beat in his step like he moved to music only he could hear. And then Elliot Stabler, of course, broad-shouldered and smirking like he knew he was going to say something that would piss her off.

“You must be the newbie,” he said with an easy grin, hands on hips. “We’ve got a bit of a tradition around here.”

Talia didn’t look up right away. She took a deliberate sip, then glanced at him with the kind of expression that could slice a throat in the right lighting.

“Do you now,” she said, voice cool.

“Yeah,” Fin added with a grin. “We read your file, we poke around your stuff, then we interrogate you like a perp. See what you’re made of.”

Talia blinked slowly. Set her cup down.

“How charming,” she said dryly.

“It’s for team bonding,” Stabler threw in.

“It’s for our amusement,” Fin corrected, eyes glittering.

Talia crossed one leg over the other, arms folding across her silk blouse, revealing a sliver of gold chain at her wrist. Her lips curved into a small, deliberate smirk.

“Alright,” she said, leaning back. “Let’s make it interesting. Why don’t you each tell me why I should pick you to interrogate me?”

Fin let out a low whistle, impressed. “Yeah, that’s a Narcotics thing. Turn the heat back on the room. I like it.”

Olivia stepped forward, always the diplomat. “Well, I’m a woman. You’re a woman. We can read between the lines. Might not even need words.”

Talia gave a polite nod. “Understood.”

Fin stepped in. “I came from Narcotics too. Midtown South. Different streets, same war zone.”

She tilted her head. “Respectable.”

Then Stabler. “Elliot Stabler,” he said, just that, like it was supposed to mean something.

Talia raised an eyebrow. “Is that it? Just a name?”

He grinned. “It’s a good name.”

She leaned in, voice a touch warmer now, like a match before it sparks. “We used to call you Stapler over at Midtown North.”

Stabler blinked. “Oh?”

“Rumour was you threw one. At a perp. Or maybe a lieutenant. Hard to tell. Stories change when they pass through enough precincts.”

Fin laughed, clapping Stabler on the shoulder. “That sounds about right.”

Then Fin’s chin jerked toward the man still reading at the desk behind her. “And that’s Munch.”

The man, Munch, didn’t look up.

“Pass,” he said, voice flat, like he hadn’t even paused his sentence in the book.

“Oh, come on,” Fin started.

“I’m old enough to be her father,” Munch muttered, flipping a page. “I’m not playing this game.”

And that’s when she turned.

Talia looked at him, really looked. The curve of her body stilled, breath caught mid-rhythm. Her gaze lingered long enough to make the air shift. She took in the grey at his temples, the trench coat slung carelessly over his chair, the way his eyes didn’t flinch. He didn’t leer. Didn’t posture. Just… existed. Quiet, unreadable, and infuriatingly calm.

She smiled. Not big. Not sweet. Something older. Like a memory of warmth in a cold room.

“Oh, really?” she said, voice like the first touch of whiskey. “How interesting. How quaint.”

Even Olivia turned at that.

Talia stood slowly, fingers brushing her desk, rings catching the light, nails neatly painted. She smoothed the front of her coat and walked past the three detectives without another word. Her heels clicked like punctuation on the floor.

As she passed Munch’s desk, she reached out; absently, confidently, and let her hand brush along its edge.

She didn’t look at him when she said it, but the smirk was in her voice. “You sure you’re up for it, old man?”

He didn’t answer. Not right away.

But as she took her seat on the corner of his desk, legs crossed, smile playing on her lips like a dare, she caught it.

Just the corner of his mouth.

Twitching upward.

Victory.

Interrogation Room 2B – June 4, 2004 – 10:05 AM

They called it “the box,” like it was meant to trap you. A square of chilled air, bolted metal, and two chairs too far apart to feel human. But Talia didn’t flinch when they opened the door. She stepped inside like she’d paid for the concrete herself.

The fluorescent lights above flickered once, then steadied, catching the gleam of gold at her ears and the soft shine of her curls, piled like shadows around her face. Her heels, clicked against the linoleum like the ticking of a well-kept watch. Controlled. Unbothered.

Munch clocked it all. First the shoes. Then the way her trousers flared slightly as she walked. Then the silhouette of her back; rigid, self-contained, shoulders squared like she was preparing for war. And maybe, in a way, she always was.

She didn’t wait to be told where to sit. She slid into the chair across from him with the ease of someone who’d done this a hundred times, but never from that side of the table. Legs crossed at the knee, arms folded, a slight lean back. Her expression unreadable. A woman trained not just in deception, but in the art of appearing uninterested.

The folder in his hand was thick. Her personnel file, post-academy assignments, psychological evaluations, every report she ever refused to comment on. A box of personal belongings sat on the table between them, impounded after an operation gone sideways. A lighter. A chain with two charms. A cigarette case with no cigarettes. A half-scribbled journal page tucked into a leather-bound field notebook that still smelled faintly of coffee and cloves.

Munch didn’t speak right away. He liked to let the silence stretch, let it become awkward. But this one… didn’t blink.

He opened the folder slowly. “Talia Nadine Amari-Volkov.”

She tilted her head slightly, curls shifting with the motion. “You sound surprised.”

“I’m not,” he said flatly, flipping a page. “Just trying to decide if you’re overqualified… or just really good at pretending you are.”

She didn’t smirk, not exactly. Her lips just curved like they knew something he didn’t. “Mystique goes a long way.”

He looked over his glasses at her, deadpan. “So do cult leaders.”

That earned him a ghost of a smile. Not a real one, Talia didn’t give those away for free. “I’ve always had a thing for charisma and mass delusion,” she said.

Munch tapped the edge of her file with a single finger. “Egyptian and Russian?”

“Pharaohs and tsars,” she replied, voice smooth as bourbon. “We did holidays with incense and vodka. My mother read scripture. My father rolled cigarettes on a map of Beirut. We coped.”

He huffed a dry chuckle. “You cope now with Cold War cassette tapes and crime scene poetry, apparently.”

“I collect things,” she said simply, like it wasn’t an explanation, but an assertion of fact.

“Like what?”

Talia leaned back further, eyes half-lidded but watching him with hawk precision. “Secrets. Stories. Men with unresolved guilt and bad posture.”

He arched an eyebrow. “That last one personal?”

“Maybe.”

There was a pause, soft and electric. Munch didn’t fill it. He just sat there, watching her. His arms folded now, mirroring her posture. She noticed. She always noticed.

“You into anything?” he asked.

She tilted her head again, and this time the smile was slower. Deeper. More dangerous. “Men with dark glasses and too many secrets are a type.”

“That a compliment?”

“Sure.”

He didn’t laugh, not quite, but something in his face eased for the first time. Still, he glanced back down at the file, like he needed the paper to break the eye contact.

He looked at her longer than he needed to. “You Jewish?” she asked then, abruptly.

He blinked. “Yeah. Why?”

“You carry it like a flag tucked inside your coat,” she said, her tone softening just enough. “Not showy. But proud. And sharp.”

He stared at her. “That’s either the strangest compliment I’ve ever gotten… or a psychic assessment.”

“Maybe both.”

“You always like this?” he asked.

“You mean perceptive?”

“I meant difficult.”

“Only when bored,” she said, crossing the other leg with a subtle shift. The motion drew his eye for a split second. She noticed that too.

“You smoke?” he asked next.

“Once a year.”

He gave her a look. “Why?”

She didn’t blink. “Redacted for a reason.”

For a moment, neither of them moved.

Then Munch closed the file, slower than he opened it. “You’re going to be trouble.”

“I hope so,” she said, standing with a movement too fluid for someone raised in violence. “Otherwise, I’m wasting a lot of expensive mascara.”

The silence she left behind wasn’t empty. It was laced with intrigue. Like the start of a very long, very unsolvable mystery.

The metal chair let out a quiet squeal as Talia crossed one leg over the other. A golden anklet winked from beneath her cuff, barely visible, but wholly deliberate. Her bracelets clinked softly as she folded her arms, catching the flicker of the overhead light. She didn’t fidget. She didn’t blink too much. She didn’t smile unless it served her.

She didn’t just look good. She looked dangerous, the kind of beautiful people underestimated, right before she gutted them with a question they never saw coming.

Across the table, Munch leafed through her file with the unhurried detachment of a man who’d read everything twice already but wanted her to think he hadn’t. His glasses sat low on the bridge of his nose. One hand flipped the pages; the other hovered near the edge of the table, tapping a pattern she’d already memorized.

He didn’t look up. Not yet.

“You know,” he said eventually, voice dry and amused, “you wear more gold than half the guys we’ve booked on trafficking charges.”

Talia’s lips curved, just slightly. “I’m the eldest daughter. Of five. In an Egyptian-Russian household.” She tilted her head, letting a curl slide down her shoulder. “This isn’t fashion. It’s lineage.”

That made him glance up. Just a twitch of his mouth, half smile, half something else. “I thought it was an intimidation tactic.”

She leaned forward, just a little. “You intimidated?”

“Only mildly,” he said, eyes returning to the folder. “You’ve got a record longer than most rookies three years in. Stings. Undercover buys. Surveillance files that read like short novels. And enough redacted lines to make a FOIA agent weep.”

Talia lifted a brow. “Is this the part where you accuse me of being a spy?”

Munch hummed. “If you were, you’d be too smart to get caught.”

“And you’d be too curious not to try.”

That got a breath of a laugh. Low. Gravel-edged. Real.

She tapped a finger against the metal table. “Go on. Ask the real questions.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” he said, finally placing the folder down. “I plan to.”

He looked at her, really looked, for the first time. Her eyes were sharp. Quietly incendiary. Like staring into the reflection of fire on water; beautiful, layered, impossible to track.

“So. Fluent in three languages. Cold War literature in your desk. A lighter with your initials. A cassette marked ‘Stargate: Confirmed?’” He looked up. “You don’t make a simple first impression, do you?”

She shrugged. “I like hobbies.”

“That’s not a hobby; that’s a red flag with a postal code.”

She smiled. “Only if you lack imagination.”

He raised a brow. “And the conspiracy theory podcasts?”

“They calm me,” she said, folding her hands on the table like she was about to host a dinner party.

Munch stared. “The Illuminati calms you.”

“The CIA doesn’t. Big difference.”

“That’s the kind of thing someone in the CIA would say.”

“I’m flattered you think they’d recruit me.”

He studied her for a beat, then exhaled, sitting back in his chair. “So, what’s the deal with the ancient Greek?”

“Scripture. Philosophy. Old curses,” she said with an offhand grace. “I like understanding the things people swore were too sacred to question.”

“That’s… vaguely ominous.”

“Everything sacred usually is.”

Munch just shook his head. “You’re a very interesting woman.”

“And you’re a very curious man.”

“Should I be concerned about that?”

“You should be more concerned if I stop talking.”

He nodded, once. “Your file said the same thing.”

She tilted her head. “Huang?”

“Weiss,” he corrected. “’Emotionally suppressed. Possible trauma history. Highly promising candidate for investigative work.’”

“She tried to get me to cry once,” Talia said, gaze unwavering. “Didn’t go well.”

“Why not?”

She smiled, slow and lethal. “I hate wasting mascara.”

Munch laughed, really laughed. Not loud, but true. It was the sound of a lock turning halfway, startled out of rust.

She studied him, eyes soft but assessing. “Is that allowed? You laughing?”

“Not on record.”

“Well.” She leaned back again, blouse shifting slightly as she moved, gold catching the light. It looked hand-poked. Intimate. Older than it should’ve been.

His eyes flicked to it, then back up. “You believe in the evil eye?”

“I believe in patterns,” she said. “Bad energy clings to broken systems. Sometimes charms help.”

“I don’t usually trust people who believe in everything.”

“I don’t believe in everything,” she said, voice suddenly lower. “Just the things no one talks about.”

He paused, weighing that. “Like?”

She smiled. “Like the Ark of the Covenant being stored in an Ethiopian church surrounded by armed monks. Or that the NYPD’s budgeting committee is run by two Freemasons and a guy who collects teeth.”

Munch snorted. “You know that last one’s probably true.”

“I wouldn’t joke about that,” she replied. “Men like that always have a basement.”

He chuckled again, then rubbed his face with one hand like trying to shake something off. “You know, I thought you’d be more guarded.”

“You think this isn’t guarded?”

“Touché.”

He picked up the file again. “You requested Cold Cases. Why?”

Talia’s tone shifted. Just slightly. “Because I like things that leave traces. Because ghosts talk when no one’s listening.”

“Who are you listening for?”

She didn’t answer. But her expression said enough.

Munch let it hang, then tapped the table once. “You’re very hard to read.”

She stood, finally. Slow, graceful. Every movement deliberate. “That’s intentional.”

He didn’t stop her. Just watched her walk to the door, coat settling at her hips, gold still catching the light.

She paused with her hand on the handle, not turning.

“If you ever want to compare theories, Cold War files, unsolved murders, or the FBI’s missing archive, I don’t keep office hours. But I do take bribes in coffee and original microfilm.”

The door clicked shut behind her.

Munch didn’t speak.

But he was smiling as he opened the folder again, flipped to the last page, and underlined her name once in red ink.

Talia stepped out of the interrogation room, unbothered. She moved with the kind of precision that made people straighten up without knowing why. The second the door shut behind her, three sets of eyes were already on her.

Fin, arms crossed and leaning against a desk, gave her a subtle nod of approval. His face was unreadable to most, but she caught the twitch of a grin at the corner of his mouth. Olivia, sharp-eyed and polite, offered a small smile, welcoming but reserved. And standing between them, barely hiding the mischief in his smirk, was Elliot Stabler.

Talia looked between them, then raised a brow. “So… do I pass, or do I get cuffed?”

Before any of them could answer, a voice called from just behind her. “Congratulations, Detective.”

She turned to see Captain Don Cragen step out from the hallway, coffee in one hand, calm authority in the other.

“You’re officially in,” he said. “And since you’re the newbie, you’ll be shadowing Munch and Tutuola for the next few months. Learn the ropes. Make it look good.”

Talia’s eyes flicked to Munch, who had just exited the interrogation room himself. His posture faltered for a beat, barely noticeable to anyone else, but to her, it screamed resignation and existential dread. He looked like a man who’d just found out his favourite conspiracy theory had been debunked by a woman in vintage lipstick.

“C’mon, Captain,” Munch groaned. “You’re punishing me, and we both know it.”

“Not a word,” Cragen said without looking at him, raising a finger.

Fin let out a quiet laugh.

Talia smirked. “Aw. Was it something I said in there?”

Munch stared at her like she’d just challenged him to a duel. “You know exactly what you said.”

She winked and walked off toward her new desk.

The others dispersed, the morning’s rhythm slowly resuming, phones ringing, chairs creaking, the metallic thud of case files hitting desks. But Talia wasn’t finished yet.

Instead of settling in, she made a sharp pivot and slid into Cragen’s office, closing the door behind her with a soft click.

Cragen didn’t even look up at first. “Close the blinds if you want this to feel official.”

Talia didn’t move. “Why me?”

He paused mid-sip. “You’re going to have to narrow that down.”

“Why me, here?” she asked, stepping further in. “Why SVU? Why now? You don’t just pluck a Narcotics detective out of Midtown North and drop her into this unit without a reason.”

Cragen set his mug down and finally looked at her, really looked. “Fresh eyes,” he said simply.

She narrowed hers. “Just that simple?”

He tilted his head. “Your instincts are loud, Amari. You don’t trust anyone, but you care. That’s rare. And dangerous. Which makes it useful.”

Talia studied him for a beat. “You read my file.”

“Read it? I underlined half of it,” Cragen said dryly.

Her lip twitched.

He leaned forward. “You’ve seen the worst of the city and still give a damn. Narcotics didn’t break you. That matters here.”

A beat of silence passed between them. She nodded once. No thanks. No flattery. Just understanding. She turned to go.

“One more thing,” Cragen added, just as her hand reached the doorknob. “You get one shot to prove you belong here. This unit, this isn’t about collar count. It’s about victims. Do the job for the right reasons.”

She didn’t look back. “I always do.” And then she was gone.

Her new desk sat directly across from Munch; small, slightly dented, the drawers half-stuck, but it was hers. She pulled out her field journal first, setting it beside a tray of incoming files. Next came a photo, its edges worn: her siblings, lined up in front of their old apartment, sunlight and grief frozen in time. Then a tiny icon of Saint Mary, and beside it, a curled parchment bearing a verse in Coptic. She touched both gently, lips moving in a silent prayer.

A gold chain unravelled from her palm, anchoring the corner of the desk like a tether. The evil eye charm glinted under the lights.

Munch passed by, holding a folder and pretending not to stare. He failed.

There was something about her. The way she moved, like everything was on purpose. The way her lips curled just slightly when she was reading something others missed. The way she folded her sleeves with military precision and then leaned back like a jazz singer mid-rant. Even her handwriting looked like it had secrets.

He lingered for a moment too long.

“Something you need?” she asked, not looking up.

“I’m still deciding,” Munch said, deadpan.

She glanced up, eyes sharp. “Try not to be too intimidated.”

Fin snorted from two desks over. “You two are gonna kill each other.”

Munch muttered, “Only if she doesn’t poison me first.”

Talia just smiled and reached for her coffee. “You wish I liked you enough to kill you.”

SVU PRECINCT – June 4, 2004 – 10:47 PM

The precinct after dark was a world of its own. Most of the daytime chaos had drained out with the sun, interns gone, desk phones silenced, even the vending machine had stopped humming. The only lights left burning were the ones that mattered: the ones over the detectives still working.

Talia sat at her desk, backlit by the pale fluorescence of a cracked overhead fixture that made her hair gleam like mahogany silk. She was adjusting the height of her monitor, aligning her notes in a grid only she understood. The cords were coiled like veins across the desk. Her keyboard was wiped, her files color-coded, her digital folders already renamed and nested.

Truthfully? She was stalling. She’d been done ten minutes ago.

What she wanted was simple: to go home, peel off her bra, light incense until the room smelled like thyme and sage, pour a proper glass of whiskey over one perfect cube of ice, and maybe, maybe order in from the Moroccan place down the block. Sit cross-legged on her couch in her silk robe and nothing else. Let the weight of the day melt into shadows.

But no. There were reports to log, and something in her refused to leave a single comma unchecked.

Behind her, the detectives’ bullpen was emptying. She could hear Fin cracking a joke, Olivia laughing under her breath, someone grabbing a jacket from the rack. Keys jingled. Chairs scraped. A final printer chugged.

And then, footsteps toward her.

“Talia,” Olivia said softly, jacket slung over one arm. “You up for a drink?”

“I wish,” Talia groaned, not looking up. Her fingers hovered over the keys. “Just wanna finish this and go home before the building turns into a ghost story.”

Olivia smiled. “Next time?”

“Definitely,” Talia replied, flashing a tired but genuine grin. That kind of grin you only shared with women who’d seen the same bad days you had.

The others left. Their footsteps echoed once, then vanished. Doors closed. Locks clicked. Silence settled like a heavy coat.

Except… one light stayed on. His.

Across the table, Munch hadn’t moved in over thirty minutes. His desk was a landscape of coffee stains, scattered printouts, and a cracked reading lamp. He was leaning over something old, yellowed, and probably not assigned. A file, or a theory. Something dead he hadn’t given up on.

Talia kept typing, but her ears stayed sharp.

Ten more minutes passed. The silence was companionable. Focused. But then, he spoke.

“You done soon?” Munch asked, not looking up.

She smirked, hands still on the keyboard. “Why? You got somewhere to be?”

“I don’t date, kiddo,” he replied, too quickly.

Talia turned slightly in her chair, eyes dancing. “Then what do you do with your nights?”

He didn’t answer. She didn’t press. That was the rhythm of their banter; poke, parry, retreat.

“You can leave,” she offered quietly, more sincere this time. “I’m fine here.”

“I don’t leave women alone at night,” he muttered, eyes still fixed on his paper. “Let alone women like you.”

Her brow lifted. “Women like me?”

He finally glanced up, deadpan. “The kind who attract trouble by simply existing.” A pause. And then, as if remembering manners too late: “C’mon. I’ll walk you to your car.”

She opened her mouth to argue. He was already standing.

Talia sighed, shut her laptop, and rose with that signature elegance that made people underestimate her. They both shrugged into coats at the same time; black, long, functional, and she laughed softly. “Matching now? That’s a level of hell I didn’t prepare for tonight.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Munch deadpanned, but she caught the twitch at the corner of his mouth.

They exited the precinct, the door creaking behind them. The parking lot was near-empty and unsettlingly quiet, a lone flickering streetlamp casting odd shadows across the concrete. The cold bit at her fingers as she pulled gloves on.

“Where’s yours, Amari?” he asked.

“Around the corner,” she said, casually. They turned, heels and boots echoing in sync.

And then, Munch let out a low whistle, slow and reverent. “Holy hell.”

Talia’s eyes gleamed. “What did you think I drove? A Corolla?”

She hit the fob. Lights blinked. Her car, purred to life like a panther stretching its limbs.

“This,” Munch said, stepping closer, “this is art. This is sex on wheels.”

Talia chuckled, crossing her arms as she leaned against the driver’s side door. “Yeah,” she said with a wry glance at the car. “And tragically? It doesn’t even get me laid.”

Munch let out a sharp laugh that echoed slightly off the brick walls. “Criminal,” he muttered. “Somewhere, some poor schmuck is gonna regret that for the rest of his life.”

She laughed, delighted. “You sound aroused.”

“I am.”

“Flattered.”

“You shouldn’t be,” he muttered. “I’m a New Yorker. I’m hard to impress.”

“Could’ve fooled me.”

Talia reached for the door handle, but he beat her to it; opened it smoothly, casually, like muscle memory. She raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

Sliding into the seat, she adjusted the rearview with one hand, the other resting lightly on the steering wheel.

As she buckled in, she murmured, “Gentleman.”

Munch tapped the hood gently with two fingers. “See you tomorrow, kiddo.”

She watched him walk away in the mirror; long coat, hands in pockets, old soul energy and all.

And though she wouldn’t admit it, not even to herself, she was suddenly, quietly… looking forward to tomorrow.

Chapter Text

SVU PRECINCT – June 28, 2004 – 8:23 AM

A few weeks in, and the rhythm of SVU was starting to settle under Talia’s skin, like a new song with an old tempo. It was quieter than Narcotics, less adrenaline-fueled, more emotionally intricate. Here, the focus wasn’t just on the crime, it was on who it happened to. The how mattered less than the after. That suited her just fine.

Her desk, directly connected to Munch’s, was already a shrine to organized chaos. A ceramic ashtray sat in the corner, holding two lipstick-smudged cigarette butts from a bad night last week. A pyramid of cherry gum packs guarded her case files like a sugary security detail. A framed photo of her sister, leaned just beside her badge. Her notebook, its pages covered in red-ink notes, half-sentences, lay open beside her coffee.

Iced. Vanilla syrup. Extra cold. Always.

She liked the team. Elliot was protective in a big brother sort of way, prone to the occasional lecture but good at giving space. Olivia was warm and sharp, disarming in a way that made even the most closed-off witnesses start to unfold. They sometimes dragged her out for drinks after shift, and she went, laughing along, even when she felt like the baby sister tagging along to a party she wasn’t cool enough for.

Fin, though, Fin was unusual. They’d both come up through Narcotics, both knew what it meant to chase ghosts through tenement halls and watch too many kids bleed out for someone else’s turf war. There was an ease between them, unspoken but solid. He never questioned her instincts. Sometimes they spoke in shorthand the others didn’t catch, and sometimes he brought her coffee without asking, like he already knew what kind of night she’d had.

She got along best with Melinda. Their M.E. had the kind of dry, understated humour Talia thrived on. They laughed at dark things over body reports and bonded over their shared disdain for bureaucracy.

But Munch… Munch was different.

The proximity to Munch was both convenient and cursed. He didn’t dislike her. Not exactly. They shared a desk cluster, a mirrored setup where his world of grayscale sarcasm met her storm of color-coded notes and quiet superstition. Sometimes he’d glance over without turning his head. Sometimes she’d pretend not to notice.

They hadn’t said much to each other since she arrived.

He offered the occasional deadpan comment over his glasses; she responded with the kind of smile that could be either a threat or a joke. Still, she caught him looking sometimes. Not long. Not obvious. Just... long enough.

This morning was bright and blue-skied, one of those New York days that tried to lie about the kind of city it really was. Talia pushed open the bullpen door with her coffee in hand and her curls already half-wild from the summer humidity. She wore a slate-blue blouse tucked into black slacks, rings on her fingers. Her badge caught the sunlight, but she didn’t notice.

She dropped into her chair with a low sigh and cracked open her gum. The smell of fake cherry and cheap peppermint flooded her nose. She liked it. Familiar. Sharp.

Cragen’s voice interrupted her quiet, “Amari.”

She looked up. He was already standing over her desk, manila folder in hand, face unreadable.

“You’re riding with Munch and Tutuola today,” he said, dropping the file onto her desk like it weighed more than paper. “Try not to kill each other.”

Talia arched a brow, unwrapping her gum slowly. “So, I’m the sacrificial lamb this morning?”

“You’re the new lamb,” Cragen replied dryly. “Don’t make me regret it.”

Across the table, Munch looked up over the rim of his glasses. His expression was unreadable, something between irritation and mild amusement. He said nothing. Not yet.

Talia reached for the file, flipping it open with fingers still ringed in sleep. She scanned the report, her brows drawing together.

“What’s the case?” Munch asked finally, voice gravel-soft.

Cragen turned his attention to the room.

“Victim’s female, twenty-three,” he began, his tone neutral but clipped. “Found unconscious behind a bar on 9th and Delancey. Beaten, drugged, says she was raped. No witnesses. She was dumped like garbage.”

Talia’s jaw tightened, as she read the victims name. Her fingers stilled on the folder.

Fin stood from his desk with a grunt. “She conscious?”

“Woke up an hour ago,” Cragen nodded. “Mercy General Hospital. They’ve got her stabilized, but she’s not speaking much. Docs say she’s disoriented. Scared. I want the three of you over there within the hour. Get a statement if she’s willing.”

There was a pause. A beat longer than necessary. Cragen’s eyes landed on Talia. “Take it slow,” he added quietly, only for her. “She’s been through hell.”

Talia nodded once. The weight of that kind of hell, she understood.

They moved to leave. Fin grabbed his jacket. Munch closed the folder on his desk. And without a word, he handed her the keys.

The gesture was subtle, automatic, almost. But Fin arched a brow. “What, no fight over shotgun this time?” he asked, smirking.

“She gets it today,” Munch muttered, already heading toward the door.

Talia followed, heels clicking, still scanning the case file. Her expression was untidy, but under it, something stirred. She could already feel the shape of the story under the facts. And she hated the way it felt.

Fin drove. Munch took the back. Talia climbed into the passenger seat. As the car pulled into traffic, she leaned her elbow against the window and stared out at the passing blur of concrete and commuters. The city was loud. But in the silence between them, her thoughts were louder.

“You alright?” Fin asked, eyes flicking toward her in the rearview.

She nodded. “Yeah. Just... prepping.”

Munch didn’t say anything, but she felt his gaze flick to the back of her head. She wondered, not for the first time, what exactly he saw when he looked at her.

Not just the hoops or the high cheekbones or the trench coat that made her look like a noir detective dragged out of a 1950s fever dream. But the rest of her. The parts she kept tucked behind her smirks and sarcasm.

“You’ve been here, what?” Munch finally asked. “Three weeks?”

“twenty-four days,” she said without turning around. “But who’s counting?”

Fin snorted a laugh. Munch didn’t.

The silence stretched again, comfortably this time. Or maybe just cautiously.

Then, soft and without irony, he asked, “You like it here?”

Talia turned her head slightly, catching his reflection in the side mirror. Their eyes met for half a second. “It’s slower,” she said. “More humane.”

Munch nodded. Once.

Then she added, voice lower, “It’s the first place I’ve worked where they care more about the people than the paperwork.”

Another pause. Then, from the back: “That doesn’t last.”

Talia gave a tight smile. “Neither do most people.”

Fin, wisely, said nothing.

They turned down 5th. The traffic was building. Sunlight cut through the windshield and bathed her in gold. Munch looked away.

He didn’t know why, but there was something about her, something just left of predictable. She wasn’t loud. She wasn’t flashy. But she burned slow, like a candle too close to paper. One gust in the wrong direction and the whole room might catch fire.

He watched the back of her head and thought, she’s going to get under everyone’s skin.

What he didn’t admit was this:
She already had.

MERCY GENERAL HOSPITAL - June 28, 2004 – 10:41 AM

The elevators hissed open with the soft hydraulic sigh of a place too used to grief. Mercy General was always cold, over-air-conditioned, sterile, its halls lined with taupe and pale blue like a poor man’s idea of calm. Talia stepped out first, her shoes quiet against the tile, her coat cinched tight at the waist. Fin followed, hands in pockets. Munch trailed behind, flipping through the case file as he walked, eyes scanning the preliminary report with quiet scepticism.

They were headed to Room 6B. But halfway down the corridor, Talia stopped short. Her breath caught before the memory could name itself.

Outside the room stood three figures. A crying older woman in a floral hijab, her hands knotted in a damp tissue. A middle-aged man pacing. A younger girl, maybe a cousin, arms crossed and eyes darting with suspicion. Talia knew them. Not from a case file. Not from a police report.

From before.

She froze.

“T?” Fin asked, glancing sideways.

“Why don’t you two let me get the victims statement?” Talia’s voice didn’t sound like hers. Not the clipped, assertive tone they were used to. This was softer. Deliberate.

Fin raised a brow. “You know them?”

Talia didn’t answer. She’d already started walking.

Munch watched her go, his eyes narrowing. “She knows them.”

She approached quietly, like she didn’t want to disturb something sacred. Her badge remained clipped to her belt, but it wasn’t what she led with. Instead, she spoke in a low, reverent voice.

“Salam, khaltu,” she said gently, crouching a little as the crying older woman lifted her head. (Hi, auntie.)

The woman gasped, her lined face lighting with something more sorrowful than surprise. “Hayati,” she whispered, reaching out and folding Talia into her arms. (My life.)

Talia let herself be held. Just for a moment.

“What are you doing here?” the woman asked in Arabic-accented English, her voice trembling.

Talia pulled back, giving her a tight smile. “Police duty,” she said softly, lifting her badge but not with pride. “Is she awake?”

A nod. The older woman’s eyes were wet, her mouth trembling as she looked back toward the room.

Talia walked in slowly, the door whispering shut behind her.

The room was dim, one curtain pulled halfway across the window, soft light cutting across the blankets like prison bars. Machines hummed quietly. The beeping was steady. Sterile. Almost cruel in how calm it was compared to the mess of bruises and gauze on the girl in the bed.

Layla.

The name settled on her chest like ash.

She was twenty-three. Dark curls matted with blood. One arm strapped to a saline drip. Her face was puffy, lip split. She looked half-conscious, half in a dream she couldn't escape.

Talia stood for a long time before she moved. The lump in her throat was a living thing. She forced it down.

She pulled the chair beside the bed and sat. Slowly. Like she was afraid to wake the ghost of the girl she used to know.

She reached out and took Layla’s hand. Her fingers twitched. “Hey, habibti,” Talia whispered. “It’s Talia. You remember me?” (Sweetheart.)

Layla stirred. Her eyes fluttered open, sluggish, unfocused. And then, recognition. “T?” she croaked, her voice rasping through bruised ribs. “What are you doing here?”

Talia smiled, but her eyes were glassy. “Heard what happened,” she said gently, brushing hair from Layla’s forehead. “I’m here as a detective. I need to get your statement, okay?”

Layla blinked slowly. “You became a cop?”

“Shocking, I know.” Talia pulled her field notebook from her coat pocket. Her hand shook, just slightly, as she clicked the pen. “Can you tell me what happened?”

“I-I was at the cemetery,” Layla said, her voice growing steadier by inches. “Visiting Lana. I left around seven, stopped by the bodega on 10^th…”

Talia nodded, her grip on the pen tightening.

“And then… I don’t know. It gets fuzzy. Next thing I know, I’m in pain, everywhere. Behind some bar.”

Talia hesitated. “Did you see him? The man who hurt you?”

“No,” Layla said, too fast. Like a match struck too soon.

Talia didn’t press. Not here. Not yet. But her eyes narrowed slightly, a flicker of suspicion brushing through her trained instincts. She closed the notebook and leaned forward, pressing her forehead to Layla’s for a second. “I’m gonna find him,” she whispered. “I promise you.”

Layla turned her face slightly, tears slipping down her cheek.

Talia stood. Her knees ached with the effort. The grief in her chest wasn’t clean. It was tangled. Heavy. And older than this room.

She slipped back into the hall, eyes dry again. Armor back in place.

Fin and Munch were waiting by the vending machine.

“You get anything?” Fin asked, handing her a coffee he hadn’t opened yet.

Talia took it with a nod. “Yeah. Enough.”

Munch studied her face. “You okay?”

“Sure,” she said. It wasn’t convincing.

Before anyone could follow up, a doctor in navy scrubs approached. “Detectives?” he asked, holding a clipboard. “I have the tox screen for Layla Nadeem.”

“Positive for methamphetamines?” Talia asked flatly, not even glancing at the paper.

The doctor blinked. “Uh, yes. High dosage. You know the patient?”

Talia didn’t answer. She leaned back against the wall, closed her eyes, and exhaled slowly. The sound was barely audible. But it was the sound of someone trying to bury a scream beneath professionalism.

She walked. Nothing left to say.

Fin watched her go. “What the hell was that?”

Munch’s eyes followed her, something unspoken flickering behind his glasses. “She’s too close to this.”

“You think she should be off the case?”

“I think,” Munch said quietly, “someone should’ve pulled her off already.”

Talia didn’t hear that part. She was already outside.

She got in the car and stared ahead, unmoving. Not crying. Just… waiting for something to hurt less.

SVU PRECINCT - June 28, 2004 – 12:06 PM

The precinct hummed low with fluorescent light and muted urgency. Phones rang, conversations overlapped in pockets, and the sound of sneakers and boots scuffed against linoleum that had seen decades of blood, sweat, and bureaucratic caffeine.

The ride back had been silent. Talia sat in the back seat, framed in the window like a portrait half-lit by the sun. She sat frozen, her thumb tapping the same spot on her knee like a ticking clock. Munch didn’t ask. Neither did Fin. There was something in the air; dense, unspoken, personal. And Talia wasn’t offering.

By the time they pushed through the precinct doors, she had already set her expression to neutral. Controlled. Composed. But the moment they entered the bullpen; she didn’t head for her desk. She veered instead toward the main board, her eyes scanning it like it had insulted her.

The victim’s photo had been pinned. A Polaroid from booking, early 2000s. Black liner, chapped lips, tired eyes. A ghost in soft focus. The woman’s name had been scrawled in red ink beneath it, but Talia didn’t look at the name. Just the face.

She slid up onto the edge of the nearest table, one foot on the floor, the other swinging absently. Her posture was too casual to be real.

Cragen entered with that familiar scent of old coffee and authority. He didn’t waste time.

“Talk to me. Do we have any hits on the DNA?” he asked, crossing his arms, his tone clipped.

Fin answered first. “Running it through CODIS now. CSU’s pushing it.”

Cragen nodded. “And the vic?”

Munch stepped forward, one hand on the back of a chair. “Still running. Nothing yet flagged in active warrants or federal.”

Talia finally spoke, voice lower than usual. “She was picked up in ’94 for possession. Again in ’02. Methamphetamines and cannabis. Lesser charge the second time, probably flipped for a deal.” Her fingers moved to her temple like it physically pained her to say it out loud.

Cragen studied her for a beat. “She still using?”

“Maybe. Or she cleaned up and someone dragged her back in,” Talia muttered, voice flat.

“Okay,” Cragen said, already shifting gears. “Find her dealer. Maybe he knows something.”

“You know her?” Munch asked it softly, eyes flicking over to her. No accusation. Just curiosity wrapped in concern.

Talia didn’t answer. Not directly.

“She had ties to Elias Merza,” Talia said softly, almost too softly for a detective. “Small-time. Been in and out. Used to hang around the bodega on 10^th and Avenue C. Same spot she said she was last conscious.”

A few pairs of eyes turned toward her. Fin’s brow raised slightly. Munch tilted his head, but Cragen didn’t flinch.

“Then stake it out,” Cragen ordered, eyes locked on the board. “Talia. Munch. You’re up. He shows, I want DNA. Anything that ties him to that alley. Watch, wait, do not spook him.”

That earned a pause. Munch glanced sideways, already bracing. “Lucky me,” he muttered under his breath, though not unkindly.

Talia slid down from the table in one fluid movement, coat already slung over her shoulder. “Copy that,” she said. Then added, around the cigarette pressed between her lips, “You drive.”

Munch raised a brow. “You don’t trust my passenger skills?”

She didn’t answer. That earned her a longer look. Cragen didn’t say anything, but his eyes followed her as she moved for the door.

Fin stepped in, voice even. “I’ll be ready to rotate if you need backup.”

Munch nodded. “We’ll call if he twitches.”

As they turned to leave, Munch let his eyes linger on Talia for just a second too long. She hadn’t put out the cigarette. Her fingers trembled slightly as she flicked ash into a plastic cup. Not enough for most to notice. But he did.

She caught him looking. Her voice was soft when she spoke, just for him. “Don’t ask me what’s in the box on this one.”

He didn’t. But as they stepped into the hallway, he filed the moment away.

Because something about this case wasn’t just professional for her.
And the way her voice had cracked, just slightly, when she said, “maybe she got dragged back in”?
That wasn’t a detective talking. That was something else.

He wondered, not for the first time, what ghosts she hadn’t told him about.
And why they suddenly felt a little closer.

BODEGA ON 10^TH - June 28, 2004 – 3:26 PM

The city was loud in that way only New York could be loud, buses groaning down pothole-ripped avenues, car horns like blunt instruments, and the dull murmur of sidewalk conversations that bled through the cracked windows of the unmarked Crown Vic.

They had been watching the corner bodega for hours. Four hours, thirty-two minutes, twenty-eight seconds. Talia had counted each of them, one heartbeat at a time.

Her shoulder ached from leaning against the window. The seatbelt cut into her side, and the rearview mirror had been tilted slightly too high since Munch last adjusted it. She hadn’t said a word about it. She hadn’t said much at all.

The only scent in the car was burnt tobacco and fading bergamot, her cigarettes, tucked into the console between them, and the remnants of his cologne, barely-there but old-fashioned. Her lighter had been flicked open and shut so many times that the silver had warmed in her hand.

Still no sign of Elias Merza. No buzz at the corner. No unusual movement inside the bodega. Just a tired clerk behind bulletproof glass and a teenager buying sour candy. Talia’s jaw locked. She’d smoked through most of her pack, and it wasn’t calming her down, it just made the heat behind her eyes feel raw. It was tradition.

Munch had taken point on the radio, giving mechanical check-ins back to the precinct every twenty minutes. His voice was steady, impersonal, a sharp contrast to the quiet storm brewing beside him. He didn’t look at her. Not yet. But he’d noticed the way her fingers shook slightly as she lit another cigarette, how she’d barely touched her coffee, how she kept her right knee bouncing even though she wasn’t the kind of woman who fidgeted.

Finally, he asked it, low, like a scratch across static. “How’d you know she had meth in her system?”

Talia didn’t answer at first. Her lips parted around the cigarette, exhale trailing like a confession she didn’t want to make. Her voice, when it came, was softer than it had been all day. “I picked her up in ’02.”

Munch turned slightly, eyes still trained on the front of the bodega but his focus drifting now, to her, not the job. “You know her?”

A pause.

Then a slow, deliberate breath left her lungs like a shudder. “She was my sister’s best friend.”

Munch blinked. That changed things. “Was?”

Her voice cracked just slightly on the edge of her next words, but she swallowed it down. Hard.

“Lana, my sister, she overdosed almost two years ago. On meth. Layla and her started messing around with pills when they were still in high school. I knew. I tried to stop them. I wasn’t-” she stopped, cleared her throat, started again. “When Lana died, Layla came to the funeral. Said she’d get clean. Said the pain of losing her best friend was... too much.”

She exhaled smoke and watched it curl against the windshield like fog on the inside of her ribs. “Guess she lied.”

Her voice didn’t break. Not really. But something inside her did. Quietly. Violently. She blinked, and the world outside refocused. The corner of 10^th was still empty. But her hands felt cold.

Munch looked over at her then. Really looked. Her profile was perfect in the afternoon light, cigarette at her lips, eyes locked forward, posture tense. The kind of beauty you don’t compliment out loud. The kind you carry like a burden. She looked like someone who kept her grief in a locket under her blouse and only opened it on anniversaries.

He spoke softly; his voice stripped of sarcasm. “I’m sorry.”

She didn’t respond right away. She didn’t look at him either. But there was a moment, just a flicker, where her lips curved upward. A soft, private smile. Not happy. Not even kind. Just real.

And that, for her, was enough.

Her fingers drifted toward the Nazar charm she kept hidden in her coat pocket, just brushing the edge of it like a prayer. She didn’t say anything about it. He didn’t ask.

But then he said it anyway. “You shouldn’t be on this case.”

She finally looked at him.

Eyes that had seen too much for their age. Eyes that had cried more at night than they ever would in daylight. “I’m not leaving it.”

Munch didn’t push. She was already unravelling. But even in the unravelling, she was composed. Beautiful in that tragic, immovable way. Like a statue with a hairline crack that made it more sacred, not less.

Another moment of silence stretched between them.

Then, with dry humour creeping back in, he added: “You ever think about what you’d be doing if you weren’t NYPD?”

She raised an eyebrow. “What, like a backup plan?”

He shrugged, leaning back. “Most people don’t grow up dreaming of stakeouts in a rusty Crown Vic.”

Talia considered it. Her voice was quiet again. “I’d probably run a bookstore. Small. Dusty. Smell of old pages. Maybe above it I’d live with three dogs and no one who knew how to pronounce my last name.”

He chuckled, a low sound like gravel in his chest. “Sounds lonely.”

Talia didn’t answer right away.

She turned her head, the afternoon light catching against the tiny scar near her brow. Her profile looked sculpted from smoke and secrets. There was something in her expression, not a smile, not exactly. Something quieter.

Then she said, almost lazily. “Maybe I’d just marry some idiot.”

Munch arched a brow, still looking at the bodega but very much listening. “Yeah?”

She kept her gaze forward, voice even. “Someone older. Convinced he’s unlovable. Wears too much black. Probably owns a trench coat for every government he doesn’t trust.”

That made him glance at her, finally. Sharp. Cautious.

Talia didn’t look back at him. But her lips curled, the kind of smirk that meant she knew exactly what she’d done.

“The kind of man who thinks sarcasm’s a love language and doesn’t realize how soft he gets when no one’s watching.”

He let out a single breath; half a laugh, half a surrender. “Sounds like bad judgment.”

She nodded. “Exactly. That’s the point.”

A beat passed.

Then they both laughed, quiet, dark little laughs that didn’t fill the car so much as carve space into it. Not loud. Not long. But enough.
Enough to break the tension.
Enough to mean something.

When the laughter faded, the silence they left behind wasn’t awkward anymore. It was... familiar. A little too familiar for two people still signing their reports with last names and avoiding eye contact in the break room.

Munch shifted slightly in his seat, just enough that his shoulder brushed hers again. Barely a touch.

This time, she didn’t move away.

And neither did he.

A slow smirk tugged at the corner of her lips, bitter and razor-edged. “Better than watching your sister die with your badge still in your purse.”

And that?

That shut him up.

Completely.

The radio crackled. Static. A dispatch came through. Munch responded like muscle memory. But he looked at her again, longer this time. And she knew he saw it.

The grief she wore like perfume.

The ghosts that lived in her silence.

He wouldn’t ask again if she was okay. He already knew the answer.

But she noticed, when he shifted slightly, their shoulders brushed. Barely. A whisper of contact. He didn’t move away.

Neither did she.

And for just one breath, the stakeout didn’t feel quite so cold.

BODEGA ON 10^TH - June 28, 2004 - 10:37 PM

The streetlights buzzed like dying insects, casting yellow halos over the cracked pavement. Inside the unmarked car, the heat had long gone stale. Talia sat still in the passenger seat, one leg crossed tightly over the other, her fingers drumming against her thigh in precise, irritable rhythm.

Seven hours. No Elias Merza.

She'd lit a stick of clove gum just to keep from pulling out a cigarette, and now it was dead between her molars, bitter and stiff. Her curls were up in a haphazard clip. Her shirt had creased from tension and sweat. She still looked composed. Of course she did. But beneath that? She was storm surge.

Munch sat in the driver’s seat, silent, seeing her from the corner of his eye. He’d learned not to interrupt her when she was like this, still and simmering. She wasn’t just on edge. She was on the verge.

“I swear to God,” she muttered. “If he doesn’t show in five, I’m going in there and breaking his nose.”

“Subtle,” Munch said, deadpan.

Talia’s hand flew to the door handle. “Screw this.”

And then she was out of the car, heels hitting asphalt like gunshots.

“Amari! Wait! Talia!” But she was already crossing the street with that unmistakable stride. That don’t-fucking-stop-me energy. Munch sighed, slapped the wheel once in frustration, and turned off the ignition.

The bodega bell chimed as she pushed through the door. Inside, the air reeked of old coffee and incense. And there he was.

Elias Merza.

The bastard. Twenty-five. Arrogant. Local dealer with a reputation for selling drugs to those younger than him.

He stood behind the counter like it was any other night, bagging gum and soda for some teenager, like he hadn’t left Layla bloodied and broken behind a bar just the night before. Like her screams hadn’t echoed in Talia’s ears every time she blinked since.

“Long time no see, Merza,” Talia said. Her voice could’ve melted steel. Her badge wasn’t visible, but her rage was.

Merza turned. Confused at first. Then recognition bloomed like rot. “Ahhh, Talia.” He grinned, slow and snake-like. “How’s your sister?”

The floor dropped out beneath her.

“You should know,” she said, stepping forward. Every inch closer was a memory, of Lana. Of Layla. Of everything they’d been too late to stop.

Merza’s smirk faltered.

He bolted.

The door slammed open. Talia flew after him.

“Shit!” Munch cursed, scrambling into gear as her figure vanished down the sidewalk. She moved like a shadow stitched to rage, long legs slicing through the dark, coat flaring like wings.

Munch slammed on the siren, the red-and-blue lights bursting against the night like a warning.

She was fast.

Too fast.

He couldn’t keep pace, but he could intercept.

Merza darted into the street without looking. Wrong move. The car struck him hard enough to knock him sideways, but not out. He groaned, trying to crawl. Talia was on him in an instant, breath ragged, hair falling loose, fury written across her face like scripture.

She grabbed him by the collar, yanked him up with enough force to bruise, and slammed him against the hood.

“Elias Merza,” she hissed through clenched teeth, “you’re under arrest for the assault and rape of Layla Nadeem.”

She didn’t wait for backup. She cuffed him herself, fast and tight, not caring if the metal bit too deep.

“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law,” she recited, each line like a sentence in a poem she’d rewritten too many times in her head. “You have the right to an attorney. If you can’t afford one, one will be provided for you.”

And then, with no ceremony, she shoved him into the back seat. The door slammed shut with a hollow thunk.

Munch eyed her as she stood there for a second, chest rising and falling, hair wild, hands twitching like they weren’t done yet.

“You okay?” he asked softly.

She didn’t answer.

But the guilt was pouring off her shoulders like steam, hot, heavy, unbearable. He could see it. He could feel it. But this wasn’t the place. Not with him in the back seat. Not with her jaw clenched so tightly she might chip a tooth.

He got in the car and drove.

SVU PRECINCT – June 28, 2004 - 10:46 PM

Merza was processed and tossed in the box, already mouthing off about rights and mistaken identity. Munch didn’t even flinch.

“Got the dealer?” Fin asked, walking over with a half-eaten sandwich.

Munch popped the gum from his jaw and muttered, “Yeah. Road Runner here chased him through three intersections.”

Fin looked past Munch to where Talia stood at the corner of the room, arms crossed, staring at the interrogation glass like it might crack under the weight of her gaze.

“Damn,” Fin said, “She always like this?”

Munch didn’t smile. “She’s got personal skin in this one.”

Munch lingered at the glass. Watched her.

“You trust your gut on this guy?” he asked.

She didn’t turn. “I know he did it.”

He nodded once. Then added, softer, “You’re too close.”

She did turn then. Her eyes dark, tired. “I don’t care.”

There was a long silence between them. A breath held too long. And something unspoken crackled in the space. Munch opened his mouth; maybe to warn her, maybe to comfort her, but she was already inside the box. And as the door closed behind her, he just stood there, staring.

THE BOX - June 28, 2004 - 10:57 PM

The fluorescent bulb overhead buzzed like it was straining to stay alive, casting a sickly yellow pallor over the metal table below. The rest of the room was cloaked in soft shadow, just enough light to see the tension crawl across Merza’s face, but not enough to feel safe.

The two-way mirror reflected nothing. But he knew.

He always knew.

Elias slouched back in the chair like he owned the goddamn building. Hoodie half-zipped, wrists twitching from whatever cocktail he’d sweated out an hour ago. There was a cut on his lip; old, crusted. Not from this. From something else.

Talia stood across from him, coat still on, shoulders rigid, her hands resting calmly on the table like she wasn’t a breath away from detonating. Her curls were pulled back, tightly today, no earrings. Her eyes didn’t flinch when he looked up and smirked.

She didn’t sit.

“Where were you last night?” she asked, voice even, almost bored.

Elias tilted his head, chewing on his tongue. “The bodega near the cemetery. 10^th and Avenue C.” He gave a little shrug like that explained everything, then let his back collapse against the chair again.

“You remember Layla Nadeem?” she asked, quieter now.

His brow lifted. “The girl from the cemetery? What’s this about?”

There it was. The shift. His voice light, but his fingers twitched harder. He was still smiling, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes anymore.

Talia said nothing. Instead, she dropped the folder she’d brought with a hard snap onto the table. The sound echoed. The edges curled. Polaroid copies of crime scene photos fanned across the metal surface, one of Layla’s split lip, another of bruises down her spine, medical reports, rape kit, toxicology screens, the hospital intake note with the words unconscious on arrival.

His smile vanished. “I didn’t touch her.”

Talia leaned forward slowly, pressing her palms into the table. “Didn’t say you did,” she said flatly. “Interesting that’s the first thing out of your mouth.”

Elias shifted. His eyes jumped to the mirror on the wall, pupils dilated, jaw clenched. Someone was definitely back there. Probably Fin. Definitely Munch. Maybe God.

She sat down now, deliberately, folding her coat behind her as she lowered herself into the chair beside him instead of across. Her presence changed the room. Too close. Too calm.

“You sold to her before,” she said, voice low. “To Lana too. Ring a bell?”

And there it was.

His head snapped up. She felt it before he spoke, the flicker of panic behind the bravado. He knew the name. He remembered.

Talia smiled, slow and tight. “So, here’s the thing,” she said, tone dipping into dangerous calm. “You can give us a DNA swab now, here, clean, quiet, or we get a warrant and pull it off your toothbrush after you’ve been served powdered eggs in holding and county oatmeal in Sing Sing.”

He barked a sharp laugh. “You’re pissed ‘cause I wouldn’t sell to you too, is that it?”

She could have hit him. God, she wanted to. But instead, she just leaned in, just enough that he felt her breath on his neck.

“You think this is a game?” she whispered. “That girl woke up choking on her own scream, with blood on her teeth and bruises she couldn’t name. And you think I won’t burn every inch of your world down for her?”

He flinched. The kind of flinch that isn’t about guilt. It’s about being seen.

She pulled back. Cold again. Controlled.

“This can go two ways,” she said, slipping the swab packet from her coat pocket and laying it on the table like a dealer laying down the final card. “You hand me your DNA now, or I throw you to Narcotics. You remember them, don’t you? They’re the ones who made your cousin cry.”

Elias stared at the swab. His hand didn’t move.

“Clock’s ticking,” she said and stood.

He didn’t follow. She didn’t look back.

Talia stepped out and let the door hiss shut behind her. The sound was too loud in the silence that followed.

Fin was leaning against the wall, arms folded, chewing gum like it owed him money. “You alright?”

She didn’t answer. She was already walking.

SVU PRECINCT – June 28, 2004 – 11:20 PM

The place was nearly empty. Phones were quiet. Lights half-dimmed. Munch was at his desk, glasses on, reading something Talia couldn’t see. He didn’t look up when she entered, but he spoke.

“You got under his skin.”

She stopped at her desk, set her coat down. “He got under mine first.”

A beat. The tension hovered, soft but unmistakable. Munch finally looked up. His eyes found hers, searching for something.

“You ever heard the term ‘conflict of interest?’” he asked, tone dry.

She smiled without humour. “All my interests are conflicted.”

Another beat.

“You going home?”

“Eventually,” she said, collecting her things; journal, lighter, the same chain with the Nazar and the cross. Her hand lingered on it.

Munch noticed.

“I’ll walk you out,” he offered.

She looked at him then. Really looked. The kind of look that held a hundred silences, a dozen unspoken screams, and one very loud ghost named Lana.

“I don’t need walking,” she said.

He didn’t argue.

But he stood anyway when she left.

SVU PARKING LOT – June 28, 2004 – 11:35 PM

She stepped into the cold night, keys in one hand, the city flickering around her. Her car sat under a busted streetlamp, her shadow stretching far too long for how tired she felt.

She sat behind the wheel, closed her eyes, and let the silence settle around her like smoke.

Inside the precinct, Munch was still watching the hallway she’d vanished down.

Chapter Text

ASTORIA - July 9, 2004 - 08:02 AM

It had been nearly two weeks since the Elias Merza arrest. Two weeks since the cuffs clicked shut around Elias’s wrists, and she had smiled, but only with her mouth. She filed the paperwork with precision, sent the evidence to forensics, briefed the ADA, and then walked out of the precinct without saying goodbye. Just handed in a time-off slip, muttered something about being "done with men who cage ghosts," and left.

Since then, she had barely spoken to anyone except her dogs and God, and even He was getting the silent treatment some days.

In the mornings, she went to the Coptic church down the block, where incense clung to her curls and the chanting reminded her of her mother’s voice. In the evenings, she lit a candle in the Russian church, where no one asked her name. The rest of her hours were spent sitting with Ramses, Anubis, and Heka at the basketball court, watching neighbourhood kids play while she sipped Arabic coffee from a paper cup and fed the dogs pieces of boiled egg, flatbread and labneh.

Heka, now nearly two, had developed a terrifying talent for begging at the bodega. He'd sit just inside the door, wide-eyed and noble, until someone surrendered a slice of turkey or a bite of beef jerky. “Little bandit,” she muttered every time, but still let him do it. No one could say no to those eyes.

This morning wasn’t supposed to be different. She walked the dogs at dawn, scrubbed the dirt from their paws, changed into her work uniform, slate slacks, a white silk blouse with the cuffs rolled up, and heels just high enough to command a room. Her trench coat hung from her arm like armour waiting to be strapped on.

But when she stepped out onto the stoop, locking the door behind her, someone was waiting by the curb.

“You’re late,” Fin said.

She blinked once. “I plan on coming in at ten. I’ve got errands.”

He jerked his chin toward the car. “Then I’m riding with you.”

She gave him a side glance. “You sure, Fin?”

“What?” he said, walking ahead. “Got skeletons in your closet you don’t want me seeing?”

Talia rolled her eyes but followed, heels clacking softly on the pavement. “I’ve got whole graveyards.”

He opened the passenger side door for her. She paused, hand resting on the roof.

“I’m headed to East Elmhurst,” she said.

He hesitated, just for a second. “The cemetery?”

She nodded.

Fin didn’t say a word. He just got behind the wheel and turned the ignition.

They didn’t speak for the first few minutes. Queens passed quietly around them; bodegas opening, kids dragging backpacks, the scent of baking dough and car exhaust thick in the summer air.
Talia kept one hand in her lap, the other curled loosely around the gold chain at her wrist, rubbing the tiny Nazar charm like a rosary.

Fin finally glanced at her. “You’ve been quiet.”

“You’re the first person I’ve spoken to all week,” she said, eyes fixed on the passing streets.

“You needed the time.”

“I needed the distance.”

He nodded slowly, then after a beat: “You picked a hell of a case to get too close to.”

She closed her eyes for a moment. “Yeah… In truth, I did it for my sister. She got caught up in drugs. I thought maybe if I kept the streets clean, locked up the dealers, I could save her… Turns out I was too late.”

A pause.

“I found her in the bathtub. OD’d.”

Fin tapped the turn signal, jaw tight. “That why you joined?”

“Not at first,” she said. “I wanted to do something with literature. Translate dead languages. Read poetry in dusty corners.”

He smirked faintly. “And now?”

“Now I interrogate monsters and write in margins no one reads.”

A beat.

“The Merza case-” he started.

“-was too close,” she cut in. “Way too close.”

He exhaled through his nose, kept his eyes on the road. “Why the cemetery?”

She swallowed. “Tradition,” she said. “My sister’s buried there. So’s my brother. My parents too.”

“You going to see all of them?” Fin asked gently.

“Yes.”

He hesitated. “Anyone else?”

Talia looked out the window again, quiet. “Myself.” She whispered.

Fin glanced at her again, but said nothing. After a long stretch of silence, he reached into the centre console and pulled out a pack of gum. Held it out to her. “You want one?”

She blinked. “Gum?”

“Yeah. My kid says it helps with grief. Gives your mouth something to do while your brain shuts up.”

Talia took a piece. Chewed. “Your kid’s smart,” she murmured.

He smiled. “Gets it from his mom.”

They drove the rest of the way in silence. When they pulled up to the gates of the cemetery, Fin didn’t park on the curb. He pulled in. Turned off the engine.

“You don’t have to come in,” Talia said softly.

He looked over at her. “Yeah, I do.”

She opened the door. He followed.

Some grief needed to be witnessed.

ST. MICHAEL’S CEMETERY - July 9, 2004 - 08:15 AM

The morning air hung heavy with the promise of heat, but St. Michael’s still wore its hush like a veil. The car hadn’t even fully stopped when Talia stepped out, crossing the quiet street with her coat loose around her shoulders. The hum of summer had not yet begun. She moved with purpose; shoulders square, chin set, grief buried deep beneath the muscle memory of years.

Across the street stood the flower vendor’s cart, shaded by a worn canvas and framed by a trellis of ivy that had long since learned to survive New York. The sign read Vartan’s, hand-painted in fading Armenian script, a fixture as steady as the man himself. He was already there, pruning tulips that hadn’t sold yesterday. The scent of roses, water, and old tobacco clung to the air.

“Talusha!” Vartan called out in his thick accent, slipping out from behind the stand like a grandfather stepping into sunlight. His voice hadn’t changed since she was little, a mix of gravel and warmth. “Come, come. I have your father’s favourite ones today.”

She smiled, and for the first time that morning, her jaw relaxed. “Ah, Vartan jan,” she murmured, wrapping her arms around his weathered frame.

He kissed both her cheeks and held her at arm’s length like he needed to check if the years had been kind. “I lit a candle for Mikhail last night,” he said quietly, more to the memory of the man than to her. “And I prayed. Same prayer I always say. That he finds peace before the rest of us do.”

Talia’s throat burned, but she nodded. “Merci,” she whispered, and gestured subtly over her shoulder. “I brought someone with me.”

Fin stood at the edge of the sidewalk, awkward in his leather jacket, watching the moment like he wasn’t sure if he belonged in it. Talia beckoned him closer.

Vartan’s eyes narrowed, assessing. “Who is he?” he asked bluntly, already drawing conclusions.

“He’s a detective,” she replied. “Works with me.”

Vartan extended a hand, but his gaze didn’t waver. “Then you protect her,” he said in a tone that left no room for debate.

Fin, ever the composed one, nodded respectfully. “I do, sir.”

Something in that answer satisfied Vartan. He ducked back behind the stall and returned with two bouquets; white carnations, ivory chrysanthemums, and soft-petaled roses with a blush like sun-touched porcelain. “These are for you. Tell Mikhail I still haven’t forgiven him for not sending you to med school.”

He handed them off without asking for payment. Fin blinked. “Ain’t you gonna?”

But Talia was already walking away.

“She don’t pay here,” Vartan said, watching her go like a father watching his daughter walk into a war. “Not today. Not ever.”

They crossed into the cemetery, Talia knew the way without looking, she’d walked these paths many times. The cracked stones beneath her heels were familiar, the rustling trees overhead heavy with memory. Fin kept pace beside her, quiet in that respectful way of his. He didn’t ask questions. Didn’t try to comfort her. He just walked.

The Orthodox section of the cemetery was tucked behind a low wrought iron gate, the paint chipped and rust blooming along the hinges. It opened with a groan, like the grounds themselves remembered every mourner who passed through.

Inside, the air was still. Sacred.

The graves here bore names written in Cyrillic, etched deep into black granite that caught the light like obsidian. Crosses stood like sentinels, three-barred, with the bottom beam tilted downward in remembrance of the thief who fell. Some had crumbled with time. Others stood proud, adorned with offerings.

There were tokens left on nearly every grave. Loaves of bread gone hard with age. Embroidered cloths from distant villages. Handwritten prayers folded into glass jars. A dyed egg, chipped and sun-bleached, sat beside a bottle of vodka left uncorked. And everywhere, candles. Tall and thin, short and squat, flickering in glass lanterns fogged with age. The smoke smelled like myrrh, wax, and tears.

The graves weren’t abandoned. They were attended to, remembered. This wasn’t a place of silence. It was a place of whispered conversations with the dead.

Fin looked around, quiet. He muttered, “Never seen anything like this.”

Talia stepped forward in silence, leading Fin to the farthest end of the Orthodox plot. She didn’t need to look to know the path. Her feet remembered it. Her bones remembered it.

There, nestled beneath a row of cypress trees that whispered like mourners in the wind, were four headstones, standing together in solemn, eternal formation; like sentries, or a family portrait too still to bear.

She stopped. Didn’t speak. Didn’t breathe for a moment. Just stood, staring at the names etched in stone.

MIKHAIL VOLKOV

1932-1994

Historian. Father. Beloved.

Truth is eternal, love endures.

MIRIAM NABIL AMARI

1938-1996

Mother. Scholar. Light of Our Home.

Mercy and forgiveness.

KAREEM BASIM AMARI

1973-2002

Son. Brother. Martyr.

They can kill the man, not the dream.

LANA AMARI

1981-2002

Daughter. Sister. Light.

You are still with us.

Talia crouched down in front of her father’s grave, her knees creaking from the cold stone path beneath her. She laid one of the bouquets gently, reverently, as if placing something into a cradle. Her fingers brushed the inscription, now worn soft by rain and time, and she felt the sting of tears behind her eyes, but didn’t let them fall. Not yet.

“My baba,” she murmured, her voice a low hush, “was the one who taught me the world was full of lies. But that didn’t mean truth didn’t exist.”

The candle she’d lit flickered beside the stone, struggling against the morning breeze. “He taught history in St. Petersburg. Real history. Not the kind that got you medals, the kind that got you watched.” Her mouth twitched. “By ’78, he was sure the KGB had an eye on him. He packed us up and moved us to Alexandria overnight. Said we’d be safer under the Nile than under Moscow’s boot.”

A silence settled between her words. Fin didn’t interrupt.

“I was five. I didn’t understand why my dolls were gone. Why my mother was crying in Arabic in a Russian kitchen. But he kept saying, start over, start over, start over. Like it was a prayer. He thought exile was better than erasure.” She reached up to her collar and touched the thin chain tucked beneath, his ring, worn around her neck like a talisman.

“I was eighteen when he died,” she said softly. “It was sudden. Heart attack. I didn’t make it to the hospital in time. I had one missed call from him.”

A breath left her like wind from a punctured lung.

“And I still haven’t deleted it.”

She bent forward and touched the grave, pressing her fingers into the dry, sun-warmed soil like it could hold her back.

“He was the beginning of everything,” she whispered. Then stood, slowly, as if standing pulled grief up with her. She moved to the next stone.

Her mother’s.

Talia knelt again, but softer this time, as though her mother might scold her for wrinkling her slacks. “She was the flame,” she said simply. “Our house was quiet until she walked in. Then it smelled like incense, and coffee, and scripture written in Greek that no one else could pronounce but her.”

She laid the flowers down, smoothing the petals with her thumb, making sure none drooped. “She taught Coptic theology, first in Alexandria, then Columbia. She could argue about Christological dogma in four languages and then teach me how to tie a headscarf in the same breath. She said knowledge was sacred, but kindness was holier.”

She smiled. A real one, but lined with ache. “She burned frankincense on Sundays and played Fairuz on cassette. When I asked if music was allowed in church, she told me music was just prayer that learned how to fly.”

Her throat caught on the next words. She didn’t fight it. “She died of cancer. Two years after my father. It was… quiet. But ugly. I still smell hospitals in my sleep.”

Fin shifted behind her, still silent.

“She made me promise to wear white to her funeral.” Talia’s eyes closed. “We wear white for the resurrection, habibti. Not for despair.”

She pressed two fingers to the engraved cross and traced it down to the verse below. “She and Baba are buried together. She said she didn’t believe in separation, not in life, not in death.”

Fin glanced at the two graves, hands in his pockets. “She sounds like someone who knew what mattered.”

Talia didn’t answer. She just turned to Kareem’s grave. She paused for a long time. As if stepping closer to it would change something. As if, this time, he might answer.

She crouched and retrieved the worn paperback left at the foot of his stone. A book of Darwish poetry. The spine was cracked. The pages watermarked. Her thumb found the fold in the middle of the book like it had muscle memory.

“This was his favourite,” she said. “He used to recite lines when he was angry. Or scared. Or dreaming. Which was all the time.” She held the book to her chest. “Kareem was fire. Raw and righteous. He wanted a better world, and he didn’t care how many systems he had to burn to make it. He organized walkouts in college. Smuggled books into Cairo. Wrote letters to dissidents like they were friends.”

She smiled, but it broke halfway through. “He was my favourite.”

Fin’s voice came softly, almost reluctant. “What happened to him?”

Talia didn’t look away from the stone. “He was shot at a protest. Alexandria. 2002. I told him not to go.”

The silence following her words was like an iron weight. “They aimed at the crowd. No warning. Two bullets to the chest.” Her voice flattened, collapsed in on itself. “I flew there the same day. I had to identify him in a morgue with a broken air conditioner. I remember thinking his hair still smelled like cardamom.”

Her fingers trembled. “He wanted to change everything. But they didn’t even let him finish the sentence.” She ran her hand along the edge of the grave, as if she could feel his pulse through stone.

“I didn’t speak at his funeral,” she murmured. “But I asked him afterward, who am I without you? I still don’t know.” She stood too fast, as if staying crouched meant she might shatter.

Fin took a small step closer, but didn’t speak. He just looked at her, like he wanted to say something, and knew now wasn’t the time.

Then turned to the final grave.

Lana.

Her knees buckled halfway down, and this time, she didn’t catch herself. She landed hard, graceless, dirt smudging the hem of her coat. The last bouquet shook in her hands. She laid it down gently. And kissed the stone like it might kiss back.

“Lana was the baby,” she whispered. “Smart. Wild. Too clever for the world. She once made a professor cry with a question about Greek funerary rites.” Tears slipped freely now. “She got into university. Anthropology. She wanted to find beauty in bones. Said that skeletons told better stories than people.”

Talia laughed, short and sharp. Then crumbled again. “But she… struggled with addiction. With shame. With silence. With shadows. I used to find her in the hallway, humming to herself like she was keeping something away.”

She glanced at Fin, barely. “I didn’t catch her in time.”

Her hand splayed over the soil like she might find her heartbeat buried there. “She had the most beautiful voice. Untrained, but full of colour, like light leaking through stained glass. She sang when she was happy, when she was scared… and sometimes, when silence was too dangerous.”

She blinked through the tears, her voice fraying like thread. “They called it an accident. But the silence she left behind was too sharp. I wore black for thirty days. I burned her letters in a copper bowl.” Talia bowed her head. And whispered the hardest words. “I should’ve sung louder.”

The wind stirred through the trees, lifting her curls, brushing the edges of her coat. And still, she didn’t move. She stayed. Hand to stone. Body bowed. Mourning not just the dead, but the versions of herself buried with them.

And behind her, Fin remained silent. Not because he didn’t know what to say. But because there was nothing left to say that hadn't already been sung in grief.

Talia rose from her knees slowly, as if her grief had weight. Her coat fluttered slightly in the breeze, but her hands were steady now, even as the skin beneath her eyes still shimmered from tears.

Fin said nothing at first, he just stepped beside her, rested a single arm around her shoulder, and gave her a brief, brotherly squeeze. She let him, just for a moment, then straightened, brushing invisible dust off her trench coat.

“Thank you,” she said, finally turning to face him. Her voice was even, not emotionless, but it had that quiet strength she always wore after pain, like armour. “For coming. For not saying too much.”

Fin tilted his head. “You don’t have to thank me.”

“I know,” she said. “But I will.”

They reached his car, and as she opened the passenger side door, she paused. “Just… don’t tell anyone about this. Not that I’m ashamed,” she added quickly. “But this, my family, it doesn’t get to be what makes me. Or breaks me.”

Fin looked at her, long and level. “Your story’s your own, Talia. I won’t say a word.”

She gave him a soft smile. The kind that flickered more than it glowed. Then, quietly, she added, “I still have two older brothers. Ameen teaches sociology at Columbia. Samir’s in the army. Iraq deployment.” Her voice thinned. “They’re alive. But far. And I don’t know which is worse.”

Fin didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.

She climbed into the car, and he followed. The ride back to the precinct was silent. Not cold. Not awkward. Just… understood. Like grief had pulled up a seat between them, and neither of them dared disturb it.

SVU PRECINCT - July 9, 2004 - 09:57 AM

The precinct was buzzing when they returned. Phones ringing, keys clacking, low conversations slicing through the tension in the air. But Talia could feel it instantly, something was waiting for her.

Cragen stood at her desk, arms folded, jaw tight. His presence drew a quietness from those nearby. He didn’t move when he saw her enter. Just nodded toward his office.

She barely had time to shrug out of her coat when she heard the familiar rasp behind her.

“And so, the prodigal daughter returns,” Munch muttered from behind his desk, not bothering to look up from the file in his hands.

Talia gave him a sideways glance, her smirk automatic. “Missed me, Munchie?”

He finally looked up, arching an unimpressed eyebrow. “Like a kidney stone.”

She laughed under her breath. “Touching.”

And then she was gone, slipping into Cragen’s office and shutting the door behind her.

The blinds were half-closed, streaking his desk in uneven stripes of light. Dust floated in the beam near the window like ash suspended in air. Talia stood at attention, back straight, voice calm. “You wanted to see me, sir?”

Cragen didn’t look up immediately. He scribbled something on a folder; her file, no doubt, and clicked the pen closed with a kind of finality that made her stomach drop.

“Close the door,” he said without looking.

She did. He leaned back, hands folded across his chest, and gave a long, measured sigh. “I can’t let your first case in SVU go without a conversation.”

Talia didn’t respond. She braced herself.

“I know you came from Narcotics. I know you’re used to going off instinct and grit and getting the bad guy no matter what it costs. But this unit is different.” He pointed to his desk with two fingers. “Here, if you lose the victim’s trust, you don’t lose a lead, you lose the whole damn case. And more than that, you lose them.”

She nodded, tight-lipped.

“You chased a suspect down three city blocks. Alone. And you didn’t tell anyone you had a personal tie to the victim.”

He let that hang there.

“You made a survivor feel cornered. Unsafe. And that can’t happen again.”

Talia took a breath. “You’re right, sir. I acted on emotion. Not protocol. I should’ve disclosed the connection. And I didn’t. That’s on me.”

Cragen blinked. He was used to defensiveness. But she offered none. Just acceptance, like a soldier awaiting the blow. He studied her for a moment longer. Then glanced down at the file on his desk. “You’ve got a sharp mind, Amari. That’s clear. You work like someone who’s already seen too much. But you’re still green in this unit. And someone should’ve pulled the reins.”

She blinked. “Sir?”

He closed the file, tapping the corner with his knuckles. “This isn’t just on you. Detective Munch was supposed to be mentoring you during your transition week.”

Talia stiffened.

“He didn’t. He let you operate solo. No oversight. No check-ins. That’s not how this works.” He leaned forward, elbows on the desk now, voice lower. “So, from today forward, you’re officially assigned to Munch. Full-time partner. You don’t move without him. You ride together, work the same cases, sit side-by-side. You split paperwork, you share coffee. Hell, if one of you farts, the other better know why.”

Talia blinked at that. Her lips twitched.

Cragen didn’t smile, but the edge of his mouth moved. “This isn’t punishment. It’s structure. He’s a cynic, yeah, but he’s good. And you…” He tapped her file. “You’ve got potential. But you don’t know how to slow down. And if you don’t learn that fast, this job will tear you apart.”

His voice dropped just a notch. “And maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll teach that bastard something too.”

Talia finally let herself smile. Just faintly. “Yes, sir.”

“Good. Dismissed.”

Talia stepped out of Cragen’s office and walked back toward the desks with a new weight in her shoulders. But it wasn’t defeat. It was steel.

She dropped into her chair across from Munch, met his eyes, and said plainly, “well, detective. Looks like we’re married now.”

He exhaled sharply through his nose. “God help me.”

Talia grinned. “Come on, don’t act like I’m not your type. You love chaos in lipstick.”

“I love quiet. And peace. And retirement,” he shot back, flipping the page on his report.

“You’re gonna be disappointed on all three counts.”

He finally looked at her, really looked. Something passed between them. Not warmth. Not yet. But curiosity. Respect. Maybe the faintest hint of recognition. She was not what he expected. And he wasn’t sure yet whether that was a blessing or a bomb.

“So, what’s the case?” she asked, grabbing her coat again.

“Stakeout,” he muttered. “Red Hook. Suspect’s been seen loitering near the old warehouse. Possibly connected to two assaults.”

“Sounds fun,” she said, zipping her coat. “Let me guess, you drive like an old man?”

“I don’t drive,” he said. “I sulk behind the wheel and yell about the CIA.”

She laughed. “Perfect.”

They stepped into the elevator together. The doors slid shut.

And for just a moment, in the flickering fluorescent light, as she leaned against the rail and he stared ahead with arms crossed and eyes tired, something shifted.

Maybe it was fate. Or partnership. Or just the beginning of a story neither of them had the words for yet.

But Talia looked at him sideways, her smile soft and unreadable.

And Munch?

He didn’t say a word.

But he noticed.

RED HOOK - July 9, 2004 - 02:12 AM

The air was thick with sea salt and something sour from the docks. The unmarked car idled just beyond the reach of the busted streetlamp, engine humming low, the only thing keeping the cold from creeping fully into their bones.

They’d been sitting there for hours.

Not talking. Not shifting. Just breathing in the silence between them, the kind that wasn’t empty, but dense, like fog. The kind of silence that only came from shared insomnia, broken families, and the kind of job that made sleep feel suspicious.

Munch tapped the edge of his battered thermos with the back of his pen. A soft, rhythmic clink. Not quite impatient. Not quite focused. Just something to fill the air so it didn’t swallow him whole.

Talia was curled in the passenger seat, coat wrapped tight around her. Her curls were pulled into a low knot, brow furrowed as she read the same case file for the fifth time under the yellow light of the glovebox.

She smelled like jasmine and black coffee. A mix of comfort and warning.

Munch was doing everything in his power not to notice.

Not her perfume. Not the way her nail traced the corner of a page without turning it. Not how still she got when she wasn’t arguing, or interrogating, or working a suspect into submission. She’d gone quiet, like a storm just off the horizon.

He stared through the fogged windshield at the warehouse across the street. “Y’know,” he muttered, dry as dust, “you remind me of this girl.”

Talia didn’t look up. She licked her thumb, turned the page. “That supposed to be a compliment or a confession?”

“Just an observation.”

She raised a brow, smirking faintly. “Go on, then. Let’s hear this fairytale.”

He shifted in his seat, elbow against the door. “Back when I was still in Baltimore. Homicide. But there was this one week, I came up here for a cross-jurisdiction case, something in Crown Heights with ties to a guy we were chasing. Should’ve just stuck to the paperwork, but the 114^th needed bodies on patrol. I got roped in.”

Talia’s attention drifted from the file to him, just a little.

“I didn’t want to go home,” he added. “Wife number two had just chucked my vinyl out the window. Thought walking a beat in Queens was better than staring at my own mistakes.”

She blinked slowly. Said nothing.

“I remember passing this bodega,” he said. “Run by an old Arab guy with a trembling hand and a soft spot for the loudest girls in Astoria.”

That caught her.

“It was summer. Air so thick you could chew it. I’d see the same crew out front, girls with big hoops and bigger mouths, arguing about mango juice or screaming about Nas lyrics. The owner pretended to be annoyed but lit up every time they came in.”

Talia tilted her head slightly, just listening now.

“One of them. She stood out. Big hair. Big voice. Moved like she had the whole city in her pocket. Never gave her name. Rolled her eyes every time I so much as breathed. I was just trying to get witness names after a fight broke out, and she…” he chuckled, low, “...she told me if I was cuter, she might cooperate.”

He shook his head. “Then she called me a fascist and walked off.”

Talia had gone perfectly still.

Munch didn’t notice, not yet.

She turned toward him, the case file slipping from her lap unnoticed. “…What year was this?” she asked softly.

He squinted toward the windshield. “Summer of ‘94. Maybe ‘95. Hard to forget.”

Her voice dropped. “Wait.”

He looked over. “What?”

She stared at him, eyes wide with disbelief. Searching his face like it held some hidden doorway.

“That was me.”

He froze.

"...What?"

Chapter Text

BODEGA ON 33^rd - June 17, 1994 - 10:27 PM

The bodega on 33^rd was a staple of the neighbourhood, older than the corner it stood on. Its neon signs flickered like tired eyelids, casting blue and red halos across the cracked sidewalk. Inside, the hum of the fridges clashed with the whir of a half-broken fan mounted in the corner, doing absolutely nothing against the muggy Queens night. The air was thick with cumin, heat, and adolescent chaos.

Talia barely eighteen, sharp as a switchblade and twice as pretty, was arguing by the refrigerated section, a mango juice in one hand and a guava in the other, glaring like her life depended on it.

“Mango is superior. It’s rich, it’s complex,” she said, lips glossed, gold hoops catching the light as she moved.

Zeyneb clapped back, flinging her arm toward the guava shelf. “Guava is tropical elegance. You just don’t get it.”

“You don’t get it,” Talia countered.

Dunya was already halfway through a bag of hot chips, licking the neon red powder off her fingers like she was preparing for war. “You’re both wrong. Passionfruit clears.”

Marianna, Cuban, brassy, and bold, leaned over the counter like she owned it. “Ali habibi, how much do we owe you?”

Behind the counter, Ali; grizzled, patient, and decades past giving a damn, looked over his glasses with a sigh. “It depends. Are you paying for what’s in your stomachs or just what’s still sealed?”

Meanwhile, Zeyneb had popped the lid off a container of labneh and was loudly smacking her spoon into it. “This one’s mine now.”

“It’s mine,” Talia snapped and yanked it out of Zeyneb’s hands.

“Possession is nine-tenths of the law,” Zeyneb smirked, licking the spoon slowly just to provoke her.

Ali muttered something in Arabic and crossed himself for good measure. These girls had been coming in since they were twelve. They were loud. They were beautiful. They were trouble. And they were family.

But tonight? Something was brewing.

Outside, the summer air buzzed with that specific tension Queens got right before midnight on a Friday. A call had gone out: “group of rowdy young women disturbing the peace.”

Enter Detective John Munch.

Still technically on loan from Baltimore Homicide, doing legwork for a potential connection to a case that had slipped north. The 114^th Precinct needed extra warm bodies, and Munch, always the reluctant nomad, was here, cigarette unlit behind one ear, trench coat on despite the oppressive heat, and tie loose like it had given up.

He looked like film noir died and got dumped in a borough that never stopped yelling.

The unmarked car pulled up slow. The streetlamps caught the sheen of sweat on his forehead, and he stepped out with all the enthusiasm of a man summoned from the grave. His shoes crunched gravel, and the second he clocked the girls, he felt it, trouble.

Five of them, crowded into a bodega like it was their private palace. Talia was in the centre. Tank top hugging her figure, baby hairs slicked beneath a paisley bandana, curls spilling like defiance down her back. Her arms were folded, gum snapping. Her gaze met his like she was sizing up a worthy opponent.

“Ladies,” Munch drawled, voice as dry as dust.

No one answered. Dunya crunched louder. Meriem popped her gum. Zeyneb stuck her head further into the fridge.

Munch exhaled. “Alright, what the hell is going on here?”

Still nothing.

Then, an explosion of giggles. Marianna slapped Zeyneb’s arm, Dunya choked on her chips, and Talia just tilted her head.

“Oh my God,” Zeyneb hissed. “Who the hell brought their dad?”

Talia stepped forward, her walk deliberate, hips swinging like the street was her stage. “You got a warrant, old man?” she asked, voice honeyed and deadly.

Munch blinked. “This is a bodega. Not your living room.”

“No shit?” she replied sweetly.

“You wanna tell me what happened here?”

“No.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Do you have ID?”

“No.”

“You’re legally required-”

“Nope.”

Finishing her third ‘no’ like it was the most delightful syllable in the alphabet, she blew a bubble with her gum and let it snap loudly. She was taunting him.

Munch sighed hard and pinched the bridge of his nose. He was too old for this. “Miss, I’m not gonna ask again.”

And that’s when Dunya leaned against the chips rack and started chanting, “Racism! Racism!”

Meriem raised a fist. “Police brutality!”

“I haven’t even touched anyone,” Munch muttered, looking completely done.

“And you ain’t going to,” Talia shot back, stepping even closer. Close enough to smell her coconut oil and defiance.

For a moment, there was nothing but the hum of the fridge and the buzz of the fan.

He stared at her. She stared right back.

Ali, now visibly sweating behind the counter, waved his arms like a man warding off a curse. “Leave them be, detective! They’re just loud! They’re always like this!”

Munch’s gaze shifted to Ali. “You sure?”

“They're good girls,” Ali said. “Mostly.”

Munch ran a hand down his face. “You’re lucky he’s in a forgiving mood.”

Talia smirked, saccharine and smug. “If you was cuter, I might’ve cooperated.”

That caught him. Just for a second, something unreadable flickered across his face. And then she turned. Hair bouncing, labneh in hand, she strutted out with the others in tow like a five-woman revolution. Marianna tossed her curls. Meriem whistled at a passing car. Dunya yelled something in Arabic too fast for Munch to catch.

As they disappeared around the corner, Zeyneb yelled loud enough for the entire block, “I’d let that old man handcuff me!”

Talia laughed. Loud. Bright. Free.

Munch stood in the doorway of the bodega, watching the chaos recede.

Ali passed him a bottle of water, unasked. “Don’t take it personal. That one?” He nodded toward where Talia had gone. “She bites everyone.”

Munch just shook his head and took a long sip. “She’s gonna be trouble.”

Ali chuckled. “She’s already trouble.”

And somewhere, under the heavy Queens heat, a seed had been planted.

A summer of hell for Talia Amari-Volkov had just begun.

BASKETBALL COURT NEAR 33^rd - June 24, 1994 - 11:23 PM

The court lights buzzed like hornets overhead, flickering every few minutes like they were arguing with the dark. Summer had settled over Queens in its usual way; thick, slow, loud. The air tasted like bodega cigarettes, hot concrete, and someone’s cousin’s cologne drifting too far from the court.

Talia lounged on the bleachers like she owned them.

Her curls spilled in every direction, the gold hoops in her ears catching the broken court light like little suns. She wore a zip-up hoodie, too big for her frame, the hem hitting mid-thigh over the white cotton shorts underneath. Her Jordans were clean, too clean to be from today. Her white crew socks were scrunched perfectly low, like she’d rolled them down with attitude alone. One leg stretched out long; the other bent casually beneath her, foot tapping to the beat of the boombox somewhere behind the fence.

Her iced coffee from the corner bodega sweated against the bench beside her. Half-finished. Extra sweet. A straw chewed nearly flat.

Across the court, her girls shouted over the ongoing pickup game; Meriem, Dunya, Zeyneb, and Marianna. Loud. Beautiful. Shameless. They played in their own language of shrieks and laughter, as sharp and bright as the gold jewellery they all wore like armour. The boombox was blasting Biggie, bouncing off brick walls and making the yuppies on Crescent sweat in their sleep.

Talia wasn’t in the mood to join. Not tonight. She just watched that signature pout painted across her lips, chin resting in her hand like she was waiting for something she couldn’t name. There was something faraway in her stare, like she was watching her friends from a different year, or maybe from a few feet deeper in grief.

And then, the deep growl of a tired engine. An unmarked car rolled slow into the alley next to the court.

Door opened. Cue trench coat.

John stepped out into the heat like a man walking into purgatory. Same wrinkled button-down. Same crooked tie. And yes, still wearing the goddamn trench coat like he didn’t believe in summer.

He looked like a noir film got left in the sun, set on fire, and then dragged into Queens.

He scanned the court like a man doing mental calculus about how many reports he could ignore and still sleep at night. Then muttered, mostly to himself, “Let me guess… someone’s blasting Biggie again and scaring the yuppies on Crescent.”

Talia didn’t even flinch.

She turned her head slowly, met his eyes like she was already bored. “Ain’t you got people to catch, officer?”

“I’m not an officer,” he replied, dragging out a cigarette like it weighed five pounds. “Homicide detective. Fancy, right?”

She squinted. “Homicide? Out here? What, someone choke on a slice of halal pizza?”

“Closer to a domestic dispute that turned into a stabbing. Don’t worry, your crew doesn’t match the victim profile.”

“Oh,” she said flatly, “you profiling now?”

“I’m always profiling,” Munch replied, lighting up. “It’s half the job. The other half is filling out paperwork about people who don’t listen.”

She turned toward him fully now, her legs crossing at the ankle, the ice in her coffee clinking softly as she lifted it to her lips. “You always this charming when you’re off-duty, detective?”

“Only when I’m exhausted and underpaid,” he said, exhaling smoke like punctuation. “Which is always.”

He took in the scene, the court, the chaos, the barely functional lights. Then back to her. “You always sit out while your friends raise hell?”

Talia tilted her head, curls bouncing. “Someone’s gotta keep an eye out in case the Feds show up.”

Munch laughed under his breath. It surprised them both.

There was a long pause. The game continued behind them in bursts of shouting and laughter. Someone missed a layup. Someone else called them trash. Meriem screamed “You got no ankles!” loud enough for half the block to hear.

Talia sipped again. Her eyes shifted, just a bit softer now. “You ever even shoot a basketball, old man?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Are you challenging me, labneh girl?”

She blinked. Her smirk was slow. “You remember me?”

“Hard to forget the teenager who tried to weaponize dairy products and civil disobedience,” Munch muttered, cigarette between his lips. “You got your whole squad chanting police brutality.”

Talia shrugged like it was nothing. “Maybe you deserved it.”

“I definitely did,” Munch agreed.

He sat on the bleachers, not too close, just enough to let the smoke drift between them. He didn’t look at her directly. That would be too much. But he was listening. Watching the way she shifted. The way she quieted when no one else was around.

“You always this quiet when your friends aren’t looking?” he asked.

Talia’s eyes narrowed slightly. “You always this nosy when you’re not investigating a corpse?”

“I’m naturally curious,” he said. “Sue me.”

“I might,” she said.

“Please don’t. I’m terrible in court.”

A silence fell, but it wasn’t awkward. Just... charged. The kind of quiet that sits between two people who don’t know each other but recognize something anyway.

She didn’t ask his name.

He didn’t ask hers.

They just sat there, bathed in the heavy heat of late June, letting the night stretch long around them. Then, “T!” Meriem’s voice shattered it all. “Come get your man before I do!”

Munch blinked. “Your man?”

Talia groaned, standing up in one fluid motion. “Don’t flatter yourself, detective.”

He leaned back on his elbows, watching her go. “Nice seeing you again, labneh girl.”

She tossed her empty coffee into the wire trash bin with a clean arc. “Try not to die of heatstroke in that coat.”

And she walked away, shoulders loose, curls bouncing, hoops catching the light like halos, like warnings.

He watched her go. Didn’t know her name. But he’d remember her walk for the rest of his life.

SIDE STREET NEAR 33^rd - June 30, 1994 - 09:49 PM

The sidewalk shimmered faintly in the leftover heat of the day, like the pavement itself was sweating. Streetlights flickered overhead in that lazy Queens rhythm; on, off, on again, like even the bulbs were too tired to commit. Somewhere in the distance, a car door slammed. A dog barked twice, then went silent. A faint radio played something slow and Spanish from an open apartment window.

John turned the corner slowly, one hand in his coat pocket, the other gripping a spiral notebook he hadn’t written in for the past twenty minutes. Patrolling the area, he’d say if asked. Technically true. But the unspoken truth sat heavier than his badge in this heat.

He’d passed 33^rd three nights in a row now, habit by now.

Not because of any official lead. Not because it was his jurisdiction. But because... he didn’t want to go home. Not to the silence. Not to wife number two’s half-packed boxes. Not to the sound of his own thoughts echoing off drywall and failed wedding vows. And if he just happened to take a detour near the neighbourhood where that girl lived, that mouthy little anarchist with the curls, well. Who was he to argue with fate?

And tonight?

There she was.

Leaning against the chain-link fence of the locked basketball court like she was posing for a mixtape cover. One leg bent behind her; the sole of her sneaker hooked lazily into the fence. Her joggers were cinched at the waist, hoodie zipped halfway down, sleeves pushed up. A cheap gold bracelet glittered on her wrist. Her hair, pinned up messily with a plastic claw clip, spilled loose curls around her face, damp at the temples from the heat.

She was smoking. Of course she was.

The cherry of her cigarette glowed with each drag, lighting her features in brief flashes of gold and shadow. She didn’t look at him. Didn’t need to. Her voice came low, cool, like she already knew the shape of his breath. “You stalking me now, detective?”

Munch stopped mid-step. A beat of silence passed. He smiled, slow, sardonic. “You think everything’s about you?”

She let the silence stretch, then smirked, barely turning her head. “No. But you might be.”

That landed. He sighed, stepping closer, his trench coat fluttering with a hint of drama that he didn’t quite earn. “This your turf now?”

Talia tapped her ash onto the sidewalk. “This has always been my turf. You’re just late to the party.”

“Story of my life,” he muttered. He stood beside her now, not too close. Just within reach of the chain-link fence. Just close enough to smell the faint sweetness of her perfume, vanilla and coconut and rebellion.

She glanced at him; cigarette pinched between her fingers. “Didn’t think you’d actually stop.”

“Didn’t think you’d be out here alone.”

Talia shrugged, flicked ash again. “I like the quiet. Plus, cops keep cruising by.”

Munch gave a dry chuckle. “Can’t imagine why.”

She held the cigarette out toward him, casual. “You want one?”

He raised an eyebrow. “You offering to corrupt an officer of the law?”

“I’m offering to be polite,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Take it or don’t.”

He took it.

Their fingers touched, just a brush. Her skin was warm. His was rougher than he remembered. There was something about the contact that felt... heavier than it should have. She lit it for him. Flame against filtered paper. And now they stood shoulder to shoulder, framed in amber streetlight, passing slow curls of smoke between them like a shared secret. For a long moment, neither of them said anything. The city went on around them, loud and oblivious. But this corner? This corner was its own pocket in time.

“It’s too hot to sleep,” Talia said eventually, voice lower now. Not flirtatious. Just honest.

Munch glanced sideways. “You don’t strike me as someone who sleeps easy.”

She gave a small laugh, short, bitter. “That obvious?”

He shrugged. “Takes one to know one.”

She looked at him fully then, her face unreadable. “You married?”

He blinked. “Was.”

“Divorced?”

“In progress.”

Talia made a face like she’d just solved a riddle. “That explains the trench coat in July. Divorce energy.”

Munch took a drag. “And here I thought it was style.”

“Mm. You’d be cute if you smiled.”

He didn’t.

But he looked at her, eyes tired, smile tugging at the edge of his mouth like it wasn’t sure if it wanted to show up. “You always this charming with strange older men?”

“Only the ones who stalk me,” she said, grinning wide this time.

Another silence. Then, unprompted, he asked: “You got someone to walk you home?”

She scoffed lightly, but it wasn’t rude. More like... amused. “You offering, detective?”

“I might be.”

Talia tilted her head, assessing. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “I’m the scariest thing walking these streets.”

He didn’t doubt it. But still. He searched her face for a moment, like he could find the blueprint of her future etched there. Like he could find the crack before it ever formed. “You don’t have to be,” he said quietly.

Her smile faltered. Just a hair.

And then, because she didn’t want to linger too long in anything that felt too soft, she turned. Flicked her cigarette to the pavement. Ground it out with her sneaker like it never meant a thing. She walked off. Slow. Confident. Curls bouncing with each step. The kind of walk that made men turn and women take notes.

She didn’t look back.

Until she did.

Halfway down the block, she glanced over her shoulder, just once. Her brow raised. Not seductive. Not wistful.

Daring.

A dare in gold hoops and streetlight.

Munch stayed rooted in place. The taste of her cigarette still on his tongue. Her scent, vanilla and heat and whatever the hell was happening, still clinging to his coat.

He knew, in that moment, this was going to be a problem.

And he didn’t care.

STEINWAY ST - July 4, 1994 - 02:38 PM

It was the kind of heat that made your bones feel swollen. Humid, wet, and mean. Like the air itself was mad about something.

The city crackled with Fourth of July static, kids tossing firecrackers in the gutters, someone grilling on a roof five buildings over, sirens weaving in and out of the soundtrack of Steinway Street. But here, in the narrow alley behind the laundromat, the celebration stopped.

Yellow tape fluttered like cautionary prayer flags between rusted poles. The body lay slumped near the dumpster; gunshot to the head, close range. No wallet. No ID. Just a bloodstain soaking into the concrete like the city was drinking it in.

John ducked under the tape with a clipboard in one hand and a flashlight he didn’t need in the other. His trench coat stuck to his shirt like betrayal. His shirt stuck to his skin like punishment.

Baltimore said two weeks, he thought bitterly. It’s been a month.

He didn’t miss home. Just missed being somewhere else. Anywhere that wasn’t melting asphalt and nosy Queens residents gathering like pigeons around a tragedy.

The crowd was already thick. Neighbourhood uncles leaning out of windows with iced tea. Kids craning their necks. A trio of women whispering about curses. A man yelling from the sidewalk, “Yo, that kid from 34^th? Heard he owed people money.”

Munch squinted at them. “This isn’t a block party. Go home. Grow up. Learn a skill.”

“Was it a robbery?” someone shouted.

“Execution-style?” another whispered.

Munch sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Do I look like the ghost of Crime Scene Future? Move back.”

And then. “Yo, Detective Noir!”

The voice slid in like smoke; feminine, amused, unmistakably familiar. Munch’s spine tensed.

He turned his head.

There she was.

Talia was leaning against the brick wall of the corner bodega across the street, arms crossed, legs bare beneath frayed denim cutoffs. A vintage Knicks tee was knotted at the waist, and a red bandana kept her curls half-up, but most had slipped loose, clinging damp to her neck. Her gold hoops swung when she tilted her head, catching sunlight like weaponry.

Lip gloss gleamed. So did her grin. Of course she would be here. Of course she’d spot him first. She strolled over with the casual arrogance of someone who had never once been asked to leave a place she didn’t want to be. And if she had? She didn’t listen.

Talia slipped under the police tape like it was streamers at a party. Munch opened his mouth to stop her, but she was already next to him, peering over his shoulder, one hand on her hip, the other pulling a piece of gum from her mouth like she was unwrapping a secret.

“What happened?” she murmured, lowering her voice to match his. “Give it to me on the down low.”

“You shouldn’t be here,” Munch hissed, stepping slightly in front of the body.

“Neither should half the people gawking at the corpse, but I don’t see you arresting Mrs. Ghada from the second floor.” She nodded toward a nearby woman in a floral robe and slippers, loudly praying under her breath.

He sighed. “Homicide. Gunshot. Male. No ID. You happy?”

“You always this charming around dead people?”

He shot her a look. “Are you always this smug near crime scenes?”

She grinned wider. “Only when they’re boring. Robbery?”

“Doesn’t look like it.”

“Execution-style?”

He narrowed his eyes. “How do you know that?”

Talia shrugged, unconcerned. “It’s the neighbourhood. You think I haven’t seen this before?”

That landed harder than he wanted it to. He studied her for a long moment, too long. Then finally asked, “Did you see anything?”

She hesitated just enough for it to matter. “I saw a car. Around 11:45. Black Impala. Tinted windows. Two people in the front. Could’ve been women. They were laughing.”

Munch blinked. “Laughing?”

She nodded. “Not loud. Just... like a joke had landed. Then they peeled off. Fast. Toward Crescent.”

He scribbled it down, brow furrowed. “You always this observant?”

She met his eyes without blinking. “You always this slow?”

He let out a short laugh, unexpected, almost real. “Jesus. You’re exhausting.”

“And yet,” she said, already turning, “here you are.”

“Wait.” He moved forward a step. “At least give me a name this time.”

Talia turned halfway, walking backward now, smirking. “Still a detective, right?”

Munch rolled his eyes. “Come on.”

She cupped her hands around her mouth like a cheerleader. “Figure it out!”

Then she turned fully and slipped under the tape again, sliding into the crowd like she’d never been there. But not before tossing one last glance over her shoulder; playful, proud, unreadable.

The sun hit her just right.

Her skin glowed like honey. Her hoops shimmered. And the gold chain around her neck bounced lightly against her collarbone as she moved, disappearing into the sea of heat-dazed onlookers.

He watched her until he couldn’t anymore.

“Munch!” his partner snapped, snapping a latex glove on his hand. “What the hell are you doing? We’ve got blood trace and no timeline!”

Munch looked down at his notes, then back toward where she vanished.

“I think I just met my best informant,” he muttered.

He didn’t say what else he thought. Didn’t say that something about the way she walked away made his stomach knot. Didn’t say that he’d remember the exact shade of her lip gloss longer than he’d remember this poor bastard’s name. Didn’t say that it was already too late to stop whatever this was.

BODEGA ON 33^rd - July 10, 1994 - 00:27 AM

The bodega was dim, the kind of quiet that only existed after midnight. The fridges hummed with the low, electric drone of insomnia. Fluorescent lights buzzed above like bees trapped in glass. Outside, the block had gone to sleep, firework debris littering the curbs, smoke clinging to the air from earlier barbecues. Even the stray cats had disappeared.

Ali sat behind the counter pretending to read a newspaper, his glasses perched low on his nose. He wasn’t reading. He was listening. As usual.

In the corner, by the tiny folding table tucked between the stacked water bottles and the busted ATM, Talia was curled up like she belonged there. She had her legs tucked under her in the red plastic chair, worn smooth from years of use. A container of labneh sat open in front of her, half-eaten. She dipped the back of her spoon into it like it was gelato. Her pomegranate juice, still unopened, glistened with condensation beside her keys and a pack of Orbit gum.

Her curls were twisted up into a clip, some strands rebelliously falling down around her face. Baby hairs still slick, kohl smudged faintly under her eyes, like she’d been out dancing and didn’t bother fixing it. Bangles clinked softly every time she moved her wrist.

She looked peaceful. But her eyes were red. From crying.

And then, ding. The door chimed.

She didn’t flinch.

“Back again, detective?” she said, not even looking up. “I’m starting to think this is less ‘coincidence’ and more ‘tragic compulsion.’”

“I like the labneh,” Munch replied dryly, stepping in with that weary noir gait, trench coat still on like he hadn’t realized it was July. Glasses slightly crooked, the circles under his eyes deeper than ever. “And the... warm hospitality.”

Talia scooped another bite without blinking. “You’re just hoping I’ll insult you again. Admit it. You like being humbled by teenage girls.”

“I didn’t arrest you,” he said, hovering near the chips aisle, arms crossed. “I asked for ID.”

“And I said no.”

“And I said-”

“That I was legally required. Yeah, yeah. And I said no.” Talia waved him off.

Munch blinked, exasperated. “You have a perfect memory. It’s unnatural.”

She smirked without looking up. “It’s a blessing and a curse. Mostly a curse when people try to lie to me.”

There was a moment of silence between them, filled only by the fridge and the soft clink of her spoon against the plastic container.

Then, casually, Munch said, “We picked him up.”

She looked up at that. Just her eyes first; slow, sharp, alert. The spoon stilled midair. “The guy from the alley?” she asked.

He nodded. “Paulie Mansour. Black Impala, two priors, mouth like a buzzsaw. Girlfriend cracked first. Said he came home sweaty, paranoid, and reeking of fear.”

Talia snorted. “I knew it was Paulie. I said that. You remember me saying that? The way he hit the curb like he’d never driven under pressure before? Rookie hour.”

Munch tilted his head. “Still not giving me names?”

“Nope.” She licked a bit of labneh off her thumb. “I’m not a snitch. I’m a prophet.”

He actually smiled at that, just a twitch of the lips, but it was real. “You ever think about doing this for a living?”

Talia paused, furrowing her brow. “What? Sitting in a bodega eating labneh and talking shit?”

“I meant... being a detective.”

She blinked. Then scoffed so hard she nearly choked on her juice. “Me? Please.”

“I’m serious.”

“You’ve gotta be out of your mind.”

Munch stepped closer, one hand in his coat pocket, voice softer. “You’ve got the eye. You see things. Details most people miss. And you’ve got instincts.”

She leaned back in the chair, balancing her spoon between two fingers like a cigarette. “My oldest brother’s getting his Master’s in sociology. The other’s in the military. My brother writes political essays that get censored internationally. They’re out here doing shit that matters. I’m the one who gets into yelling matches over guava juice and makes mixtapes about Zizek.”

Munch didn’t laugh. He just looked at her. Really looked.

“So what?” he said gently.

Talia faltered. Just for a second. “I don’t know who I am yet,” she said, voice smaller than usual.

And for once, she didn’t armour it with a joke. Not right away. Then, “but I do know Paulie drives like a bitch.”

He chuckled, then pulled his glasses off and rubbed at his face. “You change your mind... about the whole ‘figuring yourself out’ thing... let me know. I’ll put in a good word. You’d make a hell of a detective.”

Talia raised an eyebrow. “You think I’d take career advice from someone who wears a trench coat in the summer?”

He turned, walking toward the door. “You’ll remember me.”

“Oh, please.” She rolled her eyes. “Detective Noir. Queens’ favourite killjoy. You’re like a fever dream I can’t get rid of.”

The bell over the door jingled as he stepped out.

And just before it shut. “Hey!” she called after him.

He paused.

“Don’t forget the juice next time.”

He didn’t answer.

Didn’t turn around.

But she saw the corner of his mouth curve, just slightly.

Unbeknownst to Munch, it would be ten years before he heard Talia Amari-Volkov’s voice again.

By then, she’d have a badge of her own.

And he’d already be too far gone.

Chapter Text

RED HOOK - July 9, 2004 - 02:12 AM

“…What?” Munch said, his voice caught somewhere between disbelief and a laugh he didn’t trust himself to have. He didn’t move, didn’t even blink, just froze, eyes locked on her like maybe if he stared hard enough, the answer would be different.

Talia leaned back, one palm covering her mouth, eyes sparking like a fuse had just been lit. “The summer of ’94?” she said, and her laughter slipped through the cracks in her composure. “That was me, old man!” Her voice rose with the giddy disbelief of someone unearthing a secret they weren’t supposed to find. “My friend Zeyneb said she’d let you handcuff her!”

He groaned, pinching the bridge of his nose like the weight of the memory might give him an aneurysm. “Oh, God.”

“I knew you looked familiar!” She slapped the dash once, not hard, just enough to punctuate her glee.

“You were a menace,” he mumbled, but the corners of his mouth betrayed him.

That sent her over the edge. She doubled forward, laughter breaking out in a rush, unrestrained, belly-deep, the kind that makes you lean into the moment with your whole body and that made her wipe her eyes and catch her breath in shaky little gasps. It lit her up from the inside, and for a few seconds, she wasn’t the detective with a dozen walls and a file full of redacted trauma. She was just… joy. She was a girl in a bandana again, impossible and alive.

Munch couldn’t look away. He’d built his life on being the guy who didn’t get caught staring, and yet here he was, caught like a rookie. He tried not to, but there it was, the sight of her glowing like this, all teeth and light and reckless amusement. He didn’t mind being the punchline. Not right now.

He cracked a smile. “You’re lucky I didn’t book you for disturbing the peace.”

“I was the peace,” she shot back, twirling a curl around her finger like she’d just declared victory.

He snorted. “You were a fever dream in a bandana.”

That only made her giggle more, softer now, like they’d stumbled into a secret no one else could hear. She leaned back against the seat, smirk still tugging at her mouth. “You really remember that?”

“Yeah.” His eyes flicked to hers, then back to the road ahead. “Didn’t know why. Guess now I do.”

The quiet settled in again, thick but not heavy. Outside, a streetlamp buzzed, casting pale halos on the wet asphalt. Inside, the air smelled faintly of her perfume and his coffee, a combination he suspected might be dangerous in the wrong hands.

“Guess I’m the reason you became a detective,” he said, smirking over the rim of the cup.

“As if,” she scoffed, mock-offended.

“Then why?” His tone shifted, not teasing, but genuine curiosity. It was enough to make her hesitate.

She turned toward the window, watching the way the sodium light caught in the slick streets. Why? For Lana? For the helpless ones? For every bad ending she couldn’t stop as a kid? Her parents had built a life in books and lectures. Her friends had degrees and safe careers. And here she was, chasing predators in the dark.

“I don’t know…” she murmured at last, her earlier smile dimming. “I guess I just wanted to protect people who couldn’t protect themselves.”

He studied her profile, the set of her jaw, the quiet conviction in her tone. “You’ve got good instincts, Amari,” he said finally. “Annoying as hell back then. But sharp.”

Her smile this time was smaller, worn-in. “Thanks, Munch.”

Their eyes met, held just long enough for something unspoken to hum between them.

“Doesn’t seem like he’s going to show up,” she said after a while, voice back to business.

“Guess you’re right,” he muttered, turning the key in the ignition. “Let me drive you home.”

The rest of the ride was quiet in that companionable way that sneaks up on you. She gave him directions, and he followed them without comment, winding through sleeping streets until they pulled up outside her rowhouse. The lights inside were off; the street was still. No barking, no scuffling, Ameen must’ve already taken the dogs out and fed them before heading upstate. The only light came from a streetlamp across the way, its glow cutting soft shadows across the stoop.

They stepped out together. He followed her up the worn steps, hands deep in his coat pockets.

“You want coffee, old man?” she asked, one brow arched.

“I shouldn’t,” he said, but the words came slower now, less conviction than there should’ve been.

She narrowed her eyes playfully, then shrugged. “Then don’t. See you tomorrow, John.”

And before he could reply, she leaned in, close enough for him to catch the warmth of her breath, the faint trace of jasmine and soap, and pressed her lips to his cheek. Not a polite brush. A kiss with just enough weight to make his pulse shift, just enough time for her to catch the cedar and sandalwood of his cologne.

Her favourite.

She lingered there a second too long, then pulled back, slow, letting the space stretch between them. He didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Just watched her.

She stepped inside, closed the door softly, and leaned back against it, her heart drumming louder than the quiet hallway around her.

She’d just kissed a senior detective.

And God help her; she didn’t regret it.

Outside, Munch stayed where she’d left him, staring at the closed door like it might open again if he willed it hard enough. His hands were still in his pockets; shoulders squared against the night. What the hell just happened? He’d spent his career talking people into saying things they didn’t want to say, pulling truth out of silence. And now he was the one left wordless.

Eventually, he turned and walked back to the car. The door creaked as he slid into the driver’s seat. He didn’t start the engine right away. Instead, he sat with his hands on the wheel, eyes fixed on the building across the street.

She’d been right there all along. In the same city. Crossing the same streets. Breathing the same air. Ten years of near-misses, and he never knew.

He remembered the girl from ’94, sharp laugh, quicker wit, the way she’d thrown him off balance in a way no one else had. And tonight, she’d done it again. He didn’t know whether to be irritated or grateful.

He should’ve said yes to the coffee. But coffee wouldn’t have stopped there, he knew it, and maybe she did too. Talia Amari had a way of pulling something out of him he didn’t show anyone else. Something warm. Something reckless.

The radio crackled softly in the background. He didn’t hear it. He just kept his eyes on that rowhouse until the streetlight flickered and the moment passed.

When he finally pulled away, the ghost of her laughter was still in the car with him.

SVU PRECINCT - August 6, 2004 - 10:08 AM

By now, Talia had been at SVU just shy of three months. Long enough to find her rhythm, short enough that she still felt like the new kid in the room. Her days had fallen into a kind of unspoken routine with Munch, early stakeouts, long afternoons chasing dead leads, and hours in the research room with case files spread across the table like some sprawling conspiracy map only the two of them could decipher.

Most mornings, he’d swing by her house in Astoria. Sometimes he honked from the curb, sometimes he came up the steps with a sarcastic, “Sleeping in on the taxpayers’ dime kiddo?”

They’d stop at her bodega for her usual, iced coffee with vanilla, heavy with milk, and a plain butter croissant she swore was the best in the city. He never ordered anything. Just leaned against the counter, reading whatever paper was handy and muttering about ‘the state of the world.’ Then they’d drive to the precinct with WNYC murmuring through the radio, arguing over whatever bizarre headline caught his eye that day.

It was comfortable. Familiar. And if either of them noticed how easy it had become, they didn’t say.

But today? Today, comfort had been replaced by misery.

New York was boiling, 36º in the shade, and the SVU precinct’s air conditioning had finally given up. The vents sighed like an old man’s regret, pumping nothing but humid breath into the bullpen. Maintenance said it’d be a few hours. Nobody believed them.

The place looked like a hostage situation. Olivia had tied her hair up with a pen, looking ready to stab the next person who spoke to her. Elliot was on his third shirt of the day, the sleeves already darkening with sweat. Fin was sprawled under a fan, eyes half-lidded, muttering about ‘Arizona being cooler than this.’

Talia, for her part, refused to give the heat the satisfaction of seeing her wilt. She sat at her desk in a silk blouse and high-waisted slacks, legs crossed, posture perfect, jaw set like she could will herself into feeling cool. In reality, the fabric clung to her like a second skin, and her curls were starting to frizz at the edges.

Across the room, Munch sat looking… infuriatingly fine. Not a bead of sweat on him. Jacket off, shirt sleeves rolled neatly to the elbow, shoulder holster sitting just right. His tie was still perfectly knotted.

It was obscene.

“Heat getting to you kiddo?” he asked, not looking up from the paper he was flipping through.

“No,” she lied.

He gave a disbelieving hum. “Thought you were raised in the desert.”

She shot him a sideways glance. “I was raised in Siberia, you ass.”

That earned her a smirk over the rim of his glasses. “Guess that explains the cold shoulder.”

Before she could throw something at him, Cragen’s voice cut through the room from his office door. “Alright, break protocol. I don’t care if you come in wearing a swimsuit. I’m melting.”

A murmur of half-hearted laughter rippled through the squad, but Talia was already on her feet. “Permission granted,” she said under her breath, grabbing her bag.

“Where are you-” Munch started, but she was already heading to the locker room.

Ten minutes later, she walked back in. The room went silent for half a second, and then Fin let out a low whistle.

She’d swapped her slacks for high-waisted black dress shorts that skimmed just below her hips, paired with a fitted white tank top so light it was practically painted on. Her gold jewellery caught the light with every step; the hoops, the bracelets, the chain around her neck and ankle. Ink peeked from beneath the hem of her shorts and by her shoulder blades when she moved.

It was effortless, unbothered, the kind of heatwave outfit you wore because you valued survival over modesty. There was no flirtation in it. Which somehow made it worse.

Munch nearly inhaled the wrong way.

“Jesus Christ, girl,” Fin muttered, holding up a palm for a high five as she passed. She tapped it without breaking stride.

“It’s hot,” she said simply, sinking back into her chair and rifling through a stack of case files like she hadn’t just walked into the room looking like that.

Munch’s eyes stayed glued to his desk. His jaw was tight enough to crack teeth. He wasn’t looking. Absolutely not looking.

Until she stretched.

She leaned forward to reach the far end of the table, tank top pulling just enough to reveal the looping black ink along her side. His eyes darted up before he could stop himself.

And she caught him.

Her gaze lifted from the file to his, locking for the briefest, most electric second. She smiled. Not big. Not obvious. Just slow and knowing, the kind of smile that asked how long do you think you can keep pretending you’re not looking?

“You alright, Munchie?” she asked, voice syrup-smooth. And once again, she was just the loud mouth girl who would stand outside the bodega on 33rd and share a cigarette with him, before either of them realized there might be something more.

“I’m fine,” he said too quickly, flipping a page he clearly wasn’t reading. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

Fin glanced between them with a grin. “You sure? You look a little… flushed.”

Munch didn’t answer.

The heat made the day sluggish, cases dragging like they were moving through molasses. By noon, tempers were short. Olivia had snapped at Elliot. Elliot had snapped at CSU. And Talia, who normally handled Munch’s sarcasm with ease, found herself glaring at him across their desks when he questioned one of her leads.

“Pretty sure we’ve already checked that,” he said, leaning back in his chair.

“Pretty sure you didn’t,” she shot back, tapping her pen against the file. “Unless your definition of ‘checking’ is reading the first line and giving up.”

“Kid,” he drawled, “I’ve been doing this since you were in high school.”

She arched a brow. “And yet here we are, in the same room, same job.”

That earned her the faintest twitch at the corner of his mouth, like he was trying not to smile.

By mid-afternoon, the maintenance crew finally got the air back on. The first rush of cool air sent an audible sigh through the room. Munch loosened his tie, just slightly, and glanced over at her.

“Better?” he asked.

She pretended to think about it. “Almost. If someone would get me an iced coffee, I might survive.”

He shook his head, standing. “You know, I’m not your personal barista.”

“Could’ve fooled me,” she murmured, smirking down at her paperwork.

When he came back twenty minutes later with her exact order from the bodega, she didn’t say thank you. Just took it, sipping slowly, eyes flicking up to meet his.

He rolled his eyes. “You’re welcome.”

She grinned. “Knew you liked me.”

It was stupid, really. Neither of them would call it flirting. It was just… whatever this was. Sarcasm traded for smirks. Coffee runs traded for rides home. Shoulder holsters and silk blouses in the same frame.

And if anyone in the squad noticed the way they gravitated toward each other’s desks, the way they lingered in conversation just a little too long…

Well. Nobody was saying anything. Yet.

BUSHWICK - September 3, 2004 - 06:19 PM

Bushwick was caught in that thin, grey pause between daylight and nightfall, where the streetlights hadn’t fully taken over, but the sun had already given up. The air had the metallic edge of coming cold, sharp enough to bite at the skin. A trash bin rolled down the block, pulled along by the wind until it slammed into a cracked curb and came to rest with a hollow clang.

Talia sat in the passenger seat of Munch’s unmarked, the paper cup of mint tea hot against her palms. She’d bought it on the way from the precinct; from the same halal cart she always stopped at. He knew the guy by now, just like she knew Munch pretended not to notice she paid extra so the vendor would throw in an extra teabag.

Her fingers clung to the cup as though it were a lifeline. The iron pills the department doc had prescribed hadn’t been doing much lately; she still felt the slow chill in her bones, the kind that no coat could fix. But she kept that to herself. She always did.

Through the windshield, frost formed in thin spiderwebs at the corners, catching the pale light from a distant streetlamp. The heater rattled and groaned like it had survived two decades of stakeouts and was considering retirement.

Four months she’d been in SVU now, four months of cases that still clung to her, dead-eyed suspects, raw-voiced victims, endless nights where she and Munch traded theories over bad coffee until the janitor kicked them out. Four months of sitting across from him in the bullpen, watching his eyes flick over files faster than his mouth could keep up with the sarcasm.

He’d been… difficult, at first. Not unkind, exactly. Just guarded in a way that felt like a locked archive room. But she’d learned the rhythms: how he reached for coffee when he didn’t want to answer a question, the way his shoulders eased when she made him laugh, the flicker in his eyes when a suspect lied badly.

Tonight, though, the silence felt different.

She glanced over at him now. Collar up, coat zipped, hair combed in that stubborn side part no wind could move. His eyes tracked the front door of the walk-up across the street. They’d been watching it for two hours, waiting for a suspect who was apparently in no rush to get arrested.

“You know…” she began, her voice cutting through the quiet like the sudden strike of a match, “you’re quite handsome.”

His head turned, sharp. He blinked at her, caught between amusement and suspicion. “What?” He let out a short laugh that sounded like it was checking the exits before committing. “You okay? You hit your head on the way in?”

“I mean it,” she said, and there was nothing teasing in her tone this time. Just honesty, laid out plain.

Munch stared for a beat too long before looking away, suddenly more interested in the frost forming on the edges of the windshield. “You don’t have to do that.”

“Do what?”

“Say things you don’t mean. To… make me feel good.” He rubbed his jaw, eyes still on the street. “I’ve had a lot of years, and a lot of women try that trick.”

Talia tilted her head, studying him. “I’m not trying anything.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, scepticism wrapping around the sound like wire.

She didn’t look away. “I just think you’re handsome.”

“Jesus.” He huffed a laugh, rubbing his hand over his face as though the words had physically landed.

She smiled faintly. “You make it sound like an insult.”

“It’s not that,” he muttered. “It’s just… I don’t hear it often anymore. Not when someone’s not trying to win something.”

The silence that followed wasn’t uncomfortable, but it was weighted. The hum of a distant train filtered in through the cracked window, mixing with the slow tick of the cooling engine.

Talia leaned back in her seat, eyes flicking to the suspect’s building. “You know what I see when I look at you?”

“A cautionary tale?” he said without missing a beat.

She laughed softly. “No. I see someone who still gives a damn. Even when it hurts.”

Munch’s eyes slid to her, narrowing just slightly. “Careful. Keep talking like that and I might start thinking you’re not just here for the free coffee.”

“Maybe I’m not,” she said lightly, but her gaze didn’t waver.

A figure appeared down the block, just enough to make them both tense. Munch leaned forward, lifting the binoculars. Talia reached for the notepad on her lap. But the man kept walking, head down, hands buried in his jacket pockets; wrong height, wrong build. Just another neighbour heading home before the dark settled fully.

They settled back into their seats. The heater coughed once, then went quiet entirely.

“Four months,” Munch said after a moment, his voice thoughtful. “That’s how long you’ve been at SVU.”

“Mm-hm.”

“And you’ve lasted this long without telling me to shove it. That’s unusual.”

“Maybe I like you,” she said, sipping her tea.

He made a face, somewhere between disbelief and amusement. “Or maybe you’re just slow to realize I’m an ass.”

“I figured it out week one,” she said, smiling into her tea.

He gave a faint huff of laughter, one that she suspected he didn’t mean for her to hear.

Outside, the street dipped further into night. A dog barked in the distance; a car rolled past with bass rattling its loose license plate. The suspect’s door stayed shut.

“You remember that guy in Brighton Beach?” Munch asked suddenly.

“The one who thought he could out-stare you in the interrogation room?”

“Yeah. You smiled at him, and he folded in five minutes.” He shook his head. “I’ve been doing this for decades and I’ve never seen that.”

“It’s not a trick,” she said, watching him from the corner of her eye. “I just let him think I saw the part of him he was trying to hide.”

“That’s dangerous,” Munch said. But his voice was softer now, almost like approval.

The heater coughed once, then died altogether. The cold began creeping in faster, drawing the warmth out of the car in slow, deliberate pulls.

“You ever wonder,” Munch started, still staring straight ahead, “why people like us sit in freezing cars for hours, waiting for people who don’t even know we exist?”

“All the time,” she admitted. “But then I think, if we don’t, who will?”

He glanced at her. Just a quick look, but it stayed with her longer than it should have.

The suspect never showed. Eventually, Munch switched off the engine, and the cold began to creep in faster. Talia tucked her hands deeper into her sleeves, still holding onto the last traces of heat from her tea.

Munch noticed the way she hunched into her coat, how her hands stayed wrapped around the tea like she could will the heat back into her body. Without comment, he reached over and adjusted her scarf, tugging it closer to her throat. “You’re going to freeze to death before you make Sergeant.”

She laughed quietly, the sound soft in the cold.

He left his hand there for a moment longer than necessary before pulling it back. “Don’t read into that,” he muttered.

“I wouldn’t dare,” she replied, but her smile said otherwise.

They sat in the growing dark, the city pressing in around them. Somewhere in the unspoken space between them; between the cases, the coffee, the four months of wary partnership, something shifted. Neither named it. But they both felt it.

Chapter Text

ASTORIA - September 25, 2004 - 3:32 AM

Talia eased the Mustang to the curb outside her rowhouse on 33^rd, the engine dropping into that low, satisfied growl it made only when she coaxed it home. The block was in that pre-dawn silence that isn’t quiet at all, pipes clanking alive in old buildings, a late N train groaning on the elevated, the wind rattling someone’s plastic lawn chair down the sidewalk. Her shoulders still held the case like armour. Four months at SVU and she was already learning which horrors learned her name and stuck around.

She killed the engine, sat a second, then slipped out with her heels hooked in two fingers. Asphalt was cool under her feet. In the building across the way, an Armenian auntie peered through lace curtains, decided it was only Talia, and let the drape fall. Astoria had eyes; they were gentle.

The front door opened with that familiar iron sigh. The scent inside; thyme, laundry soap, the ghost of incense, met her like a hand to the cheek. The living room lamp had been left on low. On the rug: three German Shepherds in one catastrophic pile. Ramses snored with a whistle. Anubis’s paw twitched like he was chasing something glorious. Little Heka, the youngest, tucked his nose under Anubis’s chest like a child hiding in a brother’s coat.

“Idiots,” she whispered, smiling despite the weight in her bones.

On the stove: a heavy pot, lid slightly askew. Ameen had been by. There was a scrap of paper under a magnet:

Fed them. Walked them. Sleep. Eat. Call me in the morning, dummy.

She lifted the lid; steam lifted with the smell of lamb, cumin, and the kind of patience that makes rice an act of love. Uzbek plov. Ameen always tried to pass it off as his, but the aluminium takeout lid in the trash betrayed him. Astoria alchemy: bought with love was still love.

She ate at the couch with the TV off, the silence loud enough to fill her ribs. The first bite was too hot, the second perfect, and then Heka’s ears pricked. He slid from the dog heap with the stealth of a thief, thumped onto the cushion, and set his chin on her thigh. Those eyes, devotion dressed like manipulation.

“No,” Talia said, firm. Heka did not move, except to lean harder.

“No,” she repeated, and Heka blinked very slowly, a saint suffering.

She ate and didn’t taste it because in the same mouthful she was still hearing a little girl’s voice cracking through a 911 line, crying I can’t find the windows, and Olivia saying calm, impossible things like Okay, sweetheart, tell me what you can smell. Fin had run the streets with her for hours, triangulating sound and faith. Monsters felt closer when they were quiet. Their quiet was always deliberate.

She finished and left two lamb-slick grains of rice for Heka, because she was only human. He licked the bowl with cathedral reverence and then collapsed, satisfied, half on her lap like a warm living scarf. She sat until the clock had no more minutes in it. Then sleep came sideways, the kind that isn’t sleep so much as the body giving up.

ASTORIA - September 25, 2004 - 7:52 AM

She woke to a patch of sunlight stabbing her eyelids and a dumb, heavy weight pressing down on her ribs. Somewhere between awake and gone, she’d migrated to the floor and joined the tangle. Ramses had chosen her midsection as his pillow. Anubis was draped over her shins like a very determined throw blanket. Heka had his face tucked against her neck, breathing dog coffee.

“Move, Anu,” she muttered into fur, pushing at an unmoving flank.

Anubis answered with the slow, operatic yawn of a man on vacation and stretched until his toes shook. Ramses followed with a full-body shiver. Heka, affronted, tried to crawl onto her shoulders, failed, and settled for her lap.

“Okay, okay. Shower. Then the park. Democracy.”

Three heads cocked at the word park. Three tails made soft thuds on hardwood.

Upstairs, they followed her because in this house privacy was theoretical. Talia stood in the bathroom and stared at her reflection while the shower beat steam against the mirror. The case lingered behind her eyes, the kind of residue no soap cuts. “Not the church of grief today,” she told herself, unconvincing. She glanced at her back when the glass cleared: saints and serpents and script; her mother’s name, her father’s; ink stitched over bone like a quilt of the things no one could take.

She thought about the painting again, Christ in Gethsemane, head bowed in that terrible, tender surrender. She’d been circling it for weeks, how to carry a garden at war on her shoulder. “Not today,” she said to the mirror. The mirror kept her secrets.

She dressed for anonymity: an oversized grey hoodie with a faint bleach constellation on the cuff, matching sweats, battered Jordans. Hair up. Gold hoops because she never left the house without something that shone. Keys, phone, bags, treats, patience. Collars and leads clicked; Ramses tolerant, Anubis dignified, Heka so excited he sat because he could not possibly stand.

Outside, the morning had remembered itself. Stoops sprouted grandparents. Kids chalked galaxies on the sidewalk. A Greek bakery worker hosed down the curb; a Yemeni bodega owner coaxed his cat inside. A woman in a housecoat watered basil and blew Talia a kiss. “Kalimera, Talia!” (Good morning / Greek)

“Sabah el-kheir, Mrs. P.” Talia lifted a hand. The dogs pranced like a small parade. (Good morning / Arabic)

The park was already patchy with dogs and people who loved them. She unclipped the leashes and watched Ramses transform into an agricultural philosopher, nuzzling grass, while Anubis angled for a tug-of-war and Heka made a beeline for the least dry patch of mud. Talia sat, spine long, on a bench that had seen a century of backs. She let the city move around her; a film she could watch without sound. A jogger in a Mets tee. A man dragging a Radio Flyer full of bagels. A teenage girl practicing fouettés on the gravel because sometimes you had to dance where the earth would let you.

“Ostavʹ,” Talia called, not looking, as Heka considered a pigeon. (Leave it / Russian)

He detoured into a puddle and loved it greedily. She smiled. The bench knew her weight. For a precious hour, the grip around her heart loosened. Fin would text later. Olivia would call. Cragen would ask for paperwork in that way that meant and how are you. Elliot would say something direct and jagged and accidentally kind. But for now; dogs, sun, the reliable rhythm of this corner of the world that never forgot anyone’s name.

When the tongues lolled and the sprints collapsed into pratfall trots, she leashed them and crossed to the Egyptian café on the corner. It was owned by her ‘uncle’ Hassan, not by blood, but by the kind of history that counts more. He’d grown up with Talia’s mother in Alexandria, and his son, Ali, had been the one to help fix up her Mustang when she bought it.

In Astoria, everyone was family, and Hassan had claimed her as his own years ago. The place had two wobbly aluminium tables, plastic chairs, and an awning the colour of sweet tea. The chalkboard out front always lied about specials because Hassan preferred to make what he wanted and then bully you into liking it.

“Talusha!” he called from inside when he saw her through the glass, voice a bell that rang down thirty years of friendship. He wiped his hands on a towel and shouldered the door open like it weighed more than it did.

“ʿAmmo,” she said, hugging him one-armed around the tray he insisted on carrying. (Uncle / Arabic)

“What will you eat? And don’t do that little ‘I’m not hungry’ face, I know your blood sugar.” He clocked the dogs. “Three bowls for the princes?”

“Bread, cheese, cucumber, tomato. Tea. And yes, three bowls. Their majesties will dine al fresco.”

He wagged a finger. “You’re too thin. I will add eggs. I won’t charge; you can fight me.”

She rolled her eyes. “You never charge.”

“Because I am a terrible businessman.” He grinned and vanished. A minute later his wife, Nadia, set down a battered stack of bowls from under the counter where Talia kept a Tupperware of kibble. The dogs flopped under the table and ate with the delicacy of jackals at a wedding.

Talia leaned back in the chair and let the neighbourhood wash through her. Cabs braided down 30^th Avenue. The N/W rattled somewhere like a distant drum. An old man sold newspapers with the day’s promises banded in ink. She reached for the café bookshelf, dog-eared paperbacks stacked two deep, and pulled down a copy of The Master and Margarita with a split spine. The margin notes in a stranger’s hand had started to feel like cousins. She found the page where she’d left a subway receipt as a bookmark and read the first line three times before the air shifted.

“As-salāmu ʿalayki, Nadine.” (Peace be upon you, Nadine / Arabic)

She looked up into a grin she’d known since they were both missing front teeth. “Wa ʿalaykumu s-salām, Alūsh,” she said, standing to hug him. (And upon you be peace, Alūsh / Arabic)

Ali was tall now, more beard than boy, hands grease-creased from the shop. He crouched to scratch Heka’s head; Heka pretended not to care and thumped his tail traitorously.

“How’s life, Miss Police?” he teased, collapsing into the chair at her side and stealing a triangle of bread so smoothly it counted as tradition.

“You don’t want to know.”

“Too late. I already asked.” He looked at her face properly then, and the grin quieted in the corners. “Bad night?”

“Long,” she said. “Hard.” She left it there, because what could you say that didn’t break something open at the wrong table?

He nodded like he understood the sentence she hadn’t spoken. “I heard they picked up Merza,” he said, voice casual, eyes not. Neighbourhood radar, every story came home, in time.

“Yeah,” she said, taking a sip of tea. “They did.”

“Good.” He put a warm palm on her shoulder for a second, squeezed, then let go. “When are you coming to the mosque? Sheikh Omar keeps asking you to talk to the boys about-” he waved a hand to include the whole chaotic city “-all of this.”

She smiled, lopsided. “You ask like I sleep.”

“You don’t,” he said. “So come on a Friday when you’re already awake.”

“I haven’t even been to church in a while,” she admitted, eyes on the steam rising from her glass. “Feels-” she searched for the word, found six, chose none, “-loud.”

He shrugged, kind. “Allah hears you over the noise. That’s His whole thing.” He pointed at the dogs. “Tell them to come by the shop. I’ll change the oil for free if they say please.”

“They’re greedy,” she warned. “They’ll eat your sockets.”

“Good. I hate those sockets,” he said, and stood, already backing away. He kissed the air near her temple the way the neighbourhood did, public tenderness with the volume turned down. “ʾEḥna benḥebbak, ma tebaʾāš gharib.” (We love you. Don’t be a stranger / Arabic)

She watched him cross the street and vanish into the bright mouth of the auto shop, radio already blaring a pop song that would be haunting every block by afternoon. Hassan came with the eggs he’d sworn to add and a paper cup of extra tea. “For your nerves,” he said, which was code for because I’m worried.

“Shukran, ʿammo.” (Thank you uncle / Arabic)

“Tell your brother he must let me win chess once in his life. I’m an old man; it’s cruel.”

“He’s not capable of mercy,” she deadpanned.

“Like you,” he sighed with love. “Go home before the day learns your name.”

ASTORIA - September 25, 2004 - 12:05 PM

Back at the house, the dogs galloped upstairs like a cavalry and presented each paw for washing because in Talia’s home cleanliness was a sacrament. Paws. Peepee. Butt. The indignity accepted with stoic sighs, because routine was safety and they were safe here.

She crossed the hall and opened the door to what used to be her parents’ room. The air shifted the way it does in spaces that remember. She’d remade it into a small church: icons on the walls in a soft halo, a brass candleholder with beeswax tapers, a low table with a bowl of holy water, a shelf of her mother’s theology texts, and her father’s history books side by side like they were still arguing gently about everything and nothing. The rug was a woven red that felt like warmth under her knees.

She lit a candle. Flame took with a tiny hungry sound. She kissed her fingers and touched them to her parents’ portrait; Miriam’s eyes a lake you could drink forever, Mikhail’s smile like the first chapter of a long story. “Ṣabāḥ el-kheir, Mama. Dobroye utro, Pap,” she said, and the words landed in the room like birds. (Good morning / Arabic & Russian)

The prayer beads were cool in her palm. She crossed herself; forehead, chest, right shoulder, left, and sank onto the rug. The city’s pulse faded to a muffled ocean. She let the beads slide, one, two, three, a rosary of breath. She tried to pray, and what came out first wasn’t a prayer so much as an inventory: Four months. Four months of children talking bravely on phones they shouldn’t have to know how to use. Four months of mothers counting breaths beside ER beds. Four months of men who lied like they breathed and women who apologized for bleeding. She had learned the smell of certain hallways and the weight of certain words. She had learned how to be gentle and how to be steel and how to hold the line when her hands shook.

It was changing her. Of course it was. She felt the case work in the tendons, how she moved, what she carried home. The precinct had its own tenderness, too; unexpected, worn smooth by use. Cragen’s Are you okay? that sounded exactly like Finish your report. Olivia’s steady hands and steady eyes, the way she could talk a storm down. Fin’s humour landing like a wool blanket. Even Stabler, who could set a room on fire by looking at it, had learned to lower his voice two shades when she touched a wall like it might bruise.

And then there was Munch.

She tried not to think his name in this room, but thoughts have their own keys. He’d become a hallway in her head she kept pretending not to walk down. Stupid Munch, sarcastic Munch, cynical Munch, kind Munch when he thought no one was looking. Handsome Munch. Driving-her-home Munch who never asked if she wanted to talk; he just drove with the windows cracked and the radio murmuring late-night jazz no station claimed, and somehow she arrived feeling like she’d spoken a hundred words out loud. That very same Munch she kissed on the cheek; quick, almost nothing, but her lips had remembered the warmth like it was a secret.

Stupid Munch with his stupid big ears and that nose that looked like it had read every book before she did. Stupid four divorces lined up like caution tape he walked past every morning. Stupid comb-over that he pretended was not a comb-over and somehow was perfect anyway, pointing in the exact, infuriating direction she wanted to tug. The stupid holsters. The stupid dress shirts that were always crisp even on days the world wasn’t. The tie knots that made her hands feel very, very unholy.

No. Not these thoughts. Inappropriate. Or if she was being honest, which she rarely was in this room, maybe not the thoughts themselves, but that one perfect, ruinous image: the squad room after hours, blinds drawn, the hum of the city muffled behind glass. His voice low, telling her exactly what line she’d crossed, and exactly how he intended to deal with it.

The weight of his hand settling at her waist, warm, claiming, drawing her forward until her hips brushed the desk. Her palms flattening on the cool wood as he stepped in close. The sound; sharp, metallic, of his belt unbuckling, the slide of leather through denim loops. His breath near her ear, the faint scent of coffee and aftershave, and the unbearable pause before-

“Stop it,” she whispered to the candle, cheeks hot in the empty room.

She pressed the beads to her heart until it hurt a little. “God,” she said softly, not sure which language to choose, so she chose all of them at once. “I don’t know how to carry this and be kind. I don’t know how to want what I want and stay right. If You’re listening, I’m not asking for peace. Just… accuracy. And the strength to keep choosing it.”

The doorframe held her mother’s scarf on a nail. She stood and brushed her fingers over the fringe like greeting a shoulder in passing. Her reflection in the glass of an icon looked like a woman who had not slept and had no intention of lying about it. “I wish you were here to guide me,” she told her mother, voice as steady as she could make it. To her father: “You’d say read more, worry less.” She smiled. “I’m doing one of those.”

She blew out the candle. Smoke lifted and curled, a ribbon of incense and bees and summer kitchens. In the quiet, the house breathed with her. Down the hall, three dogs resettled, dream-whuffing at some perfect park that never closed. Outside, Astoria cleared its throat and began another song.

Talia pressed her forehead to the cool wood of the door for a heartbeat. Then she straightened, rolled her shoulders back, and walked out to meet the day that always, always, remembered her name.

ASTORIA - September 25, 2004 - 8:49 PM

The sun had just gone down, leaving the streets in that soft glow before night fully settles. After the mess of thoughts she’d had earlier in her prayer room, Talia stayed in the living room for the rest of the evening, quietly reading. She hadn’t eaten, didn’t feel like it, and only noticed the time when the dogs started getting restless for their final walk of the day.

Outside, the last light slipped low behind the buildings, painting the sky a muted orange. She clipped their collars on but didn’t bother with leashes, letting them roam around her like they always did. Ramses, Anubis, and Heka trotted ahead as she stepped down onto the sidewalk.

The block was alive in the way she’d always known it, kids running and laughing in the street, teenagers she didn’t recognize smoking next to her building, the older men gathered around their usual backgammon boards on the sidewalk. The sight of it all made her chest loosen a little. This was home.

The dogs led the way toward the Russian Orthodox Church. Evening prayer had ended long ago, and she figured the place would be empty except for one person, Father Aleksei Petrov. He’d been a close friend of her father’s. They hadn’t met back in Russia, but here in Astoria, over countless cups of tea after liturgy, talking about history, exile, and faith.

And of course, when she turned the corner, there he was, standing outside like he’d been waiting.

“Is that a ghost I see?” he called, his warm, rusty voice carrying that thick Russian accent that had never faded, no matter how many decades he’d lived in New York.

She smirked, climbing. “Thought you didn’t believe in ghosts, Father.”

“I believe in the Holy Spirit,” he said, lifting one eyebrow.

The dogs halted at the bottom step, polite as courtiers. They knew this was boundary and blessing both.

“It’s been awhile,” she said, trying for lightness, failing.

“Usually every other week.” He didn’t ask, didn’t push, only waited with the patience of someone who had watched generations argue with God and still come back for a candle.

“Work,” she said, which was true and not the truth. Four months at SVU, four months of rooms that smelled like bleach and testimony, four months of voices that broke in the same place every time. The precinct had its own incense: copier toner and coffee, grief and fluorescent hum.

Father Aleksei stepped close, studying her the way icons study. “Doch’ Mikhaila Volkova ne zabyvayet tserkov’, v kotoroy yeyo vospitala.” he murmured, and the syllables were a hand on her back guiding her through a door she’d been avoiding. (A daughter of Mikhail Volkov does not forget the church that raised her / Russian)

The breath she’d been holding all day slid out. She glanced at the church doors and saw a hundred small ghosts: herself, knees scabbed, whispering to Lana during Liturgy; her father and Aleksei in the parish kitchen after, steam rising off chipped cups; Lana on the steps singing ‘Katyusha’ off-key until the priest himself gave up and joined.

“I should get the dogs home,” she said, already knowing she’d step inside if he asked her twice.

He didn’t. He only touched her cheek, thumb warm and fatherly. “Zazhgi svechu zavtra,” he said softly. “Za Mikhaila i za sebya tozhe.” (Light a candle tomorrow, for Mikhail and for yourself as well / Russian)

“I’ll try,” she answered, because promising felt like a vow she wasn’t ready to keep.

“Khrani tebya Bog,” he said. (May God protect you / Russian)

She descended the steps backward, a half-bow without meaning to, then turned. The dogs rose as if summoned. As they walked, people nodded, called her name, asked about her brothers, pressed pastries into her hands she didn’t remember agreeing to take. Anubis licked a toddler’s face with solemn ceremony; Heka permitted small hands to drum his ribs like a harmless storm; Ramses high-stepped like a show horse he’d never been.

This was home, which meant it was also an archive. Every building held something she could name. The deli with the mural of St. George and the dragon. The bodega where the owner had let Lana run a tab for gum and sunflower seeds. The upstairs window where Mrs. Aziz kept a plant she swore was the Prophet’s favourite. The back lot where she’d broken two teeth and the corner mailbox that still bore a nick from a summer night in 1994 when she’d thrown a bottle at a tall, comb-over detective who’d asked too many questions and not the right ones.

She returned the dogs, bathed them in quick, then took a bowl of plov back outside because September still let her pretend the stoop was a dining room. The night around her cooled into something tender. Down the block, a scuffed football skittered past under a spray of bare knees. Nico, Marianna’s nephew, saw her and waved as if he’d spotted a celebrity.

“Miss Talia! Can we borrow the dogs?”

She didn’t look up from her bowl. “Only if you bring them back uninjured.”

The shriek that followed could have lifted the dead. The dogs exploded into motion. Ramses carved loops like calligraphy; Anubis tripped over his joy, righted himself, howled; Heka performed his favourite play, become a wall, let the ball bounce off, bask in applause. Children became orbiting moons around them.

Across the way, a cluster of teenagers smoked in a corner that did not belong to them. They weren’t from here. The posture was wrong, the glance too sharp. Talia’s eyes slid over them like a warning.

“You have an extra?” she called, suddenly hungry for smoke.

They shuffled, everyone on this block knew the Amari-Volkov rowhouse, knew a detective lived here, knew which side of their own lungs their future was. One kid handed her a cigarette, then abandoned the street entirely. She put the filter to her lip, the cigarette bobbing slightly as she patted her trench pockets for a lighter she no longer carried, partly because she was trying to be better, partly because she kept forgetting she’d promised.

The paper stuck to her mouth when she muttered around it, “Damn kids,” low and almost affectionate, like she couldn’t decide if they were a nuisance or her entertainment for the evening.

“I got a light,” said a dry voice just outside the pool of lamplight.

This time she looked, just enough to catch him leaning on the railing of her steps like he’d been there for hours, hands shoved deep in the pockets of his coat, head tilted in that way he had when he was pretending not to be watching her.

John freaking Munch

Hair a little mussed, tie off-centre, his coat shrugging off the rules of tailoring. The lamplight picked out the tired lines on his face, the ones she’d learned to read as well as case notes. God help her, he looked… dangerous in that quiet, inconvenient way. The kind of dangerous you couldn’t quite outlaw.

It took effort to keep her voice flat. “You shouldn’t be here. Unless you’re here for my leftover rice.”

He shrugged one shoulder. “Wanted to make sure my partner was okay after yesterday.”

A lie. And also, true. Which was his specialty.

Four months at SVU had taught her his tells; the way he scanned exits without moving his head; his doctrine of two coffees, one sarcasm, one silence; the brief, almost imperceptible pause when a victim’s story slipped past the barricades he kept around himself.

And in those same four months, he’d learned hers; the superstition in her fingers when they brushed her Nazar charm, the way her jaw went still when someone lied, the razor’s edge between her compassion and her temper, the exact burdens she let him carry: evidence bags, cups of bad coffee, but never the grief she tucked behind her eyes.

“You gonna stand there looking like a suspicious funeral guest,” she said, “or sit?”

He didn’t ask twice. Just lowered himself onto the stoop beside her with a groan that sounded half real, half for show. The space between them felt intentional.

The neighbourhood wrapped around them like a living thing; the deli bell chiming, a couple upstairs arguing softly in Greek, a TV laughing in Spanish. Across the street, the slap of backgammon tiles came down like verdicts.

“Usually, I see this block at three in the morning,” he said at last. “Didn’t know it looked like this when the world’s awake.” He nodded toward the church dome, catching the moon instead of the sun now. “Figures.”

“What figures?”

“That you belong in a place that looks like it remembers things on purpose.”

She offered him the bowl. “Plov,” she said. “Lamb, rice, garlic, pride.”

He made a sceptical face with his mouth only. “I’m familiar with three of those food groups.”

“You cook, Munch?” she asked, and the question was both a test and an invitation.

“I speculate,” he said. “And I’ve been known to build a sandwich that can make grown men cry.”

“I also eat cereal out of a mug,” she said, as if offering a flaw to balance the ledger.

He took a bite, surprised by his own yes. “You look different,” he said, and immediately wondered if that was the wrong line to throw into this precise night.

She tipped her head, letting lamplight braid the dark in her hair. “Good different?”

He studied her for a moment. Not her blouse, not the way her hair caught the light, her. “Real.”

What he meant: You’re not wearing your armour. What he remembered: a younger version of her in 1994, all fire and sharp corners, refusing to be put in the box he’d mentally labelled ‘angry girl.’ What he knew now: she’d forged herself into something stronger, steadier, and it was killing him to realize he liked that even more.

A shout splintered the thought. “Miss Talia!” Hamid, Dunya’s nephew, skidded to a stop, panting. “Heka’s cheating! He’s just laying there like a wall and we can’t get past him!”

She cupped her hands. “That’s strategy, habibi!” (My dear / Arabic)

The corners of Munch’s mouth tugged up without permission. The laugh came low, warm, escaped before he could catch it. He didn’t laugh often in front of her. It sat between them like an unwrapped gift.

He watched her watching the kids and thought: This is what you look like when you’re not bracing for impact. And then, the thought he didn’t want to name: You don’t visit your partner’s stoop. You don’t memorize the way her block smells like bread and incense. You don’t come because you’re afraid a case took too much out of her and you want to make sure it leaves her enough to stand on in the morning.

He looked away before the thought got a name.

On cue, someone upstairs began singing to a baby. Across the street, old men roared at a move on the backgammon board like it had geopolitical implications. Nico shouted that Ramses had scored with his tail. Heka lay on his side and contemplated becoming a saint.

“Your block loves you,” Munch said, like he was stating a line of testimony.

“They loved my parents,” she corrected, but softer. “That’s the thing about church. About people like this. They keep receipts. When the world goes stupid, they show up with soup and cigarettes, and the priest says your father’s name like it never left his tongue.”

He let himself imagine, for just one unwatched second, the way her name might sound coming from a pulpit, wrapped in prayer. His hand itched to find her knee, her wrist, any point of contact, just to see if she’d lean into it, and that was exactly why he kept both hands still. He banished the thought as treason.

“You came to check on me,” she said, watching a lamppost halo his profile like a bad idea. She said it like a fact that wanted no flowers.

“I came because we’re partners,” he said, and neither of them believed that was the whole sentence.

Her lips curved slightly, accepting the fiction. “Then as your partner, you should know Heka’s tactical innovations might disrupt the balance of power on this street.”

“We should open an investigation,” he said. “Stakeout. I’ll bring the sandwiches.”

“And I’ll bring the incense.”

A silence followed, full, not empty.

She reached for the cigarette between her lips. “Got that light?”

He leaned in, closer than he needed to, until the faint warmth of him slid across her cheek. The scent of coffee and his aftershave threaded through the air, enough to make her forget the flame for a heartbeat. He flicked the lighter, its tiny snap loud between them. The glow lit her eyes first, then her mouth.

She inhaled, lips closing around the filter, and the taste of smoke tangled with the trace of his cologne that had stayed on the air between them. It made her want to lean in again, for reasons that had nothing to do with the cigarette. For a second, his pulse betrayed him. When she exhaled, the smoke curled between them like something that knew too much.

She held the cigarette out, and his fingers grazed hers in the handover, not an accident, not quite deliberate. It was the lightest brush, but it landed in her chest like a heavier thing. He didn’t smoke, just tapped ash into the gutter, letting the ember die slow.

“You ever notice,” he murmured, eyes on the church, “how some places keep people from falling apart even when there’s nothing left to hold onto?”

She followed his gaze. The dome, now silvered by the moon, looked like a shoulder you could lean your whole life against. “It’s not the place,” she said. “It’s the hands that built it.”

He nodded. And somewhere behind his careful expression, he was back in ’94 again, remembering the girl who would’ve burned herself down. Wondering if he’d be here when she decided to light another match.

“Miss Talia!” Nico again, triumphant. “Ramses scored three goals! We’re taking them around the block!”

“Be back by ten,” she called. “Or they turn into pumpkins.”

The kids saluted like bandits. The dogs swarmed them like they’d been enlisted.

“You trust them?” Munch asked.

“With my dogs?” she said. “With my life.”

He let that hang. It was heavier than it sounded. A breeze lifted, carrying a thin ribbon of old incense from the church, the memory of wax and myrrh threaded with the laughter of children and the far-off metallic squeal of the subway turning itself inside out under Queens. Talia closed her eyes for one count, one, and opened them steadier.

“Tell me a conspiracy,” she said suddenly. “Not the tinfoil-hat kind. The kind that’s really about grief.”

He thought for a beat, of Rasputin, of men in rooms and power behind a curtain. “Every conspiracy,” he said, “starts because someone can’t accept the randomness of loss.”

She nodded like he’d passed. “My father would’ve argued with you for hours.”

“I would’ve let him win,” he said, and surprised himself with how much he meant it.

“Liar,” she said, but the word softened between them.

The football thudded against the curb; Heka chose to bless the block by rolling onto his back and refusing to move. Old men crowed over a backgammon upset like the world had tilted toward justice. Upstairs, the baby stopped crying. The dome held the moon without complaint.

They stayed until the kids returned with the dogs like an honour guard. Ramses rested his head on her knee, Anubis flopped against her side, Heka just looked smug. The cigarette was long dead in his fingers. Quiet had become the bravest thing to choose.

When he stood, it was slow. “See you in the morning.”

“See you,” she replied.

He made it three steps before turning back. “And Talia-”

She waited.

“Sometimes… standing outside the door is harder than going in.”

He didn’t wait for her answer. Just walked into the night.

She watched him go, the church dome silver in the corner of her eye. Tomorrow could wait. She reached for Ramses’ ears, Anubis’s paw, Heka’s impossible calm.

“Let’s go home,” she murmured.

The block exhaled. The dome kept its watch. And the stoop, for one fleeting moment, felt like the safest place in America.

Chapter Text

ASTORIA - October 4, 2004 - 9:03 AM

The morning began with the faint chill that hinted winter was coming. Astoria hadn’t shaken off its weekend quiet yet, streets lined with corner bodegas opening their shutters, the smell of fresh bread and coffee winding through the air. Inside the rowhouse, Talia tied the belt of her dark grey trench coat, straightened the cuffs of her blouse, and tried to quiet the ache in her chest that came every Monday morning.

Five months at SVU, and she still hadn’t decided if the place was eating her alive or stitching her back together. Maybe both. She’d learned the rhythms, the walk through the squad room, the glares of fluorescent lights at 7 AM, the shuffle of case files and muted conversations about bodies and broken families. She’d learned her partner too. Or maybe not learned him, Munch was a maze, all sarcasm and cigarettes he pretended not to smoke. But he had a routine now: every morning, like clockwork, he showed up outside her house in Astoria.

He called it convenience. Said it was ‘on the way.’ It wasn’t. Not even close. But she didn’t argue.

This morning, she’d already walked the dogs, their paws clicking against the pavement. They were lazing by the window now, watching for the familiar figure. Talia was halfway through locking the door when the knock came; sharp, precise, impatient.

“He’s early,” she muttered to the dogs, who answered with wagging tails and low whines.

When she opened the door, there he was. John Munch. Trench coat. Sunglasses. That eternal air of someone who’d already solved the case but wasn’t going to tell you until you caught up.

Talia raised a brow. “You know, Munch, I’m starting to think you actually like spending time with me.”

He smirked, dry as always. “You presume much, kiddo.” The line was an obvious lie, wrapped in sarcasm. The corners of his mouth twitched, betraying what he wouldn’t admit. “We’ve got a case.”

“Of course we do.” She reached for her keys, slipping them into her pocket with a sigh. Her coat brushed against his as she stepped past him, his was black, hers slate-grey, the pair of them looking like mismatched shadows in the morning light. “So, what’s the damage?”

He adjusted his sunglasses, his tone suddenly flat, professional. “Shooting at P.S. 74.”

Her stomach dropped. “How many kids?”

“Three shot. One dead. Two on their way to Bellevue.” His voice was low, steady. The words hit like stones, the kind you couldn’t dodge.

For a moment, silence stretched between them, broken only by the barking of a dog down the block and the hum of a passing bus. Talia breathed out slowly, steadying herself. She’d seen plenty in Narcotics; overdoses, gang shootouts, kids used as runners, but SVU was different. It cut differently.

Munch opened the car door for her; a small gesture he’d never call chivalry. Just habit. She slid into the passenger seat, her mind already running through possible suspects, motives, the nightmare of parents being called.

As he settled in behind the wheel, she asked quietly, “And where are we going?”

He glanced at her, then back at the road. “Got a suspect. Fin’s meeting us there.”

The car rumbled to life. They pulled away from the curb, the city swallowing them up in its morning noise, sirens in the distance, a street vendor shouting in Spanish, the faint pulse of hip-hop from a passing car.

For a long moment, neither spoke. Then Talia broke the silence, her voice softer, almost teasing. “You really could’ve just let me meet you at the precinct, you know. Saved yourself the detour.”

Munch kept his eyes on the road, his mouth curving into the faintest grin. “And risk starting the day without Cuban coffee? What kind of partner would that make me?”

She smiled despite herself, shaking her head. “You’re impossible.”

“Accurate,” he muttered. Then, after a beat, his tone shifted again, quieter: “But maybe not wrong.”

The words lingered in the air, heavier than either of them intended. Talia turned to the window, hiding the way her chest tightened. She’d grown used to suppressing the flicker of something that wasn’t professional, something that sparked when he made her laugh, when his cynicism softened just enough to let the truth bleed through.

She pressed her lips together, the city blurring past. This wasn’t the time. Not with dead kids waiting for their names to be written into evidence files.

But still, five months in, and the routine had already started to feel like something else. Something she was terrified to name.

The car sped on, toward another crime scene, another day. And in the small silence between them, unspoken words pressed against the glass, waiting.

MAYHEW RESIDENCE - October 4, 2004 - 9:45 AM

The Mayhew building was one of those Queens walk-ups with peeling paint around the doorframe and neighbours watching from cracked windows. A patrol car sat out front, lights spinning lazily, doing nothing to calm the block. Talia adjusted the strap of her coat as she and Munch stepped up onto the stoop.

Fin was already leaning against the railing, arms crossed, eyes sharp. “What took you guys so long?” he muttered.

Munch didn’t miss a beat. “Princess needed to kiss all three dogs goodbye.” His smirk slid sideways toward Talia.

She rolled her eyes but didn’t bite. Her cheeks heated anyway, damn him. “Better manners than you.”

“Point taken,” Fin said with a grin, pushing off the railing.

They entered together. The apartment smelled of yesterday’s fried food and too many cigarettes. Family photos lined the walls in frames that hadn’t been dusted in months. The furniture was old, sagging, a life lived pay check to pay check.

Other uniforms were already inside, canvassing, but Talia stuck close to Munch and Fin, notebook in hand. Narcotics had taught her to watch corners, but here; it was about listening, reading, knowing when to push and when to soften. Munch had been drilling that into her from day one.

The three of them started in the living room.

Munch bent down, pulled open a drawer in the side table, and came up with a gun. His voice was razor sharp. “A .380 semi-automatic is not a toy, Mrs. Mayhew.”

Across the room, Mrs. Mayhew froze. A boy, Johnny, shrunk behind her, eyes darting. She turned on him in a flash. “I told you never to go near that!” Her hand twitched, ready to strike.

“Whoa!” Fin cut in, stepping forward with that commanding presence he had. “You’re in enough trouble already.”

“What’d I do?” Mrs. Mayhew snapped, turning her fury toward them instead.

Munch lifted the weapon, tilting it slightly. “This reeks of cleaning oil.”

He held it close enough for Talia to smell, and without hesitation she leaned in, inhaled. The sharp tang of solvent caught the back of her throat. She met Munch’s eyes, the smallest flicker of approval flashing in his. Her mentor, testing her.

“You covering for your son, Mrs. Mayhew?” Fin asked, arms crossed.

“I clean it once a week. So, it won’t jam if I ever need to use it,” she said, chin high, defiance sharp.

Talia’s pen scratched across the paper, but her voice came calm, even. “Weekly maintenance for a weapon you supposedly never use?” She arched a brow, just enough to let the lie hang in the air.

Munch didn’t wait. “Safety isn’t on. No lock on the drawer. I guess a child lock is out of the question, huh?” His tone was dry as dust, the kind that cut without needing to rise.

“You got a permit for that?” Fin asked, stepping forward.

“It was a gift from my brother.” Mrs. Mayhew’s voice cracked a little as she busied herself with a tray on the counter, her hands shaking.

“And you never registered it?” Talia pressed, head tilted, soft but insistent.

“I was supposed to?” she shot back, irritation bubbling.

Munch’s jaw tightened. Fin was already pulling out his pad.

“Mrs. Mayhew, we’re gonna have to charge you with possession of a weapon and endangering the welfare of a child,” Fin said.

“Get outta here.” She tried to wave them off, the tray clattering against the counter.

“And a tech needs to run a gunshot residue test on Johnny,” Munch said, his tone cutting through her protest like steel.

“Why? He hadn’t even left the house yet. There is no way my Johnny shot those kids.”

Talia stepped closer, voice lowering. She knew this rhythm; mothers, always mothers, clinging to innocence like a lifeline. “The tech still needs to run the test. Just for safety. It’s procedure.” Her eyes softened, almost pleading. “Let’s just make sure. For his sake.”

Mrs. Mayhew stared at her, something unspoken passing between them. Maybe she saw it, the grief buried deep in Talia’s eyes, the kind of grief only another mother or daughter could recognize. Slowly, reluctantly, Mrs. Mayhew nodded.

That was their cue.

The three detectives stepped back toward the door. The air in the apartment was stifling, heavy with denial and cigarette smoke.

On the way out, Munch leaned just close enough for Talia to hear, his voice low, meant only for her. “Not bad, kiddo. You’ve got the eyes for this job. People tell you things they’d never tell me.”

She swallowed, fighting the flush creeping into her throat. “Maybe because I don’t lace every sentence with sarcasm.”

“Give it time,” he said, smirking as he opened the door for her.

Fin rolled his eyes. “You two done with your comedy routine? We got a school shooting to solve.”

The three of them stepped out into the Queens morning, the city buzzing around them, each of them carrying the weight of different truths.

And Talia, her heart caught somewhere between grief and the slow burn of something she refused to name, followed Munch to the car, her notes clutched tight in her hand.

P.S. 74 - October 4, 2004 - 11:38 AM

The sun had already risen high, but it gave no warmth. The air over P.S. 74 was thin, brittle with the kind of chill that clung to concrete rooftops. A yellow police tarp flapped lazily against the chain-link fencing; CSU gear scattered in neat disarray. Reporters hovered down on the street, their long lenses turned skyward, waiting for a glimpse of a story they didn’t understand.

Talia followed Munch across the gravel-coated roof, her heels crunching softly against grit and cigarette butts long ground into the tar. She squinted against the glare of the city skyline, her trench coat pulled tight against a sudden gust of wind. Even after months in SVU, the sight of schools cordoned off by tape left her chest hollow. Places meant for children should never be stained with this kind of silence.

CSU had already marked off a corner behind a ventilation unit, the vantage point where the shooter had perched. Munch slipped his phone from his pocket, his expression unreadable behind dark glasses.

"My left or your left?" he muttered into the receiver, stepping to the side with his usual deadpan.

Talia’s lips curved into the ghost of a smile. She leaned slightly against the ledge, watching him with something dangerously close to fondness. “You look ridiculous squinting like that,” she teased softly, her voice meant for him alone. But her eyes lingered on the crease of his brow longer than she meant them to. The sun caught his hair, the deep lines on his forehead, the way sarcasm always lived at the edge of his voice. God help me, I’m starting to think that’s charming.

He clicked his phone shut and pocketed it. “The shooter picked them off from right here.”

She exhaled slowly, pressing her gloved hand against the rooftop railing. “From this height… he had the whole schoolyard in his scope.”

"Got something," one of the CSU techs called from behind them.

Talia pushed off the ledge and moved closer, the notebook already in her hand. She tried to focus on the facts, the work, not the way Munch’s hand brushed the small of her back as he guided her through the narrow space toward the find. It wasn’t much, just a hand steadying her past CSU equipment, but it left a heat that lingered longer than it should. He didn’t comment, and she pretended not to notice.

“Cozy little sniper’s nest,” she muttered, surveying the arrangement, a flattened spot on the gravel, food wrappers, the faint trace of boot prints CSU had already photographed.

“Perfect location,” Vizcarrondo agreed, crouched by the smokestack. Talia remembered her; sharp eyes, quick with a joke, always respectful with her.

“Complete with a little hiding place,” Munch added, his voice dry. “What’d he leave us?”

Vizcarrondo’s lips twitched. “Looks like he was smart enough to pick up his brass. But remember that line ‘leave the gun, take the cannoli’?”

She straightened and tugged a rifle free from the hollow of the smokestack.

Talia’s breath hitched as the sunlight glinted off the steel. “That explains why no one saw a weapon afterwards.”

“Folding stock, bolt action, internal magazine,” Vizcarrondo narrated, handing it over carefully. “High-powered scope and a flash suppressor.”

Talia pulled on gloves, the leather stretching snug across her fingers. She crouched low, examining the rifle with clinical precision, but her heart thrummed at the weight of it. A gun meant for war, hidden on a school roof. She pressed the butt gently against her shoulder, aligning her eye with the scope. The playground below swam into focus, its swings twisting gently in the wind. She dropped the rifle back into her lap, her stomach tight.

“I think we can rule out little Johnny Mayhew,” Munch deadpanned, one brow raised above his glasses.

Talia shot him a sidelong glance, her voice low. “Johnny barely knows how to tie his shoes. This? This was deliberate.” Her lips twitched at his raised brow, almost smiling despite the horror of the scene. It struck her how easily he pulled her back from the edge with nothing but a look.

Vizcarrondo nodded grimly. “This is a precision sniper rifle. Kind you use with a specific target in mind.”

Her pen scratched against her notebook as she carefully copied the serial numbers, every digit pressed hard enough to leave an imprint. “Which kid was he gunning for?” she asked quietly, the question hanging heavy in the air.

The silence that followed said more than words. Children weren’t supposed to be targets. Not like this.

“Time to find out,” Munch finally said, his voice softer than before. He slipped his hands into his coat pockets, then pushed the stairwell door open with his shoulder. “Ladies first,” he murmured, just loud enough for her to hear. Sarcasm usually coated everything he said, but not this time. It was gentler, almost old-fashioned.

Talia lingered a second longer, her eyes flicking back to the playground below. The laughter of children should’ve been echoing up here. Instead, the sound was gone, replaced by sirens and whispers. She swallowed hard, then turned and followed Munch.

For a moment on the landing, their shoulders brushed again, closer than necessary. Neither of them moved away. The silence felt charged, but neither broke it.

He’s been oddly kind these past few weeks, she thought, her chest tightening as she stepped into the dim stairwell.

And maybe that was the problem.

Because she was starting to look forward to these moments, the half-smiles, the subtle touches, the way he made space for her without saying a word. And if she admitted it out loud, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to stop.

Because kindness, from John Munch, was more dangerous than any rifle left on a rooftop.

SVU Precinct - October 4, 2004 - 2:46 PM

The bullpen was alive with its usual late-afternoon chaos; phones ringing, printers grinding out arrest reports, the muted chatter of detectives piecing together a dozen different tragedies. The windows along the far wall glared with pale autumn light, casting long rectangles across the squad room floor.

At her desk, Talia pushed a strand of hair back from her face and twisted the rest into a quick knot at the base of her neck. A pencil and two capped markers were already tucked behind her ear. Her prayer beads dangled from her right hand, the beads clicking softly as she spun them around her fingers while the system loaded another page. The notepad in front of her was already filled with tight lines of handwriting; English, and Cyrillic, the margin cluttered with half-thoughts and arrows pointing to names and dates.

She was already halfway through running the rifle’s serial number through the national trace system, her fingers moving with practiced speed over the keyboard. The gun had been wiped clean, no prints, no DNA. It didn’t matter. There was always a trail if you looked hard enough.

Munch leaned back in his chair a few feet away, pretending to scan the affidavit on his desk, but really? He was watching her. Watching the way her brow creased when she concentrated, the rhythm of those beads in her hand, the way she tapped the cap of her pen against the paper when the system lagged. Rookie nerves disguised as composure. She thought no one noticed. He noticed everything.

She rose from her chair with a small sigh, gathering her notepad and a handful of markers before moving to the glass board. With the prayer beads looped loosely around her wrist, she started writing, neat block letters mapping the rifle’s journey across the country. Her movements were sharp, efficient, but her lips tightened when she wrote Staten Island.

Munch caught himself staring again. Proud, sure. But there was something else in the way his chest tightened as he watched her. Something he refused to name.

“John, Amari, where are we with the gun trace?” Cragen’s voice carried as he strode back into the squad room, coffee in hand. He didn’t stop moving until he was standing at the edge of the glass board.

Munch straightened. “On a cross-country tour. Amari’s run the number.” He joined her at the board, eyes flicking once more to the Cyrillic scribble in the margin. He couldn’t read it, but he liked that it was there, her fingerprint on the case.

Talia stepped aside just enough for Cragen to see the board, marker still in her hand. “It was lovingly manufactured in Sturgis, South Dakota,” she began, her tone laced with dry humour as she underlined the state name. “Made its way to a wholesale distributor in Brainerd, Minnesota. Who then shipped it to a whimsically named little shop called ‘GUN HO!’ on Staten Island.” She underlined the shop name twice, her lips quirking wryly.

She didn’t look at Cragen when she said it. She looked at Munch, just for a second. He smirked faintly. Yeah. She was learning.

“When?” Cragen asked.

“Less than a month ago. GUN HO! sold it last Thursday,” Munch answered, flipping through his notes.

Cragen’s brows knit. “We have a legal purchase?”

“Complete with loophole,” Talia replied, marker squeaking as she circled Staten Island. “It’s a long gun, so no background checks are required.” She spun the prayer beads once around her finger, the gesture sharp, annoyed.

“Cash sale,” Cragen muttered, exasperation in his voice.

“Of course,” Talia added, shrugging one shoulder. Her voice was flat, but underneath it lay the sting of inevitability. Another loophole. Another kid dead.

“Buyer’s signature on the affidavit?” Cragen asked.

Munch reached across his desk, pulled the paper free, and taped it up on the board. “Yeah, but it’s illegible and I guarantee you; it is bogus.”

The three of them leaned in to study the scrawl.

“Okay, well, looks like, uh, ‘S. Brockwull’ or, uh, ‘Rockwell,’” Cragen guessed, tilting his head.

“First initial could be ‘G’?” Talia suggested, tilting her head. She pointed with her marker, a smudge of blue ink staining the side of her thumb. “Who made the sale?”

“The owner of GUN HO!” Munch replied. “His name is... Brian Ackerman.”

“Well, he did a pretty half-assed job,” Talia muttered, scribbling his name onto the board. “Didn’t get a clear signature or a full first name. We’ve basically got nothing. Except that he doesn’t give a damn.”

“Go talk to Mr. Ackerman,” Cragen ordered.

Talia blinked, surprised. She hadn’t expected him to send her out point on the interview. Cragen caught the flicker of uncertainty in her face. “Training wheels off, Amari.” His voice was firm, but not unkind. Then he turned and walked away, already barking for Olivia across the bullpen.

Talia stood still for a moment, the beads wound tight between her fingers, the weight of responsibility settling heavy in her chest. She turned to look at Munch, half expecting him to cut her down, to remind her she was still green.

But he was just watching her. Really watching. Not the way you watch a rookie, but the way you watch someone you’re betting on. Pride flickered in his eyes. Pride, and something softer, something he’d never put into words.

“Well,” he said finally, his tone dry but his mouth curving, “let’s go talk to Mr. Ackerman.”

Her lips tugged into a small, involuntary smile. She tried to smother it, but it lingered. “Let’s,” she replied, her voice low.

They walked out side by side, coats brushing, the faint sound of her beads clicking between her fingers as she shoved her notepad under her arm.

Munch kept his gaze forward, but his thoughts trailed where he couldn’t afford them to. The kid was sharp. Smarter than she gave herself credit for. And maybe he liked watching her prove it a little too much.

He pulled the bullpen door open for her, his dry mutter barely audible as they stepped into the corridor. “You’re gonna make me look bad, kid.”

She glanced up at him, the corner of her mouth tugging again. “That’s the goal, Munchie.”

The door swung shut behind them, cutting off the noise of the bullpen. Just two detectives, trench coats trailing, headed back into the city, carrying case files, unspoken tension, and things neither of them were ready to name.

Chapter Text

STATEN ISLAND - October 4, 2004 - 8:13 PM

The drive across the Verrazzano felt longer than usual. Staten Island always did. By the time Munch pulled into the deserted strip mall parking lot, the sky was a deep navy, streetlights flickering over cracked asphalt and the hollow quiet of shops long closed for the night.

He cut the engine, staring at the storefront ahead: GUN HO! The metal gates were half-pulled, neon letters buzzing faintly in the window. The place looked abandoned, the kind of hollow, ugly space where nothing good could grow.

Talia arched a brow, stepping out into the night air. “Lovely place,” she muttered, her voice edged with sarcasm, trench coat brushing her legs as she joined him on the sidewalk.

Munch smirked. “Only the best for Staten Island.”

They approached the glass door; grime streaked across its surface. Munch banged hard on it with his fist. “Anybody in there?”

For a moment, nothing. Then movement. A boy emerged from the shadows of the shop, pressing closer to the glass. He couldn’t have been older than sixteen; face smooth, expression guarded but too practiced for someone his age.

“I’m sorry. We’re closed. What is this regarding, please?” he asked, polite, rehearsed.

Munch tilted his head, his suspicion sharpening. “A little young to be working in a gun store, aren’t you?”

The boy straightened his shoulders. “I’m sixteen, sir. My dad’s the owner.”

Talia stepped forward, her gaze steady. “What’s your name?”

“Kyle. Kyle Ackerman.”

She glanced at Munch, their silent exchange saying the same thing: this didn’t smell right.

“Your dad leaves you here all alone?” Munch pressed.

“Yeah. I sweep up as part of my allowance.”

Talia softened her voice, but not her stare. “Kyle, you need to open this door.”

He hesitated, jaw working. She knew that look, saw it in kids she’d arrested running drugs in Queens, in teenagers covering for brothers or fathers they feared more than the police. Too innocent, too clean.

After a beat, Kyle reluctantly unlocked the door. The detectives stepped inside. The air was heavy with oil and metal, the walls lined with rifles, pistols, shotguns, all gleaming under fluorescent light.

Kyle stiffened. “Excuse me. Do you have a warrant?” Panic crept into his voice.

Munch didn’t miss a beat. “For what? We’re investigating the string of burglaries your dad had.” His tone was casual, but Talia caught the edge in it; he was lying, but his suspicion was already burning.

“We thought we’d check the security system,” she added smoothly, letting a trace of smugness curl her words.

Kyle shifted from foot to foot. “Can you come back tomorrow?”

Talia’s eyes roamed the walls of weaponry, her stomach knotting. She’d never liked guns, loathed them, really. The only reason she carried one was because the badge demanded it. Even then, she never chambered unless duty forced her hand. Her father had drilled into her that firearms were tools of oppression, not freedom. And here was a child, barely sixteen, standing in a room lined with them like wallpaper.

“You know,” she said evenly, “I don’t feel comfortable leaving a kid alone with all these weapons and ammo.”

Kyle bristled. “I’ve been around guns all my life.”

She shook her head, muttering under her breath, “That’s the problem.”

“You can’t be back there, sir,” Kyle added quickly as Munch moved behind the counter.

“Just want to check your security,” Munch said, already nosing near the register. “Make sure your dad doesn’t lose any more inventory.”

That’s when they heard it.

A loud, hollow banging from the back room.

Talia’s head snapped toward the sound, her eyes narrowing. “I thought you said there was no one else here.”

Kyle’s face faltered. “It’s none of your business.”

“Could be our burglar,” Munch said, already moving toward the noise.

“No, it’s not!” Kyle stepped forward, panic rising. He followed as Talia and Munch walked toward the back. “Hey, look, I’m serious! You cannot go down there!”

They didn’t stop. Talia pushed the door open, revealing a staircase. The smell hit first, damp concrete, ink, and something acrid. They descended.

Nothing could have prepared them.

The basement was a shrine of hate. A massive Nazi flag covered the back wall, its red and black stark under a single hanging bulb. Stacks of cardboard boxes lined the floor, spilling over with flyers plastered in white supremacist slogans.

Talia’s breath caught. Her chest tightened, memories flashing unbidden: 9/11’s aftermath, standing in uniform while strangers spat slurs at her, told her to ‘go back,’ the weight of suspicion in every glance at her surname. She blinked it back, her voice ice.

“Damn,” Munch muttered, stepping forward, fury seeping through his sarcasm. “There’s something you don’t see every day.”

“So, what do you do here, huh?” Talia demanded, her voice sharp, cutting through the silence. “Stockpile hate between broom sweeps?”

A woman emerged from the shadows, carrying another box filled with flyers. Her hair was stringy, her eyes hard. She set the box down and answered flatly: “Exercise our First Amendment right to free speech.”

Munch picked up one of the leaflets, reading aloud, his voice dripping disgust: “‘The reason the Jews made up the Holocaust.’”

Talia gave a bitter laugh at the sheer audacity. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

The woman’s lips twisted.

“I’m sorry, Star,” Kyle muttered, his voice small.

Star stepped closer, her gaze narrowing on Munch. She leaned in, sniffing him like an animal, then recoiled. Her face contorted. “Jew?” she sneered.

Talia’s body tensed instantly. She stepped forward, her voice sharp as a blade. “Are you this boy’s mother?”

Star turned, gave Talia a once-over, then muttered under her breath, “Terrorist.”

Talia’s eyes hardened, but she didn’t flinch. She’d been called worse.

“I’m a friend of the family,” Star snapped. “What’s your business here?”

Munch’s jaw flexed. “We’re investigating the shooting at P.S. 74.”

“What about it?” Star asked, annoyance thick in her tone.

“An African-American boy was murdered,” Talia said, her words deliberate. “With a rifle purchased right upstairs.”

Star’s lips curled. “Oh. You mean that dead little jungle bunny?”

The silence that followed was heavy. Munch’s knuckles whitened around the flyer in his hand. Talia felt something sharp twist inside her chest, grief and fury colliding. She let her mouth curl into a smirk, masking the ache. “She’s all torn up about it.”

Munch tore the flyer clean in half.

“Hey, you can’t do that,” Star snapped. “This is not a police state. You are destroying private property and you’re trespassing.”

“Well, we were just leaving,” Munch said coldly. He reached out, gripping Star’s arm firmly. “You mind coming along with us?”

Star yanked free, spitting venom. “I’m not going anywhere with you, kike.” She slapped him across the face.

For a second, Talia froze, heat flaring in her chest at the sight of his cheek reddening. The anger that surged wasn’t just professional. It was personal.

“Assaulting a police officer,” Talia snapped, stepping forward. Her voice was steel, steady as she grabbed Star and forced her wrists behind her back. “Well, now you’re guaranteed a ride with us.”

“Oh, like hell I am. I don’t recognize the authority of the puppets of the Zionist-occupied government!” Star hissed, struggling. She turned toward Kyle. “Call your daddy on your cell phone. Tell him I’m being taken political prisoner.”

Talia marched her up the stairs, every word Star spat ricocheting off her like poison. As she recited Star’s rights in a clipped, precise voice, she stole a glance at Munch. He was behind her, one hand clamped on Kyle’s shoulder, his face carved in stone.

Something twisted in her chest again; not just fury, not just sorrow. She wanted to reach out, to touch his hand, to steady him. But she swallowed it down, kept moving.

There were dead kids waiting for justice. And this basement of hate was just another circle of hell they’d have to walk through together.

SVU PRECINCT - October 4, 2004 - 9:15 PM

The ride to the precinct was quiet in the way that only seething silence could be. The hum of the Crown Vic filled the gaps where conversation might have lived, broken only by the venom that dripped from the backseat.

Star had made herself comfortable enough to spit poison into the air, tossing out racial slurs like confetti: kike, commie, terrorist. Words that still landed like blows no matter how many times you’d heard them. Talia sat in the passenger seat, her jaw tight, hands folded in her lap, eyes forward. Munch’s hands clenched the wheel just a little too tightly, knuckles pale.

Talia forced herself to breathe evenly, but the words crawled under her skin. Terrorist. Always the one that cut deepest since 9/11, a wound that never healed. She thought of her mother in Astoria, head wrapped in a veil on her way to church, how strangers used to glare like she carried bombs instead of prayer candles. She thought of Karim, shouting at protests, calling out injustice until it killed him.

And then she thought of Munch beside her. She wanted to reach out; take his hand, squeeze his fingers, kiss his cheek, something to tell him she saw him. That she knew what those words did to him too. Jew York City. She couldn’t imagine the years of it. New York. Baltimore. The sneers, the threats, the muttered comments when people thought you couldn’t hear. She wanted to tell him he wasn’t alone. But professionalism held her in place. She stayed still, head forward, her silence saying what her lips couldn’t.

When they pulled up to the precinct, the city noise greeted them, sirens two blocks over, a vendor calling out bagels and coffee, the distant rumble of the subway beneath the pavement. Talia stepped out first, smoothing the trench coat over her hips as if the gesture could iron out her fury. She reached into the back and grabbed Star by the arm, firm but steady, while Munch hauled Kyle out beside her.

Star, true to form, couldn’t keep her mouth shut. “Clean up all the crime in Jew York City? Or are you just afraid to do the job you’re actually paid for? Chasing down gang-banging, crack-smoking killer spics and coons.”

Her voice echoed across bullpen, slicing through the morning bustle. The last words were aimed at Fin, who had just stepped through the doors with his usual unshakable calm.

Talia’s stomach lurched. She saw Fin’s jaw tighten; his shoulders stiffen. Before she could even draw breath, he snapped back. “So, you know, I’m employed here.”

“Affirmative action, hard at work, ladies and gentlemen,” Star sneered.

Talia’s blood boiled, but she kept her face smooth. Astoria had taught her to hide the fire until the right moment. Her community had survived centuries of slurs and survived by meeting them with quiet dignity, or with sharp tongues when it mattered. Right now, her job was control. She flicked her eyes at Olivia and Elliot, who were crossing the bullpen floor toward her, and gestured subtly. Take her. Get her away before I break something.

“Right this way, son,” Munch said, his voice dry as dust, as he guided Kyle up the stairs. His hand at the boy’s shoulder was deceptively light but firm enough to leave no room for choice.

Talia held onto Star, dragging her through the maze of desks toward the interrogation rooms. The woman’s venom didn’t stop. “Wait, wait! Well, now, wait a minute. You can’t separate us. I demand to act as his guardian and be present when you interrogate him.”

Munch didn’t even look back. He just kept walking Kyle toward the second floor, his trench coat flaring like a shadow behind him.

“Honey, he’s not under arrest,” Talia muttered, rolling her eyes as she shoved Star toward the glass-walled room.

“We’re only gonna let him stay here till his old man comes and picks him up,” Munch tossed over his shoulder.

Kyle’s voice carried from the stairs, young but already hardened. “Do not tell them anything, Star. You wait until my father gets here. He’ll know exactly what to do.”

Star craned her neck back to answer, defiant even with Talia’s grip on her arm. “Don’t you worry, honey. Of course he’s gonna know what to do. He’s gonna sue your ass. I hope you’ve got yourself a really good shyster Jew lawyer.”

Talia didn’t flinch. She just shoved Star into the interrogation room and slammed the door shut with a sharp metallic click. She leaned against it, arms folded, lips curved in a smirk colder than ice. “Oh, I got a good one,” she shot back, voice dripping with acid.

Elliot and Olivia arrived just then, their eyes hard, ready for the interview. Talia pushed herself off the doorframe, brushing past them with a nod.

“You good?” Elliot asked, searching her face for cracks.

“Yeah.” She shrugged, though the weight in her chest begged otherwise. “Never gets easier.”

She didn’t wait for a response. She turned, heels clicking against the tile, and headed for the side exit. Outside, the city air hit her like a slap. She lit a cigarette with practiced hands, though the taste turned her stomach. It wasn’t comfort, not really. Just ritual. Smoke filled her lungs, acrid and heavy, burning out the rage just enough to function.

Her mind drifted backward, back to Astoria, where racism never went unchecked. Her neighbours; Greeks, Egyptians, Armenians, Dominicans, Russians, argued like family but stood like stone when someone outside tried to cut one of them down. Even men she didn’t like would step up when slurs came flying, because that was the rule: no one touched their own. Here, though, in this city of flashing lights and press conferences, hatred felt bigger. Louder. More protected. White supremacists in suits, smiling as they spat venom.

She crushed the cigarette under her heel, the ember dying in silence, and squared her shoulders. There was no space to fall apart. Not here.

Back inside, she hurried up the stairs, the murmur of the bullpen fading as she reached the interview rooms. Munch and Fin were already seated with Kyle. Across the room, she caught a glimpse: Munch leaning back, deceptively casual, eyes sharp as razors behind his glasses. Fin leaned forward, voice low but unrelenting. Kyle squirmed in his chair, the arrogance cracking at the edges.

For a moment, Talia lingered at the glass, watching Munch. The way he carried himself; sarcasm as armour, cynicism as shield, she recognized it because she wore the same. She wanted to walk in, sit beside him, let their shoulders brush. She wanted to let her hand rest over his on the table, steady and certain. She wanted him to know she was angry too, that they were in this together.

Instead, she took a seat and sat down across from Kyle. Professional. Controlled. Her rage folded neatly into her jacket pocket, alongside her badge.

The interrogation was about to begin. And beneath it all, buried deep, her heart thudded harder every time John Munch glanced her way.

SVU PRECINCT - October 4, 2004 - 10:02 PM

The upstairs space of cold metal and stale coffee. The walls pressed in, painted that bureaucratic shade of grey that always looked dirtier under fluorescent light. Kyle sat slouched in the chair, all teenage arrogance, the hair, the smirk, the kind of cockiness that came from being told your whole life you were better than everyone else.

Talia sat across from him, her posture deceptively relaxed; trench coat still on, curls falling into her face. Her hands were folded loosely on the table, but her eyes were sharp, unflinching. Munch sat to the left, Fin sat to the right, arms crossed.

The door swung open. Dr. George Huang slipped in with a laptop in hand, silent as ever. His calm presence never failed to unsettle suspects, and sometimes detectives too.

“You need to see this,” Huang said softly, setting the laptop down. The hum of its fan filled the silence as the screen blinked to life.

The site loaded. Black-and-red banners, swastika-style fonts, white power slogans. The kind of filth that spread through the underground corners of the internet like mould. Talia’s jaw tightened.

Kyle leaned forward eagerly, his eyes lighting up like a kid at Christmas. “Yeah. This is my site.”

With a few keystrokes, he pulled up a game. Crude graphics, ugly sound effects. A digital caricature of hate.

The computer voice screeched, tinny through the speakers: “Keep running, Jew! Keep running!”

Munch’s lip curled, disgust flashing behind the dark lenses of his glasses.

Kyle grinned, proud. “The game’s called Final Solution. Players get to be a cyber-clansman or a skinhead gang member. Chase minorities around a virtual urban landscape.”

Talia blinked once, slow. Her face was calm, but the fire behind her eyes betrayed her. Disbelief and annoyance fused into one sharp glare.

“Little webmaster-racemeister, huh?” Munch’s voice was dry, razor-sharp.

“I have the current high score,” Kyle said, puffing out his chest.

Talia leaned forward, her eyes narrowed on another file name on the screen. “What the hell is JFK Reloaded?”

“Trust me, you don’t want to go there,” Fin muttered, reaching over to slam the laptop shut before the images could poison the room any further.

“They’re just games,” Kyle spat. His voice dripped with contempt. “There are plenty of games where white men get killed, but obviously your kind has no problem with that.”

Talia’s stomach clenched at the phrase your kind. She saw Fin stiffen.

Fin tilted his head, eyes narrowing. “My kind? You mean cops?”

Kyle didn’t flinch. He leaned forward and said it, “Ni***rs”

The room shifted. Silence rang out like a gunshot. Talia’s nails dug into the skin of her palm beneath the table. Munch’s jaw worked, the vein in his temple throbbing. Fin laughed, a dry, bitter sound, because the alternative was breaking the kid’s jaw right there.

“So, you’d be happy if somebody exterminated the three of us and everybody that looks like us?” Munch asked, voice tight, each word deliberate.

“Of course not. RAW doesn’t advocate violence. We leave that to the savages. We all know who those are.” Kyle’s eyes slid to Talia, slow and deliberate, the insult sharpened for her alone.

Her heritage wrapped into one sneer: Russian, therefore a communist. Egyptian, therefore, a terrorist. A double betrayal in his eyes.

Talia sat very still. Her voice, when it came, was low, steady, dangerous. “You never had a chance, did you?”

Kyle blinked, confused. “What?”

“Your father’s been filling your head with hate since you were a baby. You’ve never thought for yourself a single day in your life.” She tilted her head, her voice softening with scorn. “I actually feel sorry for you.”

His smile snapped back, defensive, cruel. “Oh, don’t. I was lucky to be born a Caucasian. You were the one who drew the genetic short straw.”

Munch straightened from the wall, his voice cutting through the air. “You know, scientists have discovered there’s really no genetic difference between the races. It’s only skin-deep.” His eyes slid to Talia, his tone softening by a fraction. “And I truly doubt Detective Amari drew the short straw, as pretty as she is.”

The words landed like a stone thrown into still water. Talia froze, blinking once, heat rising to her cheeks. Fin glanced between them, biting back a smirk. He’d seen this coming a mile away.

Kyle sneered, undeterred. “Jews are the descendants of the union between Eve and Satan.” His eyes locked on Munch, spitting venom.

“And who do you think spawned you?” Talia shot back, her voice sharp enough to cut.

The room tensed again. Before anyone could respond, shouting erupted from downstairs. A man’s voice, calling Kyle’s name.

Kyle shot to his feet, eyes wide. “Dad!”

The detectives moved as one, following him out the door and down the stairs. In the squad room, a heavyset man stood flanked by Cragen and Olivia. His presence filled the space, Mr. Ackerman, the patriarch.

“Dad,” Kyle said breathlessly. “I’d like you two to repeat what you said about my father to his face.” He turned on the detectives, venom still dripping. “Cowards.”

Munch’s jaw tightened. Talia’s lip curled.

“I understand you home-school this boy,” Fin said, his tone flat, edged with disgust. “You afraid to expose him to the truth?”

Mr. Ackerman’s eyes glittered with pride. “My father’s a brilliant teacher,” Kyle spat before his dad could answer. “He doesn’t dumb down the lessons for minorities like they do in public school. Or distort history to mollify them.”

Olivia’s voice broke through, sharp, cutting. “Sweetheart, he’s completely brainwashed you.”

“You’re the idiot embracing the lies,” Kyle shot back at Olivia. His words spilled fast, hateful. “Sorry I let you down, sir. I should never have allowed them to breach the perimeter.” He turned to his father, eyes desperate for approval.

Mr. Ackerman laid a hand on his son’s shoulder. “We’ll talk about this at home. Let’s go.”

But Cragen’s hand was quicker, blocking their path. “Not so fast.”

Talia turned away, shaking her head, muttering under her breath, ‘Fun times.’ She drifted back toward her desk, already pulling out the forms for her report. The ritual of paperwork steadied her, the scratch of her pen a small defence against the bile still sitting in her throat.

She didn’t look up until she saw Officer Taylor, one of the Black patrol cops, escort Ackerman out. The disgust on his face mirrored her own. For the first time that night, she almost smiled, a bitter little chuckle slipping out.

Ten minutes later, Munch emerged from Cragen’s office. His expression was unreadable.

Without looking up from her paperwork, Talia asked, “How mad?”

“Not mad at all,” Munch said, his tone deceptively casual. “But we got a name on the possible shooter.” He sat down on the edge of her desk, trench coat brushing against her notes.

“You going to pick him up?” she asked, finally meeting his eyes.

“Yeah. Along with the others. And SWAT.”

His hand moved without thought, brushing a stray curl from her face. The gesture was casual enough to pass as nothing. But her heart stuttered.

She smirked faintly, pushing back the weight in her chest. “Have fun.”

Her wink was lighter than she felt. She rose, gathering her things. It was late. Too late. Cragen had already told her to take some time off, reminding her she was still green, that she didn’t need to be front line for everything. And when Munch had said ‘enough is enough’ in that low, certain voice of his, she hadn’t argued.

The cab ride home was quiet, the city lights blurring through the window. She leaned her head back, replaying the day, replaying his words.

As pretty as she is.

She hated how much it stuck with her. Hated, and wanted more.

Chapter Text

NYC SUPREME COURT - October 27, 2004 - 10:02 AM

Nearly two weeks had crawled by since the shooting at P.S. 74, and Talia Amari had been buried beneath paperwork ever since. Long nights chained to her desk, fingers inked from scribbled notes, reports stacked in uneven towers around her. GUN HO! had eaten her whole; transcripts, interviews, the endless paper trail of bureaucracy.

But her mind kept drifting elsewhere.

Every time she allowed herself a second of distraction, she heard it again: Munch’s voice, that sharp deadpan, breaking through when he’d called her pretty. He’d done it casually, publicly, like it meant nothing. But every time she replayed it in her head, a grin threatened to spread across her face. He thinks I’m pretty; she kept whispering to herself in the quiet hours, embarrassed at how girlish she sounded even in her own head.

So, when Munch and Elliot had invited her to join them at Supreme Court for the trial, she didn’t even hesitate. Watching Casey Novak in action was something she wanted, needed. To see justice happen, to watch the fight continue in another arena. To see the case carried all the way through.

And maybe, just maybe, to sit beside John Munch and feel like she belonged there.

The marble steps of the Supreme Court gleamed in the weak October sunlight, worn smooth by decades of jurors, attorneys, and defendants. The building loomed, massive and cold, as if justice itself had been carved into its bones.

The three detectives climbed the steps together. Munch walked with his usual slouch, trench coat collar pulled high against the chill, sunglasses still on though the sky was grey. Elliot was all business, his broad frame cutting through the crowd of reporters buzzing around the steps. Talia kept pace between them, her own coat brushing against Munch’s, steadying her heartbeat with every step.

Casey Novak was waiting outside, red hair catching the light. She looked up, surprised. “Didn’t think you’d show,” she said as Talia moved in for a quick embrace.

“Couldn’t miss this circus,” Talia laughed softly. Her voice was steady, but she meant it. Watching Casey at work was as thrilling to her as a good bust.

Casey smiled, and Talia realized how quickly she’d come to value the ADA. Drinks with her and Olivia after long shifts, the quiet solidarity of women who knew what it was to be underestimated in rooms full of men. The friendship was still new, but it felt solid, like stone underfoot.

The four of them moved toward the side entrance, flashing their IDs to the court officer who barely looked up before waving them through. Inside, the air was cooler, heavy with the scent of paper and polish. Their footsteps echoed off high ceilings.

Munch drifted closer as they walked the long corridor toward the courtroom. “You ever been to a trial?” he asked, his tone curious rather than condescending.

“Not really,” Talia admitted. “Narcotics didn’t sit in courtrooms. We were too busy watching dealers in the alleyways.”

He smirked. “Then this’ll be fun.”

He said it like a joke, but she caught the flicker in his eyes; he enjoyed this, the theatre of it. And when his hand brushed her lower back, guiding her forward through the swell of people, her heart jolted. The touch was brief, steady, but enough to make her flush. She prayed no one saw the way heat bloomed in her cheeks.

Inside, the courtroom was already buzzing. Judge Schuyler presided at the bench, his reputation preceding him, quick-tempered, sharper than he looked. Reporters scribbled in the back rows, and the pews creaked with every movement. Talia and Munch slipped onto a bench midway back, Elliot taking the other side. She smoothed her coat, trying to still her nerves.

The bailiff’s call silenced the room.

Star, the first witness, was sworn in.

“Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?” the clerk asked, holding out the Bible.

“I do.”

“State your name.”

“I plead the Fifth.”

A ripple of surprise moved through the courtroom. Talia leaned forward, brows drawn tight.

“Ms. Morrison, it’s just your name,” Judge Schuyler pressed.

“I invoke my right against self-incrimination as afforded me by the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.”

Talia exhaled through her nose. Of course.

“Ms. Novak are the People prepared to offer this witness immunity?” the judge asked.

“We already have, Your Honor,” Casey said firmly.

“Ms. Morrison, I understand that you have been granted immunity,” Schuyler said.

“I plead the Fifth.”

The judge’s gavel cracked. “This witness is dismissed.”

Casey stepped forward. “Your Honor, could I please request a brief recess?”

“Call your next witness, Ms. Novak,” Schuyler snapped.

“The People call Brannon Lee Redding,” Casey said.

“Sidebar,” the defence attorney barked, hurrying to the bench.

As Casey and the lawyer crowded near the judge, Talia leaned sideways toward Munch, her lips curved in dry sarcasm. “You’re right, this is so fun.”

“There’ll be drama,” Munch smirked back. His voice was low, a spark of amusement under his cynicism. He tilted his chin toward the doors just as court officers escorted in Brannon Lee Redding, wrists chained, tattoos crawling up his arms.

Talia studied him. “He’s the shooter?”

Munch nodded once, eyes still sharp behind the tinted glasses.

The testimony began.

“Mr. Redding, when did you first meet the defendant Brian Ackerman?” Casey asked.

“About a week after I got out,” Redding answered, voice flat.

“And what happened at that meeting?”

“He sees my tattoos, finds out I just got out of Rikers. Starts trying to bait me.”

“How?”

“Says skinheads are all talk. Says his group’s more organized. Says, ‘I got a whole list of targets.’ And there should be one I’m especially interested in.”

“And what target was that?” Casey asked.

“The adopted sambo of some white Rikers security guard. He gave me his home and school address. He even gave me his school picture.”

The words were still hanging in the air when chaos exploded.

“RACE TRAITOR!” Kyle screamed. He was on his feet, gun in hand, the barrel pointed at Redding’s chest.

The courtroom erupted, screams, bodies lunging for cover, pews scraping across the floor. Talia dropped instantly, muscle memory from Narcotics kicking in, her gun out before the echo of the first shot had finished. Beside her, Elliot yanked a woman down behind the bench, his own weapon raised.

Munch yelled as he drew down on the shooter. “Kyle! Drop it!”

The gavel thundered, Judge Schuyler shouting, “Court officers! Court officers!” But the order was drowned by the crack of another shot. Blood spattered across the witness stand.

Munch kept his aim steady, but before he could fire, another figure moved. A man in a court officer’s uniform; too fast, too precise, raised a weapon.

The gun fired. Munch staggered.

Talia’s stomach clenched as she saw him jerk back, crimson blooming across his back like a grotesque flower. Her instincts screamed to return fire, but Elliot’s gun cracked a split second later, dropping the imposter where he stood.

Casey screamed as Kyle seized her, dragging her close, pressing the barrel of his pistol hard against her temple.

Talia’s weapon tracked the scene, but she held, gun ready, but her mind crystal-clear. A wrong move would get Casey killed. The standoff shattered in seconds. Kyle shoved Casey away, firing wildly. A shot tore through Elliot’s elbow, sending him crashing to the ground with a howl. Another round swung toward Talia.

She froze, every calculation running at once. If she fired, she risked hitting Casey. If she hesitated, he’d kill Elliot. Slowly, deliberately, she raised her hands. “Don’t shoot,” she said, her voice calm but firm. Her gun slid across the floor with a nudge of her boot. She lowered to her knees; eyes locked on Kyle. Keep him focused on you. Not on them.

Kyle sneered, but turned back toward Elliot, raising the gun to finish him.

And then, the crack of another shot.

Star.

The federal agent’s bullet cut him down. Kyle collapsed in a sprawl of limbs and fury.

“Drop your weapon!” a court officer shouted, guns trained on Star.

“Federal agent!” Star barked, badge raised. “Hold your fire! Federal agent, don’t shoot!”

The room spun with shouts, chaos, the metallic smell of blood thick in the air.

Talia moved before she realized she was moving. Munch was down, blood spreading fast across the back of his shirt, staining the trench coat she’d silently grown so fond of. She dropped beside him, knees hitting the polished floor hard.

“John. Look at me,” she ordered, pressing her hands tight against the wound. Her palms were slick instantly, warm red seeping between her fingers.

His eyes fluttered, glassy but defiant. “You’re an idiot,” he muttered.

A laugh tore from her throat; shaky, raw, but real. “You’re bleeding out on the Supreme Court floor, and I’m the idiot?”

He tried to smirk, failed.

Her focus didn’t waver. Pressure, steady, keep him conscious. Around them, officers swarmed, shouts echoing, EMTs fighting their way inside. But Talia didn’t move. Her hands stayed firm, her body hunched over his like a shield.

She didn’t cry. She wouldn’t give him, or anyone, hat image. Instead, her jaw set, her eyes burning with a promise only she understood: Not today. Not like this.

“Stay with me,” she whispered, voice low, meant only for him. “You’re not getting rid of me that easy.”

Munch’s gaze flickered toward her, lips twitching with the ghost of sarcasm. “Lucky… me.”

And then the EMTs were there, pulling her back gently, their hands replacing hers, bandages pressing where her fingers had been.

Her palms were drenched in his blood. She stared at them for half a heartbeat, then wiped them on her coat and stood tall.

She didn’t move until the stretcher rolled past her, Munch’s face pale but alive.

Only then did she allow herself to breathe.

NYC SUPREME COURT STEPS - October 27, 2004 - 6:27 PM

The street still smelled of cordite. Yellow tape fluttered in the wind, snapping against the rails like a metronome for grief. Reporters were being shoved back by uniforms; cameras flashed against the dusky sky. Talia sat on the courthouse steps, elbows on her knees, cigarette smouldering between her fingers. Smoke curled upward, blurring her face as she watched the EMTs wheel Munch away.

Her hands were still stained with his blood.

She stared at them, flexing her fingers as if that would change the colour. The copper tang clung to her skin, sunk into the cuticles. She didn’t even bother wiping it off, what was the point? Some stains stayed, no matter how hard you scrubbed.

Footsteps approached. She didn’t look up until she heard the familiar rasp of Fin’s voice.

“What happened?” He stopped in front of her, hands on his hips, eyes narrowing at the sight of her hands, the pallor of her face.

“They shot Munch,” Talia said flatly, smoke slipping from her lips with the words. It was too casual, too quiet. Nonchalance wasn’t real; it was armour.

Fin sighed, the kind of weary sound only another cop could make, and offered her a hand. His palm was steady, solid. “C’mon. Let’s go.”

She dropped the cigarette, crushed it beneath her boot, and slid her bloody hand into his. His grip pulled her to her feet with surprising gentleness.

Her eyes caught something as Fin shifted, something tucked in his jacket. The edge of a paper bag.

“What’s that?” she asked, squinting, suspicion cutting through the fog of adrenaline.

He smirked. “Oh, you’ll see.”

“Fin,” she pressed, narrowing her eyes.

He just chuckled, steering her toward his car. “Patience, Amari.”

She didn’t argue. She was too tired. They climbed into his sedan, and as the city blurred past, Talia pulled out her phone with shaking fingers. A quick text to Ameen; Take the dogs out. I won’t be home tonight.

Her brother would know better than to ask why.

BELLEVUE HOSPITAL - October 27, 2004 - 7:14 PM

Hospitals at night always smelled the same: antiseptic and coffee burned down to tar. The fluorescent lights bleached the corridors into something sterile, inhuman. Bellevue was no different. The hallways buzzed with voices; uniforms lined the waiting area, detectives pacing with Styrofoam cups, their faces etched with the familiar cocktail of rage and relief.

Talia walked beside Fin, her trench coat draped over her arm now, sleeves rolled to the elbow. The blood on her skin had been washed, but she swore she still felt it there.

They turned the corner toward Munch’s room. Through the half-open door, she saw him, laying on the side in the hospital bed, IV line in his arm, sunglasses off for once. Beside him sat Dana Lewis, the FBI agent they’d all just found out was undercover.

Dana rose as they entered, giving them a wry smile. “Here comes your partners.” She touched Munch’s hand briefly before moving toward the door. “Excuse me, and you take care.” Her words hung softer, more personal than protocol.

As she passed Fin, she paused. “Detective Tutuola, I want to apologize to you for-”

“We’re good,” Fin cut her off, extending his hand. His forgiveness was brisk but real.

Dana turned to Talia. “Detective Amari-”

“I’ve heard worse,” Talia said, with a wink that was more armour than charm. She brushed past Dana, lowering herself into the chair at Munch’s bedside. Her hand rose instinctively, cupping his cheek. His skin was warm, rough against her palm. For once, she let herself be soft. Just for him.

Dana caught the moment, her expression flickering, but she said nothing. “All right. Take care.” She slipped out, leaving the three detectives in the muted hum of hospital machines.

Fin settled at the foot of the bed, leaning back casually like they were at a bar and not in intensive care. “So where is it you got shot?”

The bluntness made Talia laugh; a sharp, unexpected sound that cut through the sterile air.

“That would be in the ass,” Munch replied dryly. His voice was gravel and sarcasm, as always. “You want to kiss it and make it better?”

Talia laughed harder, clutching his blanket to stifle the sound. Relief and fear twisted inside her. He was alive. He was still himself.

“You better ask Talia that,” Fin deadpanned. Talia rolled her eyes, cheeks warm, lips pressing together to hide the smile tugging at them.

Fin leaned forward, fishing in his jacket. “You be nice to me, or you won’t get the shake I smuggled in for you.”

Munch perked up instantly, suspicion giving way to interest. “Fig? From McGinty’s?”

“Of course,” Fin said, producing the cup like it was contraband.

“Oh, thanks, man.” Munch’s voice softened, almost boyish for a second as he accepted it.

Fin shrugged. “Thank you for not making me have to break in another partner.” Talia blinked, confused, before he added quickly, “You don’t count.”

She raised a brow. “Gee, thanks.”

Fin’s grin softened the jab. He glanced at Munch. “I’m glad you pulled through, bro.”

The three of them sat together in the hospital room, laughter breaking through the tension, the sounds of a precinct family stitched back together. But as the minutes passed, Fin eventually excused himself, muttering about giving them space, leaving Talia and Munch alone. The noise of the hospital became distant, muffled, like the world knew to leave them in their bubble.

Talia shifted in her chair, her coat pooling across her lap. She watched him, really watched him. The rise and fall of his chest beneath the thin hospital blanket. The gauze at his side. The way his hair stuck up at odd angles, dishevelled from the gurney ride and hours of strain. He looked older in the hospital light, but softer too; less guarded.

She broke the silence first, her voice almost tentative. “Does it hurt?”

Munch cracked one eye open, smirking faintly. “Well, I wouldn’t recommend it. But I’ll live.” He yawned, then added, “You should go home. You’ve had a long day.”

“Nice try,” she said, leaning back in her chair, folding her arms. “You’re my partner. I’m not leaving you alone.”

He chuckled, the sound low and sardonic, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “You’re too stubborn for your own good.”

“Maybe,” she allowed, a small smile ghosting her lips. “Or maybe I just know better than to trust you not to make trouble the second I walk out.”

That made him laugh properly; short, sharp, and genuine. “You think highly of me.”

“I think realistically of you.” She tilted her head, studying him with a kind of fond exasperation. “Which is to say, you don’t make it easy on yourself. Or anyone else.”

Munch exhaled, sinking deeper into the pillows, his smirk fading into something gentler. “And yet here you are.”

“Here I am,” she echoed softly.

The words hung between them, heavier than they had any right to be. She tried to busy herself, straightening the blanket near his shoulder, but her fingers brushed his hand instead. His knuckles were cool, calloused. She didn’t pull away.

“You scare me, you know,” he said suddenly, his voice quieter, stripped of its usual armour.

Talia blinked, surprised. “Scare you?”

“Yeah.” His eyes stayed on hers, unflinching. “You care too much. It’s dangerous in this line of work.” He swallowed. “I stopped letting myself do that a long time ago.”

Her chest tightened, but she smiled faintly. “You don’t scare me, John. Not even a little.”

He snorted, amused despite himself. “You should.”

“I won’t,” she said simply.

They sat in silence for a moment, the machines softly beeping in the background, their hands resting near each other on the blanket. His fingers twitched, as if fighting the urge to reach for hers.

“You’re ridiculous,” he murmured, closing his eyes again, though the corner of his mouth betrayed a smile. “Sitting here babysitting a cranky old man.”

“You’re not that old.”

“That’s generous.”

She smirked. “You’re my partner. That’s what matters.”

Something flickered in his expression, relief, maybe, or something deeper. His hand finally shifted, brushing against hers. She didn’t move away.

Her heart pounded. She leaned forward, every movement deliberate, fragile. Her eyes roamed his face, the lines carved by decades of cynicism, the stubborn brow, the mouth that never seemed to soften except now. He closed his eyes, seemingly falling asleep.

Her voice was barely a whisper. “You don’t get to die before I’ve even kissed you.”

And then she did it, she pressed her lips to his cheek, close enough to graze the corner of his mouth. It wasn’t quick. It lingered. Long enough for her to feel the warmth of his skin, long enough for her to know she was crossing a line she couldn’t uncross.

When she pulled back, her thumb traced along his jaw, featherlight. “Good night John,” she murmured.

She rose slowly, gathering her coat, willing herself not to look back again. At the door, her hand on the handle, she allowed herself one last glance.

He was still. Eyes closed. Breathing steady.

But once she turned, once the door slipped shut.

His eyes opened.

And he smiled.

Chapter Text

ASTORIA - October 30, 2004 - 6:56 AM

Three days. That’s how long John Munch had been stuck in Bellevue Hospital, and three days was all Talia had spent at the precinct, throwing herself into paperwork and evidence logs like drowning would keep her from thinking. She replayed the courtroom shooting on a loop, every second etched into her memory. The sound of the shot, the spray of panic, the sight of him staggering down with shock painted across his face. The way her heart had stopped when she saw him fall; not a stranger, not just her partner, but the infuriating, brilliant, sarcastic old man she hadn’t meant to care for. Shot in the ass, of all places. Trust Munch to nearly die in the least dignified way possible.

She hadn’t visited him, well not after the first night. Not once. She stayed away, half telling herself it was because she had too much work to do, half because she didn’t know how to sit by his bed without giving herself away. But today was different. Today, he was being discharged. And something inside her, something stubborn and tender and terrifying, told her she couldn’t let him go home alone.

When she asked Cragen for a few days off, his gruff voice didn’t even hesitate. “You earned it, Amari. P.S. 74 was a nightmare. You held the line.” He didn’t say and you kept your head when Munch got shot. He didn’t have to.

The sky was just starting to pale as she bundled herself in scarves and her long wool coat, hair tucked away, heels clicking against the sidewalk. She’d chosen her uniform of armour that morning; silk blouse, high-waisted slacks, sharp as glass. Dressed to impress, dressed to distract, dressed to keep herself from trembling. If she added a wide brim hat, she thought dryly, she’d look like Munch’s mirror image. She didn’t mind.

Her Mustang coughed alive with a roar loud enough to shake the street. Neighbours twitched curtains, but it was Talia, the girl who left soup on stoops and walked everyone’s kids across the street, so nobody complained. She adjusted the rearview, smiled faintly at the sound Ali had tuned into the exhaust for her, and muttered, “Thank you, Ali.” The boy had made her car sound like thunder. The whole block probably hated it. She couldn’t care less.

She drove toward the hospital, the weight in her chest growing heavier with every red light. She told herself it was just to check on him. Just to help. Just to make sure he had soup and a safe place to rest. But beneath it all, there was something rawer: she wanted to take care of him. She wanted him to let her.

BELLEVUE HOSPITAL - October 27, 2004 - 7:29 AM

Hospitals at dawn had their own atmosphere; antiseptic and sleepless, corridors glowing too brightly, nurses moving briskly with coffee cups and clipped conversations. Talia showed her badge at the desk and wove past the uniforms stationed for protection. Word travelled fast when cops were shot; everyone had something to say, most of it whispered.

She found him near the discharge desk, slouched in a wheelchair he clearly hated, arguing with a nurse young enough to be his daughter.

“You need someone with you, Detective,” the nurse was insisting, scribbling notes on a clipboard. “Gunshot wounds aren’t something you just walk off. You’ll need rest, you’ll need-”

“I’ll be fine,” Munch huffed, pushing at the armrest like he could lift himself out on sheer stubbornness. The wince betrayed him. His face pinched, jaw tight, and he let out a breath that was almost a growl.

Talia stepped forward before she could stop herself, her hand firm on his shoulder, pressing him back down. “Don’t be an idiot.”

He turned, startled. His eyes widened; not much, just enough to show surprise, and then narrowed again, like a shield snapping back into place. “When did you get here?”

She ignored the question. Her gaze flicked to the nurse. “I’ll take him.”

Munch jerked upright, or tried to. “No, you won’t.”

“Yes,” she said, crisp as glass.

“No.”

Her eyes narrowed. “John.”

He met her glare with one of his own, though his had more weary sarcasm than fire. “I don’t need a babysitter, Amari.”

“This isn’t babysitting.” She leaned in closer, voice low, so only he could hear. “I took care of my parents through illness. I’ll take care of you.”

His mouth twitched, defences coiling. “And then your parents died,” he muttered dryly, the words harsher than he meant.

The air between them stilled. That was a blade through her ribs. But Talia didn’t flinch. She pressed her lips together, breathing through the sting, and whispered, steady: “And you’re not old enough to die. Not yet.”

For a second, he said nothing. His eyes softened, the sarcasm slipping at the edges. He looked at her like maybe he hadn’t expected her to stay, hadn’t expected her to want to.

The nurse cleared her throat, awkward. “So… you’ll be with him, Detective?”

“Yes,” Talia said without hesitation.

Munch sighed like the weight of the world was sitting on his bandaged hip. “God help me.”

She signed the papers. He let her push the wheelchair even though he grumbled the entire way.

“You realize this is entrapment,” he muttered as they rolled toward the doors.

“You realize sarcasm won’t keep you from falling on your ass in the shower,” she shot back.

“I’ve lived alone for decades, sweetheart. I can handle a shower.”

“Sweetheart?” Her eyebrow arched, just enough to unsettle him. “Already pet names, and you haven’t even moved in yet.”

He groaned. “You’re going to be insufferable.”

“And you’re going to eat soup and keep your stitches intact. Seems fair.”

Outside, the October wind cut cold through her coat. She pulled the Mustang to the curb, helping him in with more patience than she knew she had. He complained the whole time, muttering about bucket seats and vintage cars, but his hand brushed hers as he lowered himself down, and lingered. Just for a second.

They drove through Manhattan as the city woke, sirens and horns echoing in the dawn. He watched the skyline, his face softer than usual, and said quietly: “You didn’t come see me.”

It wasn’t an accusation. It was a confession.

Talia’s grip on the wheel tightened. “I couldn’t.”

He turned to look at her, waiting.

“If I saw you in that bed,” she said slowly, “I would’ve broken. And I couldn’t afford to break. Not then.”

Silence. Then, softer than she expected: “But now you can?”

Her throat closed. She glanced at him, met his eyes, and let herself say the truth without saying it. “Now I want to.”

The Mustang growled through the Queensboro Bridge, the city unfolding around them, two detectives caught in the quiet gravity of something they hadn’t named. Not yet.

But it was there.

ASTORIA - October 30, 2004 - 8:02 AM

Astoria was already awake when Talia pulled up. Bakeries spilled their warmth into the crisp morning air; fresh bread, sesame rings, buttered pastries. Grocers barked prices in Greek, Arabic, Spanish, and Italian, voices weaving into the noisy harmony of a neighbourhood that had never learned silence. Radios hummed behind open shop doors, children skipped rope on the cracked sidewalks, and the smell of strong coffee drifted from every corner café.

Talia inhaled it all like it was oxygen. This was home.

Munch, on the other hand, was not doing nearly as well. He grimaced with every step, one hand clamped stubbornly to his side, the other gripping his overnight bag like it was evidence in need of guarding. Pride kept him from surrendering the weight to her, but his body betrayed him with each sharp intake of breath.

“C’mon, old man,” Talia muttered, slipping a hand just behind his back without touching. Hovering, ready to catch him if he stumbled, but too careful of his pride to make it obvious.

He shot her a look. “You always this charming to the wounded?”

“Only the stubborn ones.”

The brownstone rose before them, modest but proud, its brick façade softened by ivy and the scuff of decades. She pushed open the wrought-iron gate, and the scent of jasmine drifted down the stoop, jasmine and something darker, warmer. Coffee, freshly ground.

Munch hesitated at the threshold, his gaze snagging on the details. Photographs crowded the hallway wall; sepia and colour alike, siblings smiling, parents in formal portraits, candid’s from holidays long gone. Icons of Mary and Saint George hung alongside Arabic calligraphy and a small silver Nazar bead, catching the morning light. The house felt alive, layered, unapologetically hers.

Something in his chest tightened. He didn’t want to go in. Because if he did, some part of him knew he’d never want to leave.

She nudged him gently. “Inside. Before you collapse and I gotta drag you, which I will.”

He obeyed, muttering something about not needing a babysitter.

And then he saw them.

Three German Shepherds sat at the foot of the staircase, tails wagging in perfect sync, ears pricked like soldiers waiting for command. Their eyes locked onto him, sharp and expectant.

Munch froze.

Talia raised an eyebrow. “What?”

He sighed, muttering under his breath like it wasn’t meant for her to hear. “Perfect. My very own private Gestapo.”

The corner of her mouth tugged upward, and then she burst into laughter; a bright, unrestrained sound that cut through the weight in the air. She leaned against the wall, shaking her head.

“They like you,” she said once she caught her breath.

“They’re staring at me like I’m a suspect,” he replied flatly. “Probably waiting for a confession.”

“Don’t worry. They only attack on command.” She winked and plucked his bag from his hand before he could protest. “You’re in my bed.”

That snapped him out of it. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me. Bed. Upstairs.”

“And you?” he asked cautiously.

“Living room.” Her tone left no room for debate.

He opened his mouth to argue, but she was already guiding him up the stairs. The bedroom smelled faintly of lavender and jasmine incense, the kind that lingered soft in fabric. Fresh sheets, smoothed with care, pillows plumped. She’d prepared this. For him.

“You don’t have to-”

“Sleep,” she interrupted.

He wanted to say he didn’t need coddling, didn’t need her fussing. But the truth was written in the heaviness of his limbs. The moment his head touched the pillow, exhaustion dragged him under. Talia slipped off his glasses and set them on the nightstand. For a long moment, she just looked at him, his face unguarded in sleep, all the cynicism stripped away. Then she bent down, pressed her lips softly to his forehead, and whispered, “Sleep well, John.”

She changed quickly; bralette, grey sweatpants, matching hoodie, slides. Comfortable, functional. She whistled for the dogs, clipped their leashes, and slipped out the door with grocery bags folded under her arm.

The morning bustle swallowed her whole. First stop: the corner grocer. A narrow storefront with crates of herbs and greens spilling onto the sidewalk. The sign read Mansour’s Market, but to everyone in the neighbourhood, he was just ʿammo Mansour.

Talia tugged the dogs to sit a few paces back, so they wouldn’t scare off anyone, then stepped toward the doorway just as Mansour emerged balancing a crate of parsley on his hip.

“Ṣabāḥ el-khēr, yā bintī!” Mansour called. (Good morning, my daughter / Arabic)

Talia smiled, slipping into the rhythm like she never left. “Ṣabāḥ el-khēr, ʿammo.” (Good morning, uncle / Arabic)

He squinted at her, catching sight of the shadows under her eyes. “What are you cooking today?”

“Shorbat ʿAds. And chicken broth.”

He raised his brows. “Are you sick, yā bintī?” Concern laced his tone. (My daughter? / Arabic)

She chuckled softly, inspecting the coriander bundles. “Not me. My partner.”

Mansour straightened, his face lighting with mischief. “Partner?”

“Detective partner,” she clarified, stepping inside for lentils.

But Mansour just grinned knowingly. “Detective, eh? Still, he’s a lucky man. You cook for him? Very lucky man.”

At the register, as she dug for her wallet, he slipped a small box of baklava into her bag. She caught the motion immediately. “Mansour-”

“No arguing,” he cut her off, raising a hand like a priest giving blessing. “ʿAmto Salma made them fresh this morning. Have them with your coffee.” (Auntie Salma / Arabic)

“Shukran.” She tried to refuse, but he waved her off. (Thank you / Arabic)

“Tfaddali, yā bintī. Allah yḥrissik.” (You’re welcome, my daughter. May God watch over you / Arabic)

Next stop: Nikos’s Butcher Shop. The smell of raw meat hit her before the bell above the door even jingled. Hooks gleamed overhead, rows of lamb ribs and thick slabs of beef hanging like ornaments. The place was busy, a couple of old Greek women in black kerchiefs waiting for their lamb shanks, two Armenian teenagers arguing over cuts for a barbecue. The butcher shop was never quiet; it was a kind of town square with a cash register.

“Guard it,” she told the dogs outside, setting her grocery bags down on the stoop. Their ears pricked at the smell drifting through the doorway, tails thumping like war drums. “I mean it,” she added, pointing at them. They whined dramatically, as if she’d just denied them their last meal, but stayed put.

Inside, Andy, Nikos’ son, was leaning on the counter like he owned the place, broad shoulders, curly black hair slicked back, a white apron smeared with traces of the morning’s work. He looked up the second she walked in, flashing that grin that could sell soap.

“Good morning, T.”

“Morning, Andy,” she muttered, tugging her hoodie sleeves up. “Two whole chickens, cut up. And whatever bones you’ve got for broth.”

Andy plucked a cleaver from the rack, twirling it once before dropping it on the cutting block with a satisfying thunk. “You making broth? For whom? Not for me, I know.”

“Dinner,” Talia replied curtly.

“Dinner,” he repeated, dragging the word like he was tasting it. “For this partner you keep talking about?”

She shot him a look. “Andy.”

“Hey, I’m not prying. Just saying. You show up here, early morning, buying chickens and soup bones, smells like love to me.” He smirked, already carving.

Talia ignored him, scanning the shelves stacked with jars of olives and tins of imported feta. “You mind if I run next door? Rosa’s expecting me.”

“Go,” Andy said, cleaver coming down on the breastbone with a crack. “But don’t think you’re getting away from the interrogation that easy.”

The bell over the door chimed, and Talia sang it like a ritual: “Rosaaa Rosaaaa” stretching the last vowel into a dramatic little operetta. The shop was already warm enough to fog the glass cases. Sugar and espresso in the air, butter and yeast humming underneath. Loaves of ciabatta cooling on racks, rosette piled in baskets, biscotti lined up like soldiers; almond, pistachio, chocolate-dipped. A tray of anginetti shone under lemon glaze. In the corner, a chalkboard listed the day’s specials in looping hand: crostata di frutta, maritozzi, cannoli, pane caldo.

Rosa popped up from behind the counter, flour on her cheek, hair twisted into a messy knot with a pencil jammed through it. She and Talia were the same age; same impatient stride, same get‑it‑done eyes. The place was hers now; her parents had passed it down last spring, keys wrapped in a dish towel like a blessing. She’d grown up in a port town outside Rome until she was ten, and it lingered in everything; her vowels, her hand gestures, the way she slapped dough like it owed her money. Rosa wasn’t Italian‑American. She was Italian, Italian, and everyone in Astoria respected the difference.

From behind the counter, Rosa popped up, apron dusted with flour, hair pulled back in a messy knot. She threw a hand on her hip. “Where the hell have you been?”

Talia leaned across the counter to kiss her cheek. “Work, amore.” (Love / Italian)

“Always work,” Rosa groaned, rolling her eyes like an Italian auntie twice her age. “Bella mia, you vanish for weeks and then you walk in here singing like Pavarotti.” (My beautiful one / Italian)

“What can I say? You inspire me.”

Rosa swatted her playfully with a dish towel. “Inspire, ha! You look thin. You eating? Or just drinking that detective coffee all the time?”

Talia smirked. “Ciabatta and some biscotti. That’s all I need.”

Rosa made a scandalized noise in her throat, already bustling around to fill the order. “Just bread and cookies? Madonna, no wonder you’re tired. Here.” She grabbed a tray and started stacking extra anginetti into the bag.

“Rosa-”

“No, no. Don’t argue. You’re family. You take them. You eat them. And you tell me tomorrow they were delicious.”

Talia laughed, shaking her head. “You spoil me.”

“You love it.”

“I do,” Talia admitted, winking as she passed a bill across the counter.

Rosa slid it right back. “Next time. Today’s on me.”

“You serious?”

“You kidding? My mama would rise from the grave if she heard I charged you for biscotti. Go, go. Take care of whoever you’re cooking for. And bring him by sometime. I need to see if this mystery detective eats like a man or like a bird.”

Talia just shook her head, smiling as she pushed out the door.

When Talia returned to the butcher, Andy slid a neatly wrapped parcel of chicken across the counter, but before she could thank him, Nikos himself emerged from the back, wiping his hands on a bloody apron. His eyes lit up the moment he saw her.

“Ahhh, Talia!” His voice boomed like a church bell. “Why haven’t you married my son yet?”

Andy grinned like the cat who’d gotten the cream, leaning against the counter with folded arms.

Talia raised an eyebrow. “I’m busy.”

“Busy!” Nikos scoffed, throwing his hands up. “Too busy for love? Nonsense. Look at him! Strong, Orthodox, good with children, good with meat. Every mother in Astoria wants him for a son-in-law!”

Andy tried to look modest but failed spectacularly, smirk growing wider.

Talia accepted the bag, keeping her face carefully neutral. “I’m sure they do.”

Nikos waved a cleaver in the air for emphasis. “And yet, here you are. Always alone. You’re wasting your youth!”

Andy leaned closer, stage-whispering, “Don’t listen to him. He thinks the world revolves around me.”

Talia rolled her eyes. “Of course he does. He’s Greek.”

That made Nikos bark out a laugh, clapping her on the shoulder with a meaty hand. “You see? She has the fire. She’s perfect.”

Andy smirked one last time, handing her the parcel. “See you soon, T.”

She didn’t answer. Because the truth was simple, and it gnawed at her as she stepped back outside to the dogs waiting loyally with the bags: Andy wasn’t the one she wanted.

Back home, the house was quiet except for the soft, steady sound of Munch’s snore upstairs. Talia unloaded the bags in the kitchen, then took the dogs to the sink one by one, washing their paws and bellies. Clean, they bounded upstairs and, ignoring her whispered protests, leapt onto the bed beside him.

She covered her mouth to stifle a laugh. “Please get down, he’s going to have a heart attack if he sees you.”

But they didn’t move. They curled protectively around him, one at his feet, one pressed to his side, one at the headboard like a sentry.

And Munch, asleep, shifted, just enough to rest a hand on the nearest dog, like he’d been doing it his whole life.

Talia stood in the doorway, heart twisting. The sight was ridiculous. And perfect.

She tugged off her hoodie, left in her bralette and sweatpants, and padded downstairs barefoot. The kitchen welcomed her with quiet. She set a pot on the stove, laid out the vegetables, the herbs, the chicken bones. The rhythm of chopping, stirring, simmering filled the silence.

It wasn’t just cooking. It was ritual. Care. The language she didn’t know how to speak to him yet.

She caught herself smiling.

And for once, she let herself.

ASTORIA - October 30, 2004 - 1:28 PM

The house smelled of simmering herbs and warm broth. Not the sterile smell of takeout containers she’d left in the precinct bin that week, but something fuller, deeper, almost ancestral. The windows in the kitchen had fogged up faintly where the pots bubbled; one with chicken broth seasoned exactly as her father used to; onion, carrot, bay leaves, peppercorns, and a generous bouquet of parsley and coriander. The other pot held lentils, her mother’s recipe. Cumin, turmeric, garlic, softened tomatoes, a squeeze of lemon at the end.

Talia hadn’t planned to cook. She never did, not in the chaos of her work schedule. But grief and longing had a way of guiding her hands toward the stove, pulling her into memory as if her parents were leaning over her shoulders, whispering, more salt, not too much heat, let it breathe, let it rest.

She stirred slowly, listening to the tick of the old kitchen clock and the occasional honk of traffic from 33^rd Street outside. The neighbourhood was alive: kids yelling in English and Spanish, the grocer’s bell chiming faintly whenever someone pulled the door, the steady hum of the auto shop across the block.

With both pots set to simmer, she finally had time to sit. She wiped her hands on a towel, tugged at the elastic waistband of her sweatpants, and reached for the book she had left on the counter. Pushkin. Nostalgia tucked between pages the way other people tucked photographs into albums. She curled up in the chair with a faint sigh. She felt Soviet today.

The dogs had abandoned her a while ago, drawn upstairs by the warm body still dozing in her bed. She smiled faintly at the thought.

Upstairs, Munch cracked one eye open to the sound of claws shifting against the blanket. The German Shepherds had taken up most of the mattress, pinning him in with the resigned loyalty of watchdogs. He groaned.

“I must be in hell,” he rasped, his voice gravelled from sleep.

He could hear Talia downstairs, pots clinking, pages turning. He imagined her ignoring him, which only made him more aware of the empty space at his side.

When she didn’t answer, he sat up, hair sticking out at impossible angles, his glasses lost somewhere on the nightstand. His body ached from the shooting. But here? Here, in her bed, it felt like time had stalled.

He was still adjusting to that. To her.

Talia heard his voice filter through the old wooden floorboards, and her lips tugged into a wry smile. She set her book down, smoothed the curls that had escaped their bun, and reached for a tray. One bowl of lentil soup, warm bread from the bakery down the block, a few biscotti, her book balanced carefully on top. She carried it upstairs like a ritual offering.

He was sitting up when she entered, shoulders hunched, squinting at her through the glare of daylight. The dogs thumped their tails against the mattress like they knew she carried food.

“Sleep well?” she asked softly, setting the tray down on the nightstand.

Munch rubbed his face with both hands. “Yeah, if you don’t count the Gestapo watching me breathe.” He jerked his head toward the dogs. “Your three goons here, I swear, they took shifts making sure I didn’t make a run for it.”

Her laugh was quiet, warm. “They like you. They don’t like anyone.”

“Great. The hounds of hell approve of me. Guess I should be honoured.”

He finally looked at her properly, and froze.

Sweatpants. Simple, grey, low on her hips. And a bralette, thin cotton, hugging the soft curve of her breasts, her skin glowing in the golden afternoon light. Her curls had spilled loose down her shoulders. Casual. Effortless. Unbearable.

Munch swallowed, throat dry. “You… cooked?” he asked, voice raspier than he meant.

“Don’t sound so shocked.” She handed him the bowl, steam curling between them. “It’s just soup. Mild. No spice bombs. Even you can handle it.”

He accepted the spoon but didn’t lift it right away, too distracted by the sight of her settling onto the edge of the bed beside him. She sat close, close enough that the heat of her body brushed his arm, but not touching. Not yet.

“You didn’t have to-”

“I wanted to,” she interrupted, pressing the spoon into his hand like a command. Her fingers lingered on his knuckles, soft but insistent. Something in his chest stuttered.

Talia opened the book again, flipping idly through its pages as he ate. The scratch of paper and the sound of his spoon were the only noises in the room. She read aloud here and there, a verse in Russian, translated softly into English. Her voice was calm, steady, almost hypnotic.

It was domestic. Dangerous in its simplicity.

Munch found himself watching her more than the print. The way her bralette shifted as she leaned forward, the dip of her waist above the elastic of her sweatpants, the curl she tucked behind her ear when it tickled her cheek. She didn’t seem to notice the effect she had on him, or maybe she did, and that was worse.

She caught him once, his gaze lingering too long. “You’re staring,” she murmured, not looking up from the page.

“Am not.”

“Mm.” Her lips curved into the smallest smirk. “Sure.”

The soup disappeared spoonful by spoonful. She reached over once to break the bread in half, handing him a piece like it was another unspoken offering. Their fingers brushed, and neither pulled away fast enough.

By the time the bowl was empty, the book had slipped from her lap onto the floor. Silence stretched; not awkward, but taut, like a string drawn too tight. The dogs shifted and sighed, oblivious.

She brushed a curl from her face, tucking it back with hands that trembled only slightly. “See? Not so bad having someone take care of you.”

He tried for a smirk, but it faltered. He held her gaze, long and steady, until the air between them turned thick, unbearably warm.

He wanted to say something. Thank you. Don’t stop. Stay. But the words jammed in his throat.

She didn’t press. She just let him see the truth in her eyes; care, warmth, and something softer than either of them dared name.

The dogs snored. A horn honked faintly outside. The world went on.

And here, in her room, they hovered at the edge of something neither could walk back from.

She wanted to reach for him. To slide her hand across the narrow gap and trace the line of his jaw, to anchor him where she could see he wanted to drift. But she didn’t. Not yet. Not when the timing would snap the thread too soon.

Instead, she stood, clearing the tray. The air shifted immediately, cooler without her so close.

“Rest, John,” she said, voice low, almost tender. “I’ll be right outside if you need me.”

She left, carrying the scent of cumin and fresh bread with her.

The room felt empty as soon as she was gone.

He leaned back, staring at the cracked ceiling, his chest hot with something he hadn’t let himself feel in years. Not attraction, he knew attraction too well. This was worse. Softer. More dangerous.

Her laugh, her care, her soup simmering like a prayer, he couldn’t file it under casual. Couldn’t shrug it off with a joke. Not when every part of her had carved itself into him already.

The dogs shifted, filling the silence, their warmth pressed against his legs like they were standing guard.

“Yeah,” he muttered to himself, running a hand through his wild hair. “Definitely in hell.”

But he didn’t move. Didn’t leave. Didn’t want to.

Because hell had never tasted like lentils and felt like home.

Chapter Text

ASTORIA - October 31, 2004 - 10:19 AM

The first thing John Munch registered when he woke wasn’t pain, which surprised him. He’d grown used to waking with some kind of reminder that his body was aging, a shoulder that protested, a rib that caught on his breath, the old wound that flared if he slept on it wrong. Today? Nothing. No pain. Just warmth.

For a moment, in that sleepy blur between dreams and consciousness, he thought maybe it was her. Maybe Talia had fallen asleep across his chest, hair spilling everywhere, the weight of her hand resting just above his heart. He wanted that image so badly that his brain gave it to him before his eyes opened. He clung to it, until he blinked.

Instead of her, three large German Shepherds were sprawled across the bed like sentinels who had abandoned their posts to take over his. Ramses had his head on the pillow where Talia should’ve been. Anubis and Heka were stretched diagonally, pinning the sheets in a tangle.

Munch let out a dry groan. “Figures. I’m not even the most important man in her bed.”

Still, he didn’t move right away. He breathed in. The sheets smelled like her; jasmine, smoke, something warm and spiced he could never name. The room was all soft edges, clutter that wasn’t really clutter, the faint sound of a radio left on somewhere in the house. Everything about it was the opposite of his apartment: hers was fresh coffee instead of instant, sunlight instead of lamps, colour and spice instead of grey walls and cold takeout boxes.

It wasn’t him.

And yet… he wanted it. Wanted it so badly it scared him.

With a reluctant sigh, he eased himself up, careful not to disturb the dogs. His side didn’t hurt at all, though he’d never admit that to her. He’d let her worry, if worrying kept her close.

On a chair by the dresser sat a neatly folded stack of clothes. He picked up the shirt and slacks. Too big for him, too neat to be anything he’d ever buy. Must’ve belonged to one of her brothers. “Great,” he muttered. “Now I’m stealing from the dead or the disapproving. Freud would have a field day.” Still, he tugged them on and padded downstairs.

She was there. Talia lay curled on the couch, arms folded, hair tumbling wild around her face. Even half-asleep, she glowed. To him, she always did, whether she was pulling apart an interrogation transcript with razor focus or standing barefoot in her kitchen with mascara smudged from yesterday. It hit him like it always did: the ridiculous, impossible thought that she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

She stirred when he passed the stairs. “I’m not sleeping,” she murmured without opening her eyes.

“Then why are your eyes closed, doll?” he shot back automatically. The word slipped out before he could catch it.

He froze.

She heard it. He could tell by the way her lips curved, slow and knowing, though she still hadn’t opened her eyes.

“Habit of yours, calling women that?” she asked.

“Only the dangerous and pretty ones,” he muttered, retreating toward the kitchen. He found the coffeepot on the stove, already brewed. Of course, she’d thought of it before he woke. Of course.

She pushed herself up, stretching lazily, the hem of her bralette riding up just slightly. He pretended not to notice, but his eyes betrayed him for a heartbeat too long.

“It’s Halloween,” she said softly. “We need to pick up candy.”

Munch glanced over his shoulder. “You celebrate that?”

“Not really,” she shrugged, reaching for the hoodie draped over the arm of the couch. “But the kids in the neighbourhood… they like to stop by. If I don’t have candy, their parents will guilt me for a year.”

He let out a half-laugh, half-sigh. It wasn’t judgment, but it was. He’d never celebrated anything in his life with that kind of tenderness. The idea of buying candy for neighbour kids felt… foreign. But he could see how natural it was to her.

For a long beat, he stood silent, mug halfway to his lips, thoughts too loud in his head. The warm kitchen, the smell of thyme and oud, the sound of her dogs padding around upstairs, it was all too much. Too close to something he couldn’t have.

“I’ll head home today,” he said, too quickly, without thinking.

The words cut through the room.

Her head snapped up, hurt flickering across her face before she caught it, tried to bury it under a calm mask. “Why?”

“You worry too much,” he said, shrugging like it didn’t matter. Like she didn’t matter.

Her voice dropped. “No, John. I care too much.”

He felt it like a blade between his ribs. Coward. That’s what he was. He wanted to grab her hand, pull her against him, promise he’d stay, stay forever, stay until the house grew quiet and the dogs grey. But the coward in him was louder.

Instead, he cleared his throat. “Where are you going?”

“Taking the dogs out. Stopping at the store for candy.” She bent to tug on her sneakers, pulling her hoodie tight against the morning chill. The dogs thundered down the stairs, tails wagging, circling her like worshippers around their queen. She clipped their leashes on, then turned back to him.

“You want to come?” she asked lightly, masking the plea under casualness. “See the neighbourhood. Meet the people I grew up with.”

The worst he could do was say no. The best would be-

“Sure,” he said. Too fast. Too unguarded. He reached for the coat she’d left for him, the one that matched hers almost embarrassingly well.

She smirked. “Where to first?”

“The bodega,” she said simply, tugging the door open. The morning sun spilled across the stoop, gilding her hair.

BODEGA ON 33^rd - October 31, 2004 - 10:59 AM

The bodega hadn’t changed in years. Not since she was a teen sneaking sunflower seeds and soda from the counter, not since her mother sent her down with a crumpled bill for fresh bread. The cracked linoleum floor, the flicker of the neon sign, the scent of old coffee and stacked plantains, it was all the same. Even Ali behind the counter looked exactly as he always had slouched, cigarette tucked behind his ear, nodding at customers without ever looking up.

Talia pushed the glass door open with her shoulder, the little bell chiming, and for a moment it was as if she had never left. Behind her, the dogs sat obediently outside, patient and watchful, their breath fogging the glass. She slipped between the shelves, familiar steps over worn tile, until she reached the candy section.

“Of course,” she muttered, half to herself. The shelves were stuffed for Halloween; plastic jack-o-lanterns of Tootsie Rolls, stacked bags of Milky Ways, Sour Patch Kids, Hershey bars. She reached for what she really wanted: peanut M&M’s, Reese’s Pieces, Snickers, a rainbow spread of Skittles and Starburst. Bright little packages of sugar against the greyness of the week. And then, without hesitation, she plucked up a handful of blue raspberry lollipops, tearing one open and slipping it between her glossed lips before she’d even thought about it.

Behind her, Munch stood still. Watching her.

She didn’t see him right away. He wasn’t looking at the candy. He was looking at her. The way she moved through this space, unselfconscious, like she belonged to it and it to her. Everyone here knew her. The old women haggling over bread nodded when she passed. Ali’s eyes had flickered up just for her. She wasn’t just another detective on the job here. She was rooted. Known.

And Munch, Munch lived in grey walls, half-light, piles of conspiracy books barricading him from the world. His fridge held beer and condiments that had expired before Y2K. No neighbours knew his name. Watching her now, he felt the weight of it; the difference. The danger of it.

He remembered the last time he’d really seen her. She had been crying then. Red eyes, tear-slick lashes, her face pale in the weak streetlight. He’d never asked her why. He told himself it wasn’t his business. He told himself she wouldn’t want him to. But the memory gnawed at him now.

She turned suddenly, a bag of peanut M&M’s in her hand. She pressed it into his palm without thinking, her fingers brushing his.

Electric. Immediate.

“You okay?” she asked softly, lollipop stem tilted from the corner of her mouth.

The truth pressed up against his teeth. No. I’m not okay. I’m in love with you, and it’s killing me.

Instead, he smirked. Armor up. “Yeah. Just never thought I’d see the day I’d be accessory to a candy run.”

She rolled her eyes, lips twitching around the lollipop. “Consider it field training.”

And then she was moving again, tossing another bag into the basket, as if she hadn’t just cracked him open.

They left the bodega in sunlight, the door jingling behind them. The dogs leapt up instantly, tails wagging, crowding around her legs with unrestrained joy. She let them loose without a second thought, three leashes dropped casually into her pocket as the pack moved down 33^rd with her like a tide.

Munch followed, slower. His eyes caught on the Nazar charm at her belt loop, glinting against her trench coat, swaying with her stride. Protection against the evil eye. She probably didn’t even think about it anymore. But he did. He thought about all the ways she needed protecting, all the ways he wanted to do it and couldn’t.

Astoria in autumn was noisy, bustling, but this stretch of 33^rd was something else, Talia’s name for it was the old city. And it fit. The synagogue, the Coptic church, the Russian Orthodox church, the mosque, all crowded onto the same block, domes and crosses and minarets brushing up against each other like family forced to share a table. The leaders of each congregation stood out front, baskets of candy on their steps, greeting neighbourhood kids, greeting her.

The Coptic church came first. Its sandstone facade stood strong, carved with crosses her mother used to trace with her fingertips. Father Stephanos Rami stepped out onto the steps, his cassock brushing his ankles, his hair silvered with age. His eyes lit the second he saw her.

“Ṣabāḥ el-khēr, yā bintī!” he called, voice echoing down the block. (Good morning, my daughter / Arabic)

Talia smiled; a real smile, unarmoured, the kind Munch almost never saw. She touched her forehead, chest, shoulders in the sign of the cross, bowing her head slightly. “Good morning, Father,” she said, warmth in every syllable.

The dogs bounded to him, nudging his hand until he chuckled and blessed them too.

“Light a candle for your mother tonight!” Father Stephanos called after her as she moved on.

Talia only nodded. She didn’t need reminding. She lit one every day. Munch walked beside her in silence. He didn’t miss the way her smile had dimmed after the priest’s words.

Next came the mosque. Sheikh Omar Al-Karim, tall and robed, stepped down to the sidewalk. He had known her mother in Alexandria, decades before, and his affection showed in the way he opened his arms.

“Aḥad Mubārak,” he greeted gently. (Blessed Sunday / Arabic)

Talia touched her hand to her heart. “Mubārak,” she returned softly, and kept walking. (Blessed / Arabic)

And then the synagogue. Munch felt his chest tighten before he even saw the man. Rabbi David Levy stepped out into the sun, basket of wrapped candies in hand, his voice booming. “John! Long time no see!”

Munch froze. Talia stopped too, her head tilting curiously. The rabbi was already striding forward, hand out, eyes bright. “Rabbi Levy?” Munch’s voice cracked into something unguarded. “I didn’t know you were here.”

The rabbi clasped his shoulders, laughing like they were back in Baltimore thirty years ago. “Transferred a few years back. And look at you, thought I’d never see you outside a basement again.”

Talia lingered at the edge of the sidewalk, watching. Munch hadn’t said a word to her about knowing her rabbi. He looked… different in this moment. Younger. Less tired. Like someone who remembered what it felt like to belong.

When they finally broke apart, she teased, “Didn’t know you knew my rabbi.”

He chuckled, shrugging like it was nothing. “Your rabbi? I’ve known him longer than you’ve been alive.” Her smirk softened, eyes lingering on his profile longer than she meant to.

The Russian Orthodox church sat at the corner, its domes catching the autumn light. She hesitated at the steps. The dogs waited patiently, already knowing the drill. She slipped inside alone, trench coat sweeping behind her.

The air was heavy with incense; the smell of beeswax candles and centuries of prayers soaked into the wood. Icons stared down with solemn faces, saints painted in gold halos and sorrowful eyes.

She lit four candles, one after the other. One for her father. One for her mother. One for Kareem. One for Lana. Her throat ached, but she said nothing aloud. She didn’t need to.

When she stepped back out, blinking against the sun, Munch was there. Holding the dogs’ leashes. Waiting.

“You okay?” he asked quietly.

She nodded. “Always.”

Neither of them believed it.

They walked toward the park, the dogs leading the way. For a while, neither spoke. The sounds of Astoria filled the silence, car horns, a vendor hawking hot pretzels, kids laughing as they raced to collect candy.

Finally, Talia broke it. “You looked different back there.”

“Back where?”

“With Rabbi Levy.” She glanced at him sidelong. “Like you belonged.”

He smirked faintly. “Don’t get used to it.”

“I liked it,” she said, too soft. And then, to cover: “It suits you. Being around people who actually like you.”

He barked a laugh. “Don’t start rumours, Amari.”

She grinned, and he felt that same electric pull he’d felt in the bodega. The one that told him if she asked him to stay, really stay, he wouldn’t say no.

By the time they reached the park, their conversation had shifted; old stories, half-jokes. She told him about running these streets as a kid, getting scolded by the church ladies, sneaking into the mosque with her shoes on. He told her about Baltimore basements and conspiracy rants that never quite landed.

And somewhere between her laughter and his smirk, the weight lifted. Just for a little while.

Talia never wanted the day to end. Neither did Munch.

But neither of them said it. Not yet.

ASTORIA - October 31, 2004 - 12:38 PM

The autumn air still clung to them when Talia unlocked the door, her dogs rushing in ahead like a tide breaking loose. Ramses bounded for the hallway first, Anubis close behind, and little Heka skittering in after them, nails clicking on the wood. They carried the damp scent of sidewalks and leaves, the ghosts of candy wrappers, the faint trace of firecrackers someone had already let off down the block.

Munch followed more slowly, leaning heavier on the frame than he would ever admit. His coat looked too big for him, like the weight of it was another thing dragging him down. He hated the way weakness lived in his body now, hated the tug of half-healed pain at his side. But when she turned to check on him, steady as a sentry, he only gave her that crooked look; half sarcasm, half surrender.

“You walk three German Shepherds like you’re leading a battalion,” he muttered. His voice was thin, but the sarcasm was intact. “Next time, I’m hiring backup.”

“Next time,” she said, brushing rain from her curls, “you’ll still be in my bed, where you belong.”

She didn’t give him time to answer. Her coat came off, hers first then his, both hung neatly on the rack. She ushered him inside with a hand against his arm, not too firm, but insistent. He didn’t resist. Not really.

The sound of children echoed faintly outside; trick-or-treaters shrieking in delight, the rustle of plastic bags, footsteps on stoops. A siren wound its way down Steinway Street, too far to matter, close enough to remind them of where they belonged.

“Sit,” she ordered softly, pointing him toward the couch. “Don’t argue.”

“I wasn’t going to,” he lied, lowering himself with the care of a man who wanted to pretend every movement didn’t cost him.

She left him there long enough to wrangle the dogs into the bathroom. The sounds carried: running water, her voice low, firm, coaxing, affectionate. The Shepherds whined, splashed, shook themselves like a rainstorm. He could picture her sleeves rolled up, fingers quick and certain, the ritual of cleaning what she loved so it wouldn’t track dirt into the sanctity she kept upstairs.

By the time she returned, her curls damp around her temples, the dogs smelled of soap and patience. She pressed a hand briefly to her hip, steadying herself, then turned to him. “Upstairs.”

“Bossy,” he muttered, but rose anyway. She shadowed him up the creaking stairs, one hand brushing the rail, the other hovering as if she could catch him if he faltered.

Her bedroom was spare but warm, the bed already turned down. She steered him to it and pressed a palm to his chest until he lowered himself onto the mattress. He let out a breath like surrender.

“You should be asleep,” she murmured, smoothing the blanket over him.

“Hard to sleep when you hover like a guardian angel with a bad temper,” he rasped. His humour was dry, but it cost him a little breath.

Her lips curved despite herself. “Better than dying alone in your Brooklyn apartment.”

That earned a laugh, low and broken but real. He tipped his head against the pillow, watching her as she reached for his glasses, slipping them carefully from his face. Without them, he looked both sharper and more vulnerable, as though the armour of distance had been lifted.

“You’ve got an answer for everything, don’t you?” he whispered.

“Someone has to keep you alive, John.” She lingered; the words heavier than they sounded.

The silence thickened. She didn’t move away. He could feel her breath warm on his cheek, see the soft gleam of her eyes in the muted light. His hand twitched beneath the blanket, aching to reach up, to touch her hair, to do something reckless.

“Talia…” His voice broke on her name.

Her pulse stumbled. She leaned in without realizing, the space between them evaporating, his breath mingling with hers.

He swallowed, his mouth curving into the faintest, wryest smile. “If you’re gonna kiss me, doll, do it before I lose what’s left of my dignity.”

Her eyes widened, soft and uncertain. She wanted it, God, she wanted it, but she let the moment stretch, unbearable, until she whispered, “Not yet.”

Her hand lingered on his chest, pressing lightly against his heartbeat, before slipping away. She stood, forcing air into her lungs, and turned for the door. “Rest. I’ll bring you something.”

He closed his eyes, his expression unreadable, and let her go. Downstairs, the kitchen welcomed her like a memory. She lit the burner beneath the pot of lentil soup she’d made the night before, the scent rising: garlic, cumin, lemon. She set out bread, tore it with her fingers, arranged it all on a tray with quiet precision. Outside, children’s voices swelled again, feet pounding past her stoop. The city went on living.

By the time she carried the tray back upstairs, he was already asleep. His chest rose steady beneath the blankets; his mouth slackened in rest. She paused in the doorway, staring at him for a long moment. He looked younger this way. Softer. Like the weight of everything he carried had finally set itself down.

She placed the tray quietly on the dresser. Then she slipped onto the bed beside him, careful not to wake him, her back against the headboard, Pushkin open in her lap. The dogs settled at her feet, warm sentinels. The room felt wrapped in something holy, something fragile.

She looked down at him once more, her heart aching with the kind of love that came only after fear. This, this was everything she wanted. Not the badge, not the endless cases, not the ghosts she carried. Just this: him breathing beside her, the city safe outside, the soup waiting on the dresser, and her book resting on her knees.

It was all she wanted. And, though he hadn’t said it, she knew it was all he wanted too.

Chapter Text

ASTORIA - November 2, 2004 - 8:48 PM

The rain had not let up all night. Sheets of it fell across Astoria, blurring the rowhouses into watercolour silhouettes, smudging neon signs into nothing but a dull glow. The gutters overflowed, rushing with a muddy stream that carried cigarette butts, soggy leaves, and half-crushed coffee cups down toward the East River.

Inside the Amari-Volkov rowhouse, it was quiet. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that sits heavy in the chest, where the sound of the rain only makes the silence feel deeper. The lamps in the living room were off; only the kitchen light glowed faintly, casting long shadows down the hallway. The air smelled faintly of coffee and incense, of rain seeping through the old brick walls.

Talia stood at the door, sleeves of her hoodie falling past her fingertips, twisting the fabric like it could tether him there. Her curls were loose, still damp from the shower she had taken hours earlier, when she had washed the smell of him from her skin only to let him back into her bed again. Four days. Four days of pretending the world outside didn’t exist, of pretending she wasn’t a cop, and he wasn’t her superior, of pretending the city didn’t breathe down their necks.

And now he was leaving.

Munch stood with his hand on the doorknob, trench coat collar turned up, rain already streaking the glass behind him. He looked out of place here; this wasn’t his Lower East Side walk-up with its conspiracy-strewn walls and cluttered bookshelves. This was her home, warm with gold frames and the faint glow of Orthodox icons, photographs of a family half-buried in grief. And somehow, in the last four days, he had fit here too well.

He turned slightly, his glasses catching the low light, and Talia saw it; the hesitation, the pull. The part of him that wanted to stay.

“You don’t have to go,” she whispered, voice barely carrying over the rain against the windows. Her eyes found his, steady, aching. “Not tonight.”

Munch exhaled, a low laugh without humour. “Doll… if I don’t leave now, I won’t ever leave.”

His words hung in the air like cigarette smoke; soft, bitter, clinging.

She stepped closer, so close she could see the lines around his eyes, the exhaustion etched into him after decades on the job, after decades of never letting anyone this close. She lifted her hand, tentative, fingers brushing his. The smallest contact.

“Then don’t,” she said, barely a breath. “Stay.”

His hand caught hers, fingers long and warm, and he pressed her palm against his cheek like it was the only anchor he had. For a moment, the world outside could have drowned, and neither of them would’ve cared.

“I want to,” he admitted, voice rough, low. “More than anything. You think I don’t? You think I haven’t been playing out every possible way this ends?” His thumb traced the back of her hand, slow, reverent. “But the truth is, Amari… I don’t get happy endings. I get half-measures. I get ghosts. And you… you deserve more than whatever I am.”

She shook her head, eyes glassy. “Don’t decide that for me. You don’t get to tell me what I deserve.” Her voice cracked, but she steadied it. “You think I don’t know who you are? I know, John. I know you’re bitter and complicated and you believe every shadow has a man behind it. I know you don’t sleep, and you eat cold Chinese takeout at three in the morning. And I know-” her breath caught, “-I know you’ve been waiting your whole life for someone to prove you wrong about yourself.”

The silence between them felt alive.

Munch looked away first, down at their hands. “Four days, Talia. That’s all it’s been. Four days and I feel like I’ve known you my whole damn life. Do you understand how dangerous that is? For both of us?”

She stepped even closer, close enough that the chain around her neck brushed against his chest. Her voice was steady, but her eyes betrayed her. “Then let it be dangerous. For once, let yourself want something without running from it.”

His hand slid from her palm to her face, tracing the curve of her cheek, her jaw, lingering like he wanted to memorize it. His lips parted like he might finally give in. The rain drummed harder against the glass, like the city itself was holding its breath.

“Talia…” he whispered, almost a prayer. “You don’t know how badly I want this.”

“Then stop leaving,” she whispered back. Her breath mingled with his. “Stay.”

For one suspended second, it felt possible. It felt like maybe he’d drop his bag, maybe he’d let the rain drown the city outside, maybe he’d follow her back upstairs and let the night stretch on forever.

But the second passed.

Munch pulled back just slightly, his hand dropping, his eyes shuttering. “If I stay tonight,” he said, his voice steadier than he felt, “I’ll never walk out that door again. And then what? You and me, hiding from Cragen, sneaking around like we’re teenagers? You think the squad won’t see it all over our faces? I can’t… I can’t risk screwing up the one good thing left in my life, my badge. And I won’t let you screw up yours.”

The words hit like a gavel. Talia’s throat tightened. She wanted to argue, wanted to scream, wanted to beg. Instead, she reached for him one last time, fingers catching the lapel of his coat. “So that’s it?”

Munch’s eyes softened. He leaned down, kissed her forehead. It was brief, but it seared. “Four days I’ll be replaying for the rest of my life,” he murmured.

Then he opened the door. The rush of cold rain-filled air hit the warmth of the house. And just like that, he was gone.

Talia stood frozen in the doorway, watching his figure dissolve into the rain-slicked street, trench coat vanishing into shadow. The sound of his footsteps faded, drowned by the storm.

She closed the door slowly, pressing her back against it. Her hands trembled. The house was too quiet again, the silence pressing in. She crossed herself instinctively, fingers brushing over the little Coptic cross on her keychain.

Upstairs, the bed still held the faint impression of him. His warmth still clung to the sheets, his scent to the pillow. For four days, she had let herself believe in something impossible. For four days, she had loved without restraint.

Now the house was cold again.

And she was alone.

But God help her, she knew he loved her too.

SVU PRECINCT - November 22, 2004 - 9:15 AM

The lull was the kind of rare gift no cop ever trusted. It was a Monday morning in late November, the kind that smelled like burnt coffee and printer ink, and yet, miraculously, no new cases were coming through the door. The bullpen was quieter than usual, detectives scattered at their desks, typing up reports, pretending to catch up on paperwork, half-heartedly scanning through old files. The hum of the fluorescent lights above was louder than the phones.

Talia sat at her desk, hair still damp from the cold air outside, curls pulled back loosely, trench coat draped over her chair. She was annotating a witness statement in the margin, pen clicking against her knee in idle rhythm. Across from her, Munch was buried in an old case file, glasses sliding down the bridge of his nose, lips pursed in that permanent state of scepticism. He looked the same as he always did, except he didn’t. Not to her. Not after the last three weeks.

Three weeks of avoiding what they both knew.
Three weeks of carefully edited sentences.
Three weeks of pretending.

He hadn’t called her doll once in public since. Not once. And she missed it, though she’d never admit it out loud. When he drove her home at night, he waited until the lights flicked on in her living room before pulling away. She knew because she caught him once, his reflection in the glass, headlights lingering a beat too long. He hadn’t said a word. Neither had she.

The quiet broke when Olivia breezed in, hanging up her coat with a smile so faint it was almost invisible. Almost. But not to this group.

Fin clocked it immediately. “Somebody had a good night.”

Olivia froze mid-step, gave him the kind of look that could dismember a man in seconds. It might have worked, if she wasn’t grinning.

“Shut up,” she said, but there wasn’t much heat in it.

That was all the spark the bullpen needed. Elliot leaned back in his chair, smirk spreading like gasoline on fire. “So? How was the date?”

Olivia’s cheeks went pink. “It was fine.”

“Fine?” Fin echoed, eyebrows raised. “That’s it? Fine?”

Talia glanced up from her notes, curiosity tugging. She slid off her chair and perched herself casually on the corner of Fin’s desk, legs crossed, pen still twirling between her fingers. “What was wrong with him?”

“Nothing was wrong,” Olivia insisted, shrugging out of her blazer. But the smirk lingering gave her away.

“C’mon, Liv,” Elliot prodded, leaning forward now, like a kid who smelled gossip. “What’s your type, huh? ‘Cause we know you’re not saying yes to just anyone.”

Olivia threw her hands up. “I don’t have a type.”

Everyone laughed. “Everybody’s got a type,” Fin said. “Tall? Short? Clean cut? Scruffy? Come on, talk to us.”

Munch didn’t look up from his file. His voice cut through anyway, dry as dust. “Her type is anyone dumb enough to think dating a cop is a good idea.”

That got Talia. She burst into laughter, shoulders shaking as she covered her mouth. Olivia shot Munch a glare, but her lips twitched. “John.”

“Tell me I’m wrong,” Munch said, finally glancing over the rim of his glasses.

“You’re wrong,” she fired back.

He arched a brow. “Am I?”

Olivia groaned, already regretting walking into this. “Why are you even in this conversation?”

“Because” Munch said, returning to his file like it was scripture, “watching all of you try to dissect romance like it’s a police sketch is the most entertainment I’ve had all week.”

That set off another round of chuckles. Even Cragen poked his head out of his office for a moment, smirk tugging at his mouth as he shook his head at his detectives acting like teenagers. For once, the air was light. Almost normal. Almost human.

Then Elliot ruined it. “Alright, fine,” he said, tossing his pen on the desk with dramatic flair. “If Liv won’t tell us, we’ll go around. Type check. Who’s first?”

“Not it,” Fin said immediately.

“Not it,” Olivia echoed.

Elliot grinned, scanning the room like a shark. His gaze landed squarely on Talia, still perched on Fin’s desk. “You’re up.”

Talia’s head snapped toward him, brows arching. “Oh no. Don’t even start.”

“C’mon, Amari,” Fin chimed in, grin wide now. “Don’t tell me you don’t have a type.”

She let out a low laugh, shaking her head. “Why do men think women sit around making lists of features we like? That’s not how it works.”

“That’s deflection,” Elliot said, pointing a finger like he’d cracked a case. “Total deflection.”

“I’m not deflecting,” she countered smoothly. “I’m ignoring.”

That made Fin snort. “She got you there.”

But Elliot wasn’t letting go. “Okay, okay, let me guess. Your type’s… tall, dark, handsome. The gym-rat thing. Probably drives something flashy.”

Talia barked out a laugh. “Wow. Groundbreaking.”

“Don’t tell me I’m wrong.”

“You’re wrong,” she said easily, twirling the pen.

“Oh, okay.” Elliot leaned back, grinning. “Then what? You like the bad boy type? Tattoos, motorcycle, leather jacket?”

“You’ve been watching too much TV,” she fired back, shaking her head.

“So, what then?” Fin pressed. “Come on, Amari. Spill.”

For the first time, she hesitated. Just long enough for Munch to notice. His posture didn’t change; still bent over the file, glasses slipping, but she could feel it. He was listening. Bracing.

The silence stretched. Then her lips curved, slow and deliberate. Mischief lit her eyes. “You know what?” she said at last, voice casual. “I like my men old.”

That landed like a gunshot.

“Old?” Elliot repeated, choking on a laugh. “Like… retirement home old?”

“Old,” Talia confirmed, dead serious. She tapped her pen against her knee, expression giving nothing away. “Preferably almost dying. Definitely Jewish.”

The bullpen erupted. Fin doubled over. “Yo, what?!” Olivia buried her face in her hands, laughing so hard her shoulders shook. Elliot slammed his palm on the desk. “You’re kidding. You have to be kidding.”

“Completely serious,” Talia said, serene as ever. She glanced across the room, just long enough to lock eyes with Munch. The moment stretched, too brief to be caught by anyone else, too sharp to be anything but intentional. Her smirk deepened. “That’s my type.”

For a man who’d built a career out of deadpan sarcasm and stone-faced paranoia, John Munch was undone by five words. His ears went hot, red creeping up his neck before he could stop it. He coughed, flipping the file like it was suddenly urgent, muttering, “Guess I should update my will.”

Talia didn’t look away. Not yet.

When she finally did, her smile lingered.

SVU PRECINCT - November 22, 2004 - 9:29 PM

The bullpen had emptied hours ago. Desks were bare, phones quiet, the silence heavy. The city outside hummed in neon and sirens, but here it was only paper shuffling and the low creak of old furniture. Munch sat at his desk, stacking files into neat, unnecessary piles. The ritual of avoidance.

He didn’t hear her until she was there. Talia, coat over her arm, hair pulled loose from its clip. She paused by his desk, shadow stretching across his paperwork.

“Almost dying, huh?” he muttered without looking up.

She leaned down, just close enough that her voice brushed warm against his ear. “Almost dying,” she confirmed softly. Then, after a beat that cracked him open, she added, “Don’t forget, you’re the one who left.”

And then she was gone. He watched her go, watched the elevator doors close, the echo of her perfume lingering in the air. His ears burned again, and for the first time in years, his heart thudded like it had no business still working.

He muttered to himself, the words falling flat in the empty room: “She’s gonna be the death of me.”

SVU PRECINCT - November 23, 2004 - 8:28 AM

The bullpen was alive in that way it only ever was between cases; half chaos, half lull. Phones rang, keyboards clacked, chairs squeaked on worn linoleum. A half-eaten box of donuts sat abandoned on the corner table, powdered sugar dusting the manila folders underneath.

Fin had his feet kicked up on his desk like a man who knew he was about to start trouble. His smirk stretched slow, deliberate. He waited until the chatter hit its peak before dropping his line like bait into water.

“So,” he drawled, just loud enough to make heads turn, “I ran into Mike Sandoval down at Narcotics yesterday.”

Talia glanced up from her notes, brow raised. Olivia shot a look across her desk, already bracing. Elliot paused mid-sip of his coffee.

“Oh yeah?” Elliot asked, always ready to stir the pot.

“Mm-hm.” Fin nodded, drawing it out like a man telling a good joke. “Tall. Smooth. Works out. Educated. Polite. Guy’s even got decent shoes, and you know that’s rare.”

Olivia smirked. “Wow. Be still my heart.”

“I’m serious,” Fin pressed, his grin widening. He jabbed a finger across the room toward Talia. “Amari. I should set you two up.”

Talia blinked, pen still poised over her notes. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me,” Fin said, smug. “You keep sittin’ around here with these dinosaurs, you’re gonna start collectin’ dust. Sandoval’s a good guy. I’ll give him your number.”

“Wow,” she said flatly, tossing her pen onto her desk. “How very thoughtful of you, Detective Tutuola. Really looking out for my best interests.”

Olivia bit the inside of her cheek to hide her smile. Elliot leaned forward, smelling blood. “So? You interested?”

Talia tilted her head, fingers tapping a rhythm on her notebook. “You know what? He does sound cute.”

That was all it took.

“Ha!” Fin slapped his desk with triumph. “Finally. A normal answer outta you.”

Elliot grinned. “See, Fin? Miracles happen.”

Olivia arched a brow. “Don’t get too excited. You’re acting like you just won the lottery.”

But Talia’s eyes slid sideways, toward Munch. He hadn’t joined the chorus. Hadn’t even looked up from the stack of case files he was pretending to read. But his jaw was tight, his ears pink, and when Talia said cute, his pen stopped moving.

She caught it instantly. And she couldn’t resist. “Oh, come on,” she said, a grin tugging at her lips. “What’s the harm? Maybe Fin’s right. Maybe I could use a little… normal.”

Fin spread his arms like a man vindicated. “Exactly. Dinner, drinks. Boom. Next thing you know, you’re not sittin’ home readin’ crime scene reports with these sad old men.”

Munch finally snapped his gaze upward. “Hey,” he said sharply, his voice slicing through the noise. “I happen to enjoy reading crime scene reports at home.”

Olivia didn’t even glance up. “That’s not a defence, John.”

Elliot coughed into his coffee, trying to hide a grin.

Talia leaned back in her chair, crossing her arms. Her voice was calm, but the undercurrent was wicked. “Besides,” she said, eyes fixed on Munch like she’d been waiting all morning for this, “old men are kinda my thing.”

The bullpen erupted. Elliot nearly spit his coffee. Olivia pressed her lips together so hard her shoulders shook. Fin slapped the desk again, doubled over in laughter.

Munch froze. His ears flamed. “You’re impossible,” he muttered, ducking his head back down into the file like it could shield him.

But the corner of his mouth twitched. And Talia saw it.

She always did.

ASTORIA - November 24, 2004 - 1:38 AM

Queens was a different city after midnight. Quieter, but not silent, an occasional siren in the distance, the hiss of tires on wet pavement, the hum of neon bleeding from a bodega that never closed. The rowhouses along 33^rd Street seemed to sleep, but Talia’s home glowed faintly, lamplight slipping through gauzy curtains, scented with rosewater and clove.

She was tired, but the ritual of coming home was grounding: shoes by the door, blouse shed on the arm of the couch, glasses perched on the bridge of her nose, not that she needed them. Silk shorts and a black bralette, bare feet sinking into the worn rug. Her dogs moved with her, lazy guardians; Ramses heavy on the couch, Anubis trailing like a shadow, Heka nudging his nose into her palm. She curled up with a book, one knee tucked under her, hair pulled loose, and for the first time all day, she exhaled.

The knock shattered it. Sharp. Out of place. At nearly two in the morning. The dogs barked once, but their tails wagged. Whoever it was, they knew him. Talia froze, book lowering slowly, a frown cutting across her face as she rose and padded barefoot to the door. She opened it.

And there he was.

John Munch. Rumpled trench coat, collar askew, hair in disarray. A man dragged here by something he couldn’t name. He clutched a case file in his hand like it was an excuse, but his eyes gave him away; restless, dark, burning in the low light.

Her voice was soft, careful. “John?”

“Don’t get excited,” he muttered, brushing past her into the living room before she could answer. He set the file down on the coffee table with too much precision, like order could disguise chaos. “I just came to drop this off. Case file. Important.”

Talia closed the door slowly, arms folding. She arched a brow. “You came all the way to Queens at two in the morning… for a file?”

“Yes.” His tone was sharp, clipped. Too sharp. He didn’t look at her.

“Uh-huh.”

The dogs padded forward, sniffing at his shoes. Heka leaned into him, tail wagging like he’d found an old friend. Munch crouched briefly, scratching behind the shepherd’s ears, eyes fixed on the dog instead of her.

“Something you want to say?” she asked gently, her voice losing its edge.

He laughed once, hollow. “No. I just… don’t think Fin’s matchmaking is a good idea.”

Her brows rose. “Oh?”

“Sandoval,” he said bitterly, spitting the name like it left a bad taste. “He’s… young. Shiny. Probably thinks cologne is a personality. He’s not-” He cut himself off, jaw tight.

Her lips curved faintly. She stepped closer, voice dipping low. “You jealous, Detective?”

His eyes snapped up. Sharp, dark, and pained. His voice cracked like a wire pulled too tight. “Don’t.”

She tilted her head. “Don’t what?”

“Don’t joke about that.”

The room stilled. The hum of the fridge, the faint hiss of the radiator, the sound of her dogs settling back down, all of it faded until it was only them.

Talia took another step, closing the gap until she could see the twitch in his jaw, the lines around his tired eyes. Her chin tilted upward, her voice a whisper. “John…”

He swallowed hard. His hands curled into fists at his sides. “You think this is a game?”

“No.” Her voice broke soft, stripped bare. “Do you?”

For a long, unbearable moment, neither moved. His breath uneven. Hers steady. Weeks of tension pressing down like a weight. His hand twitched; jerked, almost, like it wanted to reach for her, but he fought it. His voice was ragged when it finally came. “You deserve someone better than me.”

Her smile was devastating, heartbreakingly soft. She shook her head. “I don’t want someone better. I wanted you.”

That undid him. His exhale was ragged, his eyes shutting for a beat like her words had cut him open and stitched him shut all at once. When he opened them again, she was still there. So close. So warm. Waiting.

Her hand lifted, trembling slightly as it brushed his sleeve. A feather-light touch, barely there. His breath hitched. He leaned in. Just slightly. Just enough that she could feel the heat of him. Inches. Less. The air hummed.

“John…” she whispered, the sound barely air, her lips parted, her curls spilling loose around her face.

His gaze flicked down to her mouth; once, twice, and back up. His hands shook at his sides. He leaned closer, his nose nearly brushing hers. The scent of her; oud, silk, the faint smoke of her candle, pulled him under. His voice broke like confession. “Talia…”

Her lips curved in the faintest, saddest smile. “I know.”

She didn’t move closer. Neither did he. The silence roared. The almost became unbearable. It wasn’t a kiss; it was worse. It was everything but.

He closed his eyes, leaned just a fraction closer, his breath ghosting her lips, so close it was already a kiss in his head. And then, he stopped.

Like pulling himself back from the edge of a cliff.

He stepped away. One step, then two, trench coat closing like armour. His sarcasm slid back into place, brittle and thin. “I should go.”

Her throat tightened, but she nodded. “Goodnight, John.”

At the door, he hesitated. His hand lingered on the knob, knuckles white. He glanced back. His eyes were raw, tortured, overflowing with everything he couldn’t say, everything he’d denied himself.

And then he left.

The door clicked shut.

And Talia stood in the quiet, heart pounding, lips trembling with the ghost of the kiss that never was.

Chapter Text

SVU PRECINT - November 26, 2004 - 7:15 PM

The bullpen was thinning the way New York thins after dark, by degrees, with noise lingering in the corners. Phones clicked over to voicemail. Chairs scraped. Coat sleeves slid over tired shoulders. The fluorescents hummed like they resented being left on.

Olivia had ducked out first, a hand in the air, a smile that said don’t burn the place down. Elliot followed with a muttered line about traffic on the FDR and a grimace that insisted he’d be right. Even Fin had vanished, wearing a smug grin and the words ‘setting things in motion’ like a sign around his neck.

Talia knew exactly what motion he meant. Mike Sandoval. Narcotics. A decent guy by all objective measures; tall, good posture, polite. The kind of man strangers described in wedding toasts as solid. He’d texted earlier: Dinner? 8:00? She’d answered Sure with her thumb dancing over T9, more politeness and curiosity than conviction.

It was 7:15 now. And she should’ve been heading out the door.

Except John Munch was still at his desk.

He sat hunched over a battered brown file, glasses low on his nose, the lamplight carving him out of the shadows with soft gold. Tie loosened, sleeves rolled, collar slightly askew, he was all edges and exhaustion and something that felt like gravity. A curled photograph lay at the top of the stack, colour drained into sepia: a bank of winter-bare trees, black water, a shape in the reeds you didn’t want to look at twice.

Talia stood by her own desk with her jacket in one hand and keys in the other. She watched him. The bullpen’s low sounds softened around the outline of him, and she felt the familiar twist in her chest, the one that meant danger and comfort and something she refused to call by its name.

She set her keys back down. “Cold case?” she asked, voice gentle as she crossed the space between them.

Munch surfaced like a diver out of deep water, blinking. “Hm? Yeah.” He tapped the top of the file with two fingers. “Eighty-nine. Girl vanished in December. Body turned up months later in the Bronx River. No witnesses. No clean evidence. No one cared long enough.”

“Fifteen years,” Talia murmured, pulling out the chair across from him and sitting. “You pulled it today because…?”

“Because insomnia’s cheaper than therapy,” he said, deadpan, then smirked like it almost counted as a joke. “And because puzzles shouldn’t get the last word.”

She propped her chin on her hand. “Cheaper, sure. Not healthier.”

He gave her a look over the rim of his glasses. “Look at you. Diagnosing me already. Must be love.”

The corner of her mouth lifted, but she didn’t give him the satisfaction of a comeback. The light pooled on the desk between them like a warm secret. Farther out in the room, a copier clattered into sleep. Somewhere near the break room a coffee pot gasped its last breath over burnt grounds, the smell like old pennies.

“Walk me through,” she said.

He did. The cadence of his voice lowered, the sarcasm sanded down by the habit of reading the dead out loud. He skimmed notes in a hand not his own and frowned when he found mistakes, hummed when he found something that lined up. She watched his fingers trace the margin where some forgotten detective had scrawled a theory, watched the way his mouth tightened at lazy leaps. She offered a counterfactual here, a thread there. He took them without comment, but the glint in his eyes sharpened.

At some point; some quiet, unremarkable point, the rest of the squad room slid into darkness. Desk lamps winked out one by one until only their corner glowed, a little raft of light in a grey sea. The windows reflected the room back at them: two investigators in a small constellation, the city beyond as a score of amber dots and steam.

Talia forgot about the time. She forgot about Mike’s text. She forgot, even, to sling her jacket over the back of her chair. She leaned over the desk for the photograph, shoulder brushing his as she angled the light, and neither of them moved away. They breathed like conspirators.

“You’re supposed to be leaving,” he said after a long stretch, tone dry but too quiet to be teasing.

“I was,” she answered, not looking up from the photo. A modest house, a chain-link fence with a sagging corner. “Then you started talking about the way the reeds bent.”

“Cancelling dates to sit with me under a desk lamp.” He huffed a laugh that felt like surrender. “Your standards need work, doll.”

There it was. Doll. The syllable looped around her ribs like silk, and she hated what it did to her knees. She turned her head. The lamp threw his face into planes of warm and shadow, softened the comb-over she pretended to dislike and turned it into something that only existed in dim light and soft rooms. He was not beautiful. He was worse, interesting.

“Maybe my standards are exactly where I want them,” she said softly. The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was charged, like the second before a storm when the city holds its breath.

SVU PRECINT - November 26, 2004 - 8:47 PM

Her phone buzzed once in her bag: You still coming? - M. She slid it farther down without looking and nudged a paper toward Munch with the back of her knuckle.

“See that?” she said. “Autopsy notes say diatoms consistent with the lower river, not the upper. If she was found up near Scarsdale, why’s she breathing water from near the salt line?”

His mouth twisted in appreciation. “Because she wasn’t dumped where she drowned.”

“Or wasn’t drowned where she was dumped,” she countered.

“Semantics,” he said, but softer now. He liked when she met him in the margins. He liked that she saw the stubborn little burrs that snagged on his brain at three in the morning.

They moved together the way they sometimes did in interviews, two hands on one wheel, arguing through the turn but flipping the blinker at the same time. He pulled a city map from a drawer and anchored the corners under a mug, a stapler, a paperback someone had left behind. She stood, leaned over the desk, pointed with a capped pen.

“Bronx River Park, here,” she murmured. “Maintenance access by the old footbridge… and this inlet would pull debris south on a rainy night.”

He watched her hand hover over the map. He watched her wrist, the bracelet there, thin gold, like the edges of icons. He watched the curve of her mouth as she hunted a detail to death. It should have been infuriating. It had been, once. Now it was a slow, stunned delight he kept trying to talk himself out of.

“You ever going to tell me why you like this stuff?” he asked, lightly. “Rusted cases, bodies in rivers. You could’ve picked any part of this job.”

She didn’t look at him. “You ever going to tell me why you keep reopening them?”

“Because I’m a masochist,” he said.

“Because you believe,” she corrected. “Even if you pretend you don’t.”

He made a face like she’d stepped on his foot. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Be nice to me.” He gestured at the file. “It messes with my brand.”

She smiled without showing teeth. “You’re not a brand, John.”

“No? Then what am I?”

“Something real,” she said, and the word real lodged in his throat like a pill he couldn’t swallow with water. He reached for sarcasm and found none.

Her phone buzzed again.

She ignored it.

Somewhere outside, a siren wound itself into a scream, then faded. Steam out on the street vented slow from a manhole, white ghosts blurring the curb. From Cragen’s office; the light off, blinds half-drawn, the faint smell of the Captain’s cologne clung to the air like authority that lasted longer than he did.

“You’re going to miss your dinner,” John said, mild.

“Maybe,” she answered.

“Your guy-” he made a faint face “-Mike, he’ll be disappointed.”

“Maybe,” she said again, and looked at him like he was the better gamble and the worse idea.

SVU PRECINT - November 26, 2004 - 10:11 PM

By the time the computer screens dimmed themselves into screensaver fish and the heater thumped like an old man’s knee in the cold, they were still there. The case file had grown restless, spilling its pages across the desk, a fan of paper wings. Munch rubbed his temple with two fingers, the soft, thin skin at his eyes reminding her he’d lived a life before he ever walked into SVU. She wanted to know it like a file she could only open when the lights were low.

“You’re still here,” he said, as if he’d just noticed, as if it hadn’t been the only thing he’d noticed for an hour.

“You’re observant,” she shot back.

He gave her a look that wasn’t quite a plea. “I’m serious, Amari. Why?”

It was the way he said her name, Amari, like a dare and a prayer. She tilted her head, curls glinting dull bronze in the lamplight. “Because you’re here.”

The words hung, heavy as incense. He swallowed, his gaze dropping to the file as if paper could shield him from the oldest truths. “Dangerous thing to say.”

“Why?”

“Because I’ll believe you,” he said, too soft for the room and too loud for his chest.

Her breath snagged. He felt it, because he felt everything about her, the way she did him, the micro flinch when a witness lied, the way her shoulders dropped when a victim finally let go. He felt the beat where she almost reached across the desk. He felt the way he wanted to let her.

SVU PRECINT - November 26, 2004 - 11:07 PM

Her phone lit her bag again. This time she pulled it out, stared at the screen, at You still coming? and the timestamp, then typed with precise, impolite mercy: Rain check. Sorry. She flipped the phone closed with a soft snap and slid it away.

“Sandoval?” he asked, too casual.

“Yea,” she said. A smile curled at the edge of her mouth. “Cancelled.”

He made a show of returning to the map. “Your loss.”

“Undoubtedly.”

They worked in comfortable, charged silence. He asked her to read him the paragraph again about soil composition at the shoreline. She did. He countered with the precinct log of patrol car sightings the night the girl disappeared. She corrected his assumption with a detail about traffic patterns on a Friday before Christmas. When she finished, the quiet that fell wasn’t empty. It was full, like a held breath.

He leaned back and the chair protested. The sound felt intimate, like a bed creaking in a room where no one spoke. He scrubbed a hand over his face. “You ever feel like we’re just rearranging bones?” he asked, a sad little grin to soften the fatalist in him.

“Sometimes,” she said. “But sometimes you rearrange them into a skeleton that stands up.”

“Look at you. Poetry.”

“Don’t get used to it.”

“Too late.”

She laughed then, quiet, real. It cracked something gentle open between them. She let her hand rest near his on the desk. Not touching. Close enough that his pinkie brushed hers once when he shifted. A nothing touch. A seismic event.

He didn’t move away.

SVU PRECINT - November 26, 2004 - 11:54 PM

It had grown late enough that the building itself forgot them. Lights in the hallway snapped off on an automatic timer. Somewhere, a fax machine chewed paper like a dream of the last decade. The world outside their circle felt very far away.

“Munch,” she said, her voice barely above the low hum of the lights.

“Hm?” He didn’t look up. He couldn’t.

“This thing between us…”

His head snapped up like the words had hooked his jaw. For a breath, he let himself be caught, eyes on hers, open and raw the way he never was when the sun was up. She didn’t do wide, pleading eyes as a rule. But something in them tonight was unguarded, the part of her that held icons in her hands when no one watched and touched the Nazar on her keychain between cases.

He shook his head quickly, retreat like habit. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?” Soft, steady.

“Don’t name it.” He swallowed, laughed once without humour. “Don’t ruin it.”

“You think admitting it ruins it?”

He pulled his glasses off and set them down as if they weighed a pound. “It would ruin me,” he said, and the honesty of it landed between them like a body.

She stood without hurry and came around the desk. He held perfectly still, like prey that knows a gentle thing can still be dangerous. When her hand touched his shoulder; light as a moth, warm as a candle, he didn’t flinch. He didn’t move toward her either. It was restraint by the micrometre.

“John,” she whispered, and he realized he would remember the way she said his name even if he forgot everything else. “Look at me.”

He did. That was the problem. Looking at her was always his undoing, her mouth with its stubborn curve, the worry born from a hundred crime scenes carried soft at the edges of her eyes, the gold that glowed at her ear like a small crescent moon. Her breath mingled with his, clean and cool with the faint sting of cherry gum. She was close enough that he could see the breathless flutter at her throat.

She leaned in a fraction. His breath stuttered. He leaned, too, helpless against a law older than gravity. The distance between them thinned to an ache. He could feel the shape of her mouth without touching it, and the part of him that had lived a whole life alone screamed don’t and the part of him that had survived only by faithlessness whispered please.

He stopped.

He stopped so close that it felt like a cruelty. His voice caught and broke. “No,” he said, a thread. “Not like this.”

Her chest rose. She held his gaze, neither pleading nor angry, just there with him in the equal pain of it. “Then when?” she asked, not as a demand but as a prayer for a time he couldn’t name.

He couldn’t answer. There was no calendar square for a life like his. If he kissed her now he would not stop at the kiss. If he kissed her now he would never be able to lie again. And he was built of small, necessary lies, the ones that let you walk into rooms like the ones they did and come back out.

“Please,” he managed, a word he didn’t say, a word that sounded like mercy and surrender at once.

The moment fractured, not loudly, but with the quiet shiver of something fine breaking under a fingertip. She stepped back a half-step. He did too, as if they’d been tied at the ribs and the knot had loosened by one shake.

“It’s late,” she said at last, finding her voice like a hand on a rail in the dark. “I should go.”

“Yeah.” Hollow. He nodded like a man accepting sentence. “Yeah.”

She gathered her things without rushing, the ritual steadying them both: the slide of the file back into its jacket; the small click of a pen; the sweep of curls off her shoulder as she slipped her jacket on. He watched her like evidence he needed to memorize before someone locked it in a cabinet.

At the door, she hesitated. Turned. He was still sitting as if the chair had claimed him, hands clenched on his own knees, eyes dark in the lamplight. Something inside her, something stubborn and young and holy, refused to let silence file the last line.

She crossed the space in three measured strides, leaned down, and pressed her lips to his cheek, right at the corner of his mouth. Not a kiss, not really. A benediction. A brand. A promise. She stayed there a heartbeat too long to pretend it meant nothing. He smelled like old coffee and clean soap and the rain he hadn’t walked through yet. His skin was warm. Human. Hers to hurt.

When she drew back, his eyes had widened, shock and want and fear warring in them like weather. He made a sound; small, involuntary, not quite a word.

“Goodnight, John,” she whispered, and this time her voice shook.

He didn’t move. Couldn’t. The click of the door echoed across the empty room like a gavel. He sat a breath, then another, then lifted his hand and touched the place where she’d left herself. He let out a long, ragged exhale that felt like laying down a weapon.

“She’s gonna kill me,” he said to the dark. It didn’t sound like a complaint. It sounded like relief.

ASTORIA - November 26, 2004 - 12:29 AM

Outside, the city exhaled steam and late trains. In the car, window, her reflection stared back, flushed, eyes bright, mouth curved with a grief too sweet to call pain. She took out her phone and read the last text from a decent man who would have been kind and forgettable and typed the truest thing she had left:

Rain check. Something came up.

At home, three dogs lifted their heads and thumped their tails as if she’d done something brave. She laughed at herself in the hallway mirror and didn’t look away.

SVU PRECINCT - November 27, 2004 - 12:29 AM

Back at the precinct his desk, under the thin circle of lamplight, Munch reopened the file and tried to read. The words swam. He took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose and whispered, to the empty precinct and the old ghosts in it, ‘Not like this,’ as if the room could hold him accountable when he couldn’t hold himself.

The fax machine chewed another page; the heater rattled; somewhere far below, a siren stitched two boroughs together with sound. The city kept going.

They did not kiss. It was worse.

And somehow, it was better, because now there was no pretending. Only the long ache of a promise deferred, the kind that rewrites you while you wait.

Chapter Text

SVU PRECINT - November 29, 2004 - 7:48 AM

Mondays at SVU were a special brand of hell. The bullpen buzzed with the clatter of typewriters, the squeal of chairs dragged too hard against linoleum, the constant ring of phones. CSU had dropped off evidence bags that no one wanted to catalogue, and someone had spilled sugar into the coffee pot so the whole floor smelled faintly of burnt syrup.

Talia slipped in early, scarf wrapped high around her chin, curls caught in a loose bun that looked thrown together but wasn’t. Her trench coat draped perfectly from her shoulders, just shy of theatrical. She looked tired but still sharp, the kind of tired that turned heads and made people wonder what she’d been doing all weekend.

Munch noticed. Of course he noticed. He always noticed.

She slid into her chair, set her coffee on a coaster, and bent over her notes. Not once did she glance at him. Munch buried his nose deeper into the cold case file he hadn’t actually been reading since Friday. Every thirty seconds, though, his eyes flicked over the rim of his glasses. Just to check.

The bullpen doors swung open. Mike Sandoval walked in like the damn sun had decided to visit Manhattan. Neat fade, broad shoulders under a pressed navy blazer, folder tucked under one arm, coffee cup in the other. He smiled the kind of smile that seemed designed to melt tension.

“Detective Amari,” he greeted warmly, heading straight for her desk. “Sorry about the other night.”

Talia looked up, startled. A sheepish smile tugged at her lips. “Mike. Hey. Yeah… I should’ve called. That cold case with Munch ran long.”

Across the desks, Munch froze. Pen stilled in his hand. His face didn’t move, but a small, traitorous smile crept at the corner of his mouth like he’d just been given a secret. With Munch. She’d said it like it meant something.

Mike nodded, easy, genuine. “Hey, no problem. Comes with the job.” He set the coffee on her desk, nudging it toward her. “Figured you could use this.”

Talia blinked. Twice. Then smiled wider, touched. “That’s… really sweet.” Her voice was softer than she meant, brushing something raw in the room.

Munch heard it. Every syllable scratched down his spine like glass.

Mike leaned casually against the corner of her desk, shoulders loose, posture confident. “Listen,” he said, “if you’re free, maybe we grab a coffee sometime this week? No pressure. Just… off-duty.”

Most of the room didn’t notice. Olivia was on the phone, Elliot buried in forms. Cragen’s office door was shut. But Fin? Fin clocked every second, leaning back in his chair with that unreadable smirk like he’d been waiting for this plot twist.

Talia hesitated. She could feel Munch’s gaze, hot even though he hadn’t looked up. She should say no. God, she wanted to say no. But John had been stonewalling her for months; late-night, half-breathed confessions, tension so thick she could choke on it, and still, he refused to take the step. Still, he held back.

So, her lips curved. “Coffee sounds nice.”

Mike’s grin widened. “Great. I’ll text you.”

“Okay.”

Munch didn’t move. Didn’t speak. His eyes stayed on the same page of the same file. White-knuckled grip on his pen. Inside, he was burning. Coffee. She was saying yes to coffee with Sandoval. Because he couldn’t get his act together. Because he’d told himself no so many times she’d finally listened.

Sandoval clapped Fin’s shoulder on his way out. “Good to see you, brother.”

“Later,” Fin said, eyes tracking the scene like a hawk.

When the door shut, the bullpen air shifted. Talia took a sip of the coffee he’d brought. Too bitter. Not her order. She glanced up, just in time to catch Munch staring at her over his glasses. It was quick, subtle, a flicker of something raw before he dropped his eyes again.

An hour crawled by. The precinct thinned slightly as interviews pulled detectives away. Olivia ducked into Cragen’s office; Elliot disappeared with CSU. Phones still rang, but the noise had dulled.

Talia typed steadily, jaw tight, shoulders set. Across the desks, Munch flipped through another cold case, glasses slipping, pen tapping an erratic rhythm against the folder. He hadn’t read a word.

Fin leaned back in his chair, watching the two of them like he was courtside at a Knicks game. He smirked faintly to himself. No way in hell was he interrupting this. Let them stew.

By lunch, the bullpen was nearly empty. Olivia had a meeting downtown, Elliot trailed after her. Cragen retreated to his office with a fresh pot of sludge coffee.

For once, it was just the three of them. Talia stood, stretching. Her trench fell open, silk blouse gleaming faintly in the harsh light. “I’m gonna grab something to eat.”

“Taking Sandoval with you?” Munch’s voice cut across the room; flat, almost bored. His eyes stayed glued to the file.

Her brows shot up. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me.” He flipped a page without reading. “Bet he’s lurking around right now with a sandwich in hand.”

Her lips parted, incredulous. “Wow. Subtle.”

He looked up then, finally, and the look in his eyes made her stomach flip. Dry, sarcastic, yes; but sharp. Possessive.

She swallowed, forcing her voice steady. “It’s just coffee, John.”

“Yeah,” he said flatly. “That’s how it always starts.”

The air crackled.

Fin cleared his throat loudly. “Y’all want me to step outside, or…?”

Neither answered.

Talia left. She didn’t eat. Couldn’t. Her chest was too full. She thought of Mike’s smile, his easy warmth. She thought of John’s eyes, the way they’d burned when he finally looked at her. By the time she got back, her phone buzzed. See you later this evening? Mike’s name lit up her screen.

She typed back: Sure.

When she looked up, Munch was watching again. Glasses low. Expression unreadable. And Fin, still leaned back, muttered just loud enough for himself: “Messy.”

SVU PRECINT - November 29, 2004 - 2:14 PM

The bullpen had settled into the afternoon rhythm, phones ringing in predictable cycles, stenographers clacking, the hum of the copier spitting evidence packets. Talia worked quietly, eyes fixed on her monitor. She could feel him staring. She always could.

Finally, she broke. “You got somethin’ to say, John?”

He didn’t look up. “Nope.”

“You sure? You’ve been glaring at that same sentence for an hour. Pretty sure the ink’s fading.”

His mouth twitched. “You’re imagining things.”

She leaned back, arms folded, smile razor-sharp. “Am I?”

His eyes flicked up, just once, and lingered. Long enough to sting.

“You don’t get to be jealous,” she said softly. “Not when you’re the one holding the brakes.”

That hit him. Hard.

Fin’s chair squeaked as he stood, stretching. “Alright, I’m definitely takin’ lunch now. Y’all figure your soap opera out before I get back.” The door slammed behind him. Now it was just them. The silence pressed, heavy.

Finally, Munch exhaled. “He’s… good for you.”

Talia blinked. “That what you want me to believe?”

“That’s what’s true.” His voice was dry, but his knuckles tightened on the file. “He’s normal. Safe. Young. You deserve that.”

Her laugh was soft, broken at the edges. “Normal doesn’t keep me up at night, John.”

His eyes shot to hers. Something raw, unguarded. Then he dropped his gaze again. “You don’t know what you’re asking for.”

“I know exactly what I’m asking for.” The words hung there, electric.

He pinched the bridge of his nose, glasses slipping. “Christ, Talia.”

“Say it,” she whispered.

He shook his head.

“Then I’ll say it for you,” she pressed, voice trembling. “I know what I feel for you. And I’m so damn tired of you pretending you don’t feel it too.”

The bullpen was silent but for the hum of fluorescent lights. He stared at her, hollowed out, undone.

Finally, he rasped, “You’ll regret it.”

She smiled, sad and certain. “Not a chance.”

ASTORIA - November 29, 2004 - 7:30 PM

The rain came sudden and merciless, hammering the streets of Queens like it was trying to wash the borough off the map. Sheets of water bounced off pavement, pooled in gutters, ran in rivers toward the storm drains. Streetlamps glowed hazy, their yellow halos blurred by the downpour. The faint rumble of the N train overhead melted into the storm, distant but constant.

Inside her rowhouse, the storm felt far away. Talia’s bedroom was warm, golden with lamplight, the lace curtains trembling slightly against the windowsill drafts. Her closet doors hung open, half her wardrobe spilling out in silk and satin. Clothes littered the bed: slacks, dresses, jackets that whispered power in muted jewel tones. Tonight, she’d chosen differently something she never wore on the job.

A black dress, short, simple, but sharp enough to wound. Her curls fell loose, coaxed into soft waves. A string of gold glinted faintly at her wrist, the Nazar charm turned inward toward her skin like a secret. She leaned into the mirror, steady hand drawing lipstick over her mouth in one clean sweep.

She looked perfect. Too perfect.

Her reflection stared back with poise, but she could see it, the slight hitch in her breath, the way her shoulder tensed when she set the tube down. She was nervous, though she’d die before she admitted it. Mike Sandoval was… nice. Smart. He made her laugh at lunch last week. He remembered her coffee order. He’d offered to pick her up, but insisted on sending a car instead. Gentlemanly. Smooth.

It should have been easy. It wasn’t.

The dogs circled her heels, restless. Anubis pawed the floor near the front window, ears pricked. Ramses gave a low huff. Heka barked once, short, certain. Then came the knock. Sharp. Urgent. She frowned, slipping her heels off the bed. The storm had covered everything, but the dogs heard it before she did. She crossed the hall, silk hem brushing her thighs, and pulled the door open. Her breath caught.

John Munch stood on her stoop, rain streaming down his trench coat, glasses spattered with droplets, hair plastered to his forehead in sodden strands. He looked like a man who’d walked miles through the storm without an umbrella, without a thought to stop. His face was pale, drawn tight.

“Talia,” he rasped. His voice was low, rough with exhaustion, or something sharper.

Her brows knit. “John? What the hell are you doing here?”

He stepped inside before she could protest, water dripping onto her hardwood, leaving a trail darkening the entryway rug. His coat sagged heavy, rain clinging to it like a second skin. “You can’t go.”

Her pulse jumped. She shut the door behind him, heartbeat ricocheting against her ribs. “Go where?”

“You know where.” His eyes flicked over her once; dress, lipstick, curls, and then darted back up, sharp and unwilling to linger, as if every second hurt. His jaw clenched. “The date. Don’t go.”

The words landed like thunder. Talia folded her arms across her chest, though it did nothing to steady her. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me,” he said, his voice cutting, not cruel but too honest. “Don’t go.”

Her laugh was thin, incredulous. “You show up on my stoop, looking like you drowned in the East River, just to tell me not to have dinner with a man who’s actually interested in me?”

His eyes flickered. Hurt. Jealous. Defiant. “I don’t want you to.”

The silence roared louder than the storm outside. Talia’s chest rose and fell, lips parting, her words caught halfway. “You don’t get to tell me what to do, John. Not after months of brushing me off, pretending you don’t see me.”

His wet hair dripped onto his glasses as he pulled them off, setting them down on the entry table with too much force. He met her eyes bare for once, nothing between them, no shadows to hide behind. “I was wrong.”

Her throat tightened. “About what?”

His voice cracked, almost imperceptibly. “About thinking I could watch you walk out that door with someone else. I can’t.”

Her hands curled against her arms, gripping her own skin. “So, what is this, huh? You decide now? You wait until I put on the damn dress and heels and-” She broke off, laughter sharp and broken. “You’re unbelievable.”

He stepped closer, rain dripping onto the floorboards. The heat from him rolled through the space despite the storm clinging to him. “Talia, I-” His voice faltered, rebuilt itself. “I don’t do this. I don’t show up at people’s doors, I don’t beg, I don’t…” His jaw clenched again. “But you… you’re not supposed to be with someone like him.”

Her eyes burned. “Why not? He’s kind. He’s normal. He doesn’t make me feel like I’m begging to be seen.”

His voice snapped, raw. “Because I see you.”

The words cut her breath in half. She stared at him, lips trembling. The storm outside rattled the windows. “Then what do you want, John?”

His throat bobbed. His hand twitched at his side like he wanted to reach for her, but he held it back. “You,” he said simply. The word landed between them, heavy, undeniable. Her chest ached, as if her ribs might splinter. She stepped forward once, tilting her face up. Close enough to feel his breath, close enough that his stubble brushed her cheek when he leaned down. The scent of rain, cigarettes, and coffee clung to him, and she wanted to drown in it. It was there. Finally.

But his control was iron. Inches from her lips, his voice dropped hoarse. “If I kiss you, doll… there’s no going back.”

Her lips curved, trembling. “Good.”

But he froze. He shook his head once, rain dripping onto her bare shoulder. “You’ll hate me for it. You’ll wake up and regret every second, and I-” His voice broke, softer now. “I can’t lose you like that.”

Her hand rose, slow, deliberate, brushing a raindrop from his cheek. She smiled faintly, devastatingly soft. “Then maybe you should let me decide what I regret.”

His eyes burned. For one wild second, she thought he might cave, might finally, finally give in. But instead, he exhaled hard, staggered back a step, armour slamming shut around him.

“You deserve better,” he said roughly. “Better than an old man who reads conspiracy theories and collects failed marriages.”

She laughed once, broken. “And yet you’re the only one who makes me feel like I’m not drowning.”

The words hung in the air. His face twisted, as though they’d undone him. She shook her head, lips trembling. “Go home, John. Before you catch pneumonia.”

The dismissal cracked the air between them. But her voice was soft, not cruel, like she was letting him live another day. She turned, curls brushing her bare shoulders, and walked back into the house. The dogs padded after her, tails swaying. She didn’t look back.

The door clicked shut behind her. John stood there, rain streaming down his face, chest heaving like he’d just run ten blocks. His body screamed at him to go after her. But his feet stayed planted.

Through the gauzy curtains, he saw her move across the living room. She pulled the earrings from her ears, one by one, setting them delicately in a dish. Her necklace slipped off next, her fingers careful, reverent. Then she unzipped her dress, sliding it off her shoulders.

The lamplight painted her skin gold. The black lace beneath clung to her like water and stone. His chest constricted. Lucky bastard, he thought bitterly, the one who was supposed to see this tonight. The one who wasn’t him.

Her phone rang. She picked it up, voice low, apologetic. “Mike? Hey… it’s me. Yeah. Listen, I’m so sorry. I can’t tonight. The rain, it’s just… I don’t feel great. Maybe another time.” A pause, then a soft sigh. “Thanks for understanding. Goodnight.”

She hung up. Dropped her phone onto the couch. Pulled a blanket around her shoulders like a shield. The dogs curled against her legs as she sank into the cushions, her face haloed by the lamp’s glow. She didn’t look regretful. Just certain. John tore his gaze away at last, swallowing hard. He shoved his hands deep into his wet pockets and turned into the storm. The rain swallowed him whole.

SVU PRECINCT - November 30, 2004 - 9:03 AM

 The precinct was loud that morning, as usual, buzzing with the kind of energy that lived in its bones. Phones rang off their hooks, CSU lugged in bags of evidence with the usual warnings about chain of custody, and Elliot was already muttering about the coffee machine being broken again. The air smelled like burnt grounds, printer toner, and rain-soaked wool coats hung to dry.

Talia walked in like she always did; poised, cool, trench still damp from the downpour outside, curls pinned back just enough to keep them from brushing her cheek as she moved. To anyone else, she looked untouchable, unbothered. The truth? Her stomach was still twisted from last night.

From Munch on her stoop, dripping rainwater, telling her not to go. From the way his voice cracked when he said he couldn’t watch her walk out that door. From the way he almost kissed her, close enough to taste the rain on his lips, before pulling back like it might kill him.

She didn’t let any of that show now. Munch was already at his desk when she passed, glasses low, pen scratching furiously across a file. He didn’t look up. She didn’t stop. But Fin noticed. Fin always noticed. He leaned against the corner of her desk mid-morning, grin wide, body language radiating mischief. “So,” he drawled, folding his arms like he had all day to stir the pot, “how was the date?”

Talia blinked once, pen pausing mid-note. Her lashes lowered, then lifted again. She didn’t flinch. “Didn’t go.”

Fin’s brows shot up. “Oh yeah? Why not?”

She shrugged, casual, smooth. “Rain. Felt sick. Figured I’d stay in.”

Her tone was believable. Too believable. That was the problem.

Fin tilted his head, studying her face. His smirk tugged wider, but he didn’t push. “Mm-hm. Rain’ll do that.”

Across the room, Munch’s pen froze mid-scratch. He didn’t look up. His ears burned red. Talia’s hand clenched her pen tighter. She didn’t let her eyes flick toward him, not once. But she felt it, the static like a storm hadn’t left the room.

The next day was… strange. They didn’t linger in the hallways like they used to, didn’t share quiet coffee breaks in the corners of the bullpen. They didn’t sit too close during briefings or let their knees bump under the conference table. It was like they’d been rewired, orbiting around each other with careful precision, terrified of colliding. Too careful.

But every glance lasted too long. Every file handed off brushed fingers that lingered a fraction of a second. Every silence hummed with the memory of rain on glass and lips that almost, almost touched. Olivia caught it once, just the flicker of a glance, Talia’s eyes darting to Munch when she thought no one noticed. Liv said nothing, but her brow arched, a knowing half-smile ghosting across her face. Elliot, as always, was oblivious. Fin, on the other hand, clocked everything and filed it away with a grin.

SVU PRECINT - December 2, 2004 - 2:48 PM

By Thursday night, the tension had settled into routine. Until Cragen emerged from his office, stack of papers in hand, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else. “Listen up,” he called, and the room quieted. The bullpen was never truly silent, but when Cragen’s voice cut across the chatter, the detectives tuned in, half respect, half dread. “Next Thursday, there’s a fundraiser gala. City council wants SVU representation.”

Groans rippled across the desks. Olivia rolled her eyes, Elliot muttered something under his breath about monkey suits, and Fin just chuckled like he’d been handed a gift. “Yes, I know,” Cragen deadpanned, flipping through the flyers. “But attendance is mandatory. Formal dress. And they want you bringing partners.”

“Partners?” Olivia repeated, half horrified, half laughing.

“Guess I’ll dust off my tux,” Elliot grumbled.

Fin leaned back in his chair, grin sharp. “Oh, this is gonna be fun.”

Talia’s chest tightened. She didn’t move, didn’t blink, but the sound of her own pulse drowned out half the room. Across the way, Munch shifted in his chair, glasses flashing as he finally looked up, just for a second. Their eyes didn’t meet.

Cragen slapped the flyers onto desks one by one. “Before you ask: no, you can’t skip. Yes, there’s an open bar. And no, you can’t bring your dog.”

That earned a few chuckles. Even Olivia cracked a smile. Elliot muttered about babysitters and ties. Fin was already pulling out his phone, probably texting three different women at once to see who wanted to play ‘date to a cop thing.’

Talia stared at the flyer in her hand. Gala. Formal dress. Partners.

She could feel Munch watching her. Not directly, never directly, but in those sidelong glances he thought she couldn’t catch. She didn’t look back. She couldn’t.

The rest of the shift blurred. Files shuffled, suspects booked, victims interviewed. The rhythm of SVU life continued, relentless, but the weight of what wasn’t said hung over every interaction. At one point, Talia brushed past Munch on her way to the copier. His shoulder grazed hers, the contact so brief it could’ve been accidental. But he stilled. She didn’t stop walking. Later, he passed her a case file, his hand lingering a second longer than necessary against hers. Their eyes met for the first time in days. Just a flicker, just a heartbeat. It was enough to unravel her all over again.

By the time the night quieted, Fin circled back, leaning against her desk once more. “So. Big gala, huh?”

She arched a brow, keeping her voice cool. “Mm-hm.”

“You bringing Sandoval?” His grin was all teeth, taunting.

Her pen froze mid-scribble. Across the bullpen, Munch stilled too, though his gaze stayed firmly on his paperwork.

Talia didn’t rise to the bait. She flipped a page, calm. “I haven’t decided.”

Fin chuckled. “Better decide quick. Guy like him won’t stay single long.”

Her jaw tightened. “Neither will I.”

It was casual, believable, too believable. But Fin’s smirk lingered, like he’d just watched a chess game play itself out. And Munch? He didn’t look up. Not once. But his ears burned red again.

ASTORIA - December 3, 2004 - 3:24 AM

That night, Talia lay awake in the rowhouse, the rain starting again against the window. The flyer sat on her dresser, the words ‘formal dress’ blurring as she stared. She imagined the gala; the lights, the music, the photographs. She imagined Munch there in a tux, scowling at the politicians, glasses catching the chandeliers, a glass of scotch in his hand. She imagined the way his gaze would find her across the room. And she hated it. Hated how badly she wanted it. Because he’d already told her she deserved better. And still, she couldn’t picture standing beside anyone else.

Chapter Text

SVU PRECINT - December 6, 2004 - 9:48 PM

The squad room was nearly empty. Phones sat on their cradles, quiet for once. The fluorescents hummed overhead, relentless and pale, casting the bullpen in that sickly light that made every face look tired. Most of the detectives had gone home hours ago, but three desks still glowed with life. Cragen, in his office, head bent over paperwork. His blinds half-drawn, the orange glow of his lamp seeping through like a weak secret.

Munch, at his desk, across from hers. Reading, or pretending to, glasses low, the file held just close enough to obscure his mouth. And Talia, at hers. Notes spread in neat stacks, her pen moving, the gold chain at her wrist catching the light every time her hand turned.

The silence had stretched twenty minutes before Munch cleared his throat. “So.” His voice was casual. Too casual. “That gala thing Cragen announced.”

Talia didn’t look up. She hummed faintly, her pen still moving across the page. “Mm. What about it?”

He pushed his glasses up his nose, eyes flicking to her, then back to the file. “You got a date?”

Her pen paused. Slowly, she lifted her gaze. Her eyes cut sharp, narrowing. “Why?”

He shrugged, deadpan. “Because apparently mandatory fun requires a plus-one.” His tone cracked a little on the word fun. Then, softer, almost reluctant: “You, uh… you wanna go with me?”

She stilled. The bullpen hummed with silence, the kind that comes just before a confession. Her eyes studied him, steady and unreadable. The way he leaned too hard into nonchalance, pretending it hadn’t cost him something to ask. The faint tension in his jaw. The telltale pink at his ears.

Finally, her lips curved. Not teasing. Not smug. Soft. Certain. “John,” she said gently, almost like a vow, “you don’t have to ask.” That startled him. “I’m your partner,” she continued. “I’ll always be at your side. No matter what.”

Something flickered across his face. Relief. Something sharper, quickly masked under sarcasm. He muttered, “Lucky me.”

Her smirk sharpened. “Lucky you.”

Their eyes held a beat too long. The bullpen felt smaller for it. Cragen’s blinds rattled faintly with the draft from his heater. Papers shuffled. The city roared faintly beyond the window. But between the two of them, time had gone still.

Munch ducked his head again, voice low. “You’re gonna regret saying yes.”

“Maybe,” she said, pen poised again, voice steady.

SVU PRECINT - December 9, 2004 - 5:48 PM

The locker room smelled faintly of starch and soap, overpowered by the metallic tang of fluorescent lights. The tile was sterile, the benches dented, but tonight the space felt conspiratorial. Like a backstage before curtain call. A garment bag hung from a hook, unzipped. Black silk spilled against steel.

Talia stepped out of her stall barefoot, curls falling loose down her back. The dress poured over her like ink on water, clinging and shifting with every step. Black silk, slit high up her thigh, neckline low enough to make her collarbone look like a blade. She fastened a thin chain at her throat, then another, then another, gold catching the light at every turn of her neck.

Bracelets kissed softly as she moved. Her lips were painted deep, her skin luminous under the fluorescent assault. She slid small hoops through her ears, then layered studs above them, each one a star against her skin.

Olivia, pinning her own hair into a sleek twist, let out a low whistle. “You weren’t kidding about that dress.”

Talia smiled faintly into the mirror. “Would I ever?”

“Not about this,” Olivia said, tugging her lipstick into a perfect red.

From the next aisle, Melinda stepped out in deep green silk, elegant as glass. She nodded toward the ink visible on Talia’s back, the Coptic cross framed in saints and serpents. “Saints and serpents. I like the honesty.”

Talia’s eyes met hers in the mirror, warm, steady. “It’s all prayer,” she said softly. “Some of it just… sharper.”

Olivia laughed under her breath. “You two are going to make every donor forget why they wrote checks.”

“Good,” Talia murmured, sweeping a faint shimmer of gold across her eyelids. “They should suffer.”

The door swung open, bullpen noise spilling in; laughter, footsteps, the rumble of men waiting like boys outside a dance. Olivia smoothed the skirt of her gown, arched a brow. “Ready?”

Talia snapped her clutch shut. “Always.”

They pushed through the door like a headline. The squad room froze. For one decadent second, the precinct looked like an old photograph, colour leeched out, the fluorescent wash painting everything flat, except for the shock of two women lit like trouble. Olivia, sharp and luminous. Melinda, poised as a blade. And Talia, ruinous, soft as sin.

Fin let out a low, appreciative whistle. ‘Damn.’ Melinda’s answering smile was sharp as a secret.

Elliot grinned at Olivia. “You’re gonna make me look underdressed.”

“You always do,” she shot back, but warmth melted the words.

Munch rose slowly from his chair. Tuxedo. Bow tie. Crisp shirt, narrow lapels, cufflinks that had seen better decades. Glasses glinting under the lights, silver at his temples catching the glow. He looked like he’d stepped out of an old magazine cover, noir resurrected. He didn’t speak. He just looked.

At her.

The black silk clinging to her waist, the ink on her back like scripture, the gold chains glittering like promises. The way her mouth curved faintly when she saw him seeing her.

His thought; sharp, savage, undone, was simple: hell yea, I got the best one.

He didn’t say it. His mouth knew how to lie even when his eyes didn’t. So, he smirked instead. Talia’s gaze slid over him like a slow blessing. “You clean up,” she murmured as she stopped in front of him, “obscenely well.”

“Careful,” he said, voice low, gravel edged. “You’re going to encourage me.”

Fin clapped him on the shoulder as he passed, offering Melinda his arm. “You two try not to get us kicked out before the appetizer.”

“No promises,” Talia said, her voice soft, dangerous.

Munch offered her his arm. She took it. They fit. Not Bond and the Bond girl. Bond and the woman who would ruin him, and he’d let her. As they crossed the bullpen, Talia leaned just close enough for him to hear her whisper. “If you wanted me on your arm, John, all you ever had to do was ask.”

His throat bobbed. He didn’t answer. Couldn’t. But his hand lingered just a second longer at her waist when they stepped out into the cold.

THE WALDORF ASTORIA - December 9, 2004 - 6:09 PM

The Waldorf never forgot who it was. Marble gleamed like wet bone, staircases curved in perfect sweeps, chandeliers poured constellations over men in tailored suits and women in silk. Outside, the rain lacquered Manhattan to a mirror shine; inside, everything was gold and low light and the gentle churn of a jazz trio at the far end of the ballroom.

Talia had dressed deliberately, not to draw attention, but because the place demanded respect. Her perfume trailing in her wake: jasmine and oud, rich and ancient, the kind of scent that lingered long after the body left. At the coat check, the maître d’ glanced up, polite professionalism breaking for half a heartbeat when his eyes landed on her. It was nothing, a flicker, but Munch caught it.

His hand settled at the small of her back, steady, proprietary.

“Don’t start a fight with the staff,” she murmured, her voice a soft tease wrapped around steel.

“I wasn’t going to,” he said mildly, eyes on the maître d’. “I was thinking of tipping him to look somewhere else.”

She arched a brow. “Then tip me.”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. The look he gave her was tender and terrifying, currency enough.

The ballroom was full of the city’s best illusions. Donors laughing the laugh of people who liked their money to be seen doing good. Council members trading handshakes, brass officers in full plumage, Casey moving like a flame through clusters of politicians. Olivia and Elliot peeled off with the practiced ease of partners who’d danced this routine before, closing in on a deputy commissioner. Fin and Melinda made their own orbit, he pulling grins, she disarming men in suits with dry wit.

Talia and Munch drifted instead. Neither belonged to this world of checks and lapel pins, and both knew it. They lingered at the shadowed edges where the chandeliers dimmed, and the music softened. A waiter appeared like a conjuring trick; tray balanced on fingertips.

“Whiskey,” Munch said without hesitation.

The waiter’s eyes flicked to Talia. “For you, Detective?”

“Raspberry martini,” she said smoothly. A pause, then: “And a tall glass of water.”

Munch’s brow lifted. “Pacing yourself?”

She took the stemmed glass delicately. “Decadence is an endurance sport.”

He huffed something like a laugh. “You’d know.”

The martini was cold, sweating in her hand. She watched the light skitter along its rim, sipped slow. Tart first, sweet after, warmth settling in her chest. Munch drank his whiskey like it was truth serum, no flinch, no pause, just the bite and the burn. He didn’t say a word, but she caught him watching her mouth when she drank.

“Don’t,” she said without looking at him.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You never have to.”

They lasted fifteen minutes in the room. Long enough for two city council aides to introduce themselves with oily smiles, and one bored philanthropist with a lapel pin worth more than a month’s salary to corner them. Munch endured with his signature cynicism-disguised-as-politeness. Talia countered with precise charm, just enough warmth to make men think they were winning while she steered the conversation.

They haunted, they drifted, and then the sign appeared above a stairwell like a whispered plan:

Cigar Lounge - Terrace Level.

Munch’s eyes flicked to hers. His hand slipped lower at her back.

She smiled like sin. “Let’s go make trouble.”

The lounge was grandfathered into a legal twilight, the kind of room that still believed the law stopped at its door. Dark wood panelling, leather chairs softened by decades, a ceiling fan turning as slow as a heartbeat. On the far side, French doors opened onto a covered terrace where the rain whispered against the city like secrecy. Inside, tobacco had already painted the air in soft curls of amber and ash.

Munch inhaled it like memory. This was not the precinct. This was ritual. At the counter, he chose a cigar with unhurried care, not flashy, not cheap, Cuban. He rolled it gently between his fingers, pressed it to his nose, closed his eyes for a second too long. A man remembering fathers, train stations, nights when being older than you were felt like power. The cut was clean.

Talia, meanwhile, drew from her clutch a slim gold case. She plucked out a cigarette, not flimsy white, but a narrow black number, elegant, faintly wicked. From her bag came a lacquered holder, black with a gold mouth. She held it between two fingers like she’d been born to it, the jewellery on her wrist chiming faintly.

“Smoking indoors?” she asked, amused.

“Historical exemption,” he said, producing his lighter. “This place hasn’t acknowledged the future since 1931.”

She stepped in close. Too close. The silk of her dress whispered. Her bracelets chimed. She touched the unlit cigar to his lips, holding it steady. “Open,” she said, velvet command.

He obeyed. She flicked her lighter, flame a bright coin between them. Her wrist turned with slow precision as the cigar caught, ember blooming. He drew deep, and she turned it gently to keep the burn even. Her perfume mixed with the tobacco, jasmine lacing smoke. Her breath skimmed his knuckles. The first exhale curled between them, thick as scripture.

“Good?” she asked, voice low, approving.

“Dangerous,” he said.

She set the lighter between their chests, the space between them thin as paper. “My turn.”

Munch cupped his palm beneath hers as she brought the holder to her mouth. The gesture wasn’t necessary. It was intimate. His thumb flicked the lighter open again, flame steady. She leaned in, dipped the cigarette into fire, drew slow. Smoke coiled, orange ember flaring.

She didn’t look at the flame. She looked at him.

Through her lashes, eyes half-lidded, mouth curved around the holder with the kind of deliberate elegance that could ruin a man politely. Smoke slid from her lips, past him, into the room.

Munch took the holder from her, briefly, tasted the warmth of lacquer, the faint ghost of her lipstick, and returned it. Their fingers brushed deliberately. She set it back to her mouth, leaned against the doorframe. He mirrored her, opposite, both framed by smoke and rain.

The fan turned overhead. The city whispered beneath them. For a long moment, they smoked like they were writing each other in a language no one else spoke.

Finally, she broke the silence. “I didn’t go.”

He didn’t ask what she meant. He already knew. His eyes stayed on her, sharp and pained. “I know.”

“You looked?” she asked softly.

“Through your window,” he admitted, shameless, quiet. “It was raining.”

Her lips twitched. “Perv.” The word had no heat. “You didn’t call,” she added.

He exhaled smoke, low and bitter. “I was busy trying not to walk back up your steps and ruin both of us.” He tapped ash into a crystal tray. “How am I doing?”

Her smile was small, knife-sharp. “Poorly.”

He laughed once, rough. “Good.”

The door brushed open. A couple in evening wear drifted in, caught the charge in the room, and left just as quickly. Whatever lived between them had weight, enough to make strangers feel like they’d intruded on a church.

Talia’s eyes slid toward the stairwell beyond the terrace. Above it, a sign: Roof Access.

An idea.

She stubbed out the cigarette, leaned in, her voice a whisper against his ear. “Come with me.”

Her hand slipped into his. Warm. Certain.

And this time, he didn’t resist.

The stairwell door groaned when they pushed through, metal echo swallowed by the wind. And then the city spilled out before them; endless, electric, drowned in snow. Manhattan stretched like a pulse: neon signs sputtered and flickered, horns muttered faintly from streets far below, but the horizon was already bruising grey, the first hint of dawn waiting in the wings of night.

The rooftop smelled of cold iron, wet stone, and the faint char of the Waldorf’s chimneys. The ledge was rimmed in snow, softening the hard lines of the skyline, but the air still cut sharp, freezing breath into smoke.

Talia stepped out first. The silk of her dress caught the faint December breeze, dark fabric glinting like spilled ink beneath the security lamps. She leaned casually against the low ledge; cigarette holder balanced between her fingers. Smoke curled pale against the city, rising into the snowy dark.

Behind her, Munch struck a match, cupping it against the wind with practiced care. The flame trembled, then steadied, catching the cigar’s edge with a slow ember glow. He exhaled, smoke unfurling into the night like an oath.

His trench hung from her shoulders. He hadn’t even realized he’d draped it there until she didn’t give it back. His hand stayed at her waist, thumb pressed low at the curve of her back, holding her like he’d decided the space was his. She didn’t move it. She didn’t want to.

“You’ve kept that hand there all night,” she murmured, voice velvet wrapped around steel.

“You mind?” His tone was dry, low, trying for even, but it cracked at the edges.

She glanced over her shoulder, lips curving faintly, smoke slipping from between them. “If I minded, John… you’d know.”

He huffed a laugh, the kind that hurt, and pressed a little more into the silk at her back. “Good.”

They smoked in silence for a while. Silence wasn’t silence here; it was the hum of a city pretending to sleep. It was the sound of her breath, steady against the winter, and his, rougher, like it had to fight its way past words unsaid. Every time she shifted, the muscles under his hand flexed, the faintest tether tightening. He wasn’t sure if he was steadying her or himself.

She tilted her head toward the skyline, exhaled smoke into the sharp night. “Never thought I’d see this city quiet.”

“It’s not quiet,” he said. His voice rumbled low, smoke on smoke. “It’s just pretending.”

Her lips curved. “Like us.”

That made him look at her. Really look. The stairwell light painted her in fragments, the slope of her cheek, the gleam of the gold cross at her throat, the shimmer of smoke clinging to her hair. She looked alive. Tired. Devastating. And for once, he didn’t look away.

“Doll…” His voice cracked. The word felt pulled out of him, hoarse and reverent. His thumb traced the small of her back like he needed proof she was real. “I can’t keep pretending.”

Her chest pulled tight, her laugh small and sad. She turned toward him fully, silk and smoke and all that warmth wrapped in his coat. The cigarette holder dangled loosely from her fingers, ember dimming unnoticed. “Then don’t.”

The silence burned. The city leaned closer.

And John Munch; cynic, fatalist, sworn bachelor, professional coward, bent his head and kissed her.

It wasn’t tentative. It wasn’t polite. It was inevitable. His mouth claimed hers with a slow, steady heat, cigar smoke still clinging to his breath, rain and old trench coat and the salt of December clinging to his skin. His hand slid higher on her waist, pulling her into him, the other cupping her jaw, tilting her face to him like he’d been rehearsing it for months.

Talia melted into him with a helpless sound that broke something in his chest. Her fingers curled hard into his lapel, silk dress whispering against his suit, her body warm and alive under the jacket he’d never get back. She kissed him back like she’d been waiting for this through every lie, every avoidance, every storm.

The snow fell soft around them, unnoticed. The city below churned on, unaware.

When he broke away, it was only by an inch. His forehead pressed to hers, his breath uneven, his hand still stroking slow circles at the small of her back. As if to remind her, I’m here. I’m not letting go.

She laughed, shaky, lips brushing his. “Took you long enough.”

“Had to make sure,” he rasped, voice cracking under the weight of honesty. “That when I did… you’d want me to.”

Her smile was tender and sharp all at once. She kissed him again, firmer, smoke and dawn tangling between them. His hand slid into her curls this time, palm anchoring her skull, mouth hungry, as though he could devour years of restraint in one press of lips.

When she finally drew back, she bit his bottom lip softly, just enough to make him groan, ragged and low.

“You’re impossible,” he whispered, almost a laugh.

“And yet…” Her eyes glittered with the challenge, with the victory. “Here you are.”

They lingered on the roof as the cold didn’t bother them. Between kisses they smoked, the embers glowing red against the morning grey. He teased her for using a cigarette holder like a femme fatale; she told him he looked ridiculous with snow in his hair. He said she was going to ruin him. She told him that was the idea.

The skyline shifted as the sun rose, spilling light across glass towers and rooftops, turning snow into a city of fire. They stood close enough that her perfume had sunk into his shirt, his trench swallowed her whole, and the only thing tethering them to the cold reality of work waiting below was the sound of traffic picking up on Park Avenue.

When she finally leaned back, lips swollen, cheeks flushed, she whispered, “We’ll regret this.”

He shook his head, kissed her once more, slow and final. “Not for a second.”

They stayed until the sun was fully up, until they were both shivering but unwilling to move, until the Waldorf’s rooftop felt like it belonged only to them.

When they did finally leave, coats pulled tight, smoke fading from their mouths, they weren’t pretending anymore.

THE WALDORF ASTORIA - December 10, 2004 - 2:02 AM

By the time they descended from the rooftop, the jazz had faded, dissolving into memory like cigarette smoke. The ballroom looked gutted, abandoned to the ghosts of perfume and champagne. Tables stood half-cleared, wineglasses tipped and forgotten, napkins discarded like silk casualties of a glamorous war.

The SVU squad trickled out together in pairs, each pair carrying its own story: Olivia with Elliot at her side, heads bent toward each other as they laughed at some unfinished joke; Fin with Melinda Warner, his hand brushing the small of her back with such casual intimacy that it drew the faintest, knowing smile from her.

And then there was Talia and Munch. His tux jacket still hung over her shoulders, a deliberate drape, not once removed since the rooftop. His hand was steady, proprietary at her waist, guiding her through the last of the crowd. Not obscene. Not PDA in the technical sense. But obvious. So obvious.

Fin caught it first. His brows ticked up a fraction, the corners of his mouth sliding into that grin that said I knew it, I knew it before they did. Melinda followed his gaze, her eyes narrowing briefly before she leaned into Fin, murmuring something that made his chuckle rumble low.

Talia, either oblivious or pretending to be, tilted her head toward Munch. “Your hand’s going to bruise my ribs if you keep it there.”

“Good,” he murmured, dry as gin, the corner of his mouth twitching. “Maybe then you’ll remember who you walked out with.”

Her laugh came low, private. She leaned into the hold, her warmth slipping beneath his cynicism like it always did.

THE WALDORF ASTORIA - December 10, 2004 - 2:16 AM

The city was coated in white by the time they left, the snow falling in slow drifts that softened even Midtown’s hard edges. His car was parked a block away, dusted with powder. He brushed the windshield with his sleeve while she adjusted the jacket tighter around her shoulders. They slid inside, both moving with the quiet ritual of long nights: her tucking her dress carefully beneath her legs, him shrugging his coat back into place, glasses catching the glow of the dashboard lights.

He drove the way he always did; cautious, precise, a man who trusted neither traffic lights nor fate. But his right hand strayed. First to the gearshift. Then, casually, to rest against her knee. And then, slowly, his hand slid higher. Just enough to make her breath falter. His palm settled against the inside of her thigh, thumb brushing her skin through silk, deliberate and steady.

She dropped her hand over his, lacing her fingers with his, anchoring him there.

And Christ. Her thigh was warm. Too warm. Soft in a way that made his pulse thrum low and heavy. He’d spent years cataloguing autopsies, case files, bloodstains on concrete, but nothing in his life had ever felt as decadent, as dangerous, as that inch of skin beneath his palm.

God it was so soft.

The thought hit him like whiskey. He tightened his grip, thumb pressing firmer. The image flickered unbidden, sharp and obscene: burying his face between her legs, the silk gone, the warmth unfiltered, the taste of her on his tongue. It was enough to make his jaw clench, his glasses fog faintly at the edges.

He swallowed hard, eyes locked on the road. He didn’t dare look at her, not yet. If he did, he wouldn’t stop. She tilted her head toward him, lashes low, smile curling like smoke. “Eyes on the road, Detective.”

He didn’t flinch. “Call it multitasking, doll.” His eyes stayed forward. His hand stayed exactly where it was.

The silence that followed wasn’t silence at all; it was thick with everything unsaid. The city blurred past in streaks of gold and red, the snow blinding against the streetlights. His pulse hammered. Her lips parted, just slightly, as though she could taste the weight of it.

ASTORIA - December 10, 2004 - 2:47 AM

By the time he pulled up outside her rowhouse, the air inside the car was suffocating. She turned toward him, her dress pooling across her legs, curls spilling free from the night’s careful styling. Her voice was softer than it had been all evening. “You don’t want to come in? For coffee?”

Hope threaded the words, delicate but unmistakable. His hand lingered on her thigh. He finally turned, really looking at her, glasses low on his nose, eyes sharp and exhausted and wrecked all at once. His mouth curved, something between a smirk and surrender.

“If I do,” he said quietly, “I’ll never leave.”

She smiled, sinful and tender all at once. “As if I want you to leave.”

And then he leaned in. The kiss was firm, claiming, the taste of whiskey and smoke still clinging to both of them. It wasn’t cautious. It was the kiss of a man who had resisted too long, finally surrendering. His hand gripped her thigh tighter. Her free hand lifted, brushing along his jaw, thumb grazing the corner of his mouth.

When he pulled back, it was sharp, ragged, like yanking himself from the edge of a cliff. He exhaled hard, eyes burning. His hand slipped from her thigh. He reached for the door handle.

“Goodnight, doll.”

She opened her own door, stepping into the snow. He watched her climb the stoop, watched her curls catch snowflakes like stars, watched the way her dress hugged and moved with her. She reached the door, keys in hand, then turned, glancing over her shoulder with a smile that nearly gutted him.

It should’ve ended there.

It didn’t.

He hadn’t driven off.

The driver’s side door slammed, and his shoes crunched the snow hard as he followed. By the time she slid the key into the lock, he was on the stoop behind her, standing a step below, his hands firm at her waist. She startled, then melted under the touch, her body leaning back into him instinctively.

“Munch-” she whispered, half startled, half knowing.

“Don’t tell me goodnight yet.” His voice was hoarse, rough like gravel scraped low in his throat. He stood a step below her, which meant his mouth hovered at her collarbone, close enough to feel the heat of her through silk.

Her breath hitched. She turned in his arms and he caught her, hands sliding down to her hips, gripping firm. He kissed her like a starving man, no restraint now. Her mouth opened against his, soft but yielding, and he groaned low in his chest as if she’d undone something he’d held locked for years.

Her fingers slid behind his head, curling in his hair, pulling him closer until his glasses knocked against her cheek. He tore them off without looking, shoving them into his pocket. His hands dragged up over the curve of her ass, pulling her flush against him, and she gasped when she felt him hard against her thigh.

“John-” she tried, but it broke into a moan when his tongue slid against hers, the kiss deepening, hungry.

Snow clung to her curls, melted cold against his jaw, but her lips were hot, tasting of champagne and something sweet, something he couldn’t name but needed more of. His thumb hooked into the slit of her dress, dragging the silk higher until his palm pressed bare skin, warm and soft under the snow-chilled air.

When he finally tore away, both of them were panting, their mouths red, his lips stained with her lipstick, his thumb still pressed into the silk at her thigh.

She steadied herself, smile breaking through the haze. “If you don’t go home now, detective, you’re not leaving my bed until Monday.”

He laughed once, sharp, torn from his chest. “You say that like it’s a threat.”

She kissed him again, quick but tender, lips brushing his with a promise. Then she slipped inside, shutting the door soft but final.

Munch stayed on the stoop, dazed, snow dripping into his collar, his hands still burning with the shape of her. He touched his mouth, the ghost of her lipstick still smeared across him.

God help him. He didn’t care.

Because he wanted to marry that girl.

Chapter Text

ASTORIA - December 10, 2004 - 2:47 AM

The rowhouse swallowed her whole the second the door shut behind her. Talia leaned against it, chest heaving, head tipped back against cool wood. Her legs trembled, not from the heels, not from the long night, but from the echo still burning on her lips.

Munch kissed her.

It wasn’t a trick of champagne or jazz-blurred memory. He had kissed her, his hand bold on her thigh, his mouth claiming hers in a way no man had ever dared. And he hadn’t just kissed her. He had wanted her. She’d felt it, every ounce of restraint vibrating in him like glass about to shatter.

She laughed under her breath, half-delirious. “You stupid, stubborn man.”

Her heels clattered to the floor as she padded upstairs, the weight of the slip dress still brushing against her thighs. She flicked the bedroom light on, amber glow spilling out toward the street. And then she froze, because she knew.

He was there.

Under the streetlamp, trench coat collar up, cigarette burning low, John Munch. Watching her. A sinner caught in his own devotion.

Her lips curved. She shoved the curtain wide open and leaned into the frame, eyes sharp with mischief. “Perv.”

But she didn’t close the blinds.

Instead, she let the dress fall.

The straps slid from her shoulders like silk rivers, satin whispering down her hips until it pooled on the floor. She stood in nothing but black lace, delicate bra, barely-there panties, stockings cutting elegant lines into her thighs. The kind of lingerie meant for sin, meant for ruin. She stretched slowly, deliberately, as if giving him the full anatomy of her desire: the arch of her back, the rise of her breasts, the tattooed roses wrapping her legs.

Talia turned toward the window, knowing the angle gave him everything. She cupped her breasts, squeezing them together, thumbs brushing lace, and laughed low at her own reflection. Then she bent, ass high, the straps of her panties digging as she tugged her curls free. Her hair spilled forward like shadow and gold.

On the sidewalk, Munch forgot how to breathe. The cigarette trembled in his hand, ash falling unnoticed. His jaw clenched, glasses fogging faintly in the night air. He couldn’t move, couldn’t look away. His heart beat hard enough to bruise.

Talia twirled once, slow, wicked, jewellery catching light across her collarbone. Her tongue flicked against her lower lip as she leaned forward to the glass, close enough he could imagine fog on it. “Poor old man,” she murmured, but her smirk promised the opposite; mine, mine, mine.

She blew him a kiss, wicked and sweet, then pulled the blinds shut with a single sharp motion.

Munch staggered back a step. His knees actually bent as if his body was ready to go inside, to break every promise and every law and give in. His hand twitched on the cigarette, then dropped it, ember hissing out in the gutter.

“Jesus Christ,” he rasped.

But he didn’t climb the stoop. Didn’t knock. Didn’t let himself fall into the fire she’d opened for him. He shoved both hands in his coat pockets and walked back to his car with the weight of lust and sin dragging at every step. Retreat wouldn’t save him. He already knew.

Talia Nadine Amari-Volkov had ruined him.

SVU PRECINCT - December 10, 2004 - 9:58 AM

The morning after the gala felt like another life entirely. The squad room was a hive of motion, phones shrilling, CSU rolling carts of evidence down the hall, and some poor patrolman swearing at a jammed printer like it was a suspect. The coffee pot smelled burnt, the fluorescent lights unforgiving. New York hadn’t paused to accommodate hangovers.

Talia arrived late, with Cragen’s begrudging mercy bought on account of last night’s open bar. Her curls were tamed into something presentable, trench coat hanging elegant off her shoulders, sunglasses hiding eyes that still ached from too much champagne and too little sleep. She looked like she hadn’t lost a step, but the pause in her stride as she crossed the bullpen betrayed otherwise.

Munch was already there. Slouched behind his desk, glasses low on his nose, the comb-over combed but hardly convincing, shoulder holsters digging into his jacket as though he wore the weight of them out of punishment. His paperwork was spread wide, a paper barricade between himself and the world. He didn’t look up when she passed, didn’t acknowledge the soft click of her heels or the faint perfume that lingered like memory.

His pen scrawled too sharply, as though carving into the paper. Pages flipped with unnecessary force. Every movement was loud with shame.

What the hell was I thinking?

She was too young. Too radiant. Too alive. He could still see her in the slip dress, ink gleaming against her skin like scripture carved in moonlight. And him? Four divorces, a body that woke him with aches at dawn, a soul rusted with paranoia and conspiracy theories nobody wanted to hear anymore. He couldn’t even look in the mirror most days.

She deserved someone solid. Someone un-haunted. He thought bitterly of Mike Sandoval; tall, broad-shouldered, the kind of detective who smiled easily and slept through the night. Sandoval looked good in a suit. Sandoval wasn’t a ghost.

But Talia noticed. Of course she noticed. She always noticed. Her gaze lingered a second too long as she passed his desk, steady and deliberate: you’re not going to pretend last night didn’t happen, are you?

He kept his eyes on the file. Knuckles white.

Her lips curved faintly, dark gloss catching the light, but she said nothing. She just sat, posture perfect, and went to work.

SVU PRECINCT - December 10, 2004 - 12:04 PM

By noon, the bullpen was at its loudest. Phones shrilled. Printers spat out warrants. Casey strode through with a stack of motions like a crusader with paper armour. Detectives shouted across desks about interviews and suspects and coffee orders.

Talia sat directly across from him, a picture of composure. Her rings glittered each time she turned a page, bracelets clinking faintly with her pen. She looked untouchable, untarnished by last night.

Munch stared at his own files, but the words bled together. He wasn’t reading. He was stuck replaying ghosts: the voices of his ex-wives; too cynical, too closed off, too much, and beneath them, images he couldn’t stop.

Her thigh under his palm, silk warm. Her laugh under the snow, spilling like gold. The taste of her lipstick, the heat of her mouth. Not just lust. It had been honest. Christ. It had been love.

He pinched the bridge of his nose. She was fire and scripture and God’s cruellest dare. He told himself distance was mercy. If he stayed sharp, cold, sarcastic, maybe she’d get bored. Maybe she’d drift toward Sandoval or someone equally whole.

But then he looked up; one slip, one moment too unguarded, and caught her watching him. Her eyes steady, unreadable. Warmth, though, unmistakable. She tapped her pen against the desk, leaned slightly forward. “You going to pretend you didn’t kiss me, Detective?”

His pulse spiked. He forced a smirk, mask on. “I kiss a lot of people when I’m drunk.”

It was a joke. It was supposed to keep distance. But the way her smile died, sharp to frown, frown to hurt, nearly gutted him. “Oh,” she said softly. The word was small. Wounded. She shrank in her chair like he’d just erased her.

What the hell are you doing, John?

SVU PRECINCT - December 10, 2004 - 7:27 PM

The squad room emptied one desk lamp at a time. Chairs scraped. Doors slammed. Someone in holding shouted, ‘I know my rights!’ at a ceiling that didn’t care. CSU’s carts squeaked down the hall.

The fluorescent hum grew louder in the absence of voices, nagging the stragglers to leave. Talia slid into her trench coat, her movements precise, avoiding looking anywhere near his desk. Her eyes pinned to the elevator doors like she was waiting for curtain call. All she wanted was to go home, crawl into her sanctuary in Astoria, cry until sleep stole her.

“Need a ride?” His voice came from behind her shoulder, quiet, tentative. The glasses caught the lamplight. His tie was loosened, his posture uncertain.

She didn’t turn. “No.”

The word landed like a slap. He blinked, caught off guard, as the elevator dinged open. She stepped in without looking back, and the doors shut, leaving him staring after her, hollow.

PRECINCT PARKING GARAGE - December 10, 2004 - 7:39 PM

Her chest heaved as she unlocked her car. Breathing sharp, uneven. Stupid, stupid girl. Why would he ever choose you?All poise, all gloss, but scarred inside, broken in ways even she couldn’t hide. She pressed the key fob with trembling hands.

“Talia!” His voice echoed across concrete.

“Go away,” she muttered, fumbling at the door.

“Give me your keys.”

She spun, furious. “Go to hell, Munch.”

He stepped closer, surprising her with the force in his grip as he caught her arm. “Give me your keys.”

She yanked, but he was stronger than he looked, trench coat and all. “Goddammit, John-”

“Please,” his voice cracked, not commanding now, but desperate. “Just… give me your keys.”

Something in his tone; ragged, pleading, silenced her. The old Soviet steel in her told her to submit when a man demanded. She pressed the keys into his palm, wordless, and slid into the passenger seat.

The drive to Astoria was silent, Queens crawling past in sodium-orange streetlights and patches of snow. Talia stared out the window, tears sliding quiet down her cheeks. No sobs. No sound. Just heartbreak.

Was it all just alcohol? Smoke and snow? Was it all a dream?

ASTORIA - December 10, 2004 - 8:16 PM

The Mustang’s engine rumbled low as he eased it against the curb outside her rowhouse, snow still coming down in thin, silver streaks against the windshield. The wipers dragged, squeaked, like the city itself wanted to keep scraping at him.

Talia’s hand was already on the door handle, desperate to bolt. Her sanctuary was only a few feet away. If she could just get inside, she could cry alone, bury her face in incense and shadows, and forget the humiliation pressing against her ribs.

But before she could push the door open, his hand shot out. Not rough, but desperate, the kind of touch that wasn’t about strength but about need.

“Why are you crying?” His voice was soft at first, almost pleading.

“I’m not.” She jerked her chin stubbornly, eyes shining in the half-light of the streetlamp.

“Doll, I can see the tears.” His thumb brushed one away, traitorous, before she could turn from him.

Her laugh broke sharp, jagged, splintering like glass. “So, it was all a dream. A stupid, drunken lie?”

The silence that followed nearly tore her in half. He just sat there, breathing hard, the weight of every unsaid word choking him. Finally, hoarse, cracked open: “No.”

“Then why?” Her voice pitched higher, cracking with desperation. “Why are you acting like nothing happened? Why did you- why do you-” She pressed her hands against her temples.

“Because I’m not worthy!” It wasn’t just raised; it was screamed, ripped out of him like something sharp tearing free. His voice filled the car, echoed off the windows, raw, jagged. “I’m not worthy of you. Do you understand that?”

Her breath caught, stunned into stillness. “I’m old,” he barked, louder, harsher, his hands slamming against the steering wheel with a hollow crack. “I’m falling apart, Talia. My knees hurt every morning. My back aches like hell. I need glasses to read my own goddamn reports. My hair’s thinning, my skin’s grey. I am decay in a trench coat.” He turned toward her, eyes fever-bright. “You want to know what I am? I’m four failed marriages. Four women who walked away and told me I was impossible to love. I’ve got an apartment that looks like a storage unit for bad habits, a credit score that makes banks laugh in my face, and a heart so full of rust I can barely remember what it feels like to beat without fear. That’s me. That’s all I am.”

His voice broke. He dragged a shaking hand through his comb-over, pulled his glasses off, pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes like maybe he could claw the shame out of himself. “And you? God, you-you’re light. You’re young. You walk into a room, and it changes colour. You laugh and people turn their heads because it sounds like something they forgot they needed. You’ve got warmth in you, Talia. Fire. Life. And me? I’m just-” he choked on the word, spat it, “-Baltimore’s leftovers. A ghost in a trench coat. You don’t deserve a ghost.”

Talia’s chest caved with each word, like he was smashing every bone in her ribcage with his confessions. Her hands trembled on her lap, tears burning down her cheeks.

Her voice came out low, gutted. “Then you don’t know me.”

She tore at the handle, forcing the door open, snow and night air rushing in. Boots crunching hard against ice, she stumbled up the stoop, her hands fumbling with her keys. The world blurred, house lights swimming through tears, fingers shaking too much to fit metal to lock.

Behind her, his voice tore open the street. “Then tell me who you are!”

It was screamed, almost animal, cracked through with anguish. The kind of scream that wasn’t meant for her, but for the universe.

She froze, only for a heartbeat, then forced the lock open. The door swung wide. She stepped inside, coat falling off one shoulder, and disappeared into the darkness of her rowhouse.

But he followed, boots pounding through snow, trench coat flaring in the wind, chasing her into the only place she thought she could hide.

ASTORIA - December 10, 2004 - 8:07 PM

The door slammed behind them, muffling the sound of the street. Snow clung to their coats, melting into dark patches on the old tile. The space was intimate, lived-in, kind of home that had weathered grief and still dared to glow.

But Talia didn’t glow now. She ripped off her coat, her movements sharp. Rage and heartbreak rolled off her in waves.

“You think I’m perfect,” she spat, spinning on him. Her voice echoed in the living room, bouncing against bookshelves stacked too high with theology, history, and case files. “You think I’m poised, neat, some untouchable saint; well, you know nothing, John. Nothing about the shit I’ve done.”

She stormed to a shelf, grabbed a stack of files; heavy, battered, their tabs creased from years of hiding, and slammed them onto the coffee table. Papers spilled out: reports, photographs, handwritten notes in the margins. She forced him down onto the couch with a look alone, her glare brooking no refusal.

His glasses slid lower down his nose as he stared at the files, confusion cutting into dread.

“Tell me,” he said finally, jaw tight. His voice wasn’t a challenge. It was a plea.

Talia opened the first folder with trembling hands. The coroner’s report.

Lana Amari, female, 21, cause of death: overdose.

The black-and-white autopsy photo looked obscene under her soft bathroom light. Talia shoved it at him like a weapon.

“This is my sister.” Her voice cracked, then sharpened. “You want to know what I did? I destroyed evidence for her. More than once. I caught her with drugs; coke, pills, you name it. I took them, burned them, made sure no one knew. And when she died-” Talia’s breath hitched, but she forced the words out, “-I stole evidence from her crime scene. Photos, baggies, needles. I destroyed it all. Because I wanted her to die with dignity. Not as another junkie headline.”

Munch’s face went slack, stunned. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. She snatched another file. Kareem’s. Arrest records, court dockets, protests gone violent, mugshots where his eyes still blazed with conviction.

“And my brother. Do you know how many charges I buried for him? Property damage. Possession of a weapon. Conspiracy to incite violence. Even talk of ties across the border, to groups everyone called ‘fundamentalist.’” Her voice shook, but her eyes were knives. “I made them go away. Turned felonies into misdemeanours. Pulled strings, called in favours. I bent the law until it broke.”

Munch’s lips pressed into a thin line. He stared at the file, his hand twitching like he wanted to shut it, to shove the truth away. Still, she wasn’t done. She yanked another folder open and slid out a photo. Faded, worn from too much touching. A younger Talia stood arm-to-arm with Fotios Dimopoulos; crime boss, Velentzas Organization. His hand rested heavy on her shoulder like ownership.

Munch recoiled, recognizing the face from too many intelligence bulletins.

“You want honesty?” Talia said, her voice hoarse. “I cut deals with them. You think Astoria stays safe on its own? No. They run gambling, loansharking, rackets. But I made sure the streets, my streets, stayed safe. The kids, the families, untouchable. They stay clean, or I burn them myself. That’s the deal.”

Finally, her hands dropped. Exhaustion poured out of her like sand through glass. She sank into a chair opposite him, her posture no longer poised, just tired. Broken. For a long time, there was only the sound of the radiator hissing, the faint crackle of snow outside.

Munch stared at the table, at the pile of evidence, at the cracks in the foundation of the woman he loved. The perfect, radiant Talia Amari-Volkov had just bared herself raw, and what he saw left him gutted.

When he spoke, his voice was low. Almost frightened. “Do you have any idea what happens if any of this gets out?”

She shrugged, a bitter laugh escaping. “Nothing. Lana’s dead. Kareem’s dead. What’s left to ruin?”

His voice rose. “And you being in bed with organized crime? Jesus Christ, Talia-”

“Oh, don’t you act so damn high and mighty.” She snapped upright, eyes flashing. “Don’t pretend you’ve never broken the law because you thought it was wrong. You think I don’t know? You manipulate witnesses. You tap phones, you hack into cameras, you twist every rule until it breaks. Don’t stand there and judge me when your hands are just as dirty.”

Silence fell again. But this time, it was heavier.

Because she was right.

Munch had bent rules, skirted warrants, tapped into things he had no business touching. He’d justified it every time: for the victim, for the truth, because the system is rigged anyway. But hearing her say it, with that fire, that rage, it was like standing in front of a mirror he couldn’t look away from.

He dragged a hand down his face, the scrape of stubble rough against his palm. His chest ached like a weight pressing him into the couch. “I thought-” he started, then stopped. His voice wavered, uncharacteristic. “I thought you were better than me.”

Her laugh was sharp, wet with tears. “Better? John, I’m worse. I make deals with devils.”

His eyes burned. He wanted to argue. He wanted to tell her she was wrong. But the truth sat heavy in his chest. Still, he looked at her, really looked at her. Her curls fallen out of their pins, her eyes red but defiant, her hands trembling over the pile of ghosts she’d dumped onto the table. And all he saw was love.

“All this,” he said quietly, gesturing at the files, the sins, the confessions. “And I still love you.”

Her head snapped toward him, disbelieving. “Don’t say that.”

“I mean it.” His voice cracked, desperate, like a man begging at a confessional. “You think these sins make you unworthy? Doll, you’re the only person in this godforsaken city who sees me. Who looks at me and doesn’t flinch at the ruin. You think I care about Velentzas, about Kareem’s charges, about evidence burned?” He slammed his hand onto the table. The files jumped. “I care about you. And God help me, I don’t know how to stop.”

Talia’s lips parted, breath uneven.

“You think I don’t wake up every morning hating myself?” His voice was rising now, raw with anguish. “Four divorces. No kids. A closet full of trench coats and bitterness. My apartment’s a mausoleum. I’m a joke. And you-” his voice broke, “-you sit there with your ghosts and your sins, and you still shine brighter than I ever could. And I can’t stop loving you. Even if it ruins us both.”

Her tears fell freely now, but she didn’t wipe them. She just stared at him, the truth of it written all over his face.

“You’re an idiot,” she whispered.

“Yeah,” he said, voice thick. “I know.”

The files lay between them like a battlefield. Her sins. His doubts. Their love, bleeding through it all. And for the first time that night, the silence wasn’t hollow. It was charged. Alive. Terrifying. Snow beat softly at the window. The radiator hissed on. Somewhere down the block, a kid laughed in the street, the sound surreal against the storm brewing in her living room.

Talia reached across the table, her hand shaking, and laid it on top of his. Warm. Fragile. Defiant. “Then don’t you dare pretend we’re not in this together,” she whispered.

His fingers closed around hers, tight, trembling.

And for once, John Munch didn’t have a comeback.

Chapter Text

ASTORIA - December 21, 2004 - 9:04 PM

Winter had finally gotten its grip on New York. Two weeks had passed since the night Talia ripped her heart wide open in front of him, laying her sins bare like evidence files. Since then, something unspoken had shifted. John Munch carried her confessions with him, but instead of recoiling, he found himself admiring the sheer force of her will. She had carved deals with devils, and yes, bent the law until it cried out, but the result was undeniable: Astoria was safe. The streets her family had walked still hummed with life. Kids played. Shopkeepers waved. Elders nodded with pride when she passed.

And every morning when he pulled up outside her rowhouse, he saw her in the snow; tossing snowballs at teenagers, ducking behind parked cars with kids half her age, laughing with elders who watched from stoops. Talia wasn’t just part of the neighbourhood. She was its heartbeat.

He couldn’t judge her anymore. He wouldn’t. He loved her.

But loving her meant sneaking. The little rituals became survival. Holding her hand in the car, letting go before they crossed the precinct doors. A kiss before she left Astoria each morning. Another in the dark when he dropped her off at night. And more than once, he lingered on her stoop until midnight, wanting nothing more than to stay, to fall asleep in her arms, and hating himself for walking away.

They spent evenings in her living room, curled on the couch with mugs of tea and stacks of books. Sometimes they read. Sometimes they argued about conspiracy theories. Sometimes they just laughed, the kind of laughter that cracked something inside him wide open, reminding him what it felt like to be alive.

But always, every night, Talia begged him to stay. Not for sex, though the desire between them simmered hot, undeniable, but simply to sleep in his arms. To share the quiet, the breathing, the warmth. And every night, he wanted to say yes. But the ghost of his own life, four divorces deep, whispered don’t ruin her too.

This night, though, fate intervened. A nor’easter barrelled down on New York. By the time he drove her home from the precinct, snow was already swallowing the streets, buses crawling to a halt, the subways stalled in icy darkness. By midnight, the city was locked in white silence. Snowdrifts piled against cars and storefronts. Bridges closed. The whole city, for once, stopped moving.

He was snowed in. In her home. Two days before Christmas.

“Do you think it’ll clear?” Munch paced her living room, trench coat still hanging off one shoulder, glasses fogged from the storm outside.

Talia barely glanced up from her book. She was curled under a blanket, legs tucked beneath her, her dogs sprawled in a lazy pile around her feet. Ramses snored against her thigh. Anubis twitched in his sleep. Heka had wedged himself between couch and radiator, blissful.

“No,” she said simply, flipping a page. His groan filled the room.

She smirked without looking up. “I don’t understand why you can’t just sleep here.”

Her innocence cut straight through his defences. He laughed, too loudly, manic in his nerves. “I can’t sleep here.”

“Why not?” She set her book down finally, her eyes glimmering with mischief.

“Because-” he flailed, searching for logic that wouldn’t betray his want. Why couldn’t he? It was warm. There was food. And her.

“Yes?” She chuckled, standing now. The blanket slipped to the floor. She was wearing nothing but an oversized NYPD sweater and black lace panties, cut indecently high on her hips.

“Doll…” His voice cracked on the word, pleading.

She closed the distance, slid her hand into his. “Please. Just stay. One night.”

He was a fool. He was doomed. He was hers. “Okay,” he whispered.

Her smile lit the whole room. She darted upstairs, leaving him rooted on the rug, dogs blinking at him as if to say about time. When he finally followed, he found her in her prayer room closet, kneeling in the glow of votive candles, pulling down an old duvet and a stack of folded men’s clothes. Her joy was infectious, radiant.

“The heater might give out,” she said brightly, brushing dust off the duvet, “but this one’s duck feathers. And these were my brother’s, might even fit you.”

He just nodded, throat too tight. She swept past him into the bedroom, humming under her breath. The room smelled faintly of incense and lavender. She laid the duvet across one side of the bed, then peeled off her sweater. Her back was to him as she unclasped her bra, shoulders bare, skin luminous in the lamplight.

Munch froze. He hadn’t seen her tattoos up close before. Ink coiled across her back, crosses, serpents, script in languages he didn’t know. Scars and prayers woven into her skin.

He stepped closer, almost reverent, his hand trembling as he traced the lines. “It’s beautiful.”

She stilled, shivered under his touch. Slowly, he turned her to face him. The sight stole his breath. Perfect. Too perfect. His fingers mapped her like scripture: hips, waist, the curve of her breast, up to her jaw, until he cupped her cheek. His lips pressed to her forehead, a kiss heavy with devotion, not lust.

He grabbed a T-shirt from the chair, slid it over her head with careful hands, covering what he wanted but couldn’t yet take. Then he changed into her brother’s clothes; worn sweatpants, a threadbare tee, and lay beside her.

“Come here, doll,” he whispered.

She melted into his arms, her scent filling his lungs. For once, his mind was quiet. No conspiracies, no ghosts, no regrets. Just her. And he slept, truly slept, for the first time in a decade.

ASTORIA - December 22, 2004 - 7:28 AM

The city was still silent when he woke. No buses groaning, no honking horns, no subway rattle beneath the floor. Just the muffled hush of snow pressing against glass.

He blinked at the clock: 7:28. His body felt lighter than it had in years. Beside him, Talia slept on her stomach, curls spilling across the pillow, one hand tucked under her cheek. Peaceful. He watched her breathe, slow and even, and thought: Don’t wake up. Please. Stay here forever.

Then her phone rang. He cursed under his breath, fumbling across the nightstand. Her hand twitched, her body stirred. He answered before she could fully wake, already regretting it.

“Amari?” Captain Cragen’s voice barked down the line.

“No, sir,” Munch said, mentally facepalming.

A pause. “John?”

“Yes, sir.”

Another pause, thicker this time. “Why the hell do you have Amari’s phone?”

Munch pinched the bridge of his nose. “Well, uh… stormed in last night when I drove her home. She offered me to stay.” Half a lie. Half truth.

Cragen sighed. “Uh huh. John, I don’t care whose bed you sleep in. File your relationship with IAB.”

Munch swallowed. “Yes, sir.”

“John?”

“Yeah?”

“Keep your pants on at the precinct, and I’ll let you two stay partners.”

Munch barked out a laugh despite himself. “Understood.” He hung up, still shaking his head.

He turned back to her, touched her shoulder gently. “Doll, Cragen knows.”

She blinked one eye open, groggy, voice rasping. “He’s known for a while.”

He sat up straight. “What do you mean he’s known for a while?”

She rolled over, burying herself in the duvet again. “I told him.”

“You told him?” His voice cracked in disbelief.

“Mhm.” She yawned. “Go back to sleep.”

And against all reason, he did. They stayed tangled together until noon, snow still sealing them in, the city outside frozen in time.

For once, neither of them cared.

ASTORIA - December 22, 2004 - 11:48 AM

The morning in Queens didn’t wake them, at least not the city. It was the dogs. Ramses whining first, a sharp impatient yelp; then Anubis, pacing the wooden floors with nails clicking like typewriter keys. Heka, dramatic as always, added a wounded cry from the foot of the bed.

Talia groaned but swung herself upright, her curls tumbling forward as she reached for her robe. “Alright, Habibi,” she murmured, stroking Heka’s ears before slipping into slippers. She padded downstairs and let them out into the little backyard, where snow had piled like a barricade against the gate. The shepherds bounded out, noses buried in drifts, barking at the flakes as if they were invaders.

Inside, the house was hushed in that winter way, the silence thick, like the walls themselves were wrapped in cotton. Munch lingered in the living room; his coat still draped on a chair from last night. He wasn’t tired, he rarely was anymore, but the quiet here felt different from the silence of his apartment. Not empty. Not lonely. Alive with echoes.

He wandered along the wall of photos.

Her brothers, caught in mid-laugh the day before Kareem boarded that doomed flight to Egypt.
Talia and Lana, two wild girls in ’97, arms slung around each other like conspirators, eyeliner smudged from joy.
One of Talia as a child, perched at her father’s knee, her smile bright while her father was bent over a book of Pushkin, lips moving silently.
Another, blurred, but tender: Talia and her mother veiled at church, both caught mid-prayer, eyes lowered, halos of light from a candleholder at their backs.

She looked so happy, he thought. Happy in ways he hadn’t seen since she walked into SVU six months ago.

His gaze drifted to the staircase. The bedroom door stood ajar, shadows spilling across the landing. He told himself he was just looking for something to wear, something less rumpled than yesterday’s shirt. But his feet carried him not toward the dresser, but the closet.

The closet smelled faintly of rosewater and tobacco. Neatly folded blouses, silk and satin, hung beside trench coats that looked like they had been stitched for war. At the back, a cardboard box sat half-hidden under a shelf.

PRIVATE, scrawled in marker.

He hesitated. Only for a moment. “A small peek won’t hurt,” he muttered, his voice softer than conscience. The lid lifted with a sigh.

Inside: photographs. Dozens, maybe more. Talia younger, almost unrecognizable in places, soft-faced but already sharp-eyed. In Moscow, bundled in a thick coat and ushanka, standing with her father in Red Square, the towers of the Kremlin behind them. Another, Alexandria, hookah smoke curling like incense around her brothers in a café, laughter frozen in grainy print.

And then, his fingers stopped. One photo had slipped partly free.

The summer of 1994.

Talia in streetwear, bandana knotted, gold hoops, mouth curled in defiance. And him, trench coat in July, cigarette lit, watching her like he already knew she’d undo him someday. The two of them together, blurred but undeniable.

The air left his chest.

“What are you doing?”

Her voice cut the quiet like a knife. Munch froze. She stood in the doorway, sweatpants in hand, her curls spilling wild around her face. Bare feet. Eyes like flint.

“I… uh…” he stammered, words failing. He couldn’t explain. Not this. She crossed the room in three strides, snatched the box from his lap, and slammed the lid shut. She slid it back onto the shelf with shaking hands, her jaw tight. But the photo, their photo, remained in his hand.

“Don’t touch what isn’t yours,” she muttered, not meeting his gaze. Her voice was low, but beneath it, a tremor. She grabbed the sweatpants, pulled them on with clipped motions, and walked out. He followed her downstairs, the photo burning between his fingers.

“Did you know about this?” he asked quietly, almost pleading, as she moved toward the living room.

“About what?” she asked flatly, plucking a book from the shelf.

He saw the title; The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn. The margins were crowded with pencilled notes in Russian, her father’s handwriting slanting sharp and impatient. A photograph of them together had been tucked into the spine, worn from use.

“This photo.” He held it out. His voice cracked more than he intended.

Talia glanced at it and, against her own guard, smiled faintly. Not mocking. Fond. “I found it a few months ago,” she admitted, her thumb brushing the book’s spine.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he pressed, sitting beside her on the couch. The photograph trembled between them.

She hesitated. Long enough for the silence to ache. Then, softly, “I didn’t know if you cared for me the way I cared for you.”

The words landed like a blade, sharp and clean. Munch’s throat closed. He looked at her, not just at her, but into her. At the way her fingers lingered on her father’s notes. At the way her lips pressed together, as if holding back something that might break her if it escaped.

His eyes softened. He set the photo down on the table, gently, like it might shatter.

“Tell me the story of this book,” he asked, his voice low, reverent.

And for the first time that morning, her face lit.

ASTORIA - March 15, 1986 - 1:39 PM

Spring in New York was not like spring in Russia or Egypt. In Russia, it was mud and thawing ice, the smell of iron in the air. In Egypt, it was dust storms and jasmine and the promise of unbearable heat.

But in Queens, spring felt alive. Green bursting between cracks in concrete, church bells mingling with car horns, languages colliding on every stoop. For ten-year-old Talia, none of it mattered. Her favourite place was not outside but in her parents’ bedroom. Their study, really.

It smelled of lemon and ink. Books leaned two-deep on every shelf, some in Russian, some in Arabic, some in English still too complicated for her. An icon of Saint George watched from one wall, while on the other a yellowed map of old Russia curled at its corners.

Talia sat cross-legged on the floor, chin in her hands, while her father sat at his desk. Mikhail Volkov: tall, bearded, his dark eyes lined with years of exile but softened by love. He stroked his beard absently with one hand while the other flipped the fragile pages of a battered book.

He read aloud in Russian, voice rolling like thunder wrapped in velvet. Pushkin. The room vibrated with it.

“Ty znayesh’, pochemu Pushkin vazhen?” he asked suddenly, glancing down at her with that half-smile that always made her feel chosen. (Do you know why Pushkin is important? / Russian)

“Potomu chto on umer na dueli?” she guessed. (Because he died in a duel / Russian)

Mikhail laughed, deep and warm. “Net, Talusha. Potomu chto on zastroil revolyutsiyu zvuchat’ kak muzyka.” (No, Talusha. Because he made revolution sound like music / Russian)

Talia frowned, rolling the thought in her head. Revolution, music. They didn’t seem like the same thing.

She tucked her bare feet under her, eyes bright. “Mozhno, ya prochitayu odno?” (Can I read one? / Russian)

Her father didn’t hand her the Pushkin. Instead, he reached for another book, a slim volume in French and English. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince. He placed it carefully into her small hands, his fingers brushing hers with deliberate gentleness.

“Poprobuy eto,” he said softly. “Eto o lyubvi. No na samom dele, o tom, chtoby videt’ serdtsem, a ne tol’ko glazami.” (Try this. It’s about love. But it’s really about seeing with the heart, instead of just the eyes / Russian)

She opened it, reverent. The pages smelled faintly of dust and lemon. The words sang to her, even if she stumbled.

Her father leaned back, watching her. The way her lips shaped each word. The way she frowned in concentration, then smiled when she got it right. Pride swelled in him like an ache.

For Mikhail, who had fled KGB suspicion, who carried exile like a scar, there was no greater victory than this: his daughter, reading with fire in her eyes, ready to inherit the world.

“Ty ponyemesh’ odnazhdy,” he murmured, more to himself than to her. “Istina vechna, Talusha. Lyubov’ prebyvayet.” (You’ll understand, one day. Truth is eternal, Talusha. Love endures / Russian)

ASTORIA - December 22, 2004 - 12:36 PM

The snow pressed itself against the windows like a thousand small hands. Outside, Queens was muffled in white, cab horns softened, the sound of tires sloshing through slush replaced by the occasional distant shout. Inside, the radiator hissed and cracked, filling the small living room with an uneven warmth.

Talia sat curled on the couch, legs tucked under her, a hardback resting carefully on her knees. She hadn’t turned the page in ten minutes. Instead, her fingertips hovered over the pencilled margins, tracing the slanted notes that had once belonged to her father.

“He used to write back,” she said finally, voice unsteady. “Like he was arguing with the book. Whole paragraphs sometimes. Like Solzhenitsyn was in the room with him, ready to debate.” Her throat worked. “I used to laugh. Said it was pointless.”

A brittle laugh escaped her now, breaking halfway through. “But he said books demand conversation. That silence was the death of thought.”

Munch, hunched forward in the chair across from her, didn’t move. His eyes stayed fixed on her face, not the book, not the snow. He watched her like he watched fire; entranced, careful, as if too much closeness might sear him, but unable to look away.

She smoothed her hand down the fragile paper, almost tender. “The last thing he gave me was The Little Prince. Said it was about love. I thought it was a children’s book. I didn’t get it then.” Her lips parted, as though the memory itself hurt. “I get it now.”

He wanted to reach for her hand, but his fingers only twitched once against his knee. He stayed still. Instead, his gaze wandered, caught on the wall where a framed photograph hung: a younger Talia and her mother, veiled in white, bent in prayer beneath the candlelight of their church.

He spoke softly. “And her?”

Talia’s eyes followed his. Her breath hitched, shoulders curling inward as though bracing against something larger than memory. When she answered, it was nearly a whisper. “My mother was light. Even when she was dying, she was light.”

And she closed her eyes, to remember.

COPTIC CHURCH IN ASTORIA - April 17, 1996 - 10:04 AM

The incense was suffocating that morning. Heavy coils of frankincense and myrrh clung to the air, so thick it felt like breathing through smoke. The marble floor gleamed with an unnatural brightness, the light from the high stained-glass windows splintering into colours that fell on Talia’s face like judgment.

Her hands tightened on the metal grips of the wheelchair as she pushed her mother inside. Each squeak of the wheels echoed across the nave, unbearably loud in the cavernous silence.

Miriam no longer looked like the woman who had once stood before classrooms with her spine straight and her voice steady. Cancer had eaten her from the inside, leaving behind sharp bones, sunken cheeks, lips that cracked from dryness. Her headscarf slipped loose on her thinning hair, and Talia reached forward to fix it, fingers trembling. “Ya mama… iḥna hina. Abuna Stefanos mustannīna.” (Mom, we are here. Father Stephanos is waiting for us / Arabic)

Miriam gave the smallest nod, her eyes glistening but unfocused. It was all she had left in her. Father Stephanos’ shadow moved across the altar, robes heavy, voice deep and mournful: “Ahlan, Miriam… w Talia. Yalla, nṣalli.” (Welcome, Miriam and Talia. Let us pray / Arabic)

The words rang like bells in the empty church. He crossed himself, then traced the sign of the cross in the air over Miriam, as if blessing could mend the body that was already collapsing. Talia guided her mother to the very front row, adjusting her veil again before crossing herself, the familiar motion suddenly desperate. She fell to her knees beside the chair, pressing her forehead to the cold wood of the pew until it almost hurt.

Father Stephanos began, his voice thick with incense and sorrow: “Ya Rab yasouʿ el-Masīḥ, ashfi w ʿāfi ʿabīdak, waʾtīhum quwwa w baraka.” (Lord Jesus Christ, heal and strengthen Your servants, and grant them power and blessing / Arabic)

The prayer echoed against the high arches, filling the silence like thunder, like pleading. Talia lifted her mother’s hand. It was ice. Paper-thin skin stretched over bones that used to braid her hair, stir pots of cumin and olive oil, press books into her palms with a teacher’s urgency. She kissed each knuckle as though trying to breathe warmth back into them. Tears fell onto Miriam’s skin, soaking into her like holy water.

Her whole life had unravelled since her father’s sudden death. Samir was half a world away, swallowed by the war in Iraq. Ameen was drowning in graduate work. Kareem had become fire and fury, his voice hoarse from protests, his fists scarred from holding banners in the cold. And Lana… Lana was already slipping into smoke and shadows, rolling joints on rooftops while the city roared beneath her.

And so, it was Talia here. Twenty years old, already carrying the weight of the house like a condemned beam. She had dropped out of LaGuardia Community College the week before, unable to keep pretending she could read poetry in classrooms while her mother coughed blood into tissues at night. She bathed her mother’s frail body, fought with insurance clerks on the phone until her throat was raw, read doctors’ reports she didn’t want to understand. And she prayed. Every night, she prayed.

Father Stephanos’ voice rose again, deeper, slower, each word like a hammer blow against stone. Talia’s lips moved with him, but no sound came. Her faith was there, but her voice was gone. When the prayer ended, the silence felt merciless.

She rose on trembling legs and lit a thin candle before the icon of the Virgin. The flame flickered uncertainly, as though even fire did not want to stay. She whispered her father’s name in Arabic, her voice so low it barely stirred the air, and crossed herself again with shaking fingers.

She wheeled her mother back out through the nave, past the saints staring down in painted silence, past the altar where smoke still curled like unanswered prayers. The squeak of the chair wheels echoed one last time, swallowed by the heavy doors.

By noon, they were back in the hospital. Two days later, Miriam passed away.

Only Talia was there. No choir, no Father Stephanos, no family. Just the mechanical rhythm of a heart monitor flattening to silence, and her mother’s head leaning against her arm. Talia pressed her lips to Miriam’s forehead, tasting salt, antiseptic, the faint ghost of rose oil.

“Light, mama,” she whispered, her voice breaking in two. “You are light.”

And then there was nothing.

ASTORIA - December 22, 2004 - 12:48 PM

The memory drained out of her like blood, and when her eyes opened again, she was back in the living room. The snow was still falling. The radiator still hissed. But her face was pale, lashes wet. Munch hadn’t moved. His jaw was tight, his glasses halfway down his nose. He looked at her the way men look at something they can’t fix. The silence ached between them.

Finally, she exhaled. “It broke me,” she said quietly. “Losing them both so close. I thought maybe if I studied enough, prayed enough, worked hard enough, I could keep the house standing. But grief doesn’t bargain.”

He wanted to tell her he understood. That he, too, had stood in churches, in funeral homes, had lost people in ways that made the world tilt. But the words didn’t form. Instead, he asked the only thing he could. “What did she give you?”

Talia blinked at him, confused.

“Your father gave you books,” he clarified, voice low. “Arguments in the margins. What about her?”

For the first time, Talia smiled. It was small, fragile, but real. “She gave me music. Said prayer was music that learned how to fly. And she gave me her hands. Always braiding my hair, always cooking beside me, always lighting candles.” Her gaze softened. “Even when she was in pain, she found light.”

She shifted closer, curling deeper into the couch. “Your turn,” she murmured. “Tell me something no one knows about you.”

Munch looked caught, like she had aimed a spotlight at him. “What kind of something?”

“Anything,” she pressed. “You think you’re a mystery, John, but you’re not. Give me one truth.”

He thought for a long moment. Then shrugged, almost too casually. “Last summer, before you transferred here… I took the Sergeant’s exam.”

Her eyes widened. “I’m sorry? what?”

“And I passed,” he added, smirking faintly.

“You passed?” She sat up straighter, incredulous. “And you didn’t say anything?”

He laughed dryly. “Didn’t seem important.”

Talia groaned, flopping back against the cushions. “God, you drive me insane.”

For the first time that day, the heaviness in the room cracked. Their laughter filled the little rowhouse, spilling warm against the windows while snow muffled the world outside.

The rest of the afternoon passed in slow spirals of memory, teasing, silence, and something gentler; the quiet thrum of two people learning, against all odds, that grief could still make room for love.

Chapter Text

ASTORIA - January 17, 2005 - 7:56 AM

Winter had rubbed the colour out of Astoria. The snow from last week had crusted into grey berms at the curbs, and the air coming in through the cracked kitchen window tasted like iron and old radiators. On the sill, the stub of a beeswax candle had gone lopsided in its brass cup. Someone in the street was coaxing a Civic to life with steady prayers and a stubborn ignition; from the avenue came the low thunder of the N and W rattling toward the city. The rowhouse itself held its own small weather; warm, dim, scented faintly of coffee, paper, and her perfume, which lived in the books long after she left the room.

Almost a month had passed since the snow day, and the stillness of it had rewired their routines. Nights had turned into monasteries with better music: lights low, vinyl crackling, two lamps throwing pools of gold across the living room, John’s long legs stretched on the couch while he read, Talia curled in the corner with a blanket and a battered novel. Their murmured jokes carried like conspiracies; his sharp cynicism softened into warmth he never wasted on the world, ladled out freely for her.

The dogs had grown accustomed to it too. Ramses sprawled at John’s feet, a lazy sentry. Anubis guarded the kitchen threshold like he’d appointed himself watchman of the samovar. And Heka, curled shamelessly against Talia’s side until she absently reached down to scratch behind his ears.

Mornings were choreography. John always woke first, because of course he did, bones conditioned by decades of night shifts. Coffee. Paper. Glasses sliding down his nose. When she opened her eyes, he’d be by the window, looking at the sky like it might offer him better odds. She loved him most in those minutes; rumpled, quiet, a man with a thousand knives of cynicism in his pockets and none of them unsheathed for her.

Now the clock pinned the morning to the wall: 7:56 AM. The window breathed cold. His trench hung by the door like a shadow with a belt.

From the bedroom, she crossed barefoot to him, cardigan thrown over a silk camisole, slacks skimming her hips. Damp curls were twisted into a clip that wouldn’t last an hour. He looked up, and the morning sharpened.

“Good,” he rasped, voice still rough with sleep and coffee. “You’re alive.”

“I am.” Her smile tugged. “And you are tolerably handsome for a Tuesday.”

“It’s Monday.”

“Time is a construct, Munch.”

“Tell that to Stabler.”

She stopped between his knees. He set the phone face-down, reached for her without thinking, the kind of reach born after years of refusing himself permission, only to have it returned, unexpectedly, by her. She fell easily into his gravity. The cardigan slipped. She knew how she looked in his eyes: the soft reprieve from a city that scraped him raw.

“Morning,” she whispered, kissing him. The brush of her mouth was warm and unapologetic. He caught it and answered in kind, one hand at her back, the other cupping her jaw, thumb grazing her lower lip until she opened for him.

The landline rang. Of course it did.

John groaned low, the sound she’d come to love; it meant I was better at this when I was alone, but now you’ve made me greedy for mornings. He reached for the receiver without letting her go.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Stabler?” she mouthed.

He tilted the phone so she could hear Elliot’s impatience through the line, already barking about a new case. John’s mouth twitched, even as his hand slid beneath her cardigan, palm warming her ribs. “Uh-huh. Yeah. We’re in Queens. Yes, I know where Williamsburg is. No, I haven’t moved to Delaware. We’ll head in.” He hung up. The rowhouse was quiet again, except for the radiator ticking and Heka giving a single sharp bark from the couch as if to remind them he was listening.

“He’s charming,” Talia said.

“He’s got a case. The kind with rules.” John leaned back in the chair, watching her like he was cataloguing every inch for evidence. “Hasidic community. They’re not going to throw confetti if a woman starts swinging a lamp at them.”

“I don’t swing lamps.”

“You light the room on fire and claim innocence while it burns.”

She leaned close, lips hovering over his, voice soft, amused, edged with yes. “Soviet women know when to be quiet. We invented secrets.”

His smile was half-surrender, half-warning. “You’re many things, doll. Quiet isn’t one of them.”

“And for you?”

“For me-” he brushed his thumb across her jaw, gaze steady, voice low “-you can be exactly what you are.”

The world narrowed to the heat between them. She kissed his hand, tracing the web of his thumb with her mouth. He looked at her like reverence was a private vice.

“You think if I go quiet for Elliot,” she murmured, “you’ll owe me something?”

“I owe you already,” he said simply.

She smirked, tugged him up. He followed, backing her toward the hall wall with laughter tangled in their mouths. Her hands teased at his shirtfront, unbuttoning nothing, yet promising everything. His shadow cut sharp across plaster; hers melted into it.

A thud interrupted them; Ramses dropping his heavy head onto John’s thigh with a disgruntled sigh.

Talia laughed into John’s mouth. “Your competition’s awake.”

John glanced down at the dog’s soulful stare. “Great. Audience participation.”

She scratched behind Ramses’ ear without breaking the kiss. “He approves.”

“Yeah,” John muttered dryly, brushing her hair back, “that’s what I needed. Canine commentary on my sex life.”

Anubis gave a sharp huff from the kitchen doorway, tail wagging once.

“Two votes,” Talia whispered, eyes glinting.

John kissed her again, hard enough to silence both of them. The second call lit the phone. He leaned his forehead to hers, swore theatrically. “Stabler’s gonna get a new partner just to stop dialling me.”

“We can let it ring.”

“We could,” he agreed, thumb tracing the edge of her collar. “Until Benson drags us out with the fire brigade.”

“Another time,” she promised. It didn’t sound like consolation; it sounded like fact.

They stepped back, air still charged, the dogs watching them like sentinels from the rug. Talia moved first, disappearing into the bedroom. John followed; not to dress, but to lean against the doorframe and watch. She was used to it now, his eyes on her like they were part of the architecture: constant, sharp, unapologetic.

She shrugged the cardigan off, and slid into a fresh bra with the kind of practiced grace that made him smirk. “Enjoying the show?” she asked without looking up.

“Better than television,” he said dryly, arms folded, though his gaze didn’t budge.

She buttoned a crisp blouse, tucked it into charcoal slacks, smoothing the line of the fabric against her hips. She bent to choose between heels and flats, weighing practicality against vanity, and John’s voice came from behind her: “Wear the heels. You like terrifying perps by looking taller.”

She shot him a look over her shoulder. “And you like staring at my ass.”

“Two things can be true,” he said, unbothered.

He dressed more quickly; shirt, tie, trench, but when she reached for her coat he stepped in and held it out for her. She slid her arms through the sleeves, and he drew it up onto her shoulders with a small, precise tug, smoothing the collar like he’d been doing it all his life. She buttoned his shirt cuffs in return, straightened his tie with a practiced flick.

The dogs stirred at the sound of keys. Ramses stretched with a groan, Anubis trotted to the door, and Heka spun in impatient circles until she clipped the leads to their collars.

“You have that look,” she said, fastening her gloves.

“What look?”

“The one that says you want to scandalize the neighbours.”

“They’re already scandalized,” he deadpanned. “My newspaper delivery offends them.”

She laughed, bright as a match. “Come on, cynic. Let’s go pretend we’re strangers.”

Outside, the cold clapped its hands. She could see their breath braid into one ribbon as they spoke, nothing words about locked doors, wallet, phone, keys. He unlocked the Mustang for her with the little flourish he pretended not to have, and she slid into the driver’s seat like a queen accepting tribute. He took passenger, because their mornings had taught them certain rituals made the city kinder.

The Mustang slid onto the expressway with a low growl, tires biting damp asphalt, the skyline flashing in fractured silver through gaps in the warehouses. The East River mirrored the grey of the sky, and trucks thundered past like iron animals. Inside the car, the air was too heavy for January. It wasn’t the heat from the vents. It was him.

John had sprawled into the passenger seat the way only he could; coat open, tie skewed, one arm resting against the door like the car belonged to him. He looked casual, almost indifferent, but his hand told another story. It was on her thigh, high, too high for innocence, his palm wide and steady, thumb drawing idle circles against the inner seam of her slacks.

Talia kept her eyes fixed on the road. She told herself to focus on the green signs overhead, the blur of graffiti on the retaining walls, the red taillights ahead. But all she could feel was the heat of his hand, inching close to where fabric gave way to skin.

“Eyes forward, doll,” John murmured, leaning in so his breath ghosted her cheek. His voice was calm, cynical as always, but threaded with that private amusement he reserved for her. “Plenty of bridges you could drive us off if you’re not careful.”

Her hands tightened on the wheel. “Then maybe you should stop distracting me.”

“I’m not distracting you,” he said smoothly, pressing a little firmer, thumb dragging higher. “I’m testing you.”

She swallowed, biting the inside of her cheek. “You’re cruel.”

“And you like cruel.” He smirked, close enough that she could feel it. “You like me keeping you exactly where I want you.”

The Mustang swerved an inch before she corrected. His laugh was low and unkind in the best way, curling through her nerves like smoke.

Her pulse betrayed her, hammering under her blouse. He felt it in the way her thighs shifted, her body tensing under his palm. His grin widened. He pressed his thumb closer to the seam of her pants, dragging lazy circles higher, higher, until she let out a sound that wasn’t quite a moan, but close enough.

“Look at you,” he muttered, his voice all smoke and satisfaction. “Driving like a model citizen while I’ve got you trembling under my hand. I should get a medal for public service.”

Traffic thickened, horns spitting like curses, the car boxed in by trucks on either side. The city blurred; graffiti, billboards, rusted girders overhead. Talia kept her jaw set, refusing to give him the satisfaction of seeing her lose focus, but her breathing betrayed her: shallow, uneven, caught between control and collapse.

John noticed. He always noticed. His hand inched higher, heat bleeding through fabric, deliberate as a match struck in the dark. “God, you’re perfect like this,” he said low, half to himself, half to her. “Trying so damn hard not to fall apart.”

“Keep your voice down,” she hissed, though her grip on the wheel trembled.

“Why? No one can hear us. Just trucks and asphalt.” He leaned in, lips brushing her ear, voice rough. “Besides, I like watching you break while the whole city drives by with no idea what’s happening in here.”

Her thighs shifted again, betraying her, and he rewarded the motion with a slow squeeze, his palm claiming every inch he touched. She bit back a sound that might have been his name, and he chuckled darkly against her hair.

“That’s my good girl,” he whispered. “Obedient enough to keep driving, needy enough to let me ruin you without lifting a finger.”

The Mustang purred, and the toll booths appeared ahead, green lights flickering them forward. She handed the attendant a bill with fingers that shook more than they should have, John’s hand never leaving its place. He thanked the man like they were just another couple on their way into Brooklyn, and as soon as the car rolled forward again, his thumb pressed a fraction higher, testing her.

“John…”

“Yes, doll?”

“I hate you.”

“No, you don’t.” His voice was smooth as smoke. “You love every second of this.”

She bit her lip so hard it almost hurt, staring straight ahead as the city unfolded into Brooklyn’s industrial edge; warehouses, smokestacks, a skyline of water towers against the winter sky. His hand stayed high, steady, relentless. A constant reminder. A claim.

By the time the Williamsburg exit loomed, her pulse was frantic, her body tight with unspent need. He finally eased off, sliding his hand back down to her knee like nothing had happened. He leaned back in the seat, utterly at ease, eyes forward now.

“You’re welcome,” he said dryly, as if he’d just fixed her taxes.

She shot him a look sharp enough to cut, but her lips betrayed her with the ghost of a smile.

He smirked, settling deeper into the leather. “Relax, doll. The day’s only getting started.”

RESIDENCE OF AVI ZELINSKY - January 17, 2005 - 8:49 AM

The block wore winter like a stern face: slate sky pressed low over South Williamsburg, salt-bleached curbs, a thin film of ice feathering the brownstone steps. Delivery trucks idled at the corner deli; a stroller squeaked past; its plastic rain cover fogged with the breath of a fussing toddler. Posters in Hebrew peeled at the edges from the damp; fundraising for a yeshiva dinner, a lost glove tacked above a pushke notice. It was a Monday morning that felt like a held breath.

Elliot stood outside the residence, collar up against the wind, jaw already set to the day. He was waiting on the two who made the air around them hum in a way he couldn’t place, Munch’s dry electricity and Talia’s quiet warmth, opposites that somehow kept the compass steady.

Talia tugged a soft charcoal scarf from her coat pocket and, tied it to pull her curls back. It wasn’t about modesty laws in a personal sense; it was respect. A house is a house, she’d grown up taught; but some houses are also sanctuaries. As she tightened the knot, Munch watched with the kind of attention he never gave to his own tie. He didn’t say anything, but the corner of his mouth acknowledged her.

“Who we meeting?” Talia asked, exhale turning white in the cold.

“Avi Zelinsky, the boy’s father.” Elliot handed her a file as they moved toward the stoop. The paper was already roughened at the edges from his grip. Talia flipped it open and skimmed the first page: David Zelinsky, elementary-aged, rectal bleeding noted at school, hospital exam revealed repeated rape over months. Her throat caught; she had learned to swallow the first wave and breathe into the second. The scarf suddenly felt heavier on her crown.

Munch’s shoulder eased against the banister as they climbed. He turned and gave Talia a look; one they’d invented over seven months: observe first. Don’t lead with your heart where the room demands your ears. “He might be more modern Hasidic,” he murmured, voice pitched for her alone, “but it doesn’t mean he will speak to you.” He added, softer, wry: “Or any of us, really.”

She nodded. She knew the dance from her own churches; who speaks for a family when pain walks through the door, who doesn’t. “I’ll be quiet,” she said, and the promise meant more than words; it meant she’d let him take the front for this one. Mentor in daylight, something else in the hours that had no labels in the nightlight. The first month of naming that something had been a secret stitched with glances and the slight press of his hand at her back when no one was looking. Elliot didn’t know. He wasn’t going to.

Inside the hallway, the mezuzah on the doorframe caught the light, angled like a blessing and a boundary. Talia’s eyes lingered. She didn’t know the Hebrew on sight, couldn’t read the tiny scroll rolled within, but she recognized devotion when it lived in the small things. On the doormat: a dusting of kosher salt crystals tracked from the street. Through the thin door, the sound of a radio turned low, somewhere between static and song.

“Mr. Zelinsky,” Elliot called, knuckles rapping the wood with practiced authority, “open up, it’s police.”

A bolt scraped. The door opened to a hallway that held a thin hallway scent of boiled coffee and Murphy Oil Soap. A man in his thirties stood half-in shadow, black knit kippah, shirt buttoned to the throat. His eyes had the brittle shine of someone who hadn’t slept in a while.

“I’d never hurt my little boy. Name the test, I’ll take it.” Mr. Zelinsky argued. The words came out fast, as though he’d been holding them in his mouth waiting for a key to the lock.

“Start with your DNA,” Elliot said, flat, efficient.

“This is Rachael’s fault. These unspeakable things, they only happen in your world.” Mr. Zelinsky said, his voice laced with panic and frustration.

Meanwhile, Talia let her gaze move; cataloguing quietly the life of the apartment. A line of small coats hung on pegs; a pair of tiny black shoes aligned with adult ones; a pushke box near the kitchen arch plastered with a faded sticker; on a shelf, a stack of siddurim, their spines cracked from use, and a laminated card with emergency numbers in English and Yiddish pinned to a cork board. On the dining table, a plastic cover and two silver candlesticks waited beside a wax-dripped matchbox; Monday morning and Shabbat still echoed in the metal. The room felt orderly to the point of apology.

“Mr. Zelinsky, these things can happen anywhere,” Munch said, and he waved at Talia to come and write down her notes. His voice was softer than the cynicism he wore like a coat; softer in a way that made her chest ache.

“No. No, if she had let me bring David here where it’s safe…” Mr. Zelinsky said, but was cut off by Elliot.

“Safe… he was attacked this morning while he was with you,” Elliot quickly replied. He didn’t lean on the words; he just put them down like facts on a ledger and let gravity do the rest.

“That’s impossible. We were at Shul. I was with him the whole time.” Mr. Zelinsky said.

Talia kept her eyes on the page and let her voice be the gentlest thing in the room. “David was never alone?” she asked, unsure if he would answer her. It was deliberate, an opening, not an accusation.

“No, we went to Minyan, the morning service. And one of his tutors gave him a lift to school.” Mr. Zelinsky answered.

“Tutor’s name?” Elliot asked.

“Yehāreg v’al ya‘avor.” Mr. Zelinsky said and turned his back away from them. (He shall be killed rather than transgress / Hebrew)

Both Talia and Elliot turned to Munch. Talia knew enough to know the words weren’t a name, knew enough to watch Munch’s face. Something moved there, recognition, and then a decision about how much of himself to place on the table.

“That a name?” Elliot asked, confused.

“It’s from the Talmud. I believe Mr. Zelinsky’s trying to tell us he won’t take a life to save a life.” Munch explained. Talia felt the sentence settle like a stone in a river; the current moved around it, but it changed the shape of everything. She watched Avi’s shoulders, the rigid line between duty and fear.

“This tutor is an upstanding young man. An accusation like this could ruin his life.” Mr. Zelinsky argued, fear in his voice.

“You care more about this guy’s reputation than your own son?” Elliot asked, eyes narrowing.

“Of course I don’t.” Mr. Zelinsky spluttered, voice raised. “I’m just trying to behave responsibly.”

Munch stepped forward, the shift almost imperceptible; out of sarcasm, into something that had a history older than the badge on his belt. “I understand your dilemma,” he said softly. “But the biblical concept of ‘Lifnei Eever’ commands you not to look the other way.”

Avi’s mouth pressed into a line. The silence after the phrase stretched; Talia imagined it like a bridge he had to trust with his whole weight.

“We’ll be discreet,” Munch whispered.

“Tutor’s name is Jacob Ribowsky. He teaches at Torah Veyirah. It’s the local Yeshiva.” Mr. Zelinsky sighed.

“Good.” Munch said.

The word closed the room like a file. The three detectives backed out into the hall with their careful choreography: Elliot first, carrying the bluntness of the job; Munch, the door-latch gentled by long fingers; Talia last, her pen still uncapped in case a final detail offered itself like a stray thread.

On the stoop, the wind found them again. The block hadn’t changed; laundry still flapped from a third-floor line, a boy with peyos tugged his little brother’s mittened hand past a cracked hydrangea. But the air around them was different, the way it always was when you took one person’s fear and turned it into an avenue you had to walk.

Talia turned to the two men, tucking a coil of hair under her scarf with an absent thought for her mother lighting candles in Astoria, for her father’s library. It made the day kinder to line it up with faith. “Why don’t you two check out Torah Veyirah,” she said, gauging the quickest approach. “I don’t think they’ll speak to me.” There was humour in her mouth, a low chuckle to sand the edge, and she opened the Mustang’s door.

Elliot cocked his head. “Where you going?”

“To speak to my own rabbi,” Talia said, and closed the door with a small, decisive smile. The engine’s low growl stitched into the neighbourhood noise and then pulled away.

Elliot watched the Mustang pull away and shoved his hands into his pockets. “Your girl’s confident,” he said, neutral, not fishing, not not fishing. It was casual; it nearly meant nothing.

“She’s a fast learner,” Munch said, eyes still on the taillights. He let the compliment live where it landed.

ASTORIA SYNAGOGUE - January 17, 2005 - 10:19 AM

The Mustang’s engine sighed as Talia eased it against the curb, the hood catching a square of winter sun that made the old paint look warmer than it was. The stained glass over the synagogue’s entrance held light like a secret; geometric blues and pomegranate reds, letters she couldn’t read that nonetheless felt like a welcome. A deliveryman ducked from a side door with a brown paper sack balanced on his forearm; the bag breathed sesame, onion, and the faint ghost of poppy, and the smell threaded through the crisp air like a hand leading you inside.

She took the steps two at a time, heels ticking quietly. Two older men were camped by the door in heavy coats, caps pulled down, the posture of neighbours who had been having the same conversation for twenty years and were delighted to have it for twenty more. One had a newspaper folded under his arm; the other wrapped both hands around a Styrofoam cup of tea and watched the street with the fond suspicion of a retiree.

“Shalom,” Talia said, soft and sure. It sat in her mouth with respect, not performance. (Hello / Hebrew)

“Aleichem shalom, Detective,” the tea-drinker nodded, mouth tugging over her badge and her scarf with equal approval. “You tell your friend the parking is terrible today.” (Peace be upon you / Hebrew)

“I’ll lecture the city myself,” she said, and earned twin chuckles.

Inside, the foyer was hushed without being empty. Old-book hush. Lemon-polish hush. The kind of quiet that collects when people teach themselves to lower their voices for things that matter. A wall of cubbies held knit hats and small prayer shawls, and just inside the door hung a large poster with this month’s simchas; baby naming’s, bar mitzvah dates, a golden anniversary, typed in a font that had lived in this building longer than most congregants.

At the little desk past the doors, Esther Blum presided like a general with a cheerful clipboard. Her glasses rode the perilous midpoint of her nose, and her sweater was the precise blue that appears in old shuls between winter and spring. She flipped through mail with a speed that suggested she could do this in the dark.

“Detective Amari,” Esther said, looking up before Talia had the chance to knock. “Good morning. You missed the good rugelach but there’s a chocolate one hiding in the kitchen if you don’t make me confess to God about it.”

Talia laughed, warmth unclenching something in her ribs. “Good morning, Esther. I’ll take my chances with the Almighty.”

Esther’s eyes moved like a quick scan; Are you sleeping? Are you eating? Is your hair uncovered in the house of the Lord because you forgot or because you are in a rush? and then softened. “Rabbi’s in. He said he’d be at his desk until eleven before a hospital visit.”

“Thank you.” Talia touched the desk, the gesture small and fond. Esther had taught her where the light switches were years ago, how to refill the wax in the memorial candles without getting it everywhere, which door stuck in summer and which in winter. It was a sanctuary for people like her, who belonged to the city and to their own histories and sometimes didn’t know which needed tending more.

She slipped down the carpeted hall, past framed photos from decades of Purim plays (moustaches drawn on with eyeliner, cardboard crowns, a tiny Haman pouting) and arrived at the office with the brass plate: Rabbi David Levy. She knocked.

“Come in,” came the familiar voice, warm as tea.

The office smelled like paper, dust, and bergamot. Books rose to the ceiling in disciplined troops; Hebrew spines, English titles, commentaries and histories, around a desk that had known every emotion the borough could deliver. A small menorah in the window caught the thin sun; a dish of wrapped candies waited near the blotter, a bait bowl for congregants who needed one more minute of courage before they spoke.

“Detective Volkov,” he greeted, rising. Only a handful of people still used the name tied to her father’s side, and the sound of it felt like a hand on her shoulder. “Welcome.”

“Rabbi.” She smiled and took a seat, slipping her scarf a little tighter out of habit. “I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

“Please. You know you’re my favourite detective,” he said, settling with the soft creak of a chair that had been kind to a thousand confessions.

“Not John?” she teased, because if she didn’t, he would.

Rabbi Levy’s mouth tipped, the eyebrow of a man who had officiated weddings, funerals, and three neighbourhood peace treaties. “Detective Munch is also a favourite,” he said diplomatically. “But he does not eat my rugelach, which counts against him.”

She laughed, but her smile faded into the day’s shape. “We caught a case this morning. Williamsburg. A little boy.” She didn’t say more; he lifted a hand, the smallest benediction, and she felt the prayer of it in her chest even as he reached for a kettle on a hot plate.

He poured tea into two mismatched mugs; one with a faded Mets logo, one with a cartoon pomegranate, and set the pomegranate in front of her. “Tell me what you need.”

“Knowledge,” she said. “We walked into a Hasidic home. I know the customs in this neighbourhood,” she tipped her head toward the sanctuary, “but not theirs. John mentioned the, Lifnei Eever.” She let the Hebrew be approximate. “And the father said Yehāreg v’al ya‘avor. I want to understand the ground under my feet before I put weight on the wrong place.”

The rabbi’s eyes warmed with that rabbinic mixture: teacher and pastor, historian and neighbour. “Ah, talusha,” he said, the tender diminutive falling into the room like a memory. “You’re asking the right questions.”

He steepled his fingers. “First, the map. Our synagogue here is Conservative; traditional, observant, and also in conversation with the modern world. Hasidim; especially in Williamsburg, live in a different architecture. Their language is Yiddish more than Hebrew; their authority flows from their Rebbe; modesty codes are stricter; men and women are separated by design. They prefer to handle problems inside the walls of the community. Outsiders; police, journalists, represent risk.”

“Do they see me?” she asked, quiet. “Me as me?”

He considered. “They will see your badge first. Then that you are a woman. Then that you are not one of them. Some will not speak directly to you. Some will, but the sentences will be short. The mothers will see you fastest, because mothers always do.” His mouth softened. “Do not mistake silence for absence of feeling.”

Talia nodded, scribbling small notes out of habit; Rebbe, Yiddish, men/women separate, inside first, though she suspected she would remember every word. “And the phrases?”

“yehāreg ve’al ya‘avor,” he said, giving the syllables room. “It means ‘He shall be killed rather than transgress.’ There are three commandments one does not break even on pain of death: idolatry, murder, and sexual immorality. This father was saying, in his language, how grave he understands this to be. He was also, perhaps, telling you that the boy’s tutor is protected by a presumption of righteousness. That’s the tension.”

“And Lifnei Eever?” she prompted.

“Lifnei Eever, ‘do not place a stumbling block before the blind.’ From Leviticus. In rabbinic thought it becomes a mandate not to enable wrongdoing. In your world, that means you cannot look away when harm is being done, and you cannot protect the person doing harm by pretending not to see. You can remind them of that; it is Torah, not precinct policy.”

He paused, then added, “There is also pikuach nefesh, the principle that saving a life overrides nearly every other commandment. Jews may break Shabbat to save a life. They may violate most prohibitions to preserve life or health. In child protection matters, you can say: pikuach nefesh demands we act. It is not a betrayal of God; it is an obedience to Him.”

The words sat with the steam between them. Talia wrapped her hands around the mug, letting the heat climb into her fingers. “Thank you,” she said. “It helps to know the shape of the river before I step in.”

He smiled, eyes creasing. “That is why God gave us maps and boats.”

“One more name,” she said. “Do you know a Rabbi Iscowitz?”

“Iscowitz is…” Levy’s mouth made the shape of a diplomat. “Pragmatic. Hasidic, but not naive about city life. He speaks to the outside when it protects the inside. If you are fortunate, you will deal with him. He won’t give you everything, but he won’t pretend not to understand your questions.”

Talia wrote Iscowitz → pragmatic and drew a small arrow.

Levy watched the motion and then watched her face instead. “And Detective Munch?” he asked lightly, like a man inquiring about the weather and meaning something else.

Talia’s mouth tilted before she could stop it. She took a sip of tea to smooth the expression into something professional. “He’s… good at the rooms where I’m learning the language.”

“Mm.” The rabbi’s eyebrow made a small ascent and then lingered at the view. “He is a man who keeps a lot of words in his pockets,” he said. “Those men can surprise you.”

“He already has,” she said, before she remembered not to say that here, not that way. She redirected gently. “He used Lifnei Eever with the father. It landed.”

“It would,” Levy said. “It speaks to duty. To conscience. Also- ” and here his smile turned knowing, but not unkind, “-he is a Jew telling a Jew a Torah truth. That is not nothing.”

Silence hummed in the friendly way. The radiator clanged twice as if agreeing. Somewhere down the hall, a child squealed, and someone shushed them with love. Talia took the notes, the corners square beneath her thumb. “This is more than I hoped for.”

“It is exactly what you need.” Levy’s tone was gentle but iron-laced, a city rabbi’s blessing. “Go with respect. Lead with care. Ask the women questions even when the men answer. When you hit a wall, look for the door that isn’t painted like one.”

She nodded, then; because he had known her since long before the shield, let the other thing surface. “You… think heshould come here?” she asked, light as a joke, heavy as a hope.

“I think Detective Munch would enjoy arguing with me about Spinoza over tea,” Levy said, eyes bright. “And I think there is a way a man looks at a woman when he has decided that cynicism is not the only way to stand upright. I have seen that look in your hallway, talusha. It is not unholy.”

She felt heat climb her neck that had nothing to do with the mug. “We’re-” She stopped. He let her.

“You are partners,” he supplied, saving her, and then didn’t. “And something more that you will be careful with, as you are with everything. I trust you to walk and not stumble.” A beat. “Lifnei Eever applies to us, too. Do not trip your own heart with fear.”

The words landed in the quiet part of her. She closed her notebook and stood. “Thank you, Rabbi.”

He came around the desk and squeezed her shoulder, paternal and proud. “Bring him next time,” he said, as if she had asked. “I’ll make extra tea. And when you go to Williamsburg, remember: pikuach nefesh. If they balk, you say it softly, and you keep going.”

“I will,” she said. “And I’ll tell John, you expect him.”

“Tell him I have opinions about the Mets and about Moses,” Levy said. “He can disagree with one.”

She laughed, the sound easing her lungs. At the doorway, she paused. “Esther’s hiding chocolate rugelach in the kitchen.”

“I know,” he said gravely. “I placed it there. Now go take two; one for you, one for the man with too many words in his pockets.”

Talia found Esther on the way out, trading a conspiratorial look for a paper napkin and a pastry still warm at the centre. In the foyer, the two old men had been joined by a third, who argued that the bagels had gotten smaller since 1998, and this was a known fact. She promised to investigate the matter at the municipal level and stepped into the clean bite of the day.

Queens felt like home in a way that wasn’t about addresses. The Mustang started on the second try, coughing into life. As she pulled away, she tucked the sticky notes into her coat, her scarf snug at her throat, the rugelach waiting in the passenger seat like a bribe for a man who pretended not to like sweet things. She thought of the boy in Williamsburg and of the fathers who spoke in principles when names were too dangerous to say, and of Munch, telling another man, don’t put a stumbling block before the blind.

All three were true. And the city, maddening and holy, expected her to hold them at once.

She turned onto Broadway, checked her mirror, and let the day carry her toward the next door that needed knocking.

Chapter Text

SVU PRECINCT - January 17, 2005 - 11:38 AM

The precinct was already a storm by the time Talia pushed through the glass doors. Phones screamed. Radios spat static. A suspect shouted something obscene down the hall as a pair of uniforms muscled him toward holding. The smell was a cocktail of burnt coffee, copier toner, and snow tracked in on boot soles.

Her phone was still warm in her hand. Munch had called ten minutes earlier, voice clipped and urgent: Avi took David. Get here now.

She threaded through the bullpen fast, trench coat still buttoned. Elliot intercepted her halfway, that bulldog urgency in his stride, jaw set.

“Fifteen minutes after Rachel left the apartment, Avi walked out with David,” Elliot explained, steering her toward Cragen’s office.

Inside, Cragen sat with the blinds half-drawn, light striping across the clutter of manila folders. A grainy security tape flickered on the monitor. “We got a watch and warrant out on Zelinsky?” Cragen asked, his voice the calm rumble of a man who’d seen too many parents lose children.

“I got Liv and Fin canvassing Williamsburg with the precinct cops,” Elliot said.

“They might want to head a little bit further east.” The voice came from behind her; dry, sardonic, familiar. Munch stepped in, trench coat shedding flecks of snow, glasses fogged faintly. “I spoke to State Department Security Division. David Zelinsky has a passport.”

Talia’s brows knit. “Well, how’s that possible? Minor can’t get a passport unless both parents consent.”

“They did, according to this.” He handed her a document. Their fingers brushed, a quiet spark beneath the chaos.

She scanned it, lips tightening. “David’s passport application, complete with notarized consent.” She passed it to Elliot.

“Signed by Rachel Zelinsky,” Elliot muttered, frowning, before striding out, door shutting behind him.

Cragen leaned back, gaze sweeping the room. “I want you two and Elliot to take the lead on the case.” He dropped into his chair with finality, the kind that made orders feel like stone.

The three detectives exited together, the air in the bullpen shifting around them like static before a storm. Rachel Zelinsky was waiting at Elliot’s desk, wringing her hands raw. Her eyes darted from face to face like a trapped animal. “That’s not my signature. Avi must’ve forged it,” she blurted, voice thin with panic.

“Alert Port Authority. I want a blanket on Newark and Kennedy,” Cragen ordered.

“I’ll put a call into the Israeli consulate as well,” Munch added, already reaching for the phone.

Rachel’s voice cracked. “Oh, my God, he’s taking him to Israel. I’ll never see David again.”

Talia leaned in, voice steady, warm in the way only she could be in rooms that felt like tombs. “Israel is a signatory to the Hague Convention. Even if Avi gets David on a plane, Tel Aviv customs won’t let him through.” Rachel gripped the desk like it was the last thing tethering her.

But Fin’s voice cut across the bullpen, sharp and sudden: “Looks like Avi figured that out for himself. EZ-Pass just clocked his car getting off the Thruway at Harriman.” The group clustered by the bank of monitors, the flicker of traffic cam footage painting their faces in grayscale.

“Heading for the Canadian border?” Cragen asked.

“The Thruway’s the most direct route,” Fin confirmed.

“Your husband know anyone in Montreal?” Talia asked softly, her eyes steady on Rachel.

Rachel’s answer was a whisper laced with horror. “Oh, my God. He’s taking David to Kehilat Moshe.”

Talia turned, brow lifting. “Is that the Hasidic town upstate?”

Munch’s hand found the curve of her waist, grounding them both in the storm. His tone was matter-of-fact, but his thumb traced a circle against her coat as if reminding her they were tethered. “Yeah. Like the shtetls in the old country. Founded in the late seventies by Orthodox Jews from Williamsburg.”

Rachel’s voice quavered. “Avi’s talked about living up there.”

“Here we go,” Fin muttered, pulling up community images on one of the glowing screens. Ambulances with Hebrew lettering. School buses painted plain white. Streets strangely quiet.

“They have their own ambulance corps, schools, and police,” he read. “Self-reliant community.”

“Good place for Avi to hide out,” Talia murmured, her voice heavy with the weight of too many missing-child cases.

“And to hide a kid,” Munch added. His tone carried that bitter edge he wore like a second skin. “Every family up there has at least six brats. Youngest median age in the state.” That earned him an elbow from Talia; sharp enough to sting, affectionate enough to soften it.

Rachel’s voice broke. “They’re encouraged to procreate.”

“Sounds like a cult,” Fin muttered, eyes glued to the footage.

“More like the Amish,” Munch countered, dry as dust. “The grand rebbe moved his congregants to Kehilat Moshe so they wouldn’t assimilate. Wanted them to live pure, away from the amoral influences of the outside world.”

Rachel nodded frantically. “They’re extremely Orthodox. The women wear long skirts. They’re separated from the men on buses and in the Shuls. Many barely speak English. No cell phones, few cars. No TV, no movies, no magazines. They’re totally sheltered.”

The room hummed with urgency, every detective already mentally moving north.

Cragen turned, eyes sharp. “You three head up there.”

The order landed heavy. Talia’s stomach knotted, not from fear but from something harder; resolve. She felt Munch’s hand ghost against her lower back as they turned to leave, a gesture no one else caught. His touch said what he didn’t: I’ve got you, doll. We’ll burn through the dark together.

She didn’t look at him, not here, not in front of Cragen or Fin or Rachel. But the corner of her mouth curved, the barest shadow of a smile. Enough for him to know she’d heard.

KEHILAT MOSHE - January 17, 2005 - 12:48 PM

The village rose like something carved out of time. Not New York; at least not the kind of New York Talia had grown up knowing in Astoria, with bodegas on every corner and bachata bleeding from second-floor windows. Kehilat Moshe felt older, tighter, almost sealed off from the century around it.

The houses stood in rows like soldiers, narrow two-stories, curtains drawn tight. On every doorframe: a mezuzah, kissed and worn from years of ritual touch. The streets smelled of yeast and brisket, challah baking somewhere down the block. Yiddish signs crowded over each other on the main strip; kosher bakeries with bagels stacked in pyramids, wig stores displaying sheitels under fluorescent lights, a butcher’s window painted over in Hebrew letters.

Men in long black coats hurried in pairs, murmuring in Yiddish, eyes turned inward. Women shepherded strollers, two at a time, skirts brushing the sidewalk, wigs neat and gleaming under the winter sun. Children, so many children, darted between them like sparrows. The place pulsed with life, but not the kind that spilled out into the wider city. Self-contained. Guarded.

Talia sat in the back of the car with her hair covered in a simple scarf, Rabbi Levy’s notes balanced on her lap. She scanned her handwriting, but her eyes kept drifting to the window. She thought of Alexandria; how women covered their hair too, but in colours, scarves catching sea wind as easily as prayer. St. Petersburg too, where Orthodoxy was lived alongside the cold logic of technology and Soviet modernity. Tradition and progress walked together. Here, in this insular village, tradition stood alone.

Still; something in her chest stirred. “Feels like coming home, doesn’t it?” she murmured.

Munch, riding shotgun, gave a dry chuckle that warmed her more than the car’s heat vents.
“Just like the stories Bubbe used to tell,” he said, his tone edged with irony but softened by memory.

She chuckled too, catching his glance in the window’s reflection. They shared that private spark; quiet, secret, tucked beneath the badge and trench coats.

Elliot’s voice broke the moment. “Hey, check out that plate. That’s Avi Zelinsky’s car.” He tapped the wheel as he pulled up behind it.

“Place like this? I’ll bet he didn’t lock the doors,” Munch muttered as the three of them climbed out.

The winter sun was cold and bright, bouncing off chrome and glass. Talia’s breath hung in the air as she leaned to peer through the car window, eyes sharp for anything out of place.

“Excuse me, can I help you?” A man stepped out of a nearby vehicle, stocky, stern, a badge on his belt. Local police.

The three detectives flashed theirs in turn. “Yeah, we’re from the NYPD,” Munch said, voice clipped. “Investigating a kidnapping and a rape.”

Talia kept circling the Zelinsky vehicle, eyes darting for fingerprints on glass, crumbs on the seat, a candy wrapper kicked under the dash.

“You’re out of your jurisdiction,” the local officer said tightly. “You have no authority here.”

Elliot stepped forward, bristling. “The owner of this car kidnapped a ten-year-old boy. I need to speak to your supervisor.”

The officer muttered into his radio, low Yiddish threading through the static. Finally: “If you’ll come to the administrative office, the Grand Rebbe will help you any way he can.”

Munch scoffed. “You can tell the Grand Rebbe he can kiss my tuchus.” His deadpan carried enough bite to draw a few stares from passersby. Then, in a quiet voice, “My Yiddish is rusty, but I’m pretty sure they just told our friend here to keep us away from the synagogue.”

“Why don’t we go to temple?” Elliot said, storming forward.

The three strode toward the synagogue’s heavy double doors. Gold Hebrew letters arched overhead, catching sunlight. A prayer hall loomed beyond. Talia slowed, her hand brushing the scarf at her head. She glanced at Munch. He read her pause instantly.

“You waiting out here?” he asked low.

She gave a small nod. “This is their house,” she said softly.

He held her gaze for half a beat, something unspoken passing between them. Then he followed Elliot inside, leaving her to the cold air and the whispered scrutiny of the women gathered outside. Talia could feel eyes on her scarf, on her posture; curiosity, maybe suspicion. She kept her shoulders straight.

The sanctuary doors thumped open and let out a rush of warm, candle‑wax air. Elliot came first, jaw set; Munch a step behind him; David, half tucked against Munch’s side; and two men in dark coats: Avi Zelinsky, face drawn and watchful, and a bearded rabbi with tired, kind eyes who paused to button his coat against the cold.

The rabbi’s gaze found Talia immediately, as if he’d been told exactly who to look for. His expression eased. “Detective,” he said, switching to careful, classroom English. “Rabbi Levy phoned. He said you would come.”

Talia dipped her head, professional but warm. “Thank you for taking the call, Rabbi. We appreciate the cooperation.” She glanced at David; pale, blinking in the winter glare, and shifted automatically to stand between him and the cluster of onlookers gathering near the steps.

They started down toward the sidewalk, salt crunching underfoot, the chatter of Yiddish rising and falling at the edges of hearing. As they reached the curb, the rabbi hesitated, studying the simple scarf wrapped over Talia’s hair. He lowered his voice, the question gentle rather than probing. “Forgive me if this is not my place… are you married, Detective? Your head is covered.”

Talia’s answer came steady, without apology. “Not married,” she said. Then, softer; meant for one pair of ears only. “Not yet.” Her eyes flicked to Munch for the briefest beat. He didn’t smile.

She turned back to logistics, sliding into command like breath into lungs. “Rabbi Iscowitz, we’ll have you ride with Detective Stabler,” she said, already reaching past Elliot to open the Crown Vic’s rear door. “He’ll take your statement at the precinct and make sure you’re comfortable.”

“Of course,” the rabbi said, a hand over his heart in thanks. “I will do what I can.”

Talia pivoted to Zelinsky, measuring him the way she measured every man who tried to stand very still. “Mr. Zelinsky.” Her tone stayed courteous but left no space. “I’ll ride with you. We’ll go directly to Manhattan SVU. Slow, no sudden turns. Do you understand?”

Avi’s eyes flicked to Elliot, to Munch, then back to Talia’s level, unwavering stare. He nodded once. “I understand.” He reached to open the passenger door for her; a reflex born of training or culture or nerves, she couldn’t tell; and she gave him a small, ‘thank you,’ before she slid in.

There were still eyes on them from the synagogue steps; women with strollers paused mid‑turn, men in long coats conferring in low tones. Talia felt every stare and refused to shrink from any of them. Then the doors shut, engines coughed to life, and the little motorcade peeled off the curb; separate cars for separate roles, everything properly divided. Witness. Suspect. Child. Detective.

And in the thin slice of air between two idling Fords, a glance that said what neither of them could afford to say out loud. Not yet.

SVU PRECINCT - January 17, 2005 - 2:49 PM

The bullpen buzzed with that muted hum peculiar to winter afternoons in Manhattan: the clatter of typewriters no one wanted to admit were still in service, the steady ring of phones, the shuffle of uniforms and detectives weaving between desks under the fluorescence of lights that made everyone look sallow. Outside, dirty snow clung stubbornly to the gutters, iced over from the night before, while the radiators in the squad room hissed and clicked as though the whole precinct was holding its breath.

Talia’s heels clicked against the linoleum as she led David into the Juvenile Interview Room. He clutched his sleeves like they might come alive and strangle him, his shoulders hunched, eyes wide with the shell-shocked look of a child who had been through hell.

Talia softened instantly. She always did with kids. Her coat swirled around her as she sat down opposite him, lowering herself to his level with deliberate slowness, her voice pitched in that gentle register she reserved for the vulnerable.

“The Rabbi didn’t do anything to me,” David blurted before she’d even settled.

Her brows knit softly. “He kidnapped you, David.”

“No, I wanted to go. I asked him to take me,” he insisted, eyes glassy but defiant.

“David… honey…” She leaned forward, folding her hands on the table where he could see they were steady. “I need you to tell me the truth.”

“I am telling the truth.”

Talia’s heart pinched. The way he spoke was too defensive, too rehearsed. “But, honey, why would you want to leave your mom and dad? Why would you want to leave your home?”

“I didn’t,” David whispered.

She tipped her head, curls brushing her cheek, studying his small frame. “Well, why would you ask the Rabbi to take you to Kehilat Moshe?”

“He said I can go to school there.” David’s voice shrank, brittle as ice.

“You wanted to go to school there?”

“He said that they’d be nice to me,” David murmured. “He said that no one would hurt me. That I’d be safe.”

That last word tore at her. Talia reached across the table, laying a hand gently over his sleeve. “Baby, why aren’t you safe at school? Who’s hurting you? Is it one of your teachers?”

His eyes flicked to hers and away again. “I promised him I wouldn’t tell.”

The fear in his tone lanced through her like a blade. She smoothed her thumb over his arm, her voice lowering. “That’s okay, honey. We’ll find out who’s hurting you, and we’ll make sure it stops.”

David’s lips trembled, but he didn’t answer. Talia rose slowly, masking her frustration behind a composed nod. She stepped into the hall, pulling the door softly shut behind her.

“He say anything?” Munch asked, leaning against the wall, his dark-rimmed glasses sliding slightly down his nose. His voice was dry, but his eyes lingered too long on her face.

“Nothing. He’s terrified,” she said, pushing a stray curl back as Elliot appeared, file in hand, O’Halloran’s tech notes already spilling out.

Within minutes, Talia, Munch, Elliot, clustered with Dr. George Huang in front of the glowing monitor bank. Student ID photos filled the screen in tidy rows, pixelated faces of boys who should’ve been worrying about baseball cards and math homework, not being investigated for rape.

“David’s attacker is one of these boys from his school,” Elliot said, scrolling through the sea of faces.

“It’s a hundred and thirty potential suspects,” Munch muttered, irritation laced beneath exhaustion.

“And we’re gonna need parental consent to talk to every single one of them,” Talia sighed, arms folded across her silk blouse. Her voice was steady, but there was something brittle in it; a detective already calculating hours lost while a boy lived in fear.

George leaned in. “Well, maybe I can help narrow it down. We know from the pubic hair that the boy who attacked David is a few years older. He’s probably drawn to younger children because he’s not accepted by kids his own age.”

“The kid who gets picked last for kickball,” Elliot added grimly.

“Yeah. He doesn’t fit in. He probably prefers to play with younger girls as well,” George said.

“Think he’s gay?” Munch asked, his tone more cynical than clinical. He shoved his hands into his pockets like he wanted to ground himself. He almost reached out to steady Talia; his hand hovered near her back for half a second, but he didn’t touch. Something in his chest coiled instead.

George shook his head. “Not necessarily. I think he feels uncomfortable around boys his own age. He’s been picked on, and he’s angry about it. He took his anger out on David, a younger, vulnerable kid, because it made him feel powerful.”

Talia guided George toward the Juvenile Interview Room where David still sat, but her eyes lingered on Munch. He wasn’t listening. Not really. He was somewhere else, somewhere darker.

“You okay?” she murmured when she caught him by the arm in the corridor.

“Fine.” His reply was too sharp, too fast.

Her gaze softened. “You sure?” She reached for his hand without thinking, a quiet tether.

But he pulled away. The movement was small, almost imperceptible to anyone else, but to her it felt cavernous. He walked off before she could press, leaving her standing in the dim hallway, the echo of his absence louder than his voice.

Inside, George coaxed from David the name they’d been waiting for. A single word that made the room still:

Jack Tremblay.

When Fin and Elliot went to pick up Jack, the squad room bristled with tension. Talia sat at her desk, pen scratching across the lined paper of her report. Every few lines she glanced up, offering Munch a small smile, a silent olive branch. He didn’t return it. His eyes were cool, distant, his jaw set like stone. It was dissonant; he’d been so warm with her that morning, teasing, dangerous, even affectionate. Now? He looked like a man trying to build a wall out of his own silence.

The precinct door slammed open. “Where are my boys? Where are my boys?” A man barrelled in, voice ragged, anger sharp enough to split glass.

Talia rose immediately, palms lifted. “Mr. Tremblay, they’re both okay.”

“Then what are they doing here?” His voice cracked with fury.

“Sir, I’m Captain Cragen,” Cragen said evenly, stepping forward. “Your son Jack is under arrest.”

“For what?” Tremblay barked.

“Rape,” Talia said, her voice soft but unflinching.

“He’s only fourteen! He doesn’t even have a girlfriend!” Tremblay’s voice broke with disbelief.

“The victim was a ten-year-old boy,” Cragen said firmly.

“You’re wrong! Where’s my son? What are you doing to him?” Tremblay surged forward, shoving past, until Elliot and Cragen caught his arms.

“Jack! Jack!” Tremblay bellowed toward the holding room.

“Sir, don’t. Sir, you need to come this way,” Talia said, guiding him toward the observation glass of the interrogation room. He slammed his palms against it, desperate. “He can’t see you,” she reminded softly, her hand firm against his arm.

“I’m taking you home,” Tremblay spat.

“No, sir, you’re not,” Cragen said, voice brooking no argument.

Inside the glass, Jack’s face twisted. “Dad? Dad, I thought it was okay. I thought it was okay. You’ve gotta believe me. Please, get me out of here. Dad?” His pleas rang hollow against the sterile glass as the social worker pulled him back.

Talia exhaled heavily, her ribs aching with the weight of it, and turned toward the Juvenile Interview Room. David sat small and trembling in the chair. Munch was already there, arms crossed, but he wouldn’t look at her. His avoidance was a knife she tried not to feel.

She crouched beside David, her voice impossibly soft. “David, honey, did you tell Jack it was okay to touch you?”

His voice broke into shards. “I was afraid. I didn’t know what he’d do to me if I said no. I wanted him to stop. It really hurt. I cried, but he just kept doing it. He kept making me do it. That’s why I asked the Rabbi to take me away. He wouldn’t leave me alone.”

Talia’s throat thickened. She placed her hand over his trembling fist. “You’re being very brave, David,” she whispered, her words a balm in a storm.

She stood slowly, eyes flicking toward Munch one last time. He still wouldn’t meet her gaze. Something was eating him alive, and she knew it had nothing to do with the boy in front of them; and everything to do with himself.

SVU PRECINCT - January 17, 2005 - 9:28 PM

The precinct had gone quiet in that particular way it only did at night: fluorescent lights buzzing like a tired confession, the smell of burnt coffee thick in the air, the muted rattle of the old radiators trying, and failing, to fight off the January chill. Phones were silent now, desks half-abandoned, stacks of files left like crooked monuments to work that never ended.

Munch sat at his desk, coat draped on the back of his chair, glasses sliding down his nose as he stared at the glow of his monitor. His fingers hovered over the keys, but he hadn’t typed anything in ten minutes. The words blurred. The report blurred. Everything blurred.

Because his mind was elsewhere. Always elsewhere.

Talia.

God, Talia.

He could see her in the corner of his eye at her desk, Talia bent over her notepad, curls spilling forward, scribbling with deliberate, small strokes. She’d taken off her coat, the silk blouse catching the light with every breath. The soft clink of her rings ticked time in a rhythm his heart tried to match and failed; too irregular, too tired. There was a faint incense of her perfume still in the air from the interview rooms; warm, resinous, threaded with something floral he refused to name because naming it would make it real, and real things could be taken away

She looked like salvation dressed in silk and steel.

And it tore him apart.

Because she was here, with him. With him. And he couldn’t understand it.

Why him?

Why the hell him?

He stared at the reflection of himself in the dark window; an outline haloed with monitors and paperwork. Glasses sliding down a nose too long. Ears too big. The trench made him look gaunter. He’d gone skinny again without trying. Stress always carved him down to the wire like a used violin string. When did his mouth start folding into those parentheses at rest? When did his eyes turn to drought? He tugged his sleeve and saw the soft sag of cloth over a forearm that used to have more promise.

She had accepted him. Cynicism and all. His sarcasm, his bitterness, the trench coat armour, the nicotine-stained worldview. She even laughed at the sexist jokes he sometimes let slip; the ones that had driven other women out the door. She never bristled, never flinched. She just rolled her eyes and threw a sharper barb back at him, like she understood exactly who he was and still stayed.

She obeyed him at work, trusted his judgment. She listened when he ranted, actually listened, like she knew his paranoia wasn’t entirely unfounded. She acknowledged he was smarter, sharper, more experienced than most of the kids running around this squad. She gave him respect at work and at home.

And she was so damn perfect it almost hurt to look at her.

Tall, not small, built like she’d been sculpted with curves and strength in equal measure. Tattoos he adored tracing when she slept, his fingers memorizing the language of her skin in ink. Her hair; wild, untamed, endless, he could drown in it, and sometimes he wanted to.

So why couldn’t he let himself be happy? The thought looped like static in his brain.

Four-time divorcee.
Old enough to be her father.
Twice her age.
Too skinny, too wrinkled, too damn bitter.
Not good enough. Not worthy.

The loop started and once it started it didn’t stop. He’d trained his mind to collect patterns, to find the repeated error in human nature and evidence and the way cops lied even to themselves. The repeated error here was him. He was the common denominator in every failed experiment of love.

He thought of the ex‑wives. He remembered a kitchen in the dark, an ashtray full of stubborn ends, a woman’s silhouette with her back to him saying, ‘John, I can’t do this anymore,’ like she was setting down a bag of groceries that had turned heavy on the walk up the stairs.

But it wasn’t just the divorces. It wasn’t just the failures. There was blood, too. He wasn’t just a man women left; he was a man who had taken a life, and that meant something darker followed him everywhere.

There was the man he’d killed back in Baltimore. He could still feel the ache in his trigger finger, the way silence collapsed in on itself after the shot. He had told himself it was justified, told himself the system had forced his hand; but every so often, when he woke in the middle of the night, he heard it again. The sound of finality. He’d carried it with him like a rusted shiv in his gut ever since.

What right did a man who had taken life have to sit across from Talia, a woman who lit candles for the dead?

She’d accepted him. All of it. The conspiracy theories, the gallows humour, the grim museum in his head. She laughed at jokes other women had hated. She let him lead and, God help him, she liked it. She respected his instincts on the job. She deferred without being diminished. She fought him without disrespect. She’d obeyed him in the field that morning with a quick look and a nod that had made his chest feel too big for his ribs. She respected him at work and at home. No one had done both. He should’ve felt grateful. He felt hunted.

Because how long could light keep touching rot without dimming?

His mind offered him a sequence of bleak stills. Talia standing in a thrift shop in ten years time, donating a trench coat that still smelled like his after she’d aired it out on the fire escape. Talia lighting a candle in a church he didn’t believe in, whispering for a man already cold.

He pictured himself as a ghost she’d have to bury, and he was not Roman enough to imagine that as a noble end. Just a practical one. Hakuna mortality. The math wasn’t romantic. It was a ledger you couldn’t cook.

“John?” her voice carried to him, soft as if it didn’t want to wake the sleeping precinct.

He swallowed. The cursor kept blinking. He could feel sweat gathering in the hollows of his collarbone despite the cold.

She’d come to his desk without his hearing her cross the tile; that was the way she moved when she didn’t want to spook a witness, or him. She leaned a hip against the metal, curls falling forward, the light catching the faint gold in her irises. Up close, her skin carried the day’s soft fatigue: a shine at the tip of her nose, the gentlest smudge at the corner of one eye where she’d touched her face without thinking. Human. Warm. Alive.

“You ready to go home?” she asked. No agenda in it. Just an offering held out in two steady hands.

The first instinct was Yes. The first instinct was to stand, wrap his coat around both of them, steer her through the hushed hall, and take the long way because the city looked good in winter glass. The first instinct was to put a palm on the back of her head and breathe her in, home like a password.

The second instinct, stronger, was survival, the kind that throws you overboard to keep you from drowning on the ship. He couldn’t take it. He could not take the way she looked at him like he wasn’t already a demolition site with the charges wired.

“I think I’ll sleep at my own place tonight,” he said. He heard the chill in it and hated himself twice: once for the chill, once for needing it.

Her smile thinned. Not theatrical. Not wounded. Just… dimmer. “Why?”

Because I am a ruin you’re trying to live in, and I don’t want to watch the ceiling fall on you. Because I smell like old paper and ghosts. Because every time you smile I hear the countdown to the moment you realize this was a mistake and I can’t be standing there when the bell rings. Because I am rotting from the inside out and light like yours only shows where the rot has spread.

All the true answers piled up and none fit through his throat. He turned back to the monitor like the report had hands and was pulling him in. He typed a sentence and deleted it. The letters ghosted on the glass, a faint echo.

“Suit yourself,” she said softly. He felt the words like cold water down the collar. No hurt in them. No accusation. That made it worse. If she’d been angry he could’ve worn the bruise like penance. Kindness gave him nothing to bleed on. She gathered her files and walked out, the sound of her heels fading into the hush of the precinct.

Munch sat there, staring at the empty space she left behind, the words he wanted to say burning a hole in his chest. He wanted to run after her. He wanted to tell her she was the best thing that had ever happened to him. That he loved her laugh, her stubbornness, her tattoos, her voice when she prayed under her breath, the way she made him feel alive when he thought that part of him was dead.

But he didn’t move.

You poison everything you touch. The shot in Baltimore, the women in kitchens, the silence after goodbyes; they all pointed to the same verdict. He was toxic. Contagious. And sooner or later, Talia would taste the rust of it

John Munch had never believed in happy endings. And he wasn’t about to start now.

And across town, a lamp clicked off and a woman he loved without saying the word set her phone on the table and waited anyway. Waited for a man, who wouldn't come.

Chapter Text

NYC COURT - January 31, 2005 - 8:28 AM

The morning had that hard January clarity that made the city feel brittle; salt whitening the curbs, breath turning to ghosts in the air, sirens thin in the distance. Inside the courthouse, the heat hissed out of radiators and pooled low along the floors, a tired warmth that smelled of coffee, paper, and wool coats.

Two weeks since Munch’s misery had climbed back into him and refused to leave. Two weeks of him treating Talia like a contagion: no eye contact unless absolutely necessary, clipped syllables if she asked a direct question, disappearing mid-shift with the same vanishing act he used on feelings. When she went to his apartment; three separate nights, he didn’t open the door. She left him food anyway, set the containers on the little welcome mat with the cracked rubber edge: chicken soup with dill, a sesame bagel wrapped in wax paper, a bodega pint of rice pudding with a cinnamon lid. By the time she went back in the morning, the containers were still there. Cold. Untouched. It made her chest ache and eyes sting.

Because he wasn’t worthy, his mind kept telling him. Because good things were traps. Because if she was kind, then the universe had already hidden the bill somewhere he couldn’t see it.

She would talk to him tonight. She had decided that with the same soft stubbornness she used to soothe traumatized kids; the kind that didn’t look like force until you realized what it was: staying. Staying until someone who wanted to run finally stopped.

But now the case had split itself open and spilled something foul none of them could clean. David wasn’t alone anymore. Two more children, girls ten and twelve, had stepped forward. Talia had taken both their statements in the children’s interview room with the mural of the skyline, a shelf of crayons, a plush rabbit in a plastic chair that squeaked when you moved it.

One of the girls had stared at Talia’s hands and spoken in a monotone; the other had said she’d be brave if she could hold the rabbit. Talia had put the rabbit between them like an altar and said nothing when the girl’s fingers white-knuckled the ears. After, Talia had gone into the hallway and gripped the edge of the sink in the ladies’ room until the porcelain creaked. You learned to live with a cracked heart in SVU; you learned to pour your softness into the seams and pray it held.

Family Court was out of the question now. Elliot had begged Casey to try, to keep Jack away from a criminal jury, to do what was best for the kids. Then came the girls. The case rolled toward Supreme like a freight car.

Talia sat directly behind Casey in the courtroom; second row, aisle seat, legal pad in her lap, pen anchored under her thumb. The gallery behind the prosecution was full: men in black coats and black hats, some with short-brimmed fedoras, some with brims wider and flatter; sidelocks tucked neatly or curled loose. They did not speak above whispers. Their presence had weight, community gathered around its wounded, faith threaded through the silence like blue thread through a tallit. A few elders bowed their heads in the moments between testimony; a teenage boy clutched a siddur to his chest and never opened it, just held it like a life vest.

On the defence side: emptiness. A single paralegal with a harried expression. A father who never showed.

Munch hadn’t been in the first row of days. He’d ghosted the seats, then ghosted the building. No one was surprised. He worked cases like this with a long fuse and an inner blast radius; when it burned down, he got very still, very quiet, and then he vanished. Today, though, he was here for the verdict. He came in late and slid into the last bench on the aisle, coat collar up, expression shuttered. He kept his eyes on the door until he felt her, then on the floor when he couldn’t stand looking at her face.

The kid, Jack Tremblay, took the stand with a slack confusion that made Talia cold. He didn’t understand what he’d done wrong, he said, his voice flat with bafflement. In the tapes he watched, women said ‘stop’ and then kept going and then said they liked it. He thought that was how it worked. He said, “if they didn’t want it, why did they make those sounds?” He said, “that’s what women do.” He said it like he was describing rain: neutral, inevitable. Talia, who had trained herself to keep her breath invisible, felt it snag in her throat.

Casey’s questions were precise, clean cuts; the public defender’s questions were damp, clinging things, designed to smudge edges until they looked grey. The judge’s tone never rose. The jurors watched, pens in hand. Talia kept her notes legible even when her hand wanted to tremble. For the girls. For David.

No one clapped in this room. No one coughed without swallowing it halfway down. The steadiness had the texture of prayer.

When the jury filed back in, the Hasidic men stood as one, out of respect for the court, for the ritual of justice. They sat again together, the air lowering around them. Munch’s gaze slid forward, up the aisle. Talia felt it like a touch between her shoulder blades. She didn’t turn.

The clerk took the verdict; the paper made a sound like dry leaves.

The judge looked at the foreperson. “Ms. Foreman, on the counts of rape in the first degree with respect to Ashley James, Michelle Garrett, and Lucy Rhodes, how find you?”

“We find the defendant not responsible by reason of mental disease or defect,” the foreperson answered.

The words fell like something heavy dropping through a ceiling, bringing plaster with it.

“On the count of Sodomy in the first degree with respect to David Zelinsky, how find you?”

“We find the defendant not responsible by reason of mental disease or defect.”

A rustle moved through the room: not outrage; more like air being knocked out of lungs all at once. One of the women in the second row put her hand to her mouth. A man’s hat tipped as he bent his head.

“Jack Tremblay will be immediately committed to Bellevue to undergo psychiatric examination followed by a hearing to determine his present mental state and course of treatment. This court’s adjourned.” The gavel was quiet compared to the verdict. The bailiff’s “All rise” floated up, thin as tissue.

David stood too quickly and swayed. His mother caught his elbow; his father’s jaw worked; grinding teeth or a prayer. Elliot reached them in two strides, a big hand anchoring David’s shoulder in a way that said both I’m here and Keep breathing. Talia, already moving down the aisle, folded into the space beside them like she belonged there.

“I don’t understand,” David said, his voice breaking open. “Why didn’t they believe me?”

“David, they did,” Elliot said, steady as stone.

Talia’s face softened, the kind of soft that held. She kept her voice low, meant for him and him alone. “It’s just… they believed Jack too.” She didn’t look back toward the defence table when she said it. Her eyes stayed with David; on his wet lashes, on the rigid line of his mouth, on the way his hands had curled into fists because he needed a feeling that didn’t feel like falling.

His mother pulled him into a one-armed hug, still clutching her purse with the other. His father nodded at Elliot and then at Talia; gratitude blurred with bewilderment, a parent’s grim inventory of what came next: doctors, paperwork, the long tunnel of healing.

Around them, the Hasidic congregants stood slowly, carefully, like people rising after a long fast. She felt Munch before she saw him. The heat of him at her shoulder, the careful way he kept an inch of air between their coats. He didn’t look at her. She didn’t force it. She could live with an inch of air as long as he was still here.

“Maybe the Hasidim are on to something, unplugging their kids from modern life,” Munch said, voice low and flint-dry, pitched for Elliot but close enough to graze Talia. His eyes travelled the gallery; black hats, dark suits, women with their hair modestly covered, like the answer to a riddle might be hidden in the habit of a people who still kept certain gates closed.

“You can’t shut out the world, John,” Elliot said, not unkindly. There was a weary respect in it: the recognition that both men had fought long enough to know neither victory nor surrender was simple.

“These days…” Munch said, and finally looked at Talia, a direct hit he’d denied her for two weeks, “…may not be such a bad idea.”

The words landed differently on her than they did on the room. For the room, it was a quip with an edge. For her, it was an admission: I am drowning. I want out. I don’t trust the sea or the shore.

Talia didn’t smile the way she often did to draw him out of his longer shadows. She just held the look, let him see that she didn’t flinch from what was raw in him. She wanted to reach for his hand and didn’t. There were eyes here, and even if there hadn’t been, his shame was a skittish animal, reach too fast and it bolted.

The courtroom thinned. The Hasidic men made space for the women to pass first; a teenager with round glasses opened the door and held it, cheeks chapped pink. One older man approached Munch, tipped his hat, an old-world gesture of respect, and said nothing. Munch’s mouth twitched like it remembered how to be human for half a second.

MUNCH'S APARTMENT - February 5, 2005 - 9:27 PM

The hallway radiators hissed like they were conspiring. Somewhere down the corridor, a TV filtered canned laughter through plaster. The stairwell carried the smell of oniony takeout and wet wool. Talia stood in front of 3C with her fist already tight. She’d never been a beggar. She’d never chased. Her mother would have crossed herself at the sight; her daughter outside a man’s door with ringing in her ears and prayer in her throat. Her father would’ve asked what sort of man made a girl plead at all.

She knocked.

Silence. The brass peep hole stared back like a cold eye.

She knocked harder. “John.” Her voice came out steady. “Open the door.”

A beat. Then two. Nothing but the record hiss of the building, pipes ticking, a baby crying somewhere distant. She pictured him in there, sitting in the half-dark with a drink and his ghosts, letting the phone ring and the night win.

“If you don’t open it,” she said, jaw set, “I’ll call ESU, and I won’t even be nice about it.”

Nothing.

“Screw this.”

She backed up three steps, braced, then slammed her shoulder into the door. Pain forked down her arm. The door didn’t budge; old Brooklyn wood and a good deadbolt. Breath trembling, she pressed her forehead to the cool paint. “Damn it, John… please.”

Inside, Munch sat on the edge of a low, sagging couch, hands clasped so hard his knuckles had gone bloodless. The apartment was the same as ever and worse tonight; books stacked like barricades, case files fanned across the coffee table, a milk crate of vinyl by the wall, a police scanner mute but hulking. An answering machine glowed red with unheard messages. Coltrane murmured from the turntable; a soft-jazz ballad floated, scratched at the edges like a memory you shouldn’t touch.

Don’t move, he told himself. Let her go. This is the part where she figures it out. This is the test you’ve always failed; fail it early, save her time.

He hadn’t shaved. He hadn’t slept. He’d spent the day turning the same thought over and over until it cut: I am radiation. I don’t love; I irradiate. I don’t warm; I burn. Everything near me becomes evidence. If I open the door, I invite her into the blast radius.

Her palm hit the door again; flat, desperate. “John.”

He could picture her on the other side: the trench coat she wore when the wind cut hard off the river, hair tucked away; a too-careful choice that had slit him open at the synagogue that morning. The rabbi’s gentle curiosity, the sidelong glance. Married women cover their hair. And Talia, eyes lifting to John like the idea didn’t terrify her at all, had said, not yet.

Not yet.

It should have been sweet. It had been a warning flare. It had said future out loud. He’d felt something in him try to lunge toward it; and the rest of him drag that impulse into the alley and beat it to a pulp.

“Please,” she whispered, voice through wood, through him.

He stood before he could stop himself. His body betrayed him like it always did when the past and the maybe-future fought in his chest. He moved to the door, slid back the chain, turned the deadbolt, and pulled.

Talia stood there, cheeks flushed from the cold, eyes bright and furious. The hallway light made a halo out of stray strands around her scarf. She took him in; hollowed eyes, the line of his mouth set like a barricade; and stepped past him before he could decide to shut her out again.

His apartment caught her smell; cold air, coffee, a thread of her perfume, and held it. She shut the door with a click that sounded final in a way that scared him.

“Why are you here?” His voice came out rough, smoke over gravel.

“Why have you been avoiding me?” She turned to face him, chin lifted. “Did I say something? Do something? Just tell me what it is so I can fix it.”

There it was: kindness, ridiculous and aimed at him. It made him angry in the way sunlight hurts a dark room.

“I can’t do this,” he said.

“Do what?”

“This.” His hand cut the air between them like he was slicing a wire. “Whatever this is, I can’t.”

A laugh tumbled out of her, disbelieving. “John-”

“Look at me.” He took a step back, as if distance could prove his point. “I’m not… I’m not built for this. I’m old, Talia. I’m a monument to failed experiments. Four marriages, four autopsies with my name stamped on them. I’m-” He gestured to his own face, a bitter, automatic joke slipping through. “I come with features. Ears you can pick up AM radio with. A nose that gets there five minutes before I do. A temperament like a trench. I am toxic. Get away from me.”

She flinched like he’d slapped her. And then something in her hardened.

“I can’t,” she said it softly, like it was a fact, and he didn’t know what to do with a world where someone could tell him no and mean it as a mercy.

He set his jaw. “You don’t know the worst of it.”

“I know enough.”

“I killed a man.” The words came out bare. The room blinked, the record popped. He didn’t say the name; he didn’t have to. The body was always in the room with him anyway. “Because the system failed. Because I decided my rage was a better judge than a jury. You want to stand next to that? You want to love that? Are you insane?”

She stared at him. And then she moved; two steps, three, until she was close enough that he could see the heat of her anger and the bruise-blue hurt behind it.

“Probably,” she said. “I want to love that. I want to love you. I know what the world does to people, John. We both do. I am not a child. I have blood and grief and choices behind me. You didn’t judge me for mine.” Her voice broke on the edge of it, and she shoved past the crack. “So don’t you dare use your worst night like a wall to keep me out.”

He shook his head, a small, desperate motion. Get away from me, he wanted to say again. He did say it. “Please. Talia. Get away from me.”

The please startled her. It startled him. It came from the softest, most terrorized part of him. The part that remembered standing outside doors himself. The part that knew love came with receipts.

“Why?” she whispered.

“Because I will ruin it. Because that is what I do. Because every time I thought I had found a place to put my hands, it broke.” His voice scraped raw. He couldn’t look at her, so he looked at the artifacts of his life; the cup of cold coffee on the windowsill, the stack of dog-eared paperbacks about corruption and fallibility, the framed black-and-white photo of Baltimore tucked behind a speaker, half-hidden like a wound he refused to close. “Because if you stay, you’ll learn I keep every light dim for a reason. Because I am the warning label, not the promise.”

“Stop.” She said it like a command. “Stop telling me who I am.”

“I’m telling you who I am.”

“I already know.” Her hands curled, desperate to reach for him and somehow respectful of the line he kept trying to draw in chalk and call concrete. “And I am telling you who I am.” She took a breath so deep it shook her. “I am here. I am ready to love you. Why won’t you let me?”

He closed his eyes. The sentence hit him like a clean shot. Ready to love you. He had imagined a thousand versions of these words in other mouths, and all of them had been followed by a leaving. To hear them now; this woman, this impossible, terrifying answer to an unasked prayer, he felt both terror and a surge of wish so strong it made his fingers ache.

“Because the world will laugh,” he said, a last-ditch, stupid argument, and even he heard it. “Because I’m twice your age.”

“Who cares?” She threw her hands, the gesture sharp and elegant in the same breath. “You care. That’s it. No one else. Not me.”

“My friends-”

“Your friends can manage.” She stepped closer, filling his field of vision with nothing but her. “Olivia will raise an eyebrow and then defend me like a sister. Fin will call you an idiot and proceed to buy us coffee. Cragen knows, and doesn’t care. Your barber will still mess up your hair. The sun will still rise. The only person ruining you, is you.”

He laughed, a fractured sound. “I ruin everything.”

“Then ruin it with me.” Her voice cracked open finally, pleading pouring out. “Please, John. Please.” She shook her head once like she could dislodge the pride that had always kept her from this. “I hate this, okay? I hate begging. My mother would haunt me for it. But I will get on my knees if that’s what it takes to get through to you.”

“Don’t,” he said, horrified.

She did, anyway; more a collapse than a gesture, down onto the threadbare rug, right in front of him. She set her hands on his knees like she was steadying both of them. Her eyes were glassy, and she didn’t blink them clear. “Listen to me,” she said, fierce and soft. “You don’t get to throw me away to protect me from you. I am not a vase. I am a person who chose you with my eyes open.”

He stared at her hands, at the way her fingers trembled just enough to tell the truth. He wanted to cover them with his. He didn’t move. Touch felt like trespass tonight.

She swallowed. The radiators hissed; the city outside coughed a siren and then thought better of it. “That morning,” she said, “at Kehilat Moshe, when the rabbi asked if I was married and I said, ‘not yet,’ I meant it. I meant that I could imagine a future I’m not afraid of, and you are in it. And you,” her voice sharpened, “-you looked like someone told you the building inspector was on his way to condemn your heart.”

“Because he is,” Munch whispered. “He always is.”

“Then let me fight the inspection with you.” She pushed to her feet, and he felt that tiny loss of her weight against him like temperature dropping. She stood inches away now, breathing hard. “Please. I’m here. I’m ready. I will not be ashamed to say it again and again until it gets through your skull. I am ready to love you, John. Why won’t you let me?”

He could feel the answer rising; the same oily, familiar thing: Because I’m bad for you, because I’m poison, because I don’t sleep without a light on in my head and I will make you carry that lamp. But the words snagged on the hook of her eyes. He had the sudden, shameful urge to cry, which he had not indulged since the last time a marriage ended under fluorescent kitchen lights, and he had laughed instead of sobbing and then bought a new lock.

“Please,” he said again, but it changed colour as it left his mouth. It wasn’t a warning anymore. It was a prayer that she could either answer or refuse.

She nodded, quick and unpretty. “Okay.” She took his face in both hands then, forcing him to meet her. He could smell winter on her coat, the hint of shampoo. “I am not leaving because you’re afraid. I will leave if you tell me you don’t want me. Those aren’t the same thing.”

He made a small sound, a protest. “Wanting is the problem.”

“No, running is the problem.”

He gripped the edge of the couch with both hands to keep from reaching for her. His knuckles hurt. He thought of every time he’d chosen the exit over the room; every time it had translated as survival and then calcified into habit. He thought of the man he’d shot and how the gun had felt like an answer until it became a sentence. He thought of the mornings watching her laugh with Fin over bad coffee, of how the bullpen noise softened when she walked in like the place remembered it was full of people instead of cases.

“This will end badly,” he said, because prophecy felt safer than hope.

“Maybe,” she said. “But I’m asking to begin anyway.”

He stared at her. A long, raw line of quiet stretched between them. The record ended with a gentle click. He got up as if to lift the needle, an old reflex to tidy something when he couldn’t fix anything, then stopped short because moving away from her felt like treason.

She let her hands fall. Her voice grew steadier, colder at the edges, the practical tone she used with suspects who thought silence was a strategy. “I am going to say this once, and then I’m going to go.” Every word cost her; he could hear the coin drop. “I love you. I don’t know how not to. If you tell me to leave because you do not love me, I will believe you and I will go and I will not come back. If you tell me to leave because you’re afraid you’ll ruin me-” a small, almost feral smile cut through, “-I will call that what it is: an insult to my intelligence. Choose.”

He felt dizzy. “You’re half my age.”

“Choose.”

“I killed a man.”

“Choose.”

“I-” He broke, the word shattering. All the old exit strategies crowded the doorway. He could tell her to go and be noble, and he would die by inches for months and call it penance. He could drag her in and call it selfishness and then spend the next year trying not to be happy, or he could do the brave, ridiculous, teenage thing that his younger self would’ve mocked, and his older self had forgotten how to do.

“Come home with me,” she said, almost a whisper now. Not a command, not a plea. An invitation that felt like a hand held out in the dark. She turned. The click of the lock sounded like a judge’s gavel. She opened the door to the hallway, to the radiator hiss and the onion smell and the cold.

For a second he didn’t move. He studied the groove her body had left in his night; her shape in the room, in his bones. The fear screamed. It always would. But another voice, smaller and stubborn, said: Go.

He stood.

“John,” she said without turning, voice thin with the last of her courage.

He took two steps, three, past the table with his unattended drink, past the answering machine blinking red, past the milk crate and the ghosts. He reached the threshold and stopped because the simplest things required rehearsal when you’d spent years avoiding them.

“Okay,” he said.

She looked back, surprise breaking across her face like sun into a locked room. “Okay?”

“Okay,” he repeated, and it landed with weight. He slid on his coat, found his scarf by muscle memory. He turned off the lamp and immediately back on because some habits were superstition as much as sorrow, then off again because he’d promised himself not to be ruled by either. He glanced around the apartment once, the life he’d made to survive and be small, and then he chose the hallway.

They walked side by side without touching at first, like they were escorting each other through a crosswalk of fate. The stairwell was colder than the hall; their breath showed. The city’s Saturday-night noise rose from the street: a siren dopplered away, a car stereo thumped, someone laughed too loudly, a delivery bike whirred by the wind shouldered its way between buildings.

On the second-floor landing he hitched, that old instinct flaring; say something cruel, ruin it pre-emptively, control the detonation. He looked at her instead. She looked back like she’d been patient with him for a hundred years and could be for a hundred more, as long as he kept walking.

“Don’t make me regret this,” he said, and even he heard it for the joke that wanted to be a prayer.

She smiled, fierce and wet-eyed. “Then don’t run.”

They stepped out into the February night, neon slick on the wet pavement, streetlight making halos on puddles. He fell into stride with her, a beat behind, then even. He could feel the fear like a live wire and the strange, ridiculous lightness of having said ‘okay,’ anyway.

She reached out finally, testing the air between them like it might bite, then slid her hand into his.

It didn’t feel like absolution. It felt like weather. Real and cold and survivable. It felt like the city: ugly and beautiful, ordinary and holy. It felt like a decision he could make every block if he needed to.

He kept pace. He did not let go.

Behind them, his apartment went dark, and the record arm hung above an empty groove, waiting. Ahead, the night opened its exhausted, forgiving arms. He wasn’t fixed. He wasn’t clean. He was still a man with too much history and edges that cut. But he was moving.

For once, his heart had told him what to do and he’d listened. And for once, instead of turning away, he followed her home.

Chapter Text

ASTORIA - February 5, 2005 - 10:02 PM

They didn’t talk on the drive from Brooklyn. The Mustang hummed low like it had made a private pact with the night not to draw attention. Queens slid past in wet streaks of sodium light and shopfront neon; the rain had been a rumour earlier, now it clung to the sidewalks in patches of black glass. He rode passenger, coat open, tie loosened, eyes half-shut like a man pretending not to exist. When their hands brushed on the gearshift; once, twice, they both held still a second longer than necessary, as if the car itself had a pulse they were trying to feel.

Astoria smelled like winter and old bakery air when they parked; sesame, sugar, exhaust. Radiators hissed like patient snakes in the walls. They walked straight to the bedroom because there was no other honest place to put their bodies tonight, and stretched out on top of the covers without undressing. Shoes off. Coats on chairs. City on mute behind old glass.

Munch lay on his side facing her, not quite here, not quite gone. His shirt had a wrinkle pressed into it from a seatbelt that he hadn’t noticed. The pale sliver of his throat above the loosened knot of his tie was a geography of old tension; even in the quiet, he looked braced for something to hit. He said nothing. She matched him with silence of her own, staring up at the ceiling where a streetlight cut the paint into a dull trapezoid. Somewhere outside, the elevated train rumbled down 33^rd and faded, a metal animal returning to its den.

She told herself to breathe. In for four, out for six. Her chest didn’t listen.

“John,” she said, so quietly it could have been the word for a prayer.

He didn’t open his eyes at first. “Mm?”

“You’re not the only one who practices self-hatred.”

His eyes opened then; slow, immediate, careful. The part of him that made a living on dark jokes stayed where it was. “Why do you say that” he asked, not as a challenge but as a door propped with a shoulder, the hallway beyond it dim.

Talia kept looking up, as if the white paint contained an answer she would only see if she didn’t blink. “Because I’ve failed everyone I ever loved,” she said. The sentence came out like a verdict she’d rehearsed so often it no longer needed breath to stand.

He didn’t move. He had that detective stillness that said I’m here, keep going, I’ll hold the room up if it tilts.

“My father first.” She swallowed. “1994. I was 18 and knew everything and nothing. He’d been… tired. He’d call it that. Tired; like you can be tired in your chest.” Her fingertips found the seam of the blanket and worried at it. “He said it was indigestion after dinner. I told him it was probably the lamb, laughed, told him I’d brew mint tea. He smiled like he always did when I tried to mother him, and I thought it meant we had all the time.”

The radiator snapped. She flinched; she pretended she hadn’t.

“I missed the call from my brother because I was in the shower. He said, ‘Baba’s at Elmhurst; come now.’ I left the house with wet hair, no coat, September biting through my shirt like it had teeth. I drove too fast and too slow at the same time. I kept hitting red lights I still dream about. When I got there…” Her voice frayed. “When I got there, my brothers were already outside. Their faces, John, they were wrong. Faces should have colour. They told me I was too late and I… I felt like a door slamming in a hallway and the hallway was inside my chest.”

A beat. The sound of a neighbour’s TV leaking through the wall, some game show applause from a different, kinder world.

“And after, in the bathroom under the hospital fluorescents, do you know that green-white that makes skin look like paper? I found a little brown bottle in his coat pocket. Nitro-glycerine. My father had been carrying a storm around and I didn’t see the clouds. He knew and I didn’t. I still hate myself for that.” She paused, and the hissing pipes answered for her. “I didn’t say goodbye. I didn’t say anything that mattered. He died and I was late.”

John’s jaw moved like he wanted to say her name but would wait until it could hold something gentle. He didn’t offer the easy absolution that made grief feral. He just shifted a fraction closer, a concession to gravity.

Talia’s eyes slid shut and opened again; she was bargaining with memory now, the way you bargain with a precinct vending machine that’s eaten enough of your quarters to know your mother’s maiden name.

“My mother.” The words landed differently. He heard it, the reverence, the dread. “Two years later. She was already thin in that way people get when their body has learned a new alphabet and refuses to read anything else. By then I knew the hospital lights. I knew how to fold the blanket, so it didn’t rub against the IV line. I knew the way the nurse’s shoes squeaked right before dawn. I thought knowing would help.”

Her lower lip trembled; she held it still with teeth. “I was the one on duty that night. I read to her; something she’d given me when I was fifteen, about saints and stubborn women who outran kings. I remember her hand; her hands were always warm even when she was cold; it’s a trick mothers learn. And when the machines started that soft decline, when the numbers slid down like rain on a window, I put my mouth to her ear and told her she could go, that I’d take care of everyone, that I’d be good.” She laughed once, a dry crack. “As if goodness is a currency that buys back breath.”

The ceiling blurred. She let it. “I watched the light leave her eyes, John. Not a metaphor. Not a poem. The pupils changed and the world decided it didn’t need her anymore. I felt her hand get heavier in mine and I thought; this is a betrayal I’ll never forgive. Hers? God’s? Mine? I still don’t know.”

She turned her head finally. He was close enough that she could see the early stubble along his jaw, the notch in his eyebrow that never quite grew in, the crow’s-foot at the corner of his left eye that deepened when he was trying not to tell her a joke. He looked like a lighthouse that had decided to keep its light to itself.

“Kareem.” The name fell like a coin in a well that had no bottom. “2002. He said he had to go back to Alexandria, that it mattered, that his friends needed him, that some fights find you whether you’re dressed for them or not. I told him to be careful. No, I begged him. He teased me. ‘You worry too much, little sister,’ like that was my problem and not my power.”

She pressed the heel of her hand between her eyes until stars sparked. “They shot into the crowd, and the crowd was a mouth, and my brother was inside it. The call came two days later. I knew from the way the man said my name, like he was stepping on a shard of glass and trying not to move. ‘I’m sorry.’ I hate those words. I bring him home in a box and my aunt says, ‘He looks like he’s sleeping’ and I think people who say that have never watched someone sleep.”

Munch’s fingers had lifted, stalled, hovered. He let them rest against the blanket between them, an invitation to bridge or not.

“And then Lana.” Talia’s voice changed; it swayed. “Only 21. My baby. I had thought… foolishly, piously, arrogantly… that the universe would give me a break after taking my mother and brother. I thought if I behaved; I keep the house clean, I send money, I pray, I don’t cut corners, I keep the dead from dusting the furniture with their absence, maybe the universe would look away.”

The room got smaller. “I opened her door, and it smelled wrong. People don’t talk about that. How the air can tell you before your eyes do. Something was sweet in the worst possible way, like a fruit left in the sun too long. The room was too quiet. Quiet isn’t supposed to be heavy. I called her name and the name didn’t move. She was there. She wasn’t. I don’t remember phoning 911. I remember my throat making sounds I didn’t recognize.”

She dragged a hand down her face and let it drop against the mattress with a soft thump. “You know what I did after the funeral? I colour-coded the pantry. Flour in glass. Sugar in tin. Spices alphabetized. I scrubbed the sink until the steel showed me a face I couldn’t stand. I ironed sheets. I wrote lists about the lists. I told myself the world loved order, and I could love the world back if I learned its grammar. That’s all the hair and the clothes and the desk are, John. It’s scaffolding. People say, ‘You look perfect,’ and I don’t tell them it’s a brace holding the broken place closed.”

She didn’t realize she was crying until one tear hit her ear and made her flinch. He finally moved. He took the small distance she’d left him and turned it into none. His palm came up in a careful line to her cheek; the touch was firm enough to be believed, gentle enough to refuse fear. He swept his thumb once under her eye and didn’t point out the evidence.

He didn’t say, It’s not your fault. He didn’t say, you did your best. Those were plywood phrases, and this was a building on fire.

He said, “I hear you.” Then, after a second, “Keep talking.”

She exhaled like a door unlatching. “I hate myself,” she said softly, as if admitting it too loudly might make it more true. “Not in a poetic way. In the way where I look at photos and count the ways I wasn’t enough in them. I point at myself like I’m a suspect on a board. She’s late. She’s careless. She’s vain; no, worse, she’s weak, using vanity as a splint. She’s the girl who didn’t see the bottle in her father’s pocket until it was too late. She’s the woman who told her mother it was okay to go and then hated her for obeying. She’s the sister who couldn’t keep a boy from a bullet or a girl from a handful of pills. She’s all crime scene, no rescue.”

Outside, a siren flared and dimmed. Somewhere down the block, someone laughed the way drunk people laugh when they’re trying to sound like a chorus.

“And I walk into a precinct every morning in a silk blouse and a coat that fits, and I act like I can put the world back right with a file and a pen and a stare, and sometimes I do, sometimes I actually do, and then I remember the four people I couldn’t save, and the wins taste like cardboard. I know that’s obscene. People need me present, not haunted. So, I put on eyeliner like armour, and I answer phones, and I say, ‘Detective Amari, how can I help you’ like I’m not a cemetery with legs.”

Her mouth twisted; she looked at him like she was daring him to tell her she was being dramatic.

He didn’t. “Last time I saw you that summer in ‘94,” he said, voice even. “The bodega with the owner who pretends he doesn’t know my order because it makes him happy when I say it out loud.”

She blinked. “Ali.”

“Yeah. You were there. Labneh, pomegranate juice, eyes red. I wanted to ask, but a kid came in with a scratch-off, and then the train did that drunken roar overhead, and… the moment went.” He studied her face. “What was it?”

“That morning in ’94,” she said, staring through the wall at a younger street. “I stopped there for mint tea. My father had put his hand on his chest the night before and called it heartburn. I didn’t know the word angina then. I do now. I still hear the bell on that door when I run the red lights in my head.”

Silence settled again, different this time; less like a lid, more like an arm around a shoulder. He let it sit until it warmed.

“Talia,” he said, and when he used her name like that, it sounded like an oath he was making to himself not to break anything fragile. “You love so hard it hurts. That’s not the crime here.”

“It feels like it is.”

“I know.” He angled closer, his forehead almost touching hers. The shadow of his profile etched itself against the ceiling trapezoid. “But listen. You didn’t build the gun that found your brother. You didn’t cook the chemistry that took your sister. You didn’t design the muscle in a heart to fail. You stood in rooms with people you loved, and you were a witness. That’s not nothing.”

She squeezed her eyes shut, as if the certainty in his voice burned. “A witness is a bystander with better eyesight.”

“Sometimes a witness keeps the world honest.” He let the smallest ghost of a smile touch his mouth and then let it go. “And sometimes the witness shows up to work the next day and tries again because that’s the only revenge the living get.”

She swallowed a ragged sound. “What if I lose you,” she said, the sentence naked, no preamble, no camouflage. “What if I’m building another altar and don’t know it yet. I can’t… John, I cannot go through that again.”

He didn’t promise her immortality he couldn’t deliver; he didn’t swear he was a safe bet in a city where you could be blindsided crossing Northern Boulevard. He gave her the only currency that wasn’t counterfeit. “I’m here,” he said. “Right now, I’m here. I’m not leaving tonight.”

It was such a small thing, tonight, but it was a handhold on a cliff.

She let out a breath that shook. Her body angled toward him, a shutter opening to light after too long closed. His arm came around her and she fitted herself to him the way you do with a pillow you didn’t know you needed: forehead beneath his chin, one palm splayed over his ribs like she was counting them to be sure. His cologne and the nicotine ghost in his coat and the clean starch of his shirt and the smell of her own hair; jasmine and oud, mixed into an air she could live in a while.

They lay there while the city shifted down a gear. Footsteps above them crossed, paused, crossed back; a sink clanged. A bus exhaled at the curb and moved on. The trapezoid of light on the ceiling softened as a cloud slid over the streetlamp; then sharpened again. Talia’s breathing found a rhythm that didn’t hurt. She felt the slow drum of his heart under her hand and matched it measure for measure like a student learning time.

“My father used to say truth is stubborn,” she said after a long while, voice almost level. “Like a mule. It will stand in the road and keep you from passing until you climb down and take it by the halter. I keep dodging it. I keep driving around the block.”

“What’s the truth saying now?”

“That I’m alive,” she said, and the words shamed her; they also freed her by an inch. “That being alive makes me angry. That being angry makes me feel ungrateful. That guilt is a snake that knows my ankles by name. That I don’t know how to be a person who’s lost this much without becoming a room no one wants to enter.”

He made a thoughtful noise. “I do,” he said softly. “You start with one person who wants to enter.” He shifted, crooking a finger under her chin so she’d look at him. “I want to be here. In the room. With you. Even when it’s a mess. Especially then.”

She searched his face, as if she didn’t trust the sentence and needed to cross-examine it. Whatever she found made her mouth tremble into something that didn’t quite make it to a smile but wanted to.

“Okay,” she whispered.

“Okay.”

Her hand tightened in his shirt. “And if I unravel? If the scaffolding cracks? If the eyeliner smudges and the files are out of order and the bed isn’t made, and I can’t stand the mirror?”

“Then the scaffolding cracks,” he said. “And we pick up the pieces. And the bed can stay unmade. Welcome to my design philosophy.”

She snorted a sound that surprised her with its lightness. “Your apartment looks like a filing cabinet married a conspiracy corkboard and they had feral children.”

“And yet somehow you still come over,” he murmured. “Either you have questionable taste, or you like me.”

“Both.” The word escaped before she could censor it. She didn’t take it back.

He traced once along her temple, pushing a damp strand of hair behind her ear. “Close your eyes,” he said, almost like a dare. “Not to sleep. Just to rest them.”

She did. The bedroom breathed. The list in her chest loosened its grip just enough to set down a page. She felt the weight of her grief like a blanket, heavy but warming if you stopped fighting it. She didn’t forgive herself tonight; absolution was too tidy for this city. But she let herself be held while she hated herself, and that, improbably, felt like an action instead of a failure.

“I’m here,” he said again into her hair, the promise measured and small and real. “And I’m not going anywhere tonight.”

Tonight. She held the word like a match cupped against wind, flame small, stubborn, honest.

Outside, a train moaned and passed. The radiator sighed. Somewhere a car horn barked and went quiet. The trapezoid on the ceiling softened one more time until it wasn’t a trapezoid anymore, but a pale wash the colour of a throat before a song.

Two broken people, not fixed, not pretending, lay pressed together in a room that knew how to keep secrets. Between the rattle of pipes and the city’s iron lullaby, shame stopped shouting and grief, finally, finally, spoke at a volume that could be answered. And when the answer came; low, ordinary, continuous, it wasn’t a miracle or a cure. It was a heartbeat under her palm, steady and alive, insisting on the stubborn truth her father had always loved.

I’m here.

ASTORIA - February 6, 2005 - 3:47 AM

The first thing he registered was the cold. The bed had gone cold. John stirred, eyes gritty, neck stiff against the pillow. He reached out automatically, the way a man does when he’s learned someone else’s weight in his sheets, but his hand met nothing but a dent in the blanket. The radiator hissed like a living thing in the corner, but the space beside him was empty.

He sat up. Shirt still on from last night, tie long abandoned on the chair. Heka was curled at the foot of the bed, paws twitching in a dream. The other two shepherds were on the floor, sprawled belly-up in canine bliss. Guardians, every one of them. But no Talia.

“Talia?” he rasped. His voice cracked the silence.

No answer.

The bathroom door stood open. Dark. Empty. The prayer room, with its candles and icons; empty. The study, its books in military neatness, empty.

He rubbed his eyes and padded barefoot downstairs, muttering under his breath. The living room had the look of a space someone had just passed through a throw folded wrong, an absence where a blanket should have been.

He opened the front door. Cold air breathed in from the street. The stoop was empty. A wet newspaper glistened against the curb. The world outside was sleeping.

The blanket’s absence answered what his gut already knew. He glanced up.

The roof.

The ladder creaked under his weight, old wood groaning against February. His fingers stung against the metal rungs. When he pushed the hatch open, cold air slapped him awake. The city spread wide and spectral around him, Queens all concrete teeth and scattered lights. Manhattan glittered faintly to the west like a warning flare.

And there she was.

A silhouette against the pale hint of dawn, knees pulled up, cigarette between her fingers. Smoke coiled around her face and carried the wet shimmer of tears with it.

His chest clenched. “Doll…” His voice was a whisper, but it might as well have been a scream.

She startled, wiped at her cheeks, turning toward him. “I’m sorry. Did I wake you?” Her voice was shredded silk, fraying at every word.

He crossed to her, coatless, barefoot on the tarpaper. He crouched low, eye-level with her. “What are you doing up here?” He ignored her question.

She gave him a look too tired for pretence, then lifted the cigarette slightly like a flag of surrender. “This.”

He sighed, plucked it from her hand, and without ceremony flicked it off the edge. A tiny ember swallowed by the night.

“John-”

“No.” His voice was sharp, then softened. He slid a hand down her arm, firm, tugging until she had no choice but to rise. “Get up.”

“Please,” she whispered, resisting. “I just… I just want to see the sunrise.” The words sat between them like a plea for mercy.

He exhaled hard through his nose. Just hours ago, she’d bared herself to him in a way that left the air stripped raw, and he’d thought maybe, just maybe, they’d both rest. But now here she was, shoulders bowed, a blanket wrapped around her like a shroud, smoking and crying in the dark.

“Talia, get back inside,” he said, voice low but edged.

She shook her head faintly. “The sunrise feels safer than the night. I can’t breathe in there.”

He hated how much it made sense. He hated how she said it like breathing was something she had to beg permission for. “Talia.” His voice cracked; not with anger, but something thinner, sharper. Fear. “Don’t make me force you.”

She looked at him then, really looked. His hair mussed from restless sleep, the lines etched deeper across his face in the dim. He wasn’t threatening her; he was begging her.

The fight bled out of her. She let him draw her up. The blanket slid half off her shoulders, dragging along the roof. They climbed back down the ladder, slow, each rung echoing in the hollow silence of the house. When the hatch shut above them, the world narrowed again, and she felt the claustrophobia close in. He led her wordlessly back upstairs.

Neither of them lay down right away. She stood by the bed, arms wrapped tight around herself, eyes rimmed red. “Do you want water?” he asked, already knowing the answer.

She shook her head.

He stepped closer, touched her wrist. Cold. She smelled of smoke and tears, salt and tobacco threaded through the jasmine of her hair. “Come here.”

She did. He drew her down beside him, into the warmth of the sheets and the warmth of him. For a long time, nothing moved but the rise and fall of their breathing. Heka stirred and sighed, pressing closer at their feet.

She shifted, pressing her forehead into his chest. “Do you ever think maybe people like us, people who can’t let go, are just waiting our turn?”

His arms tightened. “Every day.”

Silence again, but not empty. The radiator hummed. One of the dogs thumped a paw against the floor in a dream. A siren howled somewhere down Steinway and faded.

“Then what’s the point?” she whispered.

“You,” he said simply.

Her breath hitched.

“You’re the point, Talia. For me.”

The room blurred. She bit her lip hard, trying not to sob again, but it came anyway, wracking and raw. He held her through it, steady as a wall, letting her fists clutch at his shirt.

When the tears ebbed, she whispered, “I don’t know how to love myself.”

“Then let me do it until you figure it out.”

The words landed heavy, not romantic fluff but something ragged, desperate, true.

She stared at him, eyes glassy, searching for the lie. There wasn’t one.

Her hand crept up, tracing the crease in his collar, the hollow at his throat. “You love me,” she whispered, like testing the shape of it.

“I do.” The admission was soft, almost shamefaced. “But I can’t say it pretty. I just know it’s true.”

She closed her eyes, tears sliding anew. “I’m scared you’ll wake up one day and see me the way I do.”

“Doll,” he said, thumb brushing her cheek. “I’ve seen you more clearly than you think. And I’m still here.”

Her chest shuddered against his. They lay back down, tangled in each other. She pressed her face against the hollow of his neck like she could burrow into the pulse there. He smoothed her hair back, feeling the dampness at her temple, the fine tremble in her jaw.

Neither slept. Not really. But as the first faint glow of sunrise bled through the blinds, they clung like survivors on wreckage, each refusing to let the other sink.

She loved him deeply. He loved her just as deep. But where his hatred was sharp and cynical, hers was vast and consuming. And though he could not cure her, though she could not forgive herself, in that bed, in that moment, they refused to let go.

Two broken people, bound by love, bound by grief. Watching the dawn arrive in Astoria, knowing the cracks would never disappear, but holding each other anyway.

And for now, that was enough.

Chapter Text

SVU PRECINCT - March 14, 2005 - 8:06 AM

The squad room hummed the way it always did at eight; phones trilling, printers coughing, a dozen lives half-buttoned into their day. Fluorescents turned everyone the same shade of awake. Somewhere, a pot of coffee had gone past drinkable into crime scene.

Talia walked in with a scarf knotted loose at her throat and a smile that lifted the whole floor. She moved like she’d finally remembered the shape of her own body; light but grounded, sure of the ground beneath her. Fin shot her a salute with his paper cup, and she tipped her chin back in greeting, already angling toward his desk with a case file tucked under her arm.

“Gym at lunch?” Elliot asked, passing by with that bouncing energy that made her roll her eyes and say yes anyway. Olivia and Casey were already plotting a drink after shift; Talia’s name circled into their plan with a quick clink of pens. They’d been doing that more lately: pulling her into the orbit of ordinary warmth.

She’d started going back to church, too. Not just Sundays. Some mornings before work, she slipped into a small Russian parish where the icons were all soft gold and smoke-brown; on other days she stood in the back of a Coptic church, the hymns threading the air like a lineage. She never made a show of it. She didn’t need to. The ash of incense in her hair told its own story.

At his desk, Munch pretended to read. It was a decent performance; glasses low, the sceptical squint, the little grunt that meant he’d found something damning on page four; but every few lines his eyes drifted up and caught on her. He loved the way she listened when victims spoke, the way her hands were patient and her questions exact. He loved the way she was alive today, the way laughter lived in the corner of her mouth. He took the love and wore it on the inside of his jacket like contraband.

“Hey, Munch.” She dropped a pink Post-it on his blotter without looking. Three words, a time, and a tiny sketch of a coffee cup. He slid it into his pocket like evidence that the world, for once, was conspiring to be kind.

She was happy. It showed in the way she cut a joke with Fin over chain-of-custody, in the way she let Casey talk her into one drink that always became two, in the way she didn’t flinch when Elliot dragged her to the gym and made her laugh mid-rep. She had good friends. She had work that mattered. She had a man who loved her and wasn’t hiding it from himself anymore.

But there had been a time when it was not so simple.

It began, as some stories do, in a winter city that changed its name.

LENINGRAD - November 7, 1978 - 8:01 PM

Snow came early that year, heavy and clean, packing itself into the seams of the city and quieting the streets. The radiators clanked alive in the evenings, and the windows sweated on the inside where breath met glass. In the stairwell, shoes squeaked, and voices echoed; every landing had a door that might open or might not. People learned to pass each other with the polite blankness that meant I saw nothing. You saw nothing. We both have children to feed.

Talia was only two, and she followed her father like a shadow with a heartbeat. Mikhail Volkov; broad hands, soft voice, chalk dust on his cuffs, was a historian who spoke about Russia as if it were a person you could love honestly, which made him dangerous. On lecture days, she went with him and sat in the front, feet not yet reaching the floor. She didn’t grasp the dates or the arguments, but she adored the sound; his careful Russian, the scratch of chalk, a room leaning forward to hear truth say its own name. To her, Mikhail Volkov was the sun, the centre of her small universe

Her mother, Miriam, carried another kind of truth. She kept an icon wrapped in a scarf at the back of a bookshelf, set a little tea light in a saucer when the children slept, and crossed herself with two fingers, quick and careful, as if the air could eavesdrop. Some afternoons she took Talia to stand near the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood, its onion domes rising like a fairy tale with scaffolding clinging to its skin, years of restoration glinting in the pale sun.

There were no services there then, only mosaics behind locked doors and a memory of singing. So, Miriam would bow her head outside the gates, whisper a prayer for her family, and then walk to a small, still-open parish where a few old women and stubborn men kept the ember of liturgy from going cold. Talia loved the smell of wax and old wood, the way a candle flame made the gold halos breathe.

She loved the cartoons too, the evening multfilmy; Nu, pogodi! blaring from the set while her brothers argued over the good spot on the rug. She mangled lyrics and clapped anyway, and Ameen, who was nine and thought himself very wise, teased her until she laughed harder. Samir, jaw already set like the soldier he’d someday become, would nudge her apple slice closer when he thought no one was looking. Kareem, all elbows and solemn eyes, imitated everything she did and then pretended he hadn’t.

The apartment smelled like cabbage and black tea, like wool drying on a string, like a city that held its breath. On the table lay a crumpled copy of Pravda, headlines folding themselves around the official version of a nation’s life. Under it, tucked where only Mikhail’s hands would look, were onionskin pages touched by a forensic constellation of eraser crumbs; the kind of drafts you didn’t show anyone, the kind you passed only to a friend who had become a brother, the kind that made you a person of interest.

You didn’t have to be arrested to be watched. The phone sometimes clicked in the middle of calls; letters arrived with their glue strangely dry. The doorman remembered too much. The colleague with the friendly eyes asked questions with too many commas. No one ever said KGB. You said They, and everyone understood.

On the evening of November 7; an anniversary the city marked with parades and speeches, Mikhail came home with colour high in his face and the cold in his coat. He stood in the threshold a moment, snow melting off his hat, and looked like a man who had made a decision no one would like.

“Pal'tó snyem,” he said gently to the boys when they barreled toward him. “obuv’ snyat’ snachala. My delayem vsyo po poryadku.” (Coats, shoes off first. We do things in order / Russian)

They obeyed from habit. Miriam took his hat, his scarf, and the measure of his eyes. Something in them had shifted; past anger, past argument, into the terrible calm that follows a realization you cannot unknow.

She set him at the kitchen table with tea while she drained the potatoes and salted the herring. The children were banished to the bedroom with a treat; two stories, Ameen promised, of Pushkin, with voices for the old man and the fish.

Behind the closed door, the eldest boy began The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish. He read slow, careful, because Talia liked to stop him and point at the pictures, her chubby finger landing again and again on the golden scales. “Rybka,” she said proudly. He kissed the top of her head and read the part where the sea grows black with the wife’s greed. (Fish / Russian)

Samir hovered near the window, peeking through the frost on the glass as if expecting someone outside. Kareem sat cross-legged on the floor, quiet for once, twisting the fringe of the rug between his fingers.

In the kitchen, the kettle rattled its lid.

“They called me in again,” Mikhail said, not bothering with preface. “Not to the rector this time. To a room with no windows and a desk that had too much space behind it.”

Miriam stopped moving.

“They said this is not a matter of scholarship,” he went on, voice low. “This is a matter of loyalty. That my lectures… complicate the narrative. That I am admired by the wrong students. That I am not a danger, of course not, no one is saying that, only that perhaps I would be happier with a lighter teaching load. Perhaps the journal will not have space for my next article. Perhaps the committee would like to review my syllabus line by line. Perhaps my name is causing trouble for my children’s schools.”

He looked at his hands. “They were very polite, Miriam. The politeness felt like a glove over a hand you didn’t want touching your face.”

“What did you say?” Her voice was paper thin.

“That I love my country,” he said simply. “And that truth is an act of love. They smiled like men hearing a child recite a poem.”

She set a plate down and then clutched the back of the chair. “And now?”

“Now we leave.”

The spoon clattered on the table. “We cannot,” she said, and in the we was everything; four children, a lifetime of books, a city that lived in his bones.

“We can,” he said. Calm again. Terrible with calm. “I have written to an old colleague in Alexandria. Weeks ago. I didn’t tell you because hope is a fragile thing, and I didn’t want to break it in your hands. He sent an invitation for a research visit, and the paper pushers stamped it because sometimes the machine blinks. We have a narrow window. We go to Moscow by night train. The Egyptian embassy, then the airport. If we hesitate, the window shuts, and then we will live, very politely, inside a cage.”

Her fingers found his sleeve, curled there. “Your brother,” she whispered. “The apartment.”

“He will move in tomorrow. The papers are in his name already.” He tried to smile. “I have done everything wrong and everything right at once.”

She laughed; a raw, wrong sound that was almost a sob. “What do I take?” she asked, and now they were already gone. “The icon. Your father’s books. The birth certificates. The photographs.”

“Yes,” he said. “And clothes for warmth until we reach the sea.”

She turned to the cupboard where the icon hid behind War and Peace and a row of thrifted mugs. She held it in both hands, kissed the wood where the paint had worn thin under other mouths, and wrapped it back into the scarf. “God goes before us,” she said. Then, almost angrily, “He had better.”

They packed in the language of panic; fast, then slower, then fast again. Ameen came to the doorway, book pressed to his chest like armour, eyes too alert. “Baba?”

Mikhail crouched. “My clever one. We are going on a trip. Tonight.”

“A trip?” Samir echoed from behind him, already scanning for tasks. “I’ll carry the suitcase.”

Kareem took Talia’s hand and didn’t let go, as if she might drift if he blinked.

They ate at the table with their coats on, because sometimes it’s easier to leave if your body believes you’ve already begun. Potatoes, herring, a heel of black bread. Miriam tucked a little paper packet of salt into the side pocket of the suitcase the way her mother had done, because you bring your salt to a new house, so life keeps its flavour.

The stairwell, when they stepped into it, smelled like soup and wet wool. The neighbour on the third floor opened her door to shake a rag and froze for one heartbeat too long. ‘Big night,’ she said, eyes flicking to the children’s boots. ‘Mind the ice.’ Miriam squeezed her hand as if the words had been a benediction.

On the street, snow scratched at their faces. The tram rattled past, orange lights blinking like a toy through the storm. A billboard shouted someone else’s triumph into the night. They walked to the station with their heads down, four small sets of footprints braided into two taller ones.

The Leningrad-Moscow overnight was a weary serpent of metal and heat. They found their compartment, stowed the suitcase, exhaled for the first time. The samovar at the end of the corridor hissed like a restless cat; the conductor’s shoes clicked past the door, again and again, a metronome that didn’t care about hearts. Talia fell asleep with her cheek on her mother’s collarbone, Miriam’s palm on her back keeping a rhythm only mothers knew. Ameen pretended to read by the corridor light and then surrendered, book face-down on his stomach. Samir took the top bunk because he wanted to be a guardrail between the family and the ceiling. Kareem sighed in the dark and said nothing.

In Moscow, morning bit hard. They moved through the city like a thought they were trying not to think. At the Egyptian embassy, Arabic threaded the air like a remembered song. Papers were stamped. A window opened. A woman behind a desk said, May God keep your little ones, and slid back passports with a speed that felt like mercy.

Sheremetyevo smelled like floor polish and impatience. The customs agent turned pages like a man counting heartbeats. “Tsel’ poezdki?” he asked without looking up. (Purpose of travel? / Russian)

“Akademicheskiy vizit,” Mikhail replied. His voice contained a decade of practice at saying the exact number of true words required and not one more. (Academic visit / Russian)

The agent’s gaze passed over the icon scarf, the children’s scuffed shoes, the photograph album that made the suitcase heavier than science. He made a dot of ink where only he knew it mattered, then stamped and slid their lives back under the glass.

Miriam breathed for the first time in days.

When at last they boarded, when the plane lifted from the ground and the lights of Moscow fell away beneath the clouds, Miriam wept silently into her daughter’s hair. Mikhail stared out the window, jaw tight, his lips moving in a prayer he didn’t voice aloud. Clouds parted in the sky, and land unfurled into long sheets of colour. Talia woke, blinked at the wing like it was an enormous bird, and whispered, “Rybka?” because in her mind, the world above the sea must be where the golden fish swam, too.

When the wheels kissed the runway in Alexandria, heat rose up through the floor like a blessing. The air outside smelled of salt and cumin and something sweet she would later learn was mango. Arabic rolled around them in wide soft vowels, and Miriam’s shoulders dropped as if someone had cut the strings holding her tight. She pressed her lips to the icon scarf and then to each child’s head. “We are here,” she said in a voice that had music in it again. “Hena.” (Here / Arabic)

A taxi with upholstery that had seen every summer all at once took them through streets crowded with honking laughter. Laundry swung from balconies like flags of surrender and joy. The Mediterranean sat at the end of every road like something God had put there to remind people He could.

They found a room; small, clean, a borrowed fan leaning into its work. That first night, Miriam took Talia by the hand to St. Mark’s and stood beneath the dome where a language older than their fear braided itself into song. The priest’s voice rose and fell; incense lay its hand on their heads. A woman pressed a palm to Miriam’s cheek the way mothers do when they recognize something lost and found. Ameen stared at the candles like a boy trying to memorize light. Kareem touched the stone column with gentle fingers as if it might purr.

Mikhail stood a little apart, his eyes shining in the flicker. He was not a man who showed tears to the world, but he let one escape now and it cut a clean line through the dust of travel on his face. He mouthed a prayer in Russian, then another in broken Arabic, then reached for his wife’s hand and held it as if he had been falling for years and had at last found purchase.

Later, when the children slept in a braid of limbs and blankets, he sat with Miriam at the little table by the window. The sea was a rumour in the distance; the fan ticked like a tired clock.

“I will miss the snow,” he said softly.

“You will miss arguing with the snow,” she corrected, and he smiled into his hands.

“They will not stop watching from there,” he added after a moment, truth’s habit returning even without an audience. “Letters will be opened. Colleagues will forget me. But our children… they will learn to sleep without fear of footfalls in the stairwell.” He looked toward the bed where Talia sprawled, her fist still closed around a corner of scarf. “That is worth any forgetting.”

Miriam leaned her head to his shoulder. “We carry our country differently now,” she said. “Not like stone. Like bread.”

He kissed her hair and let himself believe it.

ALEXANDRIA - May 27, 1981 - 5:38 PM

The air in Alexandria was heavy with salt that evening, warm enough that the shutters rattled with the breeze but never cool enough to chase away the thick weight of the sun. The call to Maghrib prayer had just floated over the rooftops, mixing with the echo of distant church bells. On the street below, children were kicking a battered football through the dust, their laughter breaking against the low rumble of the sea beyond.

Inside their narrow seaside house, the kitchen smelled of cumin and frying oil. Miriam stood over a wide pan of tameya, her hands moving with practiced grace as she shaped the greenish patties, dropping them one by one into oil that hissed and spat. She wore an apron tied over her loose dress, her back arched slightly to balance the weight of the child she carried. Her belly curved beneath the fabric, already pressing forward into the world, little Lana, not yet born but present in every step Miriam took.

On a low stool near the window, Talia sat with her legs tucked under her, five years old and watching every movement as if it were magic. She liked the way her mother’s bracelets clinked when she reached for the spice jar, how her fingers dusted flour from her palms onto the counter, how every step of cooking seemed to be a ritual.

“Mama,” Talia whispered, picking at a piece of parsley from the bowl, “momken asaʿid?” (Mama, can I help? / Arabic)

“Enti btsaʿid,” Miriam said, her voice soft but tired. “Itfarragi.” She reached down and brushed Talia’s cheek with her flour-dusted fingers. “Yōm min el-ayyām hatʿrafi taʿmil da, wabaʿdein hatʿallim bintik. Keda el-donya btemshi.” (You are helping. You watch. One day, you will know how to do this, and then you will teach your daughter. That is how it works / Arabic)

Talia liked that idea, a chain of mothers and daughters stretching backwards into time, but she was too young to understand what it meant. What she did understand was warmth, the smell of herbs, and the sound of her mother humming an old Coptic hymn under her breath.

From the open balcony, the boys’ laughter carried in. Ameen and Samir were out near the shore, their hair plastered with saltwater, their voices rising over the sound of the waves. They spent every free hour in the sea, as if trying to drink the whole Mediterranean into their lungs. Kareem trailed behind them, smaller, still clumsy, but determined. They were happy in Alexandria. They had friends, games, the sand to dig into, and the endless horizon to chase.

For Talia, though, the sun sometimes felt too sharp. She remembered; dimly, like a dream she had tried to hold but lost, snow. A world of white that crunched underfoot, where breath fogged in the air. Sometimes at night, she whispered to her brothers about it: the white world where you could make shapes with your breath. They laughed; said she had imagined it. But she knew.

The kitchen door opened. Her father’s figure filled the doorway, tall, serious, with spectacles slipping down his nose and a folder clutched to his chest. His expression was different tonight, urgent and unsettled, and even Talia noticed.

“Miriam,” he said, his voice carrying the hesitation of someone about to drop a stone into still water.

Miriam glanced over her shoulder, wiping her hands on her apron. “Eh di?” she asked. (What is it? / Arabic)

He set the folder down on the table. It was not like the others he always carried home from the university. This was thinner, more official. A single envelope, creased from travel.

“It’s a letter,” he said softly. “From America.”

Miriam’s brow furrowed. She turned back to the stove. “And what does America want with us?”

“They want me to teach Russian history,” he answered, sitting heavily at the table. His fingers lingered on the envelope as if it were a relic, something fragile and holy.

She flipped one of the tameya patties with sharp efficiency. “So, go. Work in America, then. Teach them their history.” Her voice carried an edge, not of cruelty, but of exhaustion.

Mikhail sighed, running a hand through his thinning hair. “It is more than that. They are offering me a tenure position.”

That made her pause. The spatula stilled in her hand. She turned, eyes narrowing. “Tenure?”

“Yes.” He looked at her with something like pleading. “Miriam, do you know what this means? Stability. A future for our children that we could not imagine before. A place where they can grow without fear of censors, of watchers, of-” He broke off, pressing his lips together.

Her face tightened. “And what of me?” she asked quietly, her accent heavy, her tone dangerous. “You begged me to follow you to Russia. Then you begged me again to leave in the night. To carry our children into Egypt, away from everything I knew. And now you stand here asking me to leave my family, my church, my university, to go across the ocean and be what? A housewife in America?” Her voice cracked at the last word, though she tried to hide it.

Mikhail rose and crossed the kitchen in two steps. He took her wrist, gently but firmly, grounding her in place. “No,” he said. “That is not what I ask of you. I fought for your name, Miriam. Do you understand? I told them I would not come unless they gave you a post as well. They agreed. You will teach theology. You will not be erased.”

She stared at him, breath catching. “They agreed?”

“They did.” He lifted the envelope and pressed it into her flour-stained hands. She opened it with trembling fingers, scanning the words she could read in English, her lips moving silently. And then she stopped, pressing the letter to her chest.

“You did this?” she whispered.

“I could not do it without you,” he said simply. “You are my equal. You always have been. And our children-” He looked toward Talia, who was watching wide-eyed. “They deserve the chance to live the dream we could not.”

Miriam sank into the chair, covering her face with her hands. Her shoulders shook, and for a moment she seemed smaller than her daughter had ever seen her. Talia climbed off the stool and padded closer, wrapping her arms around her mother’s knees. Miriam reached down blindly and pulled the girl into her lap, pressing her face into her curls.

That night, while Miriam wept into her scarf, Mikhail began to pack. Books first, always the books; then clothes, papers, the little icons from their walls. Neighbours knocked on their door, offering bread, dates, soft words of farewell. One woman clutched Miriam’s hands and said, ‘Rabbena ma‘ak.’ Miriam’s eyes filled with tears all over again. (God be with you / Arabic)

The children did not understand. Ameen was excited, imagining skyscrapers and cowboys. Samir asked if America had seas like Alexandria. Kareem cried, afraid of leaving his friends. Talia held her mother’s hand tightly, watching every movement as the house slowly emptied.

When they boarded the plane, the lights of Alexandria stretched below them like scattered candles. Miriam pressed her forehead to the window, silent. Mikhail placed his hand over hers.

“Forgive me,” he whispered. She did not answer.

Hours later, when the plane descended into New York, the world outside was grey, wet with rain. They found the rowhouse on 33^rd Street in Astoria days later, brick and narrow, with creaking stairs and a small yard. It was nothing like the wide light of Alexandria, but Miriam unpacked the icons, lit her incense, and filled the rooms with the smell of cumin and bread. She made it their home.

And in that home, weeks later, little Lana’s cry filled the air, binding them to the future they had chosen; fragile, imperfect, but theirs.

SVU PRECINCT - March 14, 2005 - 8:06 AM

Talia’s fingers toyed absently with the beads she wore around her wrist; the little prayer rope her mother had given her years ago. She wasn’t reading. She wasn’t listening. She was somewhere else entirely; on a sun-bright balcony in Alexandria, watching her mother roll tameya between her palms, or hearing the low rumble of her father’s voice reading late into the night.

Across from her, Munch had been watching for a few minutes, half amused, half worried. He lifted a hand and waved it slowly in front of her face.

“Earth to Amari,” he said, his voice dry but with a lilt of humour.

Her gaze snapped back to the present. “What?”

He smirked, leaning back in his chair, arms crossed. “You done daydreaming, or should I get you a pillow?”

“I wasn’t daydreaming,” she said, rolling her eyes, though the corner of her mouth betrayed a smile.

“Oh no? Then what do you call staring into space like you just saw Elvis?”

She tilted her head, amused despite herself. “I was reminiscing.”

He arched a brow. “About what?”

Her voice softened, almost lost under the noise of the bullpen. “My parents.” She glanced down at the beads in her hand, running her thumb along their familiar ridges.

Munch’s expression shifted, the sarcasm slipping away. He leaned forward, his elbows resting on his desk. “Yeah?” he asked, careful, gentler now. He studied her. The room behind them kept moving; Fin dropped a file onto Olivia’s desk with a grunt, Elliot slammed a phone down, but at their little island of desks, there was stillness. “You talk about them much?” he asked after a beat.

She shook her head. “Not really. My brothers… they don’t like to. And after Lana-” Her voice faltered. She drew in a breath, steadying herself. “After Lana, it felt like opening the door just made it worse.” She reached across the narrow gap between their desks, her fingers brushing the edge of his file. The contact was small, quick, but it grounded her.

“John,” she said, her voice quieter than before. He looked at her, eyes dark behind his glasses. Olivia’s voice cut through, calling Munch’s name from across the room. The spell broke. He sat back, rubbing a hand over his jaw. Talia blinked hard, pulling herself back into the noise of the morning.

“Duty calls,” she said lightly, forcing her tone back to casual.

“Always does,” he muttered, pushing up from his chair. But as he passed her desk, he let his hand brush the back of her chair, his fingers lingering for the briefest second at her shoulder. It was a quiet promise; I’m here. I see you.

She turned her head, catching his eye, and with a small, mischievous smile, she blew him a kiss.

His smirk returned, wry and sharp. “Careful, doll. People will talk.”

“Let them,” she said, eyes glinting. “They already do.”

And then the morning swallowed them both back into its rhythm, detectives moving, phones ringing, the city waiting outside. But somewhere between the files and the cases and the weight of the world, a little thread had been tied tighter, binding grief and love into something neither of them could deny.

Chapter Text

ASTORIA - March 14, 2005 - 7:28 PM

The rowhouse breathed like an old cat: a little wheeze in the radiator, a soft settling of wood, the faint purr of pipes. Outside, Astoria moved through the last chill of March; shop lights winking on along the avenue, the N/W rumbling a few blocks off on 31^st, the wet-iron smell of a day that had tried to rain and then thought better of it. In here, the world was small and warm: a single lamp pooling amber on the living room rug, a record whispering soft and scratchy, a glass of red and a glass of whiskey sweating ring-marks into old coasters.

Talia lay half-sprawled on the couch in one of his dress shirts; white, sleeves rolled to the elbow, collar open. The shirt was too big on her and perfect because of it; when she shifted, the hem skimmed her thigh and the shadow of her bralette showed through. Her legs were tangled with his, bare skin on the wool of his slacks, and Munch’s hand rested on the inside of her thigh, his thumb traveling a lazy, possessive line against the softness there.

He was reading politics. An article dog-eared with a pencil wedged in the spine. She was reading a slim anthology of love poems that smelled faintly of dust and someone else’s library. The cover had a tear near the corner; Talia toyed with it when the poem was good, and she needed somewhere to put the ache.

“Declassified my ass,” Munch muttered, eyes tracking a paragraph. “Every time they black out a page, an angel loses its wings.”

“You’re in a good mood tonight,” she said, not looking up. Her voice was soft, the way she let it be when they were alone, the edges warmed by that low jazz in the background.

“I’m drinking decent whiskey, I’m not at the precinct, and a beautiful woman has stolen my shirt. That’s my version of optimism.” He turned a page. The corners of his mouth tilted. “Besides, the article’s only three different kinds of depressing instead of the usual seven.”

She nudged his shin with her foot. “Only three? A miracle.”

“Don’t get used to it, doll.”

She smiled down at her book and, after a moment, read a few lines aloud; not quoting, exactly, but the shape of the poem in her mouth: the way love looks different under a lamp than it does on a sidewalk; the way someone’s hands can memorize the geography of a life. She closed the book on her fingers, letting the thought hang in the lamplight.

“Say it again,” he said.

“What?”

“The part about hands remembering.”

“You heard me.”

“I did.” His hand tightened lightly on her thigh. “I like how you said it better.”

She pretended to go back to reading, but the pretending only lasted a heartbeat. The way he was touching her; lazy, sure of itself, like he had all night, dragged heat up her spine. He had the unshowy confidence of a man who knew his own mouth could undo you; who had learned that the slow reverent route was its own kind of power.

He set his book on the table, facedown. “Tell me what’s going on in that head.” He said it as if he were asking for the time, as if he didn’t already know; her tells, the way the muscles in her jaw held when the day was too heavy, the way she smoothed a page twice when her heart was full.

She didn’t answer. She closed the poetry book, a finger marking a poem she would read him later, and let it slide onto the cushion. When she looked at him, the darkness in his eyes met the brightness in hers and steadied it.

“You stayed,” she said.

“I told you I would.”

“Even after I told you everything.”

He reached for her hand. The record crackled; the street sighed outside. He kissed her fingers, each one like a vow, and looked up at her with a kind of deadpan awe that would’ve been funny if it weren’t so sincere. “You really think one man’s biography of misery and divorce court scares me off?” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

She tipped forward. He caught her with a palm at her nape, thumb under her jaw, anchoring. The kiss he laid on her mouth was slow and careful, like he was translating something. When he pulled back, he brushed his mouth over her cheekbone, then her temple, then the small soft space under her ear; he tasted the line of her throat like it was a story he knew by heart. Talia exhaled, eyes slipping closed. The weight of his hand on her thigh turned heavier, steadier, the implied yes of it pouring through her.

“John,” she breathed.

“Mhm.”

“I love how you do that.”

“Which part?” The smile in his voice was wicked and tired and reverent all at once.

“The part that feels like you mean it.”

He laughed quietly. “I’m a man of many talents. Most of them involve telling the truth you don’t expect.”

His mouth found the heel of her palm and pressed a kiss there, then another on her wrist where her pulse fluttered. He turned her hand and kissed the underside, a devotion that felt almost liturgical. When he shifted his attention lower; your hand, your knuckles, the curve of your thumb, she could feel the map of herself being read like scripture.

They settled into a lazy sprawl of kisses and private jokes. He told her about his ex-wives with that dry self-own she adored: how one had accused him of sleeping in the same socks (“Unromantic,” he deadpanned), how another had called him emotionally distant (“Bold of her, considering she was dating a man who wears scepticism like skin”), and the last had told her therapist he was a lizard in human form (“Which, frankly, is libel against reptiles”).

“And yet,” Talia murmured, brushing her mouth along the sharp thoughtful line of his cheekbone, “here you are. Not a lizard.”

“Don’t spread that around. I have a brand.”

She snorted, then softened. “I like this part of you. The one who reads to me without realizing he’s reading to me. The one who brings me coffee in the morning and tea at night. The one who stays.”

“I stay,” he said. The way he said it left no room for argument.

They stayed like that a long time; books abandoned, the record side ending in soft hush and then starting again, the night arranging itself around them. At some point he rose to refill their glasses; he returned with the whiskey and a look that said he’d nearly kissed her in the kitchen just because loving her was that easy now. He took the chair beside the couch so he could keep one hand on her while she rested her head where the couch cushion dipped. His fingers combed through her hair, slow, careful, as if every curl were a thought he wanted to soothe.

“Read me the one about the window again,” he said.

She did. Her voice blurred, a little, into something drowsy. He watched the lamplight turn her skin to honey and the shadows carve elegance from her cheek. He thought, not for the first time, that he had never been worshipful in his life until now; that his cynicism had always been a fence, and she was a gate in it.

When her eyes began to drift, he slid the book from her hands and tucked a blanket over her. She caught his wrist.

“Stay,” she said.

He leaned down and pressed his mouth to the centre of her forehead. “Always, darling.”

He meant to go back to his chair, but her hand was still around his wrist, slender and stubborn, and he found he didn’t want to go far. He stretched out on the couch with her instead, fitting himself along the line of her body, one arm under her shoulders, the other covering her heart as if he could keep time with it. Talia exhaled into his shirt, a warm ribbon of breath against his ribs.

Astoria went on murmuring beyond the window. Somewhere down the block someone argued cheerfully about sports; somewhere closer, a kettle clicked from hot to warm in its resting place. The Mustang out front cooled with the slow tick of engine metal. Inside the small circle of the lamp, Munch listened to her breathing, and when she tipped into sleep, he followed; her dreams reaching back to the place where all the light began.

And so, the dreams returned.

ASTORIA - May 28, 1991 - 5:49 PM

Heat pooled in the backyard the way it does when summer sneaks in at the end of May and pretends she owns the place. The Amari-Volkov’s’ patch of Queens was a quilt: plastic chairs that stuck to the back of your thighs, a table draped in a bright oilcloth with pomegranates marching across it. The radio crackled with a Greek station from a neighbour’s window; somebody, somewhere, was singing off-key over a soccer match.

Mikhail stood at the grill like a general at his post, tongs in one hand, cigarette in the other. Smoke lifted in fragrant ribbons from skewers of lamb and chicken, from fat tomatoes blistering, from onions cut thick enough to sway. Miriam had turned the kitchen into a parade ground for mezze; bowls of olives shining like small moons, labneh drizzled with olive oil and za’atar, baba ghanoush smudged artfully by the back of a spoon, chopped salad glittering with sumac. On the counter inside: stacks of warm pita under a damp towel, a dish of pickled turnips the colour of audacity.

Talia, fifteen and pointy with purpose, sat on a plastic chair with her little sister’s chin between her fingers, trying to skitter liquid eyeliner along a quivering eyelid. “Stop blinking, Lana,” she said through her teeth. “If you blink, I will make you a raccoon and Baba will say I am a bad influence.”

“I’m not blinking,” Lana lied, eyes watering. “It burns.”

“It does not burn. Beauty hurts.” Talia softened, thumb brushing her cheek. “Almost done. You look like a movie star.”

“Which one?”

“An Egyptian one,” Talia said, and that settled it; Lana lifted her chin like a princess.

Across the yard, Ameen and Kareem had turned a football into an argument about physics and pride. “You throw like you’re afraid of gravity,” Ameen called.

“I throw like I respect my elders,” Kareem shot back, catching it with a grin and then dropping it when the neighbour’s cat streaked through like a rumour.

“Idiots,” Talia muttered fondly.

“Talusha,” Mikhail warned without turning. “My tak ne govorim.” (Talusha, we do not speak like that / Arabic)

“Yes, Baba,” she said automatically, leaning back to squint at Lana’s other eye. Sweat gathered at her temples; she used the corner of her T-shirt to blot it away, then leaned in again. “If you ruin this with tears I will-”

“Eat it,” Lana said, wicked. “Like you did my last cookie.”

“That cookie was stale.”

“It was not.”

“It was.”

“Banāt,” Miriam said, stepping out with a pitcher of something cold; mint and lemon fogging the glass. She set it down and cupped Talia’s cheek with fingers that still smelled of garlic and cumin. “Habibti, your sister does not need a wing that could lift a plane.” (Girls / Arabic)

“She could fly away from the boys,” Talia said, and both Ameen and Kareem made wounded noises as if arrows had found their hearts.

“Speaking of your brothers,” Miriam said, glancing toward the back steps where Samir stood very straight, enlistment papers folded with surgical precision in his hand. The air thinned. The radio, oblivious, crackled cheerfully on. “Samir?”

He swallowed. Talia’s hand stilled on Lana’s face. The eyeliner waited, a tiny black flag.

“I’m joining the Army,” he said.

The world paused, as if cued. Ameen’s mouth opened, then shut. Kareem’s grin faded into something wary and bright, like standing at the edge of a roof and liking the view anyway. Lana’s lashes trembled, dragging a wet black comet through Talia’s painstaking work. Talia drew in a breath she would later pretend she hadn’t needed.

Mikhail exhaled the kind of sigh that had three different meanings. He flicked ash with two fingers, looked at his son the way a man looks at a horizon he didn’t choose. “Service is honour,” he said finally, voice even.

Samir’s mouth tipped. “Yes, Baba.”

Miriam set her hand on Samir’s cheek and pressed a kiss to his forehead, that quiet prayer she had for all thresholds. “Rabena yeshīl-ak fīn mā nʾdarsh,” she murmured, thumb tracing the line of his brow. He leaned into it for a second, then tried to make a joke of the heat in his eyes. (May God carry you where we cannot / Arabic)

Ameen recovered first. “You?” he said, incredulous. “They’ll shave your head. You’ll look like an egg.”

Kareem howled. “An egg with opinions.”

“Shut up,” Samir said, without heat.

“You shut up,” Talia snapped automatically, but her voice was soft at the edges, too. She capped the eyeliner, set it down carefully like something that might explode, and stood, squaring off with her brother as if she could use attitude to hold him in place. “You’re an idiot.”

“Talusha,” Mikhail said again, but less sharply. He understood the dialect of sisters.

“It’s duty,” Samir said, shoulders back. He looked older all at once, the boy in him transferring his assets to the man without telling anyone. “This country gave us a home. I want to give something back.” He hesitated. “And, okay, the college money doesn’t hurt.”

Ameen rolled his eyes. “Ah. There it is. The American dream: paperwork and debt.”

Kareem slung an arm around Samir’s neck, getting him in a loose headlock just to prove he still could. “Write to us,” he said into his ear, mock stern. “Or I’m telling Ma you’ve been stealing her extra pita.”

“Everyone steals Ma’s extra pita,” Samir said, muffled, and Miriam clucked her tongue like a rooster that had heard gossip.

“Kifāya,” she said, half-smiling. “El-akl abl ed-dumūʿ.” She moved through them like a current, arranging plates into hands, touching shoulders, smoothing hair. (Enough, food before tears / Arabic)

The household returned to its noisy orbit; the boys resuming their football with extra swagger to disguise the fact that the future had just been invited to dinner. Mikhail turned the skewers with a tenderness that matched no version of seriousness he would ever admit to; he sent a piece of charred onion toward Talia with his tongs, the way you send a flare. She caught it in a napkin and made a face, then ate it, then grinned.

From the rowhouses across the streets, the muffled boom of a TV tuned up too loud. Queens, chorus of a thousand small lives.

“Come here,” Samir said later, when the first wave of hunger had passed and the radio had settled into a soft commercial about air-conditioners. He crooked a finger; the paper still folded in his hand. Talia went, obstinate and obedient at the same time. They stood near the grapevine. The air smelled of smoke and mint and the hopeful tang of cut tomatoes.

“I meant it,” she said, eyes dark and fierce. “Don’t be a hero.”

“I’m not a hero,” he said. “I’m an idiot who wants to do something that feels like a clean line. And I’ll be careful.”

“You can’t promise that.”

“I can promise to try.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out something small: a blank tag he’d picked up at a surplus store because it had felt like a joke that wasn’t a joke. He pressed it into her palm. “Hold this for me. When I get mine, you’ll know I did the stupid thing on purpose.”

She smacked his arm, then caught his hand and tied a thin red thread from her wrist to his, quick and graceful. “So, you don’t get lost,” she said, as if the string were magic. “So, you come back the same.”

“I won’t be the same,” he said, and they both went quiet because there was nothing to say back to that that didn’t sound like lying.

The table filled again; pita and laughter, a water fight that started with Lana flicking her fingers and ended with Kareem dousing Ameen with the hose, shrieks ricocheting off the fence. Talia laughed so hard her side hurt, then cried a little when no one looked, and then laughed again because life was both.

When dusk slid its first blue hand over the backyard, Mikhail lit the cheap strings of bulbs he’d wound along the fence, and the air went fairy-tale for a minute. He lifted his glass; mint tea, sweet and stern, and said something short in Russian, a toast that meant too many things. Miriam followed with a murmured prayer in Arabic, a seal on everything fragile and worth keeping.

The night deepened. Someone on the next block set off a single firework, the kind that sounds like a door slamming against the sky. The boys argued about whether the Mets would ever make them happy. Lana, eyeliner perfect now, practiced a movie-star look in the reflection of the sliding door. Miriam wrapped leftovers and labelled them even though everyone knew exactly what they were; Mikhail scraped the grill with long, satisfied strokes, smoke drifting up like a closing argument.

ASTORIA - July 1, 1994 - 7:28 PM

Astoria lit itself up that summer night like it had been waiting for a reason to celebrate. On 33^rd Street, colored lights were strung across fire escapes, fluttering in the faint breeze. Long folding tables sagged under trays of stuffed grape leaves, foil pans of baked ziti, samosas, kebabs, and Tupperware full of cookies and knafeh. The scent of grilled meat mixed with car exhaust and fresh tar from the street repaving. Somewhere down the block, someone blasted a cassette of Biggie, and from another window an old Greek radio carried bouzouki music that clashed and somehow worked.

It was Astoria; messy, loud, alive.

The Amari-Volkov’s were at the centre of it. Tonight wasn’t just any block party. Tonight was for Ameen, who had just earned his Master’s. The neighbourhood kids crowned him with a crooked ring of green paper laurels they had cut themselves, Scotch tape still visible. He was twenty-five, lanky in his button-down that never sat right on his narrow shoulders, beaming like he’d won the Nobel.

“Post-doc next,” he declared, holding up a can of orange soda as if it were Dom Pérignon. “And then my brain will be so large, it’ll start charging rent to live in my skull.”

The crowd of aunties and uncles laughed and clapped, someone shouting, “Mabrouk, Ameen!” (Congratulations / Arabic)

From the food table, Lana; all of thirteen and merciless, snorted. Her cheeks were stuffed with powdered-sugar cookies, and she sprayed crumbs when she spoke. “Your head’s already too big. They’ll have to widen the apartment door.”

The block howled. Ameen pressed a hand to his chest in mock agony. “You wound me, little sister.”

“She’s not wrong,” Talia said, appearing at his elbow with; Marianna, Meriem, Zeyneb, and Dunya, all in their summer best: hoops, lip gloss, cropped tees. Talia’s curls had been wrestled into a braid that barely contained them, and she carried herself like she was already older than eighteen, though she wasn’t.

Kareem swooped in, grabbing her wrist before she could sit. “Come on, dance with me. Everyone’s out, music’s good. Live a little!”

“I am living,” she protested, clutching the small book she always carried, the pages worn soft. “Some of us don’t need to embarrass ourselves in front of the entire neighbourhood.”

“Oh please,” he said, tugging harder. “Embarrassment builds character.”

Talia pulled free, laughing, ready with another jab, and then she froze.

Across the street, leaning against a lamppost like he’d been painted there, stood a man in a trench coat and glasses. He didn’t belong to the block, didn’t belong to the noise. His posture was too still, his eyes too sharp, his mouth tugged in that cynical half-line that said he knew something no one else did.

Him.

The Detective.

Her stomach dropped in a way that was both irritating and… something else. He caught her staring. Smirked. Lifted two fingers in a sly, mocking salute.

Heat rushed up her neck. She rolled her eyes so hard it hurt, snapping her book shut with a clap. “Stupid detective,” she muttered under her breath, as if saying it aloud could burn the flutter out of her chest.

Her girlfriends, noticing the exchange, whispered and giggled. “Taliaaa,” Marianna sing-songed, elbowing her.

“Shut up,” she hissed, though her lips betrayed the ghost of a smile. And the music went on, the block alive, siblings circling each other with love disguised as insults.

ASTORIA - May 7, 1996 - 11:28 PM

The stoop was cool under Talia’s bare feet, the spring night still clinging to the damp of rain earlier. The street was quieter than usual; only the hum of cars and the occasional laugh from a passing group. Inside, the house was too silent. Since her mother’s funeral last month, silence had become the Amari-Volkov family’s new tenant.

Ameen was almost never home, buried in his PhD, either in the university library or helping professors with research. Samir was deployed overseas, sending letters that smelled of sand and gun oil. Kareem… Kareem was in jail again, this time for a protest that had turned rough, despite Talia begging him not to go.

That left Lana. Sixteen now, rebellious as smoke itself, perched on the stoop like she owned it. A joint burned between her fingers, thin and defiant.

Talia stopped short. “What the hell are you doing?”

Lana tilted her head, unbothered, and blew smoke out her nose in a practiced stream. Her eyeliner was smudged, her hair in careless curls that bounced when she laughed. “Oh my God, don’t be such a downer. It’s not a big deal.”

“It’s disgusting.”

“It’s fun,” Lana countered, smirking. “Try it. Oh wait; you’re too holy for that, aren’t you?”

Talia’s jaw tightened. Without thinking, she snatched the joint from her sister’s hand, crushed it against the brick wall, and let the embers die on the sidewalk. “You’re an idiot.”

“And you’re boring,” Lana shot back immediately, though her grin softened the sting. “Go pray for me or something.”

Talia sat down beside her, shoulder to shoulder. “Don’t joke about that. Mama would-” Her throat caught. She tried again. “Mama wouldn’t want this.”

Lana’s smile faltered for just a flicker, but then she shoved her hands into her hoodie pocket. “Mama also wouldn’t want you breathing down my neck every second.”

“I’m trying to keep you alive.”

“I am alive,” Lana said, leaning her head back to stare at the streetlights. “More alive than you, Miss Perfect. Always serious, like you’re forty years old instead of twenty.”

Talia laughed despite herself, the sound cracked and sharp. “And what, you’re the fun one?”

“Obviously.”

They sat in silence, the air heavy with things unsaid. The stoop creaked under their shifting weight, the city carrying on around them. Somewhere a baby cried. Somewhere else, a saxophone drifted faint from an open bar door.

“You miss her too,” Talia whispered at last.

Lana’s eyes glistened, but she rolled them quick, refusing to let tears win. “Yeah. But crying’s boring.”

Talia slipped an arm around her shoulders anyway. Lana let her.

For a moment, they were just two sisters, clinging to each other in the hollow left behind by a mother who had held them both.

JFK - March 14, 2002 - 7:28 PM

The terminal was chaos; rolling suitcases thudding against linoleum, the loudspeaker croaking half-audible announcements, kids whining, mothers shushing, lovers arguing at payphones. The smell of pretzels and coffee clung to the air.

Talia stood in the middle of it all, trying to breathe around the lump in her throat. Kareem’s arms locked around her so tight her ribs ached. He smelled of the soap from home, faint tobacco, and something restless.

“You know, you don’t have to go,” she begged, her voice breaking against his shoulder.

He pulled back just enough to look at her, eyes shining with the stubborn light she knew too well. “And you didn’t have to become a cop,” he teased, though his smile trembled.

“Please… stay here. Just stay with me.”

“I have to,” he said, smoothing a curl behind her ear. His hand shook. “It’s my turn.”

“You’ll die,” she whispered.

He kissed her forehead, lingering like he could brand the moment into forever. “Then I’ll die for something.”

Behind them, Ameen cleared his throat, his glasses fogged from the terminal’s heat. “You don’t have to be a martyr, Kareem. There are other ways.” His voice cracked, betraying his usual calm.

Lana, only twenty now, looked small for once, her bravado stripped. “Kareem, don’t be stupid. Please. Just… don’t.”

He hugged them each in turn, saving Talia for last. His hand lingered at the back of her neck, anchoring her. “You’re strong, Tal. Stronger than me. Stronger than all of us.”

“No, I’m not,” she said, gripping him like a lifeline. “Stay, and I’ll be strong. Just don’t leave me.”

But the call came; his flight boarding. And he went, backpack slung, stride steady, without looking back.

And he did die. For something, though it didn’t feel like enough.

ASTORIA - March 14, 2005 - 7:29 PM

The only thing that got Talia out of her dreaming was the realization that it wasn’t a dream at all. It was memory. Her past; so raw she rarely dared to touch it, had just spilled out of her mouth and into the dim light of her living room.

For once, she hadn’t held back with him. The block parties of her childhood, the taste of loss at eighteen, the echo of her brother’s arms around her in an airport terminal he never returned from. All of it; everything she never said aloud, she had just given to John Munch like a confession.

And now he sat across from her, long frame folded into her couch like he’d always belonged there. The lamplight cut across his glasses, throwing one lens into shadow. He hadn’t cracked a joke to deflect, hadn’t offered one of his sarcastic quips. He just looked at her, seeing her in a way she wasn’t sure anyone had before.

Her chest tightened. “I don’t usually talk about them.”

“I noticed,” he said quietly, voice low and gravelled, every word soaked in smoke and weariness. Then, softer: “I’m glad you did.”

She tilted her head, studying him like she didn’t believe him. “Why?”

“Because now I know why your eyes looked like that,” he murmured.

“Like what?”

“Like someone put out a candle in them and you’re still choking on the smoke.”

The words pierced, and she hated him for how precise he could be. She leaned back into the sofa cushions, curling her knees under herself. “That’s poetic for you.”

He smirked faintly, the line of his mouth sardonic but tender. “Don’t tell anyone. It’ll ruin my reputation.”

For a long stretch, the room fell into silence. Outside, Astoria buzzed with its usual Monday night rhythms; traffic groaning down 33^rd Street, a couple fighting in rapid-fire Greek, the hiss of halal carts on the corner. But here, in this small cocoon of lamplight and shadows, there was nothing but them.

Talia rubbed at her temple. “I feel like I failed them. My father, my mother, my brothers, Lana. Every single one of them. I couldn’t stop anything. I couldn’t fix anything. And now?” She exhaled shakily. “Now I just keep their ghosts in my pockets like loose change. Rattling around whenever I move.”

Munch leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, voice hushed like he was afraid the walls themselves might listen. “You didn’t fail anyone, doll. You survived them.”

Her throat burned. “That doesn’t feel like enough.”

“It never does,” he said. His gaze lingered on her, unflinching, glassy with all the things he’d buried himself. “But surviving is the bravest thing you can do. You keep going. That’s more than most of us manage.”

Her lips trembled into something that might’ve been a smile, but it broke before it could hold. “You really believe that?”

“I have to,” he said simply. “Otherwise, I’d have checked out a long time ago.”

The honesty in his voice cracked something open in her. She reached out without thinking, fingers brushing the back of his hand. His skin was warm, calloused. He didn’t pull away.

“You don’t make it easy to let people in,” she whispered.

“Neither do you.” He caught her hand in his, thumb stroking across her knuckles. “Maybe that’s why it works.”

For a moment, they just sat like that, bound by the quiet current between them. She could feel the weight of his stare, heavy and consuming, like he was memorizing her every detail. Their eyes caught and held. Something hot and fragile twisted between them, the kind of tension that made the air taste metallic.

“You’re dangerous,” she said, barely audible.

“I could say the same about you,” he replied. “Except you’re the kind of danger I don’t want to run from.”

Her breath hitched. She hadn’t expected him to go there, hadn’t expected the walls he wrapped around himself in sarcasm and paranoia to fall open so easily tonight.

She crossed back to him, slow, deliberate. He didn’t move, just watched her, jaw tense like a man bracing for impact. When she stopped in front of him, close enough to feel his breath, she said, “You’re out of your mind.”

He tilted his head, lips quirking. “I’ve been told.”

Then she leaned down and kissed him.

It wasn’t tentative. It wasn’t shy. It was hungry, desperate, a kiss that carried every secret she’d just spilled and every word he hadn’t said. His hand came up instantly to her waist, pulling her down onto his lap like he’d been waiting years. Her bookish sadness collided with his cynicism, and somehow, impossibly, it fit.

When they broke apart, breathless, she pressed her forehead to his. “You can’t fix me.”

“Wasn’t planning on it,” he murmured, his mouth brushing hers. “I like you broken. Means you’ll understand me.”

A laugh shuddered out of her, half-sob. She clutched at his shirtfront like he was the only solid thing in the world.

He wrapped both arms around her, pulling her tight, his voice rough against her hair. “God, I love you. I don’t even know when it started, but it’s too late now. Before this year’s up, Talia Amari, I’m gonna marry you. Whether you say yes the first time or the fiftieth.”

Her eyes burned, tears threatening. “You’re insane.”

“Yeah,” he said, smiling crooked against her cheek. “But I’m yours.”

And she let herself believe him. For once, she let herself believe in something good.

Chapter Text

ASTORIA - March 15, 2005 - 2:39 AM

Two hours of sleep, maybe. The cheap red digits on Talia’s bedside clock said 2:39, then 2:40, then back to 2:39 again as if time itself had lost interest. The room was dark except for a slice of streetlight knifing through the blinds and laying bars across the ceiling. The baseboard radiator ticked like a nervous metronome. Somewhere outside, the N train moaned across 31^st Street and a siren wailed itself out of breath.

John stared at the ceiling, and then at the woman beside him; the unbearable fact of her, here by choice. Talia slept on her side, one hand tucked under her cheek, curls spilled over his pillow like a night sky that had slipped loose. Her breathing was slow and even; every few inhales, it snagged on a soft hitch, like she’d sighed in her sleep and forgotten to finish. A faint breeze from the cracked window carried faraway bakery sugar and the ghost of a halal grill that had long since shut down.

He told himself not to touch her. Then he touched her anyway; fingers in the margin where her hair met her neck, the smallest brush just to confirm she was real. Something settled and something else rattled loose.

He had seen her like this before; softened, unguarded, the iron of her daytime self cooled to something pliant, but tonight it pierced him. Maybe because she had finally told him everything: the block party laughter of ’94, the stoop smoke of ’96, the airport goodbye in ’02 that never undid itself. She had poured her past out like whiskey and asked him to drink it without flinching. He had. He would again.

John Munch did not have that kind of past. He did not have warm kitchens and gentle fathers, not even versions gone sour. He had a house that went silent the second the front door shut, a mother who walked on eggshells and a father whose moods were weather systems; bipolar, they called it later. In the moment it just felt like living inside a storm you couldn’t predict; sometimes sunlight, more often hail.

When the beatings came, they came for reasons that sounded logical if you bent your head the way he did: ‘wiseass,’ ‘backtalk,’ ‘look at me like that again.’ The human mind can make anything a rule if the punishment is consistent enough. He and his brother learned how to move without making noise, to laugh with the mouth and not the eyes. They learned that silence was an armour with holes in it.

The night his father died lives in John like a shard. There had been a fight. There were always fights. John had been bleeding from his lip, copper-salt spit in the sink, and his father had stood in the doorway radiating rage. “You think you’re smarter than me.” John; young, blistered, furious, had said, “I hate your guts.” It had felt like throwing a grenade. He used to tell himself that was the moment; those three words, that thin teenage triumph, that pushed a damaged man over the edge. He knew better. But knowing better and feeling forgiven are two separate countries with a border he never seemed to cross.

His father disappeared into the bedroom. The house went quiet in a way that hummed. Then the gunshot. A single, absolute noise. John had known it for what it was instantly, the way a body knows lightning even when your back is turned. His brother screamed. His mother made a sound he still hears in pipes and winter wind.

Decades, an ocean of cases, and a handful of ex-wives later, there it still was, lodged. Sometimes it throbbed. Sometimes it slept. Tonight, it woke like an animal stirred by scent.

He thought about Talia’s father, the way she said ‘Baba,’ the way her voice warmed on it even now, years after. A river of love had run through that house; you could hear its echo in everything she did. John had rivers too, but most of them had been poisoned before he learned to swim.

What are you doing, old man? The thought came with a sharpness that made his chest tight. He turned onto his back, stared at the ceiling again as if the plaster cracks could be read for omens.

She was young, brilliant, beautiful. She could coax a traumatized witness into trust with tea and a look. The neighbourhood kids trailed her down 33^rd Street like sparrows; she knew every bodega lady and every priest and imams; she kept lollipops in her desk and a spare pair of gloves in her coat for cold fingers that weren’t hers. She had a way of creating home wherever she stood.

He was the opposite; a man of exits. He had learned to leave before he was left and turned it into a personality: cynicism, black humour, ten-dollar words as body armour. He loved her. That was the truest thing in the room. He loved her in a way that made him gentler and more savage at once. And precisely because of that, the arithmetic terrified him.

She probably wanted children. Of course she did. People like her; tender with ferocious edges, the kind who could braid a girl’s hair and interrogate her abuser an hour later; made the world survivable for small humans. He, by contrast, wanted… out. He’d convinced himself for years that not wanting children was a moral position; look at the world, why replicate it? but under the rhetoric was a simpler truth: he was afraid of being his father in any form. He did not trust himself with a life he couldn’t walk away from without leaving ruins.

What if I’m stealing her future? The thought swelled until it emptied the room of air.

His chest seized. Sound narrowed to a high whine. The radiator ticked and then was miles away. He sat up too fast and the ceiling slid sideways. He pressed the heel of his hand to his sternum. It didn’t go in far enough. Panic rose with a precise, mechanical determination, like it had a job to do. Breathe, he told himself, and could not.

“John?” Talia’s voice came from the soft dark. Scraped with sleep, alert immediately. “John, hey.”

He didn’t answer. He couldn’t. He braced his forearms on his thighs and bent forward, trying to find the angle where air would behave.

The mattress shifted. Her palm found the centre of his chest, the heel of her hand firm; her other hand came to the back of his neck, cool and sure. “Breathe, honey,” she whispered into the shell of his ear. The words weren’t gentle in the way people confuse for softness. They were command and care in one tone. “In for four. Hold for four. Out for six. I’ve got you. Again.”

He tried. The first inhale scraped like a rusted hinge. She didn’t move her hands. She matched him, her own lungs a metronome he could keep time to. “In; two, three, four. Hold; two, three, four. Out; two, three, four, five, six. Good. Again.”

Somewhere between the second and the fifth repetition, his ribcage loosened. The high whine receded. The room returned piece by piece: radiator, blinds, the faint scuff of a dog rearranging itself in the hallway with a heavy sigh. He folded one hand over hers where it pressed to his heart.

“Okay,” she murmured. “There you are.”

He let his head fall back, eyes closed. Exhaustion pressed its thumbprint over his face. “I can’t do this,” he said hoarsely, and heard how it sounded.

“Not this again,” she said, lightly, because that was the first move, levity to buy a second for worry to seat itself properly. Then she slid in front of him on her knees, face level with his. She tipped a finger under his chin until he looked at her. “What is it this time?”

He swallowed. He saw the future like a hallway with no doors. “Steal your life. The version with little feet and birthday parties and science fairs. The one you deserve.” The last word cracked.

She stared. Then, because she was Talia and therefore capable of holding grief and laughter in the same hand, she laughed. It was a burst so bright and absurd that it bounced off the ceiling and came back around as a tear. She swiped at it, still smiling. “Oh, John. My love. What ever made you think I wanted children?”

He blinked. “You don’t?”

“God, no.” She made a face, theatrical and real at once. “I raised a whole household before I could legally drink. I’ve got three German Shepherds who believe they’re toddlers with paws. I am everyone’s neighbourhood auntie and half the squad’s annoying conscience. I am at capacity.”

“That’s not a reason,” he said, but a seam in him cracked open and light slipped through.

She arched a brow. “Here’s another: I don’t want to bring anyone into a world I spend my days pulling people back from. And another: I love my life; the freedom of it, the quiet when I finally get home, the way I can pour myself into one thing at a time and still have something left for you. Being good with children doesn’t equal wanting them. It just equals being decent.”

He looked at her like a man being handed the glass of water he refused to ask for. “You won’t regret it? Ten years from now?”

She tilted her head, gentle. “I might regret not telling you my name in ’94,” she said wryly. “I regret not saving Lana in time. I regret a thousand small cruelties I thought were self-protection. But I won’t regret choosing the life that fits me.” She leaned in. “I want you. Not a hypothetical you plus a minivan. You.”

His laugh this time came out wrong and right; embarrassed, relieved, cut in half. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I keep… rehearsing the fight before you’ve said the line.”

“Paranoia makes great theatre,” she said, mouth curving. “But maybe don’t sell tickets to it every night.”

The joke landed. He breathed again. She waited. Then, because she had been listening to the rhythm under his words since the moment she woke, she said quietly, “What else is it?”

He looked away. The blinds put stripes across his forearms, lean and pale in the lamplight. “My father,” he said, as if the words were barbed and might catch on exit. “He had… good days and bad storms. We called it different names then. He used his hands. Often. I told him I hated his guts. Last thing I ever said. A little while later he-” He touched his temple with two fingers in a tiny universal pantomime. “-took the fast exit.”

She didn’t gasp. She didn’t fill the air with cooing pity. She was very still, her eyes on his, soft without blur. She slid her hand down from his chest and took his. Her thumb began to move in slow arcs over the tendons at his wrist. “I’m so sorry.”

He nodded like a man acknowledging weather. “Logically, I know the chain of events didn’t start with me. But there’s a part of my brain that is young forever, and he thinks cause and effect is a straight line.”

She lifted his hand and set it over her heartbeat. “That boy did not kill his father,” she said. “An illness and a man’s choices did. Sons don’t pull triggers by accident or by wishing.” She leaned forward until her forehead touched his. “You were a child in a house that asked you to be a wall. You survived it.”

He closed his eyes. She could feel the way he worked around the words, testing their edges, finding the ones that didn’t bite. When he opened them again, there was a glassiness that wasn’t weakness so much as the proof of a dam lowering itself a few inches.

“I ruin things,” he said, very softly, like admitting to a superstition. “That’s… the data set. I touch something, it breaks. Marriages. Friendships. A liver or two. I make things worse and then I make jokes, so no one notices I made things worse.”

“John.” She said his name like a grounding wire. “You put broken things in order, every day. You go into rooms with a mess no one wants to look at and you look at it head-on until truth crawls out. You have saved more people than you have hurt. And me?” She kissed his knuckles. “You don’t ruin me. You steady me. You make my head quiet enough to hear my heart.”

He swallowed, helpless. “Say that again,” he said, a little ragged.

“You steady me,” she repeated, and he closed his eyes like the words were something poured warm across a cold place in him.

“Christ, I love you,” he said into her hair, not bothering to sand the edges off it. “I love you in a way that makes me want to be careful. I don’t do careful. Not well.”

“You’re doing fine.” She eased him back to sit against the headboard, swung one leg over his hips, and settled onto his lap as if the position were an oath. “Breathe with me again.”

He did. Her hands bracketed his jaw; his slid down to her waist; possessive by habit, reverent by surprise. The room shrank to the circumference of their togetherness: the scrape of his beard against her palm, the soft rasp of her breath, the warmth where their foreheads touched. Outside, tires hissed on damp asphalt. A plane stitched a low line toward LaGuardia. Somewhere a couple laughed in the sing-song of a language neither of them spoke and both understood.

“Doll,” he murmured, and it wasn’t the barbed play he used at the precinct; it came out like a benediction. “You’re a miracle and I don’t believe in those.”

“Believe in me anyway,” she said. “I’ll do the rest.”

He snorted, a shadow of his usual self returning. “Bossy.”

“Efficient.” Her smile tipped sideways. “And while we’re being efficient: if you propose to me before sunrise, I will say yes, and then I’ll say, ‘Ask me again when I’m wearing mascara.’”

He barked a laugh that startled the dogs into lifting their heads in the doorway. “That an invitation?”

“It’s a truth,” she said, nosing his cheek. “I want you. I want a rowhouse that smells like jasmine and coffee and dog shampoo. I want your coat on my chair and your sarcasm in my kitchen and your socks, which I will make fun of and steal. I want your insomnia next to my insomnia and the way you solve the world’s puzzles out loud at three in the morning while I pretend to be annoyed and am secretly charmed.”

“That’s a lot of liability for one woman to assume,” he said, voice roughened to velvet.

“I have good insurance,” she deadpanned.

He kissed her then; slow, then slower, a study in contradiction: the hunger of a man who had learned to go without and the patience of one who finally believed he did not have to. His hands, which did not know how to be gentle, learned her anyway. He murmured something filthy and adoring against her mouth, because he was still John Munch; because she liked the way he could thread tenderness through sin like a ribbon, and she laughed into the kiss, that impossible combination of lightness and gravity that had undone him since the first time she rolled her eyes at him in the street.

When they broke for air, she rested her head under his chin. “You’re not your father,” she said to his sternum. “You are not your fear. You’re a man who knows how to stand between harm and the soft things. That’s why I love you.”

He tucked his chin onto the crown of her head and let the compliment sit on his tongue like a sacrament he wasn’t sure he was supposed to receive. He could feel sleep prowling at the edges now that panic had vacated. He could feel the long road behind him and the one ahead. They both led through this room.

“Before the year is up,” he said into her hair, choosing the words like tools, “I’m going to marry you.”

She hummed, satisfied. “Good. Then we’ll have time to argue about which bakery makes the better baklava.”

“Your neighbourhood has already decided that by assassination and bribery.”

“Welcome to Astoria,” she said, and he could hear the smile.

They were quiet a long while. The radiator ticked its way toward silence. The city inhaled and held, as if accommodating them.

“Tell me what you hear,” she said softly.

He listened. “The train,” he said. “A fan on somewhere above us. A dog’s nails against the hallway floor.”

“What do you feel?”

“You,” he said simply. “The weight of you. Warm.”

“What do you know?”

He thought. “That I don’t have to rehearse the worst version of tomorrow if I’m holding the best part of tonight.”

She pressed her mouth to his chest, a kiss he felt down to the bone. “Good boy,” she said, not teasing him with it but giving it to him like a ribbon to tie around a truth. He huffed a laugh that almost tipped into a sob.

When sleep came, it didn’t take him hostage. It negotiated. He set his palm over the place where her heart kept time, and in the steady count he found his own. Outside, the corner deli’s metal gate rattled down and a taxi coughed past. The slice of streetlight shifted on the ceiling, pale to paler.

At 3:17 he woke briefly to her shifting, and in that small stir he remembered what it felt like to be young and voiceless and what it felt like to be fifty-something and finally heard. He didn’t move. He let the thought pass like a weather front.

At 4:06 the dogs padded in and arranged themselves into living parentheses around the bed. He could feel the house accept them all, memory and regret and the weary joy of being allowed to begin again.

When the clock gave up and turned to 5:12, the first faint commute began outside, muffled footsteps and coffee breath and the sigh of early buses. Talia’s hand drifted, half-asleep, to his jaw; her thumb traced a line there as if checking that the night had happened.

“It did,” he said, not sure if he’d spoken aloud.

“Mmm?” she asked, eyes closed.

“Everything,” he said. “The whole thing.”

“Good,” she murmured. “We’ll keep it.”

The next time he slept, he did it like a man on safe ground. The ceiling softened, the blinds unbarred, the radiator finally decided it could rest. He dreamed of nothing and woke with everything; her hair in his mouth, the imprint of her thigh across his hips, the thick smell of coffee starting somewhere in the building like a promise, and the knowledge, clean and bracing, that the past wasn’t gone and didn’t have to be, and that the future didn’t require children or perfection to be worth living.

It required this. Her. The city spooling itself awake outside their window. The vow he’d already made and would keep repeating until she got bored of hearing it.

Before the year was up, he would marry Talia Amari.

And he would try; carefully, clumsily, stubbornly, to become the kind of man who believed in miracles the way she did: not as magic, but as repetition. As practice. As the slow, noir-lit work of choosing love in the middle of the night and then again when the morning came.

ASTORIA - March 15, 2005 - 5:20 AM

Dawn hadn’t properly cracked yet; it just pressed a paler grey against the blinds, turning the room into a charcoal sketch. The radiator muttered. Somewhere down 31^st Street a bakery clicked on its lights and the smell of warm dough began its slow climb up the block.

Talia was in the bathroom with the door half-closed, light spilling like a ribbon under it. The tap hissed, then the soft scrape of a comb through wet curls, then the water again. Mint rose in the air. John lay propped on an elbow, watching the thin seam of morning form along the window. He should have been thinking about the shift ahead; paperwork, a follow-up interview, a suspect who’d go soft under the right questions, but all his focus had narrowed to the acknowledgement of a simple, impossible thing: she was here. They were here. The night hadn’t dissolved when the clock flipped past four.

He cleared his throat, voice still raw from sleep. “You know,” he said to the window, to the hallway, to the fact of her, “we’ve never been on a proper date.”

A beat. The faint clack of the toothbrush against porcelain. “Stakeouts and coffee runs count as dates in my book,” she called back, laughter sliding around the words. He could see her in the mirror if he leaned just so: curls in both hands, toothbrush at a ridiculous angle, eyes gleaming at him under a smudge of steam.

He let a smile creep in. “Great. Then I’ve already wined and dined you with the finest corner deli drip and pretzels from the vending machine.”

She stepped to the doorframe, hip leaned into it, foamy toothbrush hanging from her mouth like a dare. “High standards, Sergeant.”

“Which is why,” he went on, pushing upright, “we should raise them. Tonight. You, me, real tablecloths, silverware that weighs more than paperclips, food so overpriced we both complain about it later… fancy clothes.” He tipped his head, eyes tracing the line of her robe at the tie. “And maybe… something else.”

Her hand stilled mid-stroke. The brush froze. For a second, he saw her flinch, just a flicker, at the phrase proper date, the tight little knot where performance and vulnerability shook hands. Then she recovered fast, the corner of her mouth curling around the mint. “What do you mean by ‘something else’?” she asked, voice gone silk.

He shrugged a shoulder, played it dry. “The restaurant probably has dessert.”

“And you think you’re getting fed twice?”

“I’m an optimist.”

She set the brush in the cup, crossed to him in three clean steps, and climbed into his lap like she owned the floor plan of his body. Her arms looped around his neck. The robe parted just enough to fog his focus. “Something else is definitely on the menu,” she murmured, mouth finding his with a kiss that started teasing and turned dangerous. He felt himself answer with the kind of hunger that made him stupid in the best way.

He reached for her without the hesitation he’d carried for decades; hands mapping the muscle under her robe, thumbs pressing into the soft brackets of her waist, then slid one palm lower, cupping, claiming because she had taught him it could be done without taking. She made a low sound that rewired his lungs.

“Appetizer or dessert?” he breathed against her mouth, all gravel and intent.

“In your dreams,” she said, laughing, nipping his bottom lip before pushing off him in a lithe, merciless retreat. She caught the glance he dropped, unabashed, at the visible problem he’d acquired. His answering groan made her grin like she’d won a case.

“So?” he managed, knuckles quietly whitening in the sheet. “Dinner tonight?”

Talia paused in the bathroom doorway, and he could see the little tremor run through her, past and future and the old, private gravity of firsts. Proper dates had a gravity you didn’t joke away: showing up, letting yourself be seen, walking into a new kind of room together and not flinching when the lights were bright.

“Fine,” she said, as if it cost her nothing and everything at once. She gave him one quick, soft look, an I heard you last night; I hear you now, and closed the door, leaving a very happy, very frustrated John Munch in a bed that suddenly felt too large and not nearly large enough.

He let the door’s latch click settle, then dropped back and stared at the ceiling until the past tried to take the wheel again. He wouldn’t let it. Not today. Today he was going to do better than muscle memory. Better than all the times he’d made romance a punchline because wanting anything was the scariest thing he knew.

A list formed in his head, precise as a case file:

• Make the reservation himself. No ‘we’ll figure it out.’ Not tonight.
• Wear the suit she likes; dark, clean lines, polish the shoes, pick the tie that doesn’t look like a conspiracy map.
• Don’t default to cynicism when the waiter says market price. Make a joke, sure, but don’t use it as a shield.
• Listen. Not to the menu, to her.
• On her back, her knee under the table, her fingers. Gentle like a man who learned the lesson too late and is still allowed to apply it.
• Ask about her day and her night and her silences. Answer honestly about the fear that wakes at 2 a.m. and the one that goes to sleep at 3.
• Don’t drink more than the moment needs.
• When they get to her door, ask her if the ‘something else’ is still on the menu in the tone that makes her laugh into his mouth.

He swung his legs off the bed with the decisiveness of a man who had already failed at all of this and was choosing, with stubbornness that looked a lot like faith, to try again.

Through the door he heard the hair dryer start, then stop, then the gentle sound of her talking to one of the dogs as it nosed the crack with a worried whuff. “I’m fine, habibi. He’s being dramatic.” A pause. “Yes, again.”

He laughed; the small, secret kind he didn’t let the squad hear, and reached for his phone. He dialled a place he never would’ve taken an ex-wife; too intimate, too sincere, but that he’d clocked months ago, walking her out of a scene in the West Village when she’d been shaking and pretending not to. The host answered. John asked, voice pitched low, for “something with a view and a corner and the option to slide a chair closer without getting arrested.” He dropped a name he could afford to drop, heard the smile on the other end, and pocketed the confirmation like a talisman.

The bathroom door opened on steam and citrus. Talia’s hair was a glossy riot of curls she’d coaxed into obedience with pins, then set free again. The robe had been replaced by one of his shirts; stolen, of course, half-buttoned, sleeves rolled. She clocked him; shirtless, barefoot, hair a day past a cut, eyes still caught somewhere between the vow and the ache, and softened like he was a view she’d seen a thousand times and still paused for.

“Who were you calling?” she asked, passing him on her way to the dresser.

“A guy,” he said, neutral as a crime scene photo.

“Your guy for what?”

“My guy for our table,” he admitted, unable to help himself.

She slowed. “Our table?”

He lifted a shoulder. “Thought we’d try the kind of place where the bread basket comes on its own plate and they pretend the water is from a glacier.”

“Do I need to call my bank?” she teased, but the quiver had shifted to something more like anticipation, like a violin string tuned tight.

“Already warned them,” he said. “Also, we have a chair with your name on it.”

“That’s not how chairs work.”

“It is tonight.”

She studied him, really studied, the way she does with witnesses, taking in the edges and the middle and the story they add up to. “You’re trying,” she said softly.

He met her eyes. “I am.”

Her mouth did that thing it does when she’s about to say I love you but wants the words to land with teeth. “Try one more thing.”

“Name it.”

“Don’t disappear halfway through dessert.”

He flinched, just a little, the old reflex to turn any promise into a loophole. He let it pass. “I’ll be there for every bite.”

“And don’t make fun of me when I get dressed up.”

“I wouldn’t dare. I’ll be too busy forgetting my own name.”

“And, this is important, do not start a debate with the sommelier about the French Revolution.”

He made a helpless face. “But it was a wine-fuelled class uprising-”

“John.”

He put his hands up. “I swear to behave. Mostly.”

They moved around each other in the small room like a choreography: her at the dresser, him at the closet, the dogs weaving between legs and sighing in exaggerated despair that no one was petting them every second. She fastened small gold hoops, kept it simple; he found the tie she liked, the one that made him look like someone who remembered the point of growing up.

“Why do ‘proper dates’ make me nervous?” she asked, almost offhand, as she smoothed the shirt over her hips and checked the window to measure the morning.

“Because they’re auditions for futures,” he said, without looking away from the knot he was trying to get right. “And because you’re used to building a life out of work and loyalty and showing up. ‘Proper date’ feels like theatre and you’re allergic to anything that fakes intimacy.”

She came to stand in front of him, steadying his hands on the tie. “And you?”

“I make jokes when I want to run,” he said simply. “Tonight, I won’t.”

She pressed two fingers to the centre of his chest, right where his panic had stuttered a few hours ago. “I know.”

He caught her wrist, kissed her fingertips. “We keep it quiet at the squad,” he said, practical breaking through the sugar. “Still. For now.”

“For now,” she agreed. “They’ll figure it out. They already have. But I like having this-” she gestured between them, the room, the hour “-to ourselves.”

“Me too.” He tucked a curl behind her ear. “You live here half the week,” she said dryly, buttoning her coat. “You’re already picked up.”

“Then I’ll knock on the door like a gentleman.”

“Or…” she glanced at him sideways, lips curving, “we just go straight from the precinct. Saves time. I can get ready there.”

He blinked, then smirked. “Changing in the women’s locker room before our first proper date? That’s very you.”

“That’s very efficient,” she corrected, smoothing her curls back. “Besides, I’d rather meet you at the table than have you pacing outside my apartment rehearsing conspiracy theories.”

“Unfair. I only do that before arraignments.”

She rolled her eyes but leaned in closer, her voice dropping. “So? Straight from the precinct?”

His gaze lingered on her, heat and fondness twined together. “Fine. But I’m still bringing flowers. That’s non-negotiable.”

“Do women still like flowers in 2005?”

“This woman does.”

“Any in particular?” he asked.

Her eyes softened, the joke slipping into sincerity. “Ones that smell like a memory without hurting.”

He nodded as if she’d given him a witness statement with a clue in the margins. He could work with that. He would find something that said I listened and not I googled what girls like. (He did not know what google really was, but he knew it existed, like the Loch Ness Monster and the deep state.)

She slid her badge into her coat and shrugged it on. He grabbed his, the weight familiar, both of them returning to the version of themselves the city needed and the version they had learned to love anyway.

At the door, she turned. “Hey,” she said softly.

“Yeah?”

“Thank you for asking.”

“For dinner?”

“For a date,” she said. “For the word that means we’re doing this on purpose.”

He touched her face with the back of his hand, careful as a man checking the edge on a blade he finally intended to use to carve instead of cut. “On purpose,” he echoed.

They stepped onto the stoop. Astoria was shaking itself awake: a neighbor fumbling keys into a lock, the shutters of the corner bakery rattling upward with a metallic cough, the faint smell of burnt toast and someone’s too-cheap cologne drifting in the air. The March chill bit at their cheeks, sharp but promising spring if you were patient. He tucked her against his side as they walked, and though she made a face about dignity, he only released her long enough to lace their fingers together again, because dignity could file a complaint.

At the deli, he bought two Anthora cups; the blue ones declaring We Are Happy To Serve You, and an egg-and-cheese on a roll they shared on the walk. She stole the first bite and half the second, unapologetic, and he let her, because he was too busy memorizing the way she chewed when she was content.

“Seven-thirty?” he asked at the curb, handing her the last sip of coffee.

“Seven-thirty,” she echoed, sealing it.

She started toward her car, trench coat flaring around her. He watched her go, recognizing it for what it was: a quiet theft of his own style, a detail that made his chest ache in a way he wouldn’t admit aloud. Halfway across, she stopped, jogged back, rose on her toes to kiss him hard enough to set his day right, then tapped his lapel once, sharp as if pinning a medal.

“Don’t be late,” she warned.

“Never,” he said, and, for once, meant it.

He stood there after she disappeared, the coffee cup warm in his hand, the city opening its eyes. He thought of the reservation folded in his pocket like a promise, the flowers he’d buy that would smell like memory without wounding, the tie he’d knot right on the first try. He thought of every good thing he’d walked away from before it had the chance to leave him, and felt, with something close to joy, that he had no desire to move.

Tonight, he would sit across from her in a restaurant with too many forks and make something ridiculous, hope, look like a habit. He would not sabotage it with cleverness or fear. He would tip too much. He would touch her knee beneath the table and ask the kind of question that makes a person pause before answering. He would be better than the sum of his failures.

He crushed the cup flat in his fist, dropped it into a trash can, and headed for the precinct.

On purpose.

Chapter Text

SVU PRECINCT - March 15, 2005 - 8:02 AM

Talia pulled into her usual spot, killed the ignition, and… didn’t move. Her hands stayed clamped on the steering wheel, nails drumming against the leather. The street hummed with early Manhattan noise: traffic surging toward Midtown, a delivery truck beeping in reverse, a man swearing into his Nokia.

Her thoughts were louder.

A proper date. What the hell does that even mean?

She tried to picture it: John Munch appearing at her door with roses (absolutely not), opening the car door (maybe), pulling out her chair at some restaurant where the menu didn’t list prices (very likely), kissing her hand like a parody of 1947 (dangerously possible). She could see his mouth at the back of her knuckles and almost laughed out loud in self-defence.

She tried to picture it. John Munch. Hand-kissing.

She almost laughed out loud.

And yet, her stomach twisted. What if that was the plan? What if she was supposed to wear a dress and say the right things and pretend she wasn’t on the edge of running out of her own skin? She hadn’t been on an actual, labelled, capital-D Date since 1995. That one had ended on a Queens rooftop with hookah, weed, alcohol, and a sunrise she never forgot. This, whatever this was, felt like stepping into foreign territory.

A knock at her window popped the bubble. Talia jerked. Olivia bent down into the glass, grinning. “You moving today or declaring the Mustang your legal residence?”

Talia pushed the door open, heat flooding her face. “I was thinking.”

“Dangerous habit.” Olivia fell in step as they headed up the precinct steps. “Thinking about what?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Mm.” Olivia let that hang a beat in the cold morning before pivoting. “O’Malley’s tonight? Cheap beer, brutal darts, Elliot pretending he’s Minnesota-good at pool.”

“Can’t. Plans.” Too quick. Too clean.

Olivia’s brows went up. “Plans?”

“A date.”

Olivia stopped mid-step and let out a gasp that turned into a smile. “Shut up.”

Talia deadpanned, “I would never lie about something that reckless.”

“What’s his name?”

“Classified.”

“Uh-huh.” Olivia bumped her shoulder. “I want a debrief the size of Ohio tomorrow.”

“Then bring better coffee than what lives downstairs.”

They smiled, walked, pretended this was a normal Tuesday. The bullpen was already buzzing; phones ringing, printers screeching, Fin muttering about the Knicks, Cragen’s door half-open. Same circus, same clamour. But in the far corner by Cragen’s office, her desk sat opposite his, and that small square of space had its own atmosphere. Not quiet, never that. Just… tuned to a different frequency.

A few minutes later, the man himself arrived. Trench coat, glasses, that familiar shuffle of a body that had seen too many midnights. Two coffees in hand.

He set one down on her desk with casual precision. “One overpriced sludge for the princess.”

Talia took it, inhaling the steam to buy herself a second. “You’re spoiling me, Sergeant.”

“Don’t get used to it.” He slid into his chair, cracking open a file. His tone said he meant the opposite.

She stared at him, heart pounding, the word date flashing in her mind like a neon sign. The ordinary rhythm of the bullpen felt suddenly impossible, her nerves buzzing under her skin.

Finally, she leaned across the desk, her voice pitched low. “So… how fancy is this restaurant?”

He didn’t look up. “Fancy enough.”

“That’s not helpful.”

“Wear a dress,” he said, like it was obvious. His pen scratched across the page.

Her stomach dropped. “I don’t have a dress here.”

“Then wear whatever.” He flipped a page. “You’ll look beautiful either way.”

The words were too casual, dropped like loose change. But her stomach flipped, heat rising up her neck before she could stop it. She ducked her head quickly, pretending to shuffle papers so no one saw the blush creeping into her cheeks.

Munch smirked faintly, as if he hadn’t just detonated her entire morning with one line. “Where are you going?” he asked without looking up.

“Home,” she snapped, grabbing her bag. “To fix my wardrobe emergency before you turn me into some tragic punchline.”

He finally glanced up, smirk twitching at the corner of his mouth. “Don’t make it sound like I’m worth panicking over.”

“You’re insufferable.” She pointed at him with the coffee she was still clutching. “Don’t be late tonight.”

And then she was gone, leaving him grinning into his paperwork.

ASTORIA - March 15, 2005 - 8:40 AM

The drive home was a blur, traffic lights obediently green like the universe wanted to speed her panic. Inside her rowhouse, she kicked the door shut and immediately tore into the closet. Dresses flew out in an avalanche. The dogs padded in, plopped down, and watched with their eternal patience as their mother descended into chaos.

She ripped open the closet, yanking out dresses and tossing them onto the bed.

“Too short.” Toss.
“Too green.” Toss.
“Too tight, too sparkly, too funereal; God, why do I even own this?” Toss, toss, toss.

She flung the black gala dress onto the pile, shook her head. “Too formal. I’ll look like I’m attending my own sentencing.”

The white dress followed. “Too bridal. He’ll die of a heart attack.”

Her hands skimmed over the kaftan from Alexanderia. “Too Orientalist. He’ll make some terrible Cold War joke.” Toss.

The sarafan from St. Petersburg. “Too Soviet. Might as well wave a KGB flag and have every Russian uncle in Queens will salute me on sight.” Toss.

By the time she sat down in the mountain of fabric, hair wild, breathing fast, she groaned aloud. “I have nothing.”

And then, her eyes caught it. Not hers. Lana’s.

A dress still wrapped in dry-cleaner plastic, tags dangling. A satin red slip of a thing, low back, merciless cut. Lana had bought it for New Year’s ’99, vowing she’d debut it in Times Square. She never had.

Talia peeled back the plastic with trembling fingers, held it against her body in the mirror. The red glowed against her skin, dangerous and alive. “This could work,” she whispered.

The colour was dangerous, the cut merciless. It was Lana’s, which meant wearing it carried the weight of ghosts. But maybe that was what tonight needed; something bold enough to silence her nerves.

She paired it with black heels, the heels. Cesare Paciotti stilettos with dagger details gifted by a Russian relative. Wear these when you want to kill a man. Munch always noticed her shoes. He’d notice these.

She dug out jewellery, perfume, extra makeup, tossing them into a bag like she was fleeing the country. “I might kill him tonight,” she muttered, zipping it shut.

The dogs blinked at her. She kissed each of their heads before sweeping out the door, garment bag slung over her arm.

SVU PRECINCT - March 15, 2005 - 9:58 AM

By the time she slid back to her desk, the bullpen had thickened into full noise. A suspect yelled down the hall; Fin talked into a receiver with the patience of a saint at confession; Cragen’s silhouette leaned back in his chair, hand to brow.

Munch clocked the garment bag she failed to hide, arched a brow, and let a curl of amusement touch his mouth.

“Wardrobe emergency handled?” he asked.

“You’ll see,” she said, and shot him a look that was half threat and half something else.

He took a sip of his coffee and returned to his file like he hadn’t just set her bloodstream on a boil. She hated him. She loved him. She wanted him to make this easy. She wanted to earn it hard.

What the hell was a proper date?

She worked. She answered phones. She called a complainant back and said the calm, right things. She read Melinda’s report and didn’t let the words under her nails. She looked up at one point and found him already watching her. He didn’t look away. Neither did she.

Okay, she told herself. Okay, then.

SVU PRECINCT - March 15, 2005 - 6:26 PM

By six-thirty the bullpen softened: screensavers bouncing, fluorescents half-dim, half-eaten bagels going stale like they’d done something wrong. Melinda’s last fax cooled on the tray; CSU’s cart ticked like it had a heartbeat. It had been a quiet day, the rare kind that pretends New York can ever be gentle.

In the women’s room, Talia pressed gold disks into her lobes, checked the curve of her mouth, tilted her head to admire the dress. Red wasn’t a colour tonight; it was a decision. The back dipped low, ink catching light along her spine; icons and script that made devotion look like weaponry. She smudged a fingertip over her lower lip to set the paint and told her reflection, “Be bad.”

Across the room, John Munch fought a necktie like it had opinions. No trench coat. No thrifted blazer. Black suit, white shirt, cufflinks; the kind of sharp that becomes a rumour. He checked his flip phone, shut it, reopened it, adjusted the knot with the grim patience of a bomb tech who also, unfortunately, has feelings. He looked almost… happy. It scared him like all the right things do.

The elevator dinged.

Elliot stepped out first, jacket slung over a shoulder. “Munch. You two need to file for legal separation or can the desk keep custody tonight?”

Fin trailed, eyebrows staging a coup. “Please tell me you got subpoenaed by Congress. I brought my popcorn face.”

Olivia came last, slowing halfway down the aisle. She sniffed. “Is that the good aftershave?”

“I spilled the bad one,” Munch said, deadpan.

Elliot pointed at the cufflinks like he’d discovered a crime. “And you’re grieving with chrome?”

Munch’s phone buzzed.

mini black purse by your desk? almost done.

He typed like the screen would explode if he didn’t finish the sentence fast enough.

abort mission. eyes everywhere. not a drill.

The women’s room door pushed open anyway. Heels ticked tile, then softened on the carpet. She turned the corner. The air dropped a degree. Light took notice. Conversation glitched.

Talia paused just inside the bullpen and let her smile arrive with a delay; half a second too slow, which made it hit twice as hard. Her gaze skimmed the three detectives, slid back like a blade sheathed slow.

“Oh,” she said, purely delighted. “I thought you were all gone.” The smirk lived at the corner of her mouth like it paid rent.

Olivia tried for words, failed once, then caught a sentence by the tail. “Where are you going… in that?”

Talia’s eyes glittered. “Where do you think, Liv?”

Fin folded his arms, savouring the view like a man who’d just won a bet he’d only made with himself. “Mhm. With whom, girl?”

“Mystery man,” Talia said, and then; without looking away from Fin, walked directly to Munch. She slid her arm through his, pulled him down by his lapel like she’d been planning it since the precinct was built, and pressed a slow, unhurried kiss to his cheek.

The lipstick print bloomed like a warrant.

Olivia’s brows flew. Elliot’s mouth opened and closed, opened and closed. Fin let out a saintly little “mmm-hmm” that was ninety percent prophecy, ten percent applause.

Talia took in their faces, satisfied. “Any further questions?”

Elliot managed one. “You two are?”

She tipped her head, faux-innocent, then turned the knife with a grin. “Late for dinner.”

“Be careful,” Elliot said, paternal and overwhelmed.

Munch didn’t bother to hide his smirk. “Always.”

They hit the elevator. The doors thunked shut on the three of them still buffering. Inside the steel box that knew how to keep secrets, Talia leaned back against the wall, breath steady, eyes bright with mischief. “Consider that my press conference.”

“You stamped evidence on my face,” he said, dry, touching the lipstick print and looking almost proud.

“That was the point,” she murmured. “Now they don’t have to guess.”

He studied her, the playful front and the flicker of nerves hiding beneath it. “How nervous?”

“On a scale of one to running?” She exhaled. “I’m… excited. And dizzy. And half-convinced I forgot how to do dates.”

“Good,” he said.

“Good?”

“Means you care.” He softened it. “I’m terrified.” A beat. “Four divorces. Too old. Too cynical.”

She glanced up, and the smirk went tender. “Also, the only person I want to see me.”

The bell chimed the lobby. He offered his arm like a promise. She took it like an answer. March brushed cool fingers through her hair as they stepped onto 12^th Avenue, cabs pooled at the curb like yellow punctuation. They slid into the back of one. The driver turned jazz on low and didn’t look in the mirror. The city, for once, conspired.

“Rules,” Munch said as the cab merged into night. “No shop talk. No ghosts. If a pager cries, we pretend it’s the neighbour’s baby.”

She laced her fingers with his on the seat. “Add one: if I freak out, you kiss me before I can flee.”

“I accept your terms.”

“Where are we going?”

“A place with a name you don’t say out loud,” he said. “East Village. Cash-only. Tablecloths that are old enough to testify.”

“Hole-in-the-wall Italian,” she guessed, pleased.

“Low light. Sinatra on an old speaker. Owner that calls me Gianni even though he knows my name. The kind of place where the wine is red, the bread is warm, and the waiter insults you as an act of love.”

She squeezed his hand. “Very noir.”

“Very us.”

They drifted under the bridge, Manhattan blinking on like a marquee. Talia watched the reflection of the two of them in the window, red pooling like a secret, his profile cut in clean lines. Her nerves buzzed, then settled where his thumb traced her knuckles. She made the decision she always has to make: Stay.

GIANNI’S - March 15, 2005 - 7:34 PM

The cab let them out on a quiet East Village block that smelled like cold air, bakery sugar, a whisper of someone’s cigar out on the curb. A neon sign buzzed calmly: Gianni’s (no apostrophe because the apostrophe had fallen off in 1989 and never returned). The door was wood, heavy, and painted the kind of green that always means family.

Inside, the lights were low enough to forgive everything. A wall of framed black-and-white photos: celebrities you might almost recognize, nonnas holding wine, a Polaroid of a much younger Munch squinting at a camera like he didn’t trust immortality. A tiny speaker near the bar played jazz without bragging about it. Candles flickered in old Chianti bottles. The air smelled like tomatoes that had cooked all day and basil that had been torn by hand.

“Gianni!” a man behind the bar called, arms wide. He was not Gianni. He was technically Sal, but he liked the myth. “You bring the Princess tonight?”

Munch lifted their joined hands. “The Princess brought me.”

Sal’s eyes crinkled when he smiled at Talia. “We saved your table.” He pointed with his chin to a snug two-top in the back, half-hidden by a column and a plant that wanted to be a tree.

On the table: a small cut-glass vase with three deep red roses. No note. Exactly right.

Talia looked at Munch, suspicion and softness duking it out on her face. “You didn’t.”

“I didn’t,” he said, and he hadn’t. He’d only once told Sal that the woman he loved liked red, and apparently that counted for planning now.

Sal leaned in as he dropped two menus. “Roses are from the house,” he said to Talia, stage-whisper conspiratorial. “First time he ever brought anyone we don’t yell at.”

“Sal,” Munch said, pained.

“Eat,” Sal commanded. “Fall in love. Pay cash.”

He slid away. Talia laughed, put her purse down, put herself down across from Munch like a decision. The candles threw lacework shadows; her dress threw him off equilibrium. She looked at him over the menu. “Order for me.”

“You trust me?”

“Clearly.” A tiny pause. “Yes.”

“Okay.” He scanned the menu and ordered. “And… olives.”

“Three,” she said.

He nodded once and didn’t say I remember because remembering is only useful if you use it. The wine came; he poured, then let her clink his glass lightly. She sipped and felt the red spread warmth through her ribs, loosening knots she’d had since ’96. He watched her like a man learning a language by immersion.

“Tell me why you’re scared,” she said, voice low, the room doing them the favour of being loud enough to hide quiet things.

He didn’t reach for a joke. “Because I’ve broken things I tried to hold. Because I used to think love was a conspiracy: you never see how it starts, only the aftermath. Because I don’t want to be interesting about it anymore, Talia. I want to be… good at it.”

She took that in, let it sit. “You love me,” she said, not a question.

He breathed out like he’d been underwater, then nodded once. “More than I have any right to.”

Her mouth softened. “Then we’re even.”

The food arrived and bought them a minute. He tore bread, gave her the better piece without the show of pretending not to care which was which. She laughed when the cheese collapsed like a soft moon. He told her Sal had once thrown out an investment banker for ordering vodka sauce “like he was trying to impress a mirror.” She told him about the last capital-D Date she’d gone on, 1995 rooftop, hookah, bad beer, sunrise better than either, or how nothing labelled had felt good since, until now.

“Maybe it’s the label that’s different,” he said. “This one doesn’t itch.”

The pastas landed, steam curling up like a blessing. They ate. They talked. He told her about the first time he’d seen her hair loose in the bullpen and thought, that’s someone I could live the rest of my life around. She told him about Cairo in August, how heat could be a religion. He told her about Baltimore rain. She told him about Astoria snow. They laughed about Fin, about Olivia’s detective nose for romance, about Elliot’s face when the elevator doors shut. They both pretended not to be counting the seconds until touch was allowed again.

At some point, Sal returned with a plate holding a single cannolo, the shell dusted within an inch of its life. “On the house,” he said, like a priest giving absolution. “And if you two break up, do not come here. I am old. My heart cannot take it.”

“We’re not breaking up,” Munch said, before he could stop himself.

Sal stared at him for a beat, smiled like a man who had seen many winters, and patted his shoulder. “Good boy.”

They shared the cannolo. Talia stopped mid-bite, looked at him, and then, without ceremony, reached across the tiny table, slid her finger along the powdered sugar at the corner of his mouth, and licked it clean. His pupils went a little too wide for polite society. She tilted her head. “You okay?”

“No,” he said honestly. “But in a nice way.”

“Good.”

The bill arrived with a flourish and a joke about cash. Munch paid, left too much, because some things you only get to do when you’re happy and trying not to jinx it.

The night had pulled a velvet curtain over the East Village, sugared air leaking from the last open bakery, cigarette smoke curling lazy from a doorway. On the sidewalk, John took her hand again. It fit like he’d been practicing for it his whole life.

“Dessert still on the menu?” His voice was too even to be calm.

She leaned in, breath warm at his mouth, that dangerous little smirk back where it belonged. “For tonight?” A blink, slow as a promise. “Why don’t you find out.”

“Cab?”

She didn’t answer, because he knew it. He raised one hand; a yellow cab glided to the curb like it had been waiting for that motion all night. The driver tuned to standards; a trumpet stitched the city together in long, unhurried lines. The vinyl sighed beneath them. Streetlights carved their faces into moving pieces; her mouth lit, his profile in shadow, two reflections caught and released in every passing shopfront. Talia slid closer until her thigh found his; she stayed there like that was where she was meant to live.

“You don’t have to fix me,” she said into the seam of his shoulder.

“I wouldn’t know where to start.” He pressed his lips to her temple, the smallest kiss, a vow disguised as habit. “And I like where you are.”

Her hand searched for his under the fold of her coat, fingers lacing, pressing. “You’re allowed to be loved, John.”

“So are you.” He didn’t take his eyes off the bridge lights; he just tightened his hold until the message landed under her skin.

She breathed out. The bridge rose; Manhattan slid behind them like a rumour you wanted to keep believing.

ASTORIA - March 15, 2005 - 11:37 PM

The yellow cab’s meter clicked to a halt, headlights washing Talia’s stoop in a soft, watery gold. Munch paid in cash; tucked bills, a muttered thanks, a tip generous enough to silence the driver’s curiosity, and the city folded back into itself. Somewhere down Steinway a bodega buzzer gave a tired bleat; a late train groaned over the elevated line like a giant turning in sleep.

They stopped one step shy of her door. The porch light, stubborn and warm, hummed over them. Talia laced her fingers through his. Her hands felt like they had a pulse separate from his own. Her eyes glittered in the lamplight, and he watched the city reflected there, and then only himself.

“Thank you. Truly,” she said, voice low enough to be their secret and the night’s.

He meant to answer with a joke. That’s the easy way; sound like you’re not falling by laughing on the way down. But the sentence that rose in him wasn’t funny at all. It was a flood that breached a thin, lifelong wall. He could feel it brighten his eyes before it made a sound.

“Don’t thank me,” he said, and then, because honesty always tastes best when it shocks even you, “Just… don’t leave.”

He said it softer than he meant to, like he might scare it away. She held still, and for a second, he hated how naked he felt. Old man, four ex-wives worth of lessons, and here he was begging on a stoop like a kid about to lose the last bus.

Talia’s mouth curved. Not a pity smile. The kind she gave when she saw truth and decided to be kind to it. She stepped into him, pressed her forehead to his so their breaths tangled, warm and shared. The cold of his glasses brushed her hair.

“John,” she whispered, and there was the faintest scold in it. “What evidence have I given you, since I walked into your bullpen last summer, that I’d ever leave?”

He let out a breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding since Baltimore, since divorces two, three, and four, since all the steady drip of ‘no’s that taught him to flinch at ‘yes.’

“None,” he admitted. “But I’m thorough.”

Her laugh was quiet and bright. “Then be thorough with this,” she said, and kissed him.

Munch was not a young man. He did not pretend to be. But the way he reached for her; palms at her waist, the soft give of satin beneath trench, the ease with which her body knew his, felt young and reckless and unashamed. The kiss deepened; she tilted his chin with her thumb, and he followed, surrendering his usual control like he was setting down a weapon. When they broke, just enough to breathe, he let his mouth rest at her cheek.

“I am not going anywhere,” she said. “Do you understand me?”

He closed his eyes, nodded once, forehead still against hers. “You say that” he murmured, “and I almost believe the universe won’t notice and try to ruin it.”

“Let it try,” she replied. “We’ve made worse things dizzy.”

He wanted to laugh at that. Instead, he swallowed, let a grin ghost his mouth. “Dessert still on?”

Talia slipped her key into the lock, pushed the door, and tugged him in by the lapel. The door thudded behind them, shutting out the city with the soft, satisfied sound of home.

He shrugged out of his trench; she took it from him without a word, hung it next to her own. The hush in the apartment felt deliberate, not lonely; like a page turned smilingly.

She walked barefoot into the kitchen, and he trailed her like a man learning a new city by scent. He watched her move; confident without being cruel to the air around her. There was music, if not on the radio then in the rhythm of how she lifted cups, rinsed, poured. She returned with two small mugs and a smile that made the whole apartment seem better lit. He took a sip. Sweet, warm, vanilla with a memory of smoke. He would remember that taste later, locked away somewhere private, how it became a code for this night.

She set her cup down, reached for his tie. “May I?” she asked, even though her fingers were already at the knot.

“Consent is sexy,” he said, aware of how it sounded and not caring at all.

“Then say yes,” she teased.

“Yes,” he said, and felt the word do something to him from the spine outward.

She loosened the tie in two expert tugs, sliding silk free like a secret confessed. The collar went next; her fingers cool against his throat. He felt suddenly, unbearably present in his body: the hitch in his breath, the nick he’d gotten shaving at dawn, the way his pulse argued for hope under her touch.

“You do know,” he said, voice low, “that I have a world-class talent for ruining good things.”

“Then retire,” she said, simple as turning a key.

He let out a broken sound that could have been a laugh. “It isn’t that easy.”

She studied him openly, unafraid of the weather that moved behind his eyes. “It might be,” she said. “If someone stood with you at the window and said: look, the view is yours. No one’s coming to push you.”

The line landed somewhere that had been hungry for years. He reached for her, cupped her face, let his thumb learn the path of her cheekbone. He kissed her again, slower this time, because he wanted to feel every second. She answered with the kind of certainty that had steadied empires. The cup clinked softly as it was set aside, the apartment’s quiet tilting toward a different kind of hush.

“Come,” she said, and led him down the short hall.

Her bedroom was a gentle riot of her: deep textiles, a folded icon cloth on the dresser, a candle domed with dried lavender, a small dish of gold hoops, a pressed sprig under glass. The window gave the ghost of the block: a neon sign down the street doing its patient blinking, sirens far as stars.

They moved with an ease that came from weeks of almosts, glances stretched too tight, the charged discipline of working together and pretending it was only that. Every button answered to her patient hands. Every breath he let go became another small act of trust. He wasn’t 25. He wasn’t even 45. What he was, still, is a man who has known too much loss to be careless with a gift. That’s what it felt like: unwrapping something he had no right to but had somehow been given.

“Look at me,” she said, when his gaze flickered away as if he owed his shame an audience. “No ghosts tonight.”

He did. The room seemed to calibrate around the focus of her eyes. He found himself saying things he’d only joked about before. “You terrify me,” he confessed, the words soft but unarmoured.

“How?”

“You make me want to be known. That’s…not my brand.”

“Rebrand,” she said, and kissed him with a sweetness that lived right next to heat.

When he touched her, it was careful first, reverent, worshipful in the old, sarcastic sense: attending to what was precious. She rewarded that care with a breath against his mouth, then a sound that made his bones feel very young. He gathered her closer; she went willingly, generously, her hands mapping the story of his back as if she could translate it by touch.

He murmured into her shoulder; nothing polished, nothing planned, small scraps of awe. She answered with little hums that were half laughter, half permission. The city outside struck midnight a little early; their clock didn’t mind.

“John,” she whispered, somewhere between a prayer and a dare. “Let yourself have this.”

He did, and the letting felt like a door unlatched in a house he’d boarded up. Desire rose not like fire; he’d done the fire years, had the ash to prove it; but like tide. Immense, inevitable, steady, lifting them both. They moved together as if the room itself remembered the choreography; the candle’s flame bowed and straightened, and he thought, absently, that even the light was agreeing.

She guided him with a hand at his jaw, with the surety of a woman at home in her body and her mind. He followed with the humility of someone finally convinced that gentleness is not a compromise but a power. The world thinned to a point: air, skin, breath, the syllables of each other’s names turned into something older than language.

Time stretched. The city did what cities do; sirens, distant laughter, a door slam, a radio crackle, while their small universe rewrote its gravity. He felt her smile against his neck, felt an answering one pull at his own mouth. It wasn’t happiness like a billboard; it was the subtle, reverent kind, like a secret handshake with fate.

“Tell me,” she said softly, when he stilled to memorize the outline of her shoulder against his palm. “Say it so it’s real.”

He hesitated, not because the words weren’t there, but because they had teeth; once said, they bite down on the future and don’t let go. He looked at her. She looked back like she had all the time he’d wasted and all the time he had left.

“I love you,” he said, the consonants unshakable as a vow. “I love you, Talia.”

She exhaled, something tender breaking open in her face. “Good,” she said, fierce and soft at once. “Now say it again like you believe you deserve to.”

He did. Slowly, then again, until the sentence settled into his bones like an address he would never misplace. When she answered, it was not the lyric of a girl, not a performance. It was a woman’s truth, clean and entire.

“I love you, John. In the ordinary, in the weather, in the years.”

If there were any doubt left in him, it found nowhere to hide. He kissed her like someone who had been living on rations and had finally been handed a meal with no catch. When they sank into the bed’s familiar music; springs, cotton, the soft argument of sheets, he let the tide carry him. The night went thick and warm; the candle mapped constellations across the ceiling.

Later, sometime in that sweet, blue hour when even the sirens seem to nap, he lay with his cheek on her shoulder, fingers loosely threaded with hers. The radiator hissed; a neighbour upstairs laughed in a dream. He listened to the small domestic noises of a life and felt possessed by a gentle, bewildered gratitude.

“Old man confession,” he said into the quiet. “I thought love was either a con or an expensive hobby.”

“And now?” she asked, sleep close to her voice.

“Now it feels like a practice,” he said. “Like prayer, if I believed in anything.”

She turned her head, kissed his forehead where the years liked to sit. “Believe in this,” she murmured. “It’s here.”

He took a breath and felt it move through him without snagging on any old barbs. He looked at their hands, pale and warm against the dark quilt, and realized he had not braced for impact in a while. He’d simply…arrived.

Somewhere in the kitchen, the answering machine blinked red. Somebody from the precinct had probably called about paperwork that could survive until morning. He didn’t move. For once, the apocalypse of duty could wait. The night kept its quiet bargain, and the city blinked its neon benediction through the window, like a sign that knew both of their names.

Chapter Text

SVU PRECINCT - May 2, 2005 - 9:03 AM

The squad room was its usual morning symphony: phones ringing like impatient metronomes, CSU carts rattling past, a copier complaining about its own existence. Fluorescents hummed overhead, giving everyone a shade too much honesty.

They arrived together. Not in a parade, just… together. Talia with her long trench coat shrugged neatly off her shoulders, a coffee in each hand; John Munch with that dry half-smile that said he’d already judged the entire day and found it guilty of something. Their shoulders almost touched. Almost. The kind of ‘almost’ that said everything.

“You’re late,” Fin called from his desk without looking up. His voice carried that Queens gravel; half tease, half clock.

“By a minute,” Talia said, sliding a coffee onto his blotter with a little flourish. “I bought your silence.”

“Detective, my silence goes for more than a latte,” Fin said, finally glancing up, the corners of his mouth lifting. “But I’ll take it.”

Munch set his coat on the back of his chair and leaned in to Talia just enough that anyone pretending not to watch would have to admit they were watching. “Sweetheart, if he asks for more, we cut him off. Fiscal responsibility.”

“Public funds,” Talia murmured, eyes bright. “The city thanks you for your service, Sergeant.”

Olivia passed with a file and lifted an eyebrow that said, so we’re doing this now, out loud? Elliot hid a smirk. Melinda, on her way to the elevator, paused just long enough to aim a look at Talia that was equal parts fond and please hydrate. The quiet verdict from the room wasn’t surprise. It was a collective, yeah. We knew.

It didn’t stop the whispers. It never does. Age. Rank. The way a woman’s joy becomes a public utility; reviewed, taxed, and argued over by strangers.

“Doll,” Munch said, casual as a curtain, like the word belonged in daylight. He brushed something invisible from her sleeve. It was nothing. It was everything.

“You two need a sign?” Elliot tossed out, deadpan.

Munch didn’t miss. “We were going to put one on your desk, Stabler. ‘Beware of sentimentalism.’”

“Cute,” Elliot said, not even pretending not to grin.

The comments had started as soon as the cat left the bag; a bag that had never been closed, if we’re honest. He’s using her. She’s using him. It’s unethical. It’s weird. It’s hot. It’s wrong. Munch put people in their place the way he did everything; without raising his voice, in three sentences, under the hum of the lights, the air somehow ten degrees colder by the time he was done. He was dangerous like that. It wasn’t the badge. It was the mind.

And Talia; soft was never the same as small. She handled the looks with the grace of a woman who had practiced being underestimated and learned how to let it make her taller. She laughed at his worst jokes (even the sexist ones he trotted out like museum pieces, because he was a museum piece, and she loved the wreckage and the intelligence in equal measure), and when the day ended and the city stopped pretending it could swallow them, she thanked him in ways that were private and reverent and left his hands shaking for the right reasons. That was theirs. The door shut. The world stayed outside.

Fin’s folder hit her desk with a decisive tap. “Alright, Romeo and Juliet,” he said, sending Munch a sideways glance that translated to I’m watching you but I also kind of like you two; don’t make me say it. “We got a body. Riverside Park.”

The room shifted around those words like it always does. Love is a luxury here. Death is the timekeeper.

Talia’s mouth tightened as she flipped the cover. On top: a CSU photo clipped to a preliminary sheet. Young woman. Grass pressed flat under her limbs like a temporary grave had given up halfway through.

Munch went still beside her, that peculiar Munch-stillness where his instincts start slotting into place. “Who called it in?”

“Jogger, 02:45,” Fin said. “Name’s in the file.”

“Let me guess,” Munch said, dry. “He didn’t see anything.”

“Dark. Fog. It’s New York,” Fin said. Then, to Talia, gentler: “You ready?”

She met his eyes. “Always.”

There was that other complication, of course; the one no one could ignore. It was written in the file like a bruise.

NYPD - SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT

CASE FILE: 05-05-0219
LEAD: Det. Odafin Tutuola (16th Pct., SVU)
PARTNER (Assigned): Det. Talia Amari Volkov (16th Pct., SVU)
Command Oversight: Sgt. John Munch

VICTIM

• Name: Camila RASHID
• Age: 21
• Status: DOA at scene (pronounced by EMS 03:01)
• Affiliation: Columbia University, Political Science (Junior)
• Notes: Campus activism; Palestinian rights; labour organizing; anti-corporate protests; noted as “outspoken, intelligent; critical of admin policies.”
• Family: Parents in NJ; notified pending ME confirmation.

Incident

• Date/Time: Sun 05/01/2005; approx. 02:30 - 02:50
• Location: Riverside Park (exact coordinates logged), south of W. 115th Street entrance
• Condition at Scene: Partially clothed; blouse torn at collar seam; ligature marks on neck consistent with manual strangulation; shoes removed; body positioned supine with hands placed near abdomen (possible staging/ritual).
• No apparent robbery: Wallet (ID, cash), phone, jewellery present.

ME (Prelim) - OCME Manhattan; Case #: ME-05-2015

• Probable COD: Strangulation (pending full autopsy)
• Toxicology (screen): BAC 0.15%; benzodiazepine positive (suspected clonazepam; confirmation pending) - consistent with incapacitation prior to assault
• SAK: Positive for semen (presumptive); oral/vag/fingernail swabs collected; DNA processing underway
• Fingernails: Epithelial cells recovered (left index/right ring)
• Restraint: Wrist bruising (circumferential) suggestive of bindings

Evidence (CSU) - CSU Log: CSU-05-4421; Techs: O’Halloran, Ryan

• Victim clothing bagged and sealed (Chain #CSU-05-4421A)
• Semen swabs (Chain #CSU-05-4421B)
• Tie fragment: men’s silk; dark; torn diagonally; boutique label seam intact (high-end brand; SKU pending) (Chain #CSU-05-4421C)
• Cell phone recovered; powered down; transferred to TARU for extraction (Chain #CSU-05-4421D)

Digital/Video

• Security: Columbia campus cams show VRM (victim) exiting faculty reception at ~23:40 with Professor Daniel Langford (visiting lecturer). He trails her east along College Walk; coverage gaps after Gate 1.
• TARU: Cell extraction queued; SMS preserved; last outgoing 00:17 (“leaving soon, see you at 12th?” to contact “Leila <3”)

Witness

• Roommate: Provided notebook/journal. Contains multiple entries re: harassment by “a professor.” Final note (Friday): “If anything happens, tell Ameen.”

Persons of Interest (POI)

1. Professor Daniel LANGFORD - M, 45; Visiting Faculty, PolySci; reputation for “charming” mentorship of female students; on video with VRM post-reception; rumour of inappropriate behaviour; claims he left early no corroboration.
2. Tyler GRIGGS - M, 22; Columbia senior; fraternity treasurer; history of verbal arguments w/ VRM over activism; seen arguing outside campus bar night of incident; access to drugs/alcohol via frat.
3. Professor Ameen AMARI - M, 36; Sociology; VRM’s former professor; VRM confided harassment concerns; journal directs: “tell Ameen” if harmed; No direct evidence; elimination DNA recommended; Conflict note: Detective Talia Amari Volkov is his sister → document & oversight.
4. Unknown (Tie Donor/Owner): High-end brand indicative of trustees/donors/admin circle; could indicate status/means.

Administrative/Conflict

• COI Statement: T. Amari Volkov acknowledges familial relation to POI #3; agrees to proceed under Sgt. Munch oversight; will not lead interviews w/ Ameen Amari nor process his DNA; all decisions to be co-signed by Sgt. Munch/ADA.
• ADA Loop-In:Casey Novak notified; warrants probable (phone, dorm, frat house); campus counsel cooperative pending PR concerns.

Next Steps (Tasking)

• Fin/Talia: Canvass Riverside Park early-morning joggers/dog walkers; pull 24-hr camera nets along 116^th - 110^th; interview roommate & “Leila”; map victim’s reception timeline.
• Munch/Novak: Prepare warrants (Langford office/residence; frat house common/basement); boutique brand trace on tie fragment (subpoena vendor lists/donor events).
• CSU/ME: Rush DNA on SAK/fingernails; tox confirmation on benzo; time-of-death window narrowing.
• TARU: Full phone dump; cell tower hits between 11:30 - 02:45.

Talia exhaled slowly. The journal line sat on the page like a match head. If anything happens, tell Ameen.

Munch saw it, too. “We’ll handle the conflict,” he said, quiet, for her. “By the book.”

She nodded. It wasn’t fear. It was the ache of the personal, trying to claw its way into the professional. “I won’t touch his interview.”

Fin lowered his voice. “We’ll loop Casey. You’ll stay in the room if you want, or you won’t. Your call. But we do it clean.” He tapped the tie fragment entry. “This? That screams money.”

“In academia?” Munch said, deadpan. “Perish the thought.”

“Donors, trustees,” Talia murmured. “Endowments with names longer than the football field. If that tie is ours, it’s not a student. It’s a man who never misses a coat check.”

Munch glanced at her, pleased in that dry, proud way he didn’t wear on his sleeve. “Atta girl.”

She snorted. “That’s archaic.”

“So am I.” He leaned; voice pitched for her alone. “And you like antiques.”

If there were eyes on them, and there were always eyes on them, then let them see this: a man who was careful with her, and a woman who was not ashamed of being chosen in public. Let them do the arithmetic and call it sin. Let them mutter. They were busy doing the work.

“Alright,” Fin said, standing. “Class trip to Morningside Heights. We’ll start with the roommate and the reception guest list.”

“Try not to flirt with the dean,” Munch told Talia.

“I only flirt with men worth the paperwork,” she tossed back. Elliot choked on a laugh. Olivia didn’t bother hiding hers.

Cragen’s door cracked open, and took in the three of them like a man counting chess pieces. “Munch. Oversight, not overreach. Fin, I want this airtight. Amari…” His gaze softened almost imperceptibly. “Take care of yourself.”

“Yes, sir,” she said.

They rode the elevator down together, the doors reflecting the three of them in funhouse metal. Fin checked his notepad. Munch stared at the floor numbers like they’d confess. Talia adjusted her cuff, the little medallion bracelet at her wrist catching the light; Coptic engraving, a whisper of home, and told herself to breathe.

“You okay?” Fin asked, not looking up.

“Yes.” She considered. “No. Both.”

“Both is honest,” he said. He and Talia had that easy language; no fanfare, just a shared faith that the other would show up. “We’ll handle Ameen right.”

“I know.” She swallowed. “He didn’t do this.”

“We don’t know anything until we know,” Munch said, not unkindly. “That’s how we keep the roof over our heads.”

She met his reflection in the door. “And how we live with ourselves.”

The door slid open on the lobby’s echo. Outside, the city was grey and spring-raw. Sirens somewhere uptown stitched the air together. The three of them moved in step, the way people do when they’ve decided to be a single organism.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, FACULTY HOUSING - May 2, 2005 - 10:12 A.M.

The roommate was small in the doorway and trying to be braver than her hands allowed. She gave them the notebook like a talisman she was ready to be rid of. Talia held it delicately, as if paper could bruise.

“Did Camila ever say a name?” Talia asked, voice sand-soft.

“She said… ‘a professor,’ like it was a category,” the roommate said. “Sometimes she said ‘he follows me after events. Smiles, like it’s a dare.’”

“Langford?” Fin asked.

“She said he liked to get close at parties. But she didn’t say he followed her.”

“Who’s Leila?” Munch asked, flipping a page of his own notes.

“Her best friend from the South Asian Students’ group. They were supposed to meet at twelve. Camila texted ‘leaving soon’ and then she didn’t show.”

“Where?” Talia asked.

“12^th and Broadway. The diner.”

Munch wrote it down. “So, she leaves at 11:40 with Professor Charm, promises a friend she’ll be there by midnight, and turns up in Riverside before 3 a.m. That’s three hours for a campus that prides itself on cutting corners through parks like they’re safe.”

“College teaches optimism,” Fin said.

“Optimism is a gateway drug,” Munch answered, and Talia elbowed him lightly, a private reprimand and an even more private affection.

They took statements, calendared the day, carved the city into tasks. By noon, Novak had called back with a warrant list that could make a dean sweat. By one, TARU pinged with a first pass from Camila’s phone: a cluster of texts from an unsaved number; late Friday, early Saturday, short, insistent: “We should talk. You’re overreacting.” “I’m outside your building.” “Don’t be dramatic.”

They cross-checked the number. Department billing. Visiting faculty. Daniel Langford.

“Of course,” Munch said.

They ate bad sandwiches on a campus bench under an eager dogwood. Students hurried past with backpacks and earnest expressions. Somewhere a saxophone practiced the same scale into the open afternoon, stubborn and sweet.

“Tell me about the tie,” Fin said between bites.

“Boutique designer,” Talia said. “We need to run a subpoena on the brand’s client list and cross it with university donors and event RSVPs. If it’s a trustee night habit, someone stands out.”

“Money leaves a paper trail,” Munch said. “And paper never lies. People lie at paper.”

Talia shrugged. “Sometimes paper lies back.”

He looked at her, really looked, with that quicksilver flicker he got when she surprised him. “I’m corrupting you.”

“I’ve always been like this,” she said. “You just make it fun.”

A pair of undergrads walked by, whispering too loudly. Isn’t that…? She’s so young. He’s- The rest drowned under an ambulance wail crossing Broadway. Talia lifted her chin. Fin didn’t bother to turn. Munch’s jaw did a small, private thing.

“You don’t have to-” he began.

“I’m fine,” she said, and then, softer, for him, “I choose you. Every room. On purpose.”

He swallowed whatever joke he’d loaded. “You’ll get bored.”

“Not before you do,” she said. “And you don’t get bored. You get righteous.”

Fin stood, crumpling his sandwich paper. “Lovebirds, field trip. Dean’s office. Then frat row. Then Professor Charm.”

“ADA wants you on the Langford interview,” Talia said to Munch.

“Of course she does. I have a face that makes liars itchy.”

“You have a face that makes everyone itchy,” Fin said. “Come on.”

They moved. The case moved with them.

SVU PRECINCT - May 2, 2005 - 6:41 PM

By the time the day bent back toward evening, the fluorescents were harsher, coffee burned down to tar. TARU had sent over another dump: Langford’s calls spiked between 11:30 and 12:20 the night Camila died. The roommate had ID’d a donor who always wore silk ties ‘the colour of money.’ The dean had smiled like a defence attorney and offered up just enough to be helpful without giving anything that mattered.

Munch slid a printout across Talia’s desk. “Fraternity inventory. Tyler Griggs signed out enough liquor and pills to stock a pharmacy. Waiting on the lab to confirm if the benzos match Camila’s tox.”

“So, Langford for predation, Griggs for escalation, Unknown Money for staging,” Talia said, tapping her pen. “Or one guy who shops in all three aisles.”

Fin’s phone buzzed. He listened, frowned, then closed it. “Warner’s just confirmed clonazepam. Pills, not powder. And lividity says she was moved. Riverside wasn’t the primary scene.”

“Car,” Munch muttered. “Somebody thought the park was their private dumping ground.”

“Somebody who thought stripping her shoes would make her a symbol instead of a girl,” Talia said, voice quiet but hard.

Munch’s gaze met hers, steady. “We’ll make her a person again.”

Olivia walked up, a folder under her arm. “Novak wants Langford in first thing tomorrow morning.” Her eyes moved between them, careful. “And Ameen?”

The air shifted. Talia didn’t blink. “I can’t be in the room. But someone has to talk to him. She wrote his name down. That’s not nothing.”

Olivia hesitated, then looked at Fin. “You and Talia go tonight. Ask him about Camila, get his statement, see if he’ll consent to a voluntary swab. That way it’s clean before we ever bring him in.”

Fin nodded once. “On it.”

Munch’s jaw ticked, but he didn’t object. “You get him to swab, great. If not, I’ll line Novak up for a warrant. Either way, we cover the base.” He turned to Talia, voice softer, almost private. “You don’t need to prove anything to me, doll.”

She drew in a steady breath. “I know. But I need to prove it to myself.”

Fin clapped his notebook shut. “Alright. Columbia it is.”

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY - May 2, 2005 - 7:25 PM

The city had already turned indigo, a haze of spring dampness settling over the Upper West Side. Sirens flared and died in the distance, and the taxi horns on Broadway were sharper, more impatient, like the city was chewing on its own nerves.

Inside the unmarked, the ride uptown stretched long. Talia sat in the passenger seat, restless. She rolled her prayer beads in her pocket, thumb worrying the grooves smooth. Every so often she rubbed her fingers against her palm, as if trying to burn off the static in her chest.

Fin glanced over at her at a red light. “You’re about to wear your skin raw, T.”

“I’m fine.”

He snorted, soft but disbelieving. “Sure. And I’m mayor.”

Her jaw ticked. She didn’t answer. Instead, her eyes followed the blur of Riverside Park as they passed. She hadn’t seen her brother in months. Years, really. Not properly. He’d walked her dogs when she was buried in cases, kept her fridge stocked when she forgot what groceries were, called on Sundays. They maintained each other like artifacts; preserved, not lived with.

And now? Now he was inked into a case file. A potential suspect. A witness who had swallowed too much and said too little.

Her stomach twisted. He’d have a heart attack if he knew about Munch. The age, the rank, the cynicism; everything Ameen mistrusted. Everything she wanted.

“Relax,” Fin said, easing the car into a campus lot. “We’re not here to bury him. We’re here to clear him.”

She nodded, though the knot in her throat didn’t budge.

The Sociology wing smelled of varnished floors and chalk dust. Columbia’s Gothic stone loomed over them, judgment in limestone. Talia led Fin through the familiar maze until they reached the corner office: Ameen Amari, PhD - Associate Professor of Sociology.

She pushed the door open. Books lined the walls in suffocating ranks: sociology, philosophy, post-colonial studies, spines faded and worn, like soldiers keeping vigil. A brass lamp threw a circle of yellow over a desk cluttered with papers. The sharp scent of Arabic coffee curled from a small demitasse, steam rising like a warning.

Beside it: a black-and-white photo of their parents. A relic. Her father’s stern jaw, her mother’s serene eyes. Watching. Always watching.

Ameen rose slowly. His movements were precise, deliberate, as though measured against some internal scale. Wire-rimmed glasses caught the last light slanting through the blinds. Tweed jacket, elbows frayed, the scholar’s armour. He looked older than thirty-six; not in body, but in weight.

“Detective Tutuola. Little sister.” His voice was smooth, almost rehearsed. “Ziyāra ghayr mutawaqqaʿa.” (An unexpected visit / Arabic)

Talia rolled her eyes. She hated how he made her twelve again with just a phrase. “We need to ask you a few questions about one of your students. Camila Rashid.”

The smile faltered. His jaw tightened. He sat down, hands clasped too neatly on the desk. “Yes. Of course. I… heard. Terrible.”

“You taught her last semester,” Fin said, steady, flipping open his notebook. “Sociology and Political Dissent, right?”

“Yes.” Ameen’s nod was clipped. His eyes flicked to Talia, then away, like her presence stung. “She was bright. Passionate. Spoke up in class often.”

Talia knew that pause. That slight edit, the breath before truth got rewritten. Her eyes narrowed. “Akhūya…” (My brother / Arabic)

He avoided her gaze. “What more can I say? She was… good. Troubled, maybe. But bright.”

“Troubled how?” Fin pressed.

“She had strong opinions. Challenged authority. Columbia doesn’t always take kindly to that.”

The silence stretched. Talia’s voice slid in, low, deliberate. “ʾUl-lī ʾēlli ḥasal, iḥna ʿārfīn innaha kānit wāthʾa fīk.” (Tell me what happened, we know she trusted you / Arabic)

Ameen’s eyes flicked up, startled. He hesitated, then lowered his voice, switching tongues. “Ona skazala, chto za ney sledil kto-to. Professor.” (She said someone was following her. A professor / Russian)

Talia’s jaw clenched. “Langford?”

Ameen’s glance darted to Fin, then back down. He gave the barest nod. “She thought he had connections. Too many. She begged me not to make it worse.”

“You didn’t report it?” Fin asked, tone sharpening.

“She begged me not to!” The professor’s voice cracked, years of restraint snapping for a moment. “She said no one would believe her. You think I don’t know what that feels like?”

Talia stepped closer, her stance shifting from detective to sister. “Next time, Ameen… say something. Even if it’s nothing. Say something.”

His expression cracked, fissures running deep. His eyes, tired and furious and frightened, lifted to hers. “I know. I didn’t want her dragged through the mud. She was scared.”

Their father’s photograph sat silent on the desk between them, eyes that had lived through worse still judging. Finally, Ameen leaned back, voice lower, almost confessional. “You’re not going to find her killer in the classroom, Talia. You’ll find him in the boardroom. Or higher.”

Fin muttered, almost to himself, “Ain’t that always the damn case.”

The silence in the office thickened until even the hum of the radiator felt accusatory. Fin flipped his notebook, back to procedure. “Professor, we’re collecting elimination DNA from anyone connected. Standard procedure.”

Ameen froze. The steam from the coffee curled, a ghost rising. “You think I?”

“It’s standard,” Talia cut in quickly, keeping her voice even though her pulse spiked. “It protects you as much as it protects the case. Keeps your name clean.”

His eyes locked on hers, searching, burning with hurt. “You’re asking your brother for this?”

“I’m asking as a detective,” she said softly. “Don’t make me separate the two.”

Ameen’s jaw clenched. His hand curled into a fist on the chair’s armrest. For a long moment, she thought he’d refuse. But then he exhaled, defeated. “Fine. Let’s get it over with.”

Fin produced the sterile kit, efficient and wordless. The swab brushed Ameen’s cheek, quick and clinical. The evidence vial snapped shut with a click that sounded like judgment itself.

As they turned toward the door, Ameen’s voice followed her. Quieter. More human.
“It’s good to see you, Talusha.”

She didn’t turn back. Couldn’t. She just kept walking.

The night air bit sharper as they crossed the campus. Students hurried past with backpacks, oblivious, laughing too loudly, their world still intact. Back in the car, Fin started the engine but didn’t shift gears. He watched her for a beat. “What happened between you two?”

Talia stared out the window. The library’s stained glass glowed like a warning behind her. “Nothing.”

“Didn’t look like nothing.”

She exhaled, long and tired. “We haven’t seen each other in awhile. Now he’s a suspect. Just feels like… we can’t escape the law.”

Fin gave a low whistle, pulled the car into gear. “Family and police work, don’t ever mix clean.”

She nodded, lips pressed tight. Her heart ached in places she didn’t have words for. The rest of the ride was quiet. Fin respected the silence, eyes on the road. Talia let her head lean back against the seat. Her fingers tapped against her thigh, restless. She wanted comfort. Not her brother’s. Not the ghosts of their parents staring from old photographs. She wanted an old man’s arms, cynical and steady, waiting for her in the shadows of a Queens rowhouse.

And that thought, at least, was enough to make her breathe again.

Chapter Text

ASTORIA - May 2, 2005 - 9:28 PM

The neighbourhood was already rinsed in that humid, sodium-orange glow that makes Queens look like a photograph left too long in the sun. Someone on the block was frying onions; a radio inside a second-floor window hissed old Arabic love songs; the #Q19 sighed past like a tired animal. Talia stepped out of Fin’s unmarked and stood for a moment on the sidewalk, hands deep in her coat pockets, trying to breathe around the day.

She didn’t cry. She just… split along old seams. Seeing Ameen had been like picking up a book and finding a funeral notice pressed between the pages. It wasn’t only Camila anymore. It was Lana’s voice, brittle and bright; Kareem’s stubborn idealism; the last clean shirt of a father who died with too many truths in his chest; their mother lighting a candle in a church that always smelled like beeswax and forgiveness.

They all returned at once.

Fin didn’t say anything else? or you wanna talk? He just squeezed the steering wheel and said, “Text me if you need me.” She nodded, shut the door, and the unmarked pulled away with the quiet dignity of a friend who knew when to leave.

Her keys felt too loud in her hand. She climbed the stoop slowly, thumb brushing the blue glass evil eye charm swinging from the iron railing, a habit as old as superstition. When she unlocked the rowhouse, warmth greeted her first: heat from the radiators, dog breath, the faintest lingering ghost of incense from a candle put out that morning. It smelled like a life she was trying to deserve.

He was in the front room, exactly where her heart had hoped he would be.

John Munch sat on the couch under one of Talia’s knitted throws like a man pretending not to be comfortable. Reading glasses low on his nose, long fingers on a hardback whose spine had been handled a thousand times before her. “История России” or in old Cyrillic on the cover. One of her father’s. (History of Russia)

Ramses lay sprawled across the rug like a felled tree. Anubis had claimed the chair opposite like a judgmental uncle. Heka’s head rested heavy on Munch’s thigh, one ear cocked, a worshipful sentinel. And on the coffee table: a mug of tea going politely cold and a little dish with three sugar cubes he knew she would never take, but he put them out anyway.

“Hey, doll,” he said without looking up, because he could smell her before he saw her, the way houses recognize storms. His voice had a softness no precinct had ever earned from him.

She hung her coat by the door, and whatever thin scaffolding of professionalism had held her upright all day finally lowered itself to the floor. She crossed the room without words, took the book from his hands and set it down, and crawled into his lap like the safest place she’d ever known. The dogs shifted around them, a tide changing.

“What happened?” he asked, stroking her hair with the back of his fingers, gentle and unhurried, like he had all night. Like time worked for him.

She couldn’t answer without breaking. So, she didn’t. She pressed her face to his neck and held on, the way a person holds onto a railing on a boat, leaning into the fact of it. His shirt smelled like clean cotton and the winter of old books, and beneath that, the stubborn warmth that had made her choose him against every practical reason not to.

He didn’t press. He just slid the throw more snug around her shoulders, reclaimed the book with his other hand, and began to read in his wry Baltimore baritone, translating under his breath when the margin notes ran Russian: a passage about kings who believed they were gods, and peasants who knew better; about history repeating not because we forget, but because men in expensive ties insist on encores.

“-and here’s the moral, sweetheart,” he muttered, skimming. “Power always thinks it’s a love story.”

Something in her chest came unclenched. The cadence of him reading smoothed the day’s sharpest edges. Soon the only sounds were the radiator ticking, Ramses’ theatrical sighs, and her breath evening out in a rhythm that belonged to sleep even if she wasn’t sleeping yet. She felt herself shiver and didn’t know why until he pulled the throw up to her jaw.

“Talk to me,” he said finally, not a demand, an invitation.

She shifted, cheek still against him. “I saw Ameen.”

“That explains the haunted look.” He set a finger as a bookmark and closed the cover. “How’d the man of letters take police procedure?”

“He let Fin swab him.” A humourless huff. “He hated it. He looked at me like I’m the sheriff of a town that burned his library.”

“You’re dating the sheriff,” he said, deadpan.

“You’re not the sheriff,” she murmured, eyes closing. “You’re the historian who keeps telling me the townspeople are lying.”

“Fair.”

Silence laid down like a second blanket. Outside, a car door slammed. Somewhere else, a neighbour laughed. The city kept happening.

Talia took in a careful breath. “He thinks I betrayed him by asking, even though I didn’t. He thinks I chose the badge over him, even though I didn’t.” She swallowed. “And there’s a terrible part of me that thinks I did.”

Munch’s hand paused on her hair, then resumed, steady as metronome. “You didn’t. You chose the truth. He raised you to. He just forgot what that looks like up close.”

She let a small noise out, the kind that never leaves the throat. “Ameen and Samir still blame me for Lana. They won’t say it, but they…” She stopped, palms flattening against his chest like she needed a wall. “They think I could’ve stopped her. And I blame them for Kareem. For filling his head with war and righteousness and not enough ways to stay alive.”

He didn’t say you’re wrong or that’s unfair. He was too honest for that. He let the truth be the ugly animal it was and stroked its head anyway.

“Listen to me,” he said at last, voice roughened by care. “Grief is a crooked accountant. It always misplaces the numbers. It will bill you for every death in the room because you’re the one who keeps showing up to pay.”

Her eyes stung. She blinked until the ceiling stopped swimming. A small icon of Saint Mary on the mantel glinted as if it knew secrets. They sat like that until the clock on the shelf claimed more minutes. He read her another paragraph. She dozed and didn’t. He was present in that Munch way; hyperaware, dry, protecting her with sarcasm as if it were a shield that had worked once and might again.

When she finally spoke, it was almost a whisper. “I felt alone before today. I feel… lonelier now.”

“Not alone,” he said. “Lonely. Different diagnosis.” A beat. “One is a fact. The other’s a hallucination. We treat them different.”

“How do you treat it?” She knew the answer; she wanted to hear him say it.

He tilted his head to bump her temple with his. “You let the old man read to you until your ghosts get bored.”

A laugh, small and real. “You’re not that old.”

“Tell Cragen. He keeps counting my birthdays like evidence.”

She exhaled, and with it came confession. “I needed you tonight. More than church, more than quiet, more than being right.” She swallowed. “Weird.”

“It’s only weird if you think you don’t deserve it.” He kissed the crown of her head, brief and reverent. “You do.”

She was quiet a long time. Then: “Case is going to take us through the boardroom.”

“Always does.” He nudged the closed book. “Money has a better education than conscience. We’ll prove it again tomorrow.”

“Langford is slime,” she said, fatigue sharpening her cynicism. “Griggs is noise.” Her fingertip worried the frayed edge of the throw. “The tie, whoever owns it, feels like the point. A donor. A trustee. A man who’s never told the truth without a tuxedo on.”

“There she is,” Munch murmured, pleased. “My favourite and most beautiful detective. The one who gets to the thesis.”

She looked up at him then, truly looked, the way you look at something you’re afraid of losing. The glasses. The comb-over that refused to accept defeat. The mouth that had said terrible, necessary things to terrible, necessary men for decades and somehow still knew what gentleness was for.

“I choose you,” she said, sudden and clear, like a vow spoken into empty pews after hours. “In every room. On purpose.”

His expression shifted, just a fraction, something startled in a man who has seen too much to be surprised. He cleared his throat like he could hide it.

“Good,” he said lightly. “Because I already told my houseplants.”

She grinned into his shirt. “You don’t have houseplants.”

“Exactly.” He thumbed a lock of her hair behind her ear. “You gonna tell me what Ameen said that hurt you worst? Or you want me to guess?”

She considered. Then, softly: “He called me little sister like it’s my crime. He used Arabic like a leash. Then Russian as a shield. He told me the killer is in a boardroom and not a classroom, like he’s asking me to stop looking at the men he eats lunch with.”

“You’ll look wherever the blood says,” Munch replied. “And if the blood points to the boardroom, we’ll bring handcuffs small enough to fit over cufflinks.”

“Poetry,” she said flatly.

“I contain multitudes.”

Heka snored. Somewhere in the back, the refrigerator knocked like a shy roommate. Anubis sneezed at dust motes. Ramses rolled to show his belly, and Munch obliged with absent-minded affection.

“You should sleep,” he said eventually. “You’re dangerous when you’re tired.”

“I’m dangerous always,” she murmured, eyes heavy.

“True,” he said, almost proud. “But now you’re also mine.”

She made a content sound and then, because she could, because it was safe here, because he’d earned every private word she would ever give him, she added, “I wanted to be with you more than I wanted to be right today.”

He didn’t make a joke. He held her closer.

After a while, she stirred. “Read me the part about revolution again.”

He opened the book without needing to hunt the page; he’d been paying attention. “It says,” he paraphrased, mouth curved, “that revolution sounds like music until somebody has to pay the band.”

“That’s wrong,” she said on a yawn that made her eyes wet. “It sounds like women who are tired of being afraid.” A beat. “Camila wasn’t dramatic.”

“No,” he agreed. “She was correct. Men like Langford call correctness hysteria when it refuses to sit down.”

“We’ll make her a person again,” Talia said, that quiet promise from the precinct returning to perch on the couch with them, lighter now that it had a place to land.

“We will,” he said. “Then we’ll make the right man very small in a very bright room.”

She nodded against him. “Tomorrow we hit Langford with the texts and the timeline. Fin and I will run the park again at dawn; dog walkers, cyclists, anyone who thinks insomnia is a hobby. Novak’s got the boutique subpoenas. Trustees will pretend they don’t shop like mortals.”

“And I’ll be right behind you,” Munch said, “waving a warrant and asking donors if they’ve ever met a tie they didn’t want to strangle someone with.”

She smiled, already half-asleep. “You’re terrible.”

“I’m effective.” He angled the throw higher, turned down the lamp, left only the low amber of the standing light by the icon. The room shrank to their breathing and the sacred domestic: dogs, books, a chipped mug, a life.

In another house, in another city, she might have slept alone and called it virtue. Here, she slept held and called it survival. Her breathing slowed. The dogs settled into the kind of silence that means they’re listening for you, so you don’t have to. Munch watched her face ease and felt a ridiculous surge of gratitude toward a world that had, for once, put him in the right living room at the right hour.

“This is home,” he said to no one, because men like him don’t confess to people. The admission felt like setting down a weapon he was tired of carrying. “And by God, I love you.”

He didn’t expect an answer. He got one anyway; muffled, dream-thick, trilingual, the way her heart sometimes spoke when the day’s armour finally unlatched.

“Baḥibbak…” she breathed, a smile tucking itself into her voice. (I love you / Arabic)

“Good,” he whispered, and kissed her hair. “Hold that thought. Tomorrow we go to war.”

Outside, the metro rattled somewhere far off. A streetlight flickered and steadied. In the small kingdom of the rowhouse, under the watchful eyes of saints and dogs, they slept like conspirators who planned to win.

SVU PRECINCT - May 3, 2005 - 8:10 AM

The squad room had that morning-after look: yesterday’s coffee ringed into brown halos, fluorescent lights buzzing like gnats, a copier groaning as if the truth were heavy stock it couldn’t quite swallow. Phones rang. CSU carts rattled. Somewhere, someone laughed too loud at something that wasn’t funny. It was New York at 8 A.M., and judgment had already punched in.

Talia arrived a few minutes behind Munch, on purpose. He’d slipped out ahead of her, a gentleman’s calculus in the face of office eyes. The new brass had learned old tricks; the woman he loved didn’t need the extra commentary over her first cup of caffeine. Still, the room clocked her. The room always did.

“Amari.” Cragen called her over with a tilt of his head. His voice was steady, paternal steel. “Observation only. Understood?”

“Understood, sir.” She smoothed a cuff, felt the medallion bracelet kiss her wrist. The metal was cool, a small reliquary against the heat in her chest.

They moved toward the hallway, the one that funnelled you toward the box where words either saved you or sharpened your fall. Casey fell into step beside Talia, a slim red folder tucked under her arm like a scalpel.

“You’re here as a detective,” Casey said, tone soft but unarguable. “Not as his sister.”

“I know.” Talia’s throat worked. “I’m fine.”

Casey’s mouth did a sympathetic quirk. “We both know that’s not required.”

Behind the glass, the box was all angles and interrogation geometry. Fin stood planted, solid as a lamppost. Munch leaned with the casual indifference of a cat who knew exactly how much the canary weighed. Across from them sat Ameen, a scholar’s neatness that already looked rumpled by the room.

Talia’s breath snagged. “Oh God,” she whispered, hand covering her mouth. The words fogged the glass and vanished.

Casey’s shoulder brushed hers, a quiet human thing. “Breathe, Talia.”

In the box, Fin’s voice was the one a man could trust if he deserved to. “Professor Amari. Appreciate you coming down. We’ll make this quick.”

Munch’s dry baritone cut in, sanded smooth by scepticism. “Quick’s a relative term. You academics love lectures.”

Ameen’s mouth twitched. “If you’re hoping for a lecture, Sergeant, you’ll be disappointed.”

Fin slid a slim folder forward. He didn’t open it yet; sometimes the weight of paper spoke louder than the words inside. “Camila Rashid. Student of yours. Her journal says: ‘If anything happens, tell Ameen.’ That’s heavy. You want to explain why she trusted you that much?”

“She confided in me,” Ameen said, defensive already, the scholar’s spine straightening like an old argument. “About harassment. She asked me not to escalate.”

“You mean,” Munch said, voice conversational in the way a scalpel is smooth, “she begged you to protect her, and you decided silence was safer. That about right, Professor?”

Fin didn’t give him time to bristle. “She ends up dead in Riverside. Benzos in her system. Ligature marks on the neck. You can see why this looks bad, right?”

“I didn’t touch her,” Ameen snapped. The syllables hit the table like dropped coins.

Munch leaned in just enough to make the air worse. “That’s the problem with smart men; you think denial is enough. DNA has a way of grading on a curve none of us wrote.” He let it hang. “We already have your elimination swab.”

Behind the glass, Talia felt the floor tip a degree. She pressed her palm to the cool, watched her own ghost hand against the reflection. Cragen’s presence flanked her, silent guardrail.

In the box, something in Ameen cracked. “She was terrified of Langford.” He said the name like it tasted bad. “She told me he followed her, smiled like it was a game. I wanted to protect her.”

“So why not report him?” Fin asked, no heat, just the weight of the obvious.

“Because I know how this system works!” Ameen’s control blew open. He surged forward, caught himself, fingers whitening around the chair’s edge. “You bury women like her in bureaucracy until the only thing left is her reputation in shreds.”

His head turned. He didn’t look at the glass, he looked through it, the way you look at a childhood room you don’t live in anymore. He knew she was there. He always knew.

“And I wasn’t going to drag her through that,” he finished, quieter, a man out of ammunition.

Munch’s reply was surgical. “You’re right about one thing. This system’s a graveyard for women who speak up. But that’s not your excuse. That’s your confession. You chose silence. She chose you. And now she’s dead.”

Silence expanded, a living thing. Even the HVAC seemed to hold its breath. Ameen’s face shifted; the professor’s mask slid and something raw peered out; guilt, fear, an old grief with a new name.

Fin closed the folder with a patient tap. “We’ll wait for the DNA. In the meantime, don’t leave the city.”

Ameen’s voice dropped back into its register, stripped down. “I didn’t kill her.”

“We’ll let the evidence teach us who did,” Munch said, straightening. “Evidence doesn’t grade on a curve.”

The chair scraped. It was the small violence that made Talia move. She stepped into the doorway before she could talk herself out of it.

“Enough.” Her voice was low but carried, an older authority than rank. “If you’re not charging him, let him go.”

Her eyes stayed on Munch. He met them levelly, reading her like he always did; line by line, with care and unkind accuracy. Behind her, Cragen gave the slightest nod: proceed.

Munch stepped back from the table, ceded inches that meant a mile. “Seems you’re free to go, Professor… for now.”

Ameen stood too fast, the chair legs skittering. He moved past Talia; too close on purpose, the way family always passes, brushing the bruise so they can say it was an accident. She pivoted after him into the outer room, where desks and detectives formed a public arena.

“Ameen, istanna!”  The Arabic words landed like memory, too intimate for fluorescent lighting. (Ameen, wait! / Arabic)

Ameen stopped, shoulders rigid, refusing to give her his face. His words came low at first, heavy enough to shake the air. “You shame me.”

Talia froze, hand half-lifted, pulse pounding in her ears. Then he turned, and the look in his eyes was fire and ice all at once. His voice rose, hard and merciless. “You shame the name of Amari-Volkov. Do you even understand what that means? In our family? In our culture? Honor is everything. It is what we carried across continents, through war, through exile. It is what kept us alive when we had nothing else. And you-” his hand cut through the air like a blade, “-you drag it through the dirt in front of strangers. In front of outsiders.”

The room had gone still. Phones rang, unanswered. Detectives looked up from desks, their eyes darting between the professor and his sister.

“How dare you.” His voice cracked, then sharpened, each word cutting into her. “Your father would be ashamed; his prized child, his brilliant one, hiding behind a badge and pointing it at her own blood. Your mother would be mortified; her daughter turning against her brother in front of the world.”

He stepped closer, towering over her in that old way that never needed violence to crush. “And Lana. Kareem.” His voice broke on the names, then hardened again. “They are dead, Talia. And you were supposed to protect them. You were supposed to be strong for them. Instead, you failed. Their blood is on your hands, not mine. And now? now you come here to accuse me, to call me a murderer, as if you haven’t destroyed enough of this family?”

The words hit like stones. Every sentence a lash across her skin.

Talia felt herself folding inward, shrinking. She wasn’t Detective Amari now. She was the little sister who had stood silent while her brother thundered in their parents’ kitchen, the one who had lowered her eyes because to look back was rebellion. The New Yorker in her wanted to rise, to spit fire, to fight. But the Russian, the Egyptian in her, the daughter raised on obedience and family hierarchy, kept her rooted, silent, enduring.

And in her silence, the squad room heard guilt. They always did. Her throat burned. Her lips pressed tight. She couldn’t argue. How could she? He had taken their father, their mother, Lana, Kareem; all the ghosts she carried, and stacked them into a weapon she could not parry.

Then, another voice.

“Professor.”

Munch.

Not loud. Not sharp. Quiet. Lethal.

“Refrain from raising your voice at my detective.”

The my was deliberate, a small stake in the ground. A claim and a protection, both. Heads turned at my, the way they turn at the first rumble of a train.

Ameen’s retort died on his tongue; maybe he saw what the room saw, Munch a half-step closer than politeness warranted, Fin behind him a whole wall. Maybe he heard the courtroom in Casey’s stillness, the command in Cragen’s quiet. Maybe he just remembered there were too many witnesses for him to say the next cruel thing and still like himself in the morning.

The patriarch in him bristled, but the room wasn’t his kitchen, and Talia wasn’t his to control anymore. She was NYPD. She was Munch’s partner. She was more than his little sister.

He swallowed down whatever fury still clung to his tongue. And with a stiff jaw, Ameen turned and walked out, the elevator swallowing him whole. The room exhaled. Then life stuttered back in; phones, paper, someone’s chair squeaking like it had missed its cue.

“You okay?” Fin asked, already knowing the answer and asking anyway, because that’s friendship.

Talia loosened her jaw by force. “Yeah.” The word cracked. She steadied it. “Langford’s next?”

Fin’s eyes searched her face. He found enough there to trust the lie. He nodded. “Let’s go remind a visiting professor what ‘visiting’ means.”

They moved, the way professionals do; forward, not because forward is easier, but because backward is a luxury the work doesn’t grant.

As they crossed to the other interrogation room, Munch stepped alongside Talia without the theatre of asking permission. He didn’t touch her; he didn’t need to. Presence is sometimes the most intimate thing in the world.

“Doll,” he said, pitched for her alone, a low current under the room’s noise. “You want five minutes to go break something I won’t ask about?”

Talia’s mouth twitched. “Later.”

He studied her profile, cataloguing the damage like a curator who knows what varnish can’t hide. “You didn’t deserve that.”

She turned her face just enough to meet his eyes. A thousand things lived there; anger, love, the ache of old funerals, the stubbornness of living anyway. “He’s my brother.”

“Today he was a man who forgot that.” Munch’s gaze flicked to the closed elevator, then back. “You didn’t forget who you are.”

“Who am I?”

His mouth softened, almost a smile. “The woman who keeps me honest.” A beat. “Also, the detective who’s about to ruin a predator’s morning. Pick whichever helps.”

She huffed the smallest breath that wanted to be a laugh when it grew up. “Go sit with Casey. I’ll meet you in the box.”

“You like ordering me around.”

“Command structure.” She straightened her shoulders. “Sergeant.”

There was a glint in his eyes, affection dressed in sarcasm. “Yes, Detective.”

He peeled off toward Casey and Cragen. Fin bumped her shoulder with his knuckles: ready? She was.

They entered the second box. On the far side of the glass, Casey conferred in a low voice with Munch; Cragen folded his arms, the set of his jaw signaling do it right. Talia allowed herself one thought like a hand on a doorknob: tonight, his arms, her breath, the quiet. Then she let it go. The room required all of her.

The door opened. Daniel Langford slid into the interrogation chair with the frictionless ease of a man who believed his failures were charming if properly narrated. Mid-forties, salon haircut, the smug tilt that comes with donor cocktails and an inbox full of adoration.

“Professor Langford,” Fin said, neutral. “Thanks for coming in.”

Langford smiled at Talia, not at Fin. “I respect the NYPD. And your… diversity initiatives.” His eyes flicked to her hair, her skin, like they were part of the décor.

Talia sat, folded her hands. “We asked you here because you were one of the last to see Camila Rashid alive.”

“Tragedy,” he said, with the careful cadence of someone auditioning for empathy. “She was… intense. Many causes. Very passionate.”

“Passion didn’t strangle her,” Fin said. “Someone did.”

Langford’s attention slid back to Talia, as if the man in the room were scenery. “I walked her out of a reception. Campus can be unsafe at night.”

“Chivalry,” Talia said, tone unreadable. “How old-fashioned.”

He tried a laugh. “You know how students are.”

“We do.” Her voice cooled. “We also know you texted her late Friday and again after midnight Saturday.” She let the printouts sit by her elbow, not offering them yet. “We’ll get to that.”

Langford’s gaze landed on her badge, then drifted to her hands; no ring, and then, because men like him always looked for leverage, to the two-way mirror, as if the answer to what she was worth would be reflected there.

“Professor,” Fin said, drawing the line back to business, “tell us about the gap between 11:40 and midnight. She promised a friend she’d meet her at twelve. She never did. Where were you?”

“Home,” he said. “Alone.” The oldest alibi. The weakest.

Talia opened the folder then, slow. Text bubbles printed in black-and-white stared up like dull eyes: We should talk. You’re overreacting. I’m outside your building. Don’t be dramatic.

She slid the page forward. “This your number?”

Langford’s silence was answer enough.

Behind the glass, Munch watched Talia work, no smile now, just the steady focus of a man entrusting someone with his last unbroken thing. Casey’s lips were a thin line. Cragen didn’t blink.

Talia met Langford’s gaze and didn’t look away. “Here’s what I think. You followed her after the reception. You had reason to believe she’d go quiet; she’d already told you she didn’t want trouble. You’re a careful man, Professor. Careful enough to make trouble for other people and call it mentorship.”

Langford bristled. “This is absurd.”

“Absurd is a rich word,” Talia said. “Make sure you save some for court.”

Fin’s phone buzzed once. He read the text, lifted his eyes to Talia, then to the glass. A small nod: not yet, but soon.Evidence crawled at the speed of bureaucracy and miracles; you learned to speak to the room while the lab spoke to the dead.

They pressed. He parried. It would be a long morning. It would end where these mornings always end, somewhere between paperwork and the beginning of justice.

When they stepped out at last for a breath that wouldn’t come, the hallway felt colder. Talia leaned a shoulder to the cinderblock, let her head tip back. Fin stood alongside her, a human bracket.

“You good?” he asked.

“No,” she said honestly. “But I’m working.”

“That’s the job.”

She nodded. The elevator dinged somewhere down the hall, ordinary as a dropped dime. She thought of Ameen’s words thrown like stones, of her mother’s icon at home, of her father’s old lectures about courage and consequence. She thought of Camila, who had written a man’s name in a journal like a life raft and drowned anyway.

And she thought of Munch; the sarcastic, cynical man who loved her without flinching and made the room safer by standing in it.

She pushed off the wall. “Let’s get him to say his first real lie.”

Fin’s mouth quirked. “I thought he already did.”

“Not the kind we can nail down.” She straightened. “That one’s coming.”

They walked back toward the glass, toward the box, toward the terrible, necessary work. The day was long. The city was watching. And love; quiet, bruised, stubborn, threaded through the noise like a promise she would keep when the lights went out.

Chapter Text

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, FRATERNITY ROW - May 4, 2005 - 5:28 PM

Frat Row held the day hostage even as the light bled out of it; porches layered with plastic cups, sticky railings, the sweet-sour film of last night’s keg on concrete. Music leaked in stubborn loops from half-shut windows, bass thudding like a dull heartbeat. Fin and Talia walked the cracked sidewalks with cop eyes and tired feet, knocking on doors that opened too slowly for people with nothing to hide.

“Detectives,” said a boy in a baseball cap, eyes sliding over Talia’s badge to her face like he was grading her on a curve she’d never asked to be on. “We already talked to campus security.”

“You’re getting an upgrade,” Fin said, even. “You know Camila Rashid?”

The boy shrugged, smirked, looked past them to check if anyone was watching him be important. “She’s at every protest. Campus theatre.”

Talia’s expression didn’t move. She’d spent years building that stillness. “Theatre doesn’t leave ligature marks.”

Door to door they went, and every house felt the same: a curated mess, a scripted innocence. Brothers contradicted each other in separate conversations, the way amateurs rehearse but forget that truth doesn’t need cue cards. Two mentioned pills passed around like candy at late-night parties. “Midterms, finals; whatever,” one said, feigning altruism. “People get stressed.”

“Stress doesn’t show up as clonazepam in a dead woman’s tox,” Fin replied, jotting names, times, who said what in which room.

Tyler Griggs made them wait. When he did open the door, he wore privilege like cologne. The smile was just wide enough to pretend it was generous.

“Mr. Griggs,” Talia said. “We’re canvassing. Where were you Saturday night after eleven-thirty?”

“Hanging with my brothers.” His gaze did a lazy loop; Fin, then Talia, then a flick at her hair as if cataloguing things he could someday admire out loud. “We had people over after the reception.”

“People,” Fin echoed. “Names?”

Griggs spread his hands. “It’s a fraternity, not a logbook.”

“Do people take benzos at your parties?” Talia asked, mild.

“People take what people take.” He flashed a grin. “You know how college is.”

“Remind me,” Talia said. “I missed that version.”

Fin let the silence stretch until it grew teeth. “We’ve got statements you hand out pills ‘when the cause gets noisy.’ Your words in a chat thread: ‘couple K-pins and they’ll calm the revolution.’ That ring a bell?”

Griggs’ smirk faltered before he remembered it was glued on. “Jokes,” he said. “You ever heard of jokes?”

“Yeah,” Fin said. “Try a new one.”

Later, TARU gave them the receipts. A group chat where Griggs joked about ‘calming the revolution.’ The tox screen from Camila’s body matched exactly. Their disgust hardened into procedure. The stink of sour beer and privilege hardened into evidence.

On the sidewalk, dusk finally took the block. Talia tipped her face up into the thin blue of the sky and exhaled. Fin watched the fraternity with a patience that said he’d seen all of this before and learned to let the paper do the punching.

“You’re quiet,” he said.

“I’m busy not breaking things,” she said.

He nodded. “That’s the job.”

Her phone buzzed. MUNCH lit the screen. She answered without moving away from Fin, not hiding and not performing either.

“Report,” Munch said, voice warm gravel.

“Frat row,” Talia replied. “Pills at parties. Griggs thinks activism is a scheduling conflict.”

Munch made a sound that could have been a laugh if he spared those. “Parasites always think the host is dramatic.”

She smiled, small. “You eating dinner?”

“I’ll eat when you’re back to insult my cooking.”

“You don’t cook.”

“You don’t let me.” A beat, softer. “You good, sweetheart?”

She did the inventory; hands steady, spine straight, heart messy. “Working.”

“That’ll do,” he said, and the line went to a quiet that wasn’t lonely. She tucked the phone away and looked at Fin, who pretended to be very interested in the porch railing’s chipped paint.

“I didn’t hear a thing,” he said, deadpan.

“You heard everything.”

“Yeah.” He started back toward the car. “Let’s go tell Novak her warrant’s going to need a bigger stapler.”

They left Frat Row with the sun finally losing the argument.

CSU LAB, ONE POLICE PLAZA - May 4, 2005 - 9:28 AM

Morning ground itself down the way mornings do at One PP; screen doors of cubicles half open, the taste of burnt coffee on everyone’s tongue, CSU’s hum like a second electricity. Talia and Fin stood shoulder to shoulder as a tech slid a report across steel.

“Silk,” the tech said, tapping the photo of the torn fragment. “Limited edition. Uptown boutique. We got the manufacturer to confirm a micro-run.”

“Who buys it?” Fin asked.

“People who don’t read the right column on the check,” the tech said. “Novak’s subpoena pulled three trustees on the client list.”

The names glowed from the page like they always do when money thinks it’s invisible. One outshone the others by sheer audacity: Harlan Pierce, senior board member, gala regular, mentorship dinners that somehow never made it onto official calendars.

Photos surfaced: the faculty reception under cheap up lights, Camila at a table, Harlan Pierce leaning in too close, that tie unmistakable. He’d bought two from the boutique. He wore one that night.

“Money always leaves trails,” Talia said, studying the printout, the neat knot of the tie like a noose in miniature.

“Mmh,” Fin answered. “It just hires someone to call them destiny.”

They ferried the package up to the war room, where Novak set down her coffee like a judge about to rule. She spread photos, receipts, the boutique’s confirmation. “Purchaser: Pierce,” she said. “Board of Trustees. Wears that exact tie in this exact photo, on the exact night.”

Munch, who’d been leaning at the edge of the table like a habit, deadpanned, “Langford’s a leech, Griggs is a parasite, but this guy? He’s the whole ecosystem.”

“Let’s collapse it,” Novak said, eyes sharp.

Cragen nodded from the doorway, a general counting ammunition. “Get me probable cause I can read to a judge without blushing.”

“We’ll need TARU’s phone-map,” Fin said. “Pierce’s device near Riverside around two-thirty.”

“Already pinged,” Novak answered. “And the boutique’s delivery invoices; they had a tailor flag a repair at Pierce’s town house two months ago. Same line.”

“Predators don’t hide,” Talia murmured. “They sponsor.”

Munch glanced at her, the almost-smile that meant she’d said something he wished he’d said first. “Write that on the warrant,” he told Novak. “Judges love poetry.”

Novak didn’t smile. “Judges love paperwork. You two; Frat Row again, grab anything we missed. I’ll go charm a boutique into letting me read their ledger like it’s a love letter.”

She left in a wake of legal intent. Fin and Talia gathered their coats. Munch followed them a step into the hallway and lowered his voice.

“Eat something,” he told Talia.

“I did.” She didn’t.

He studied her face, mapping that stubborn light he pretended not to adore. “Bring me something to ruin Pierce’s morning. I’ll make you breakfast tomorrow and won’t call it dinner.”

“Deal,” she said, and carried the small warmth of it like a lighter in her pocket as they went.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY - May 5, 2005 - 9:02 AM

The corridor to the Sociology department smelled like floor wax and old paper, agency and age cooked into the varnish. Light fell through tall windows in pale bands, turning dust into constellations. Students drifted past in backpacks and hopeful voices, their laughter pitched too high for the day Talia carried in her chest.

She paused outside Ameen Amari, PhD - Associate Professor of Sociology, the hand-lettered nameplate he refused to replace with a plastic one, and wiped her palm once on the inside of her trench. She hadn’t slept, not really. Sleep had been a room with the lights off and the TV still whispering; her mind kept showing reruns of the day Ameen’s voice raised in the precinct; father’s name used like a weapon, mother’s name like a bell struck too hard. In the quiet elevator ride home, she had wanted only two arms and a voice that made sarcasm feel like shelter. She’d found both; he’d poured her into bed like an apology and let the city keep its judgments.

Now there was this. She knocked, two soft raps.

“Da,” came the answer, automatic. Then, “Yes.” (Yes / Russian)

She pushed in. Ameen sat behind the desk in tweed, wire-rims catching the light. He didn’t look up right away. His posture had changed; the scholar’s neatness was still there, but it had a stress fracture running through it. Seventy-two hours ago, he’d been a professor with theories; now he was a man on the perimeter of a homicide. It makes even careful men older.

“You busy?” Talia asked. Her voice came out smaller than she intended, a younger register that betrayed the shape of their history.

“Too busy to hear accusations.” He kept his eyes on the monitor. “Too busy to be accused of a crime I didn’t commit.”

The sigh tugged itself out of her. She closed the door behind her and crossed the room, each step measured, her badge weightless and heavy all at once. Outside, a student’s rolling bag thumped across a seam in the hallway floor, the sound like a metronome for grief.

“I didn’t come to accuse you,” she said. “I came to tell you the DNA didn’t match.”

Ameen’s fingers froze above the keyboard. The relief that moved over his face was quick, almost shameful in how it revealed him. Then the shutters came down again. “And you thought it would?” His tone was careless; his eyes were not.

“No,” she said truthfully. “But the file needed to think so, if only long enough to search you and set you free of it.”

He made a sound; half scoff, half hurt, and leaned back, finally looking at her. “You talk like a detective.”

“I am one.”

“You are my sister.” The words squeezed through his teeth, small and hard.

She swallowed. “I can be both.”

They stared at each other across the fault line of the desk. On its surface lay a neat stack of blue books from last semester; finals he hadn’t yet returned, and a memo from the dean’s office couched in consultation language, the institutional dialect of plausible deniability.

Talia moved to the picture. She did what she’d done since she was small: picked it up, tracing their mother’s cheekbone, their father’s jaw with her thumb. “Bābā ʿallimna ma neskutsh.” (Baba taught us not to be silent / Arabic)

 “The state broke him for that.” His voice lost volume and gained weight. “You should remember.”

“I remember,” she said, still looking at the photo. “That’s why I don’t look away.”

Silence sat down with them. The radiator hissed like an old man complaining; a far siren braided itself into the morning air. Talia set the photo back exactly where it had been, aligning the wooden corner with a ghost mark on the desk; ritual precision, as if accuracy could order pain.

Ameen stood abruptly, restless energy breaking the chair’s quiet. He crossed to the narrow window and stared at the campus green, students moving like bright pieces on a board. “Ona prikhodila ko mne.” (She came to me / Russian)

He didn’t turn. “Camila. She came to my office after hours with the lights off, sitting where you’re standing, whispering like someone was outside listening. ‘A professor follows me,’ she said. ‘He smiles like it’s a dare.’”

“Langford,” Talia said. Not a question.

“That was the name she didn’t say and made me hear anyway.” He rubbed at his glasses with the hem of his sleeve, a small ruin of his usual care. “She begged me not to escalate.” He faced her now, hands open, empty. “You heard me tell them that three days ago. You were behind the glass, weren’t you?”

Talia nodded once.

“Then you heard me say the rest.” His voice thinned. “That I didn’t trust the system to love her more than it loves quiet. That I couldn’t bear to feed another girl into the machine we all pretend is justice until it spits her out as an inconvenience.”

“You’re not wrong,” Talia said. “But you’re not right enough.”

He exhaled, a laugh with no humour in it. “There’s the badge.”

She let it land. “There’s the body, Ameen.”

The words hung between them, cold and holy. He flinched, barely.

“You shamed me,” he said after a moment, and this time the anger came dressed in something older; patriarch, elder brother, the family ledger all at once. He switched to Arabic, the register that could both cradle and cut. “Enti faḍaḥtīni ʾuddām-hum.” (You humiliated me in front of them / Arabic)

Talia stood very still. “Enta elli ʿalleyt ṣautak.” (You’re the one who raised your voice / Arabic)

“I raised my voice because you forgot who we are.” His hand cut the air. “Family. Name.” He pointed to the photo. “Shamed the name Amari-Volkov.”

She didn’t argue. She let the accusation climb the walls and echo back on itself until it lost force. Then, quietly: “You used our parents like a cudgel. You used Lana and Kareem like curses.”

He shut his eyes. The names dragged both of them underwater for a second. Lana; the laughter too loud, the mascara too black, the heart too tender, gone at twenty-one. Kareem; rallies and book clubs, arrested at a protest, then Alexanderia, then a crowd, then the call that unstitched the world. Grief was a country they had claimed residency in without wanting citizenship. “Ya byl v yarosti.” The Russian softened it just enough to admit it. “Ya boyalsya.” (I was in a rage. I was afraid / Russian)

“So was I,” she said, and her voice finally shook. “You were in the box with two detectives and the man I love, and I am… I am the bridge that those things walk across. I was afraid I’d lose you. Again.”

He heard the last word. Again.

His posture changed first; the tiny slackening of shoulders that means someone has put down the smallest stone. He sank back into the chair. “Sit.”

She did, perching on the front edge like she might need to run soon. He looked at her with the steady gaze he used to wear when she read her childhood essays aloud in the kitchen and asked him if commas could be brave. “You love him,” he said, without rancour now. “The old one with the deadpan.”

Talia’s mouth wanted to smile and didn’t. “Yes.”

“He is… too old,” Ameen said, as if listing furniture. “And cynical, like vinegar in tea.”

“He is kind,” she said, like a correction. “And careful. And he is the one who would have stood between you and that room if you had taken another step.” She folded her fingers together. “He didn’t.”

Ameen considered that. “He spoke like a man defending something he did not want to lose.”

“She is not a thing,” Talia replied, and only after did she realize she had switched to third person, the better to keep the ground from falling. She steadied. “I am not.”

Ameen nodded once, a concession a brother makes when he remembers the sister is the better fighter. He reached for the coffee and took a sip, grimaced. “Cold.” He set it down, then stood and crossed to the little hot plate he kept by the window, where a dented rakwa sat. “ʾAhwa?" (Coffee? / Arabic)

She let herself breathe. “ʾĀh.” (Yes / Arabic)

He worked by muscle memory: water, the delicate mound of coffee, the watchful bloom of foam. The smell filled the room; home and bitterness and mornings before funerals. He poured into two small cups and handed her one on a saucer he’d bought at a flea market because the blue pattern reminded him of their mother’s good set.

“‘Now what happens?’” he asked, mirroring her tone from countless childhood questions.

“Now I find out who killed her and why,” she answered, lifting the demitasse, letting the heat rise into her face.

“Do you have a suspect?” The professor was back, in the best sense; curious, disciplined.

She nodded, once.

“I kto?” (And who? / Russian)

“I can’t say.”

He huffed, but it was almost amused. “Of course not.”

They drank. The small sounds of the office; paper relaxing, the gentle tick of the wall clock, turned into a kind of secular liturgy. Outside, a student recited Spanish verbs into a cell phone; the world refused to share their mood, as it always does.

Ameen set his cup down. “I said cruel things that day.” It wasn’t an apology; it was the rung right below one.

“You said true things in cruel ways,” Talia said. “And false things with our parents’ names attached.” She watched him absorb that without defence, a sign of strength she’d learned to recognize only after losing too much. “I’m not here for an apology.” She touched the photo with one finger. “I’m here so we don’t let ghosts do our talking.”

He nodded like a student receiving a grade that hurt but rang right. “What will you need from me?” he asked.

“ADA Casey Novak will likely call you,” Talia said. “She’ll ask about Camila, about the harassment, about what you did and didn’t do. She’s good. Answer simply. Don’t theorize. Don’t protect institutions. Protect truth.”

“Protect truth,” he repeated, tasting the words like a professor tests a phrase for seminar. “My specialty.”

“Then prove it,” she said, not unkindly.

He looked at her for a long time. Then he pulled open a drawer and retrieved a small, waxed paper packet. “Here,” he said, pushing it across. “Khachapuri.” He made a face. “From the Armenian place on Broadway. Not… authentic, but the closest thing to the corner shop in our street when we were little.”

Talia laughed, surprised into softness. “That was Georgia, Ameen.”

“We were diaspora to the diaspora,” he said. “Everyone’s grandmother used the same cheese.” He pushed it farther. “Yeshʹ." (Eat / Russian)

She tore a piece and chewed, the salt and butter waking up memories she hadn’t planned to visit before noon. In her head she heard their mother’s domestic theology, “Feed the grieving. The soul is a mouth.” She swallowed, and some small, stubborn knot in her chest eased.

“What happens now,” Ameen said again, gentler, “between you and me?”

“We send each other our calendars,” she said. “We stop being voices and start being faces. We light candles together on the anniversaries instead of alone.”

His mouth tilted. “You always were the planner.”

“You always were the lecture.”

He chuckled; dusty, then warmer. “Don’t disappear, Talusha.”

She grimaced affectionately. “Don’t call me that at work.”

“This is my office.”

“And this is my case,” she said, smiling for real this time.

He returned it, small but present. “Ladno.” A beat. “You will… tell the old one that if he hurts you, I will-” (Alright / Russian)

“-write an essay?” she offered.

“-make a phone call,” he said. “To very unpleasant people.” His eyes glinted. “I know where he works.”

“He knows where you live,” she countered, and they both laughed, siblings again, the sound building a light, fragile bridge over yesterday’s wreckage.

Talia stood, smoothing her trench. She touched two fingers to the icon of Mary as she passed; a habit that wasn’t exactly faith and wasn’t not. At the door she paused. “Casey will call soon,” she said. “Answer your phone.”

“I always do,” he said, then amended, “I will.”

She turned the knob. He called after her, softly, “Hāfiẓī ʿalā nafsik.” (Take care of yourself / Arabic)

She glanced back. “We-enta kamān.” (You too / Arabic)

The hallway was brighter than when she’d come in; or maybe her eyes had adjusted. She took the stairs instead of the elevator, letting the building’s old bones announce each step. At the bottom, she lingered a moment by the glass doors, watching the campus spin its normal day. Students laughed, a bike bell chimed, someone argued about Kant in the slow, delighted way you do when you’ve never had to bargain with a morgue clock.

Her phone buzzed.

MUNCH: Alive?

She stared at the screen a second longer than necessary, then typed:

TALIA: Alive. Coffee helped. So did… bread with a childhood accent.

MUNCH: Carbs and culture. Dangerous combo. Come home tonight; I’ll make “breakfast.”

She could hear the quotes in his text, the dry music of them. She typed:

TALIA: Toast and judgment?

MUNCH: I was thinking eggs and cynicism. But we can negotiate.

Her reflection in the glass smiled before she knew she was doing it. She stepped into the day, the badge warm against her ribs, the case a tide pulling her forward, her brother somewhere behind her at a desk that finally felt less like a barricade and more like a desk. The city smelled like damp stone and coffee and promise. She took a breath and let all three be true.

Chapter Text

ASTORIA - May 5, 2005 - 9:29 PM

Talia didn’t mean to stay at the precinct until the lights burned the squad room hollow. But CSU pinged late, TARU dragged, and paperwork bred like guilt. By the time she looked up, Munch was gone. She pictured him trudging down Queens Boulevard, leash in hand, muttering at the Gestapo dogs, maybe picking up takeout from the halal cart she liked. His idea of domesticity: sabotage disguised as devotion.

33^rd Street glowed when she turned the corner, the rowhouse lit like a sentinel. She cracked the window; the rain-wet air carried a ribbon of jazz curling from the second floor; smoke layered over brass. She killed the engine, sat a moment, and heat pooled low in her belly before she even touched the key in the lock.

What are you doing, old man?

The door gave with a sigh. Her knees nearly buckled.

John Munch: glasses slipping low, hair mussed from impatient fingers, whisky glass dangling careless in one hand, a book open in the other. The lamp cut him into chiaroscuro, cigarette smoke curling around him like a private halo. Ramses, Anubis, and Heka lounged at his feet, perfectly seduced to his side.

He looked like sin’s librarian. And she wanted to be overdue.

“Welcome home, sweetheart,” he said, letting the words drip slow. He didn’t move yet, enjoying the theatre of being seen. Then he rose; long, deliberate, a silhouette that swallowed the room whole.

She closed the door with her back, coat falling from her shoulders, shoes kicked off like surrender. “What’s the occasion?”

“Nothing special.” His voice was lower than smoke, rougher than whisky. “Can’t a man greet his girl at the door like any loving man?”

“You?” She tried to laugh, sharp and teasing, but it broke when he kissed her. Deliberate. Brief. Tasted of ash and malt. Her pulse stuttered like neon in the rain.

“How was your brother?” he asked, once he let her breathe.

She dropped into the couch, letting the cushions catch what her bones couldn’t. “He forgives me. Wants to see me more often.” The words carried bruises under them.

“Then lighten up.” He folded into the chair across from her, long frame collapsing like shadow on shadow.

“Still have a case to solve,” she murmured, flicking open her cigarette pack. Flame lit her cheekbones sharp, smoke trailing like a secret.

He watched her through the haze. “Sweetheart, if we solved all the cases, we’d have nothing left to keep us awake at night.”

She exhaled sideways. “You keep me awake enough.”

That got her a look; the kind that weighed her, burned her steady. It turned the air sharp, erotic without a touch. The dogs sighed into sleep. The record spun a saxophone into the quiet. They traded cigarettes, filters damp from the ghost of each other’s mouths. Their knees brushed, then stayed. His hand drifted to her wrist, not claiming, just resting. She leaned into it anyway.

She leaned back, exhaling toward the ceiling. “You always make this house feel like trouble.”

“That’s because it is,” he said, sliding closer, voice dry as stone. “And trouble suits you, doll.”

Her laugh was a soft rasp. “You’d ruin me if I let you.”

He tilted his head; mouth just shy of hers. “Sweetheart, you already did.”

The kiss wasn’t gentle this time. It was a collision of ash and hunger, whisky and want. His hand tangled in her curls, tugging just enough to steal her breath. She gasped into his mouth, and that made him smirk against her lips.

She swung her leg over, straddled his lap, the whisky glass clattering to the floor and rolling under the couch. The dogs stirred but didn’t lift their heads. The lamp flickered in smoke. “Christ, Talia,” he muttered into her throat, voice gone low and ragged. “You’re gonna kill me one night. Just like this.”

Her laugh trembled, half-moan. “Then I’ll resuscitate you.”

“Don’t tease.” His hand pressed the small of her back, pulling her tighter, closer, until the line between them blurred.

Her cigarette burned down in the ashtray, forgotten. The jazz bled into something softer, slower. His glasses slipped, caught against her cheek as he kissed her again, harder. She didn’t care.

The night unfolded that way: smoke, laughter muffled against skin, the creak of old furniture bearing witness. No explicit words passed. Just the grammar of breath, of fingers, of mouths finding answers in silence. Noir in its truest sense; everything implied, nothing confessed.

By the time rain slicked down the windows, the record hissed on its last groove, and the whisky glass lay abandoned on the floor. Her body was tangled against his, breaths still uneven, his shirt half-open, her curls sticking to his jaw where sweat met smoke.

“Doll,” he murmured, thumb dragging lazy across her lower lip, eyes glinting behind crooked glasses. “You drive me insane.”

Her laugh was low, breathless, a rasp more than a sound. “And you love it.”

“Love’s a cheap word,” he said, voice rough, dangerous. “But whatever this is… I’m not letting it go.”

She caught his collar, pulled him back into her kiss, tasting smoke, whisky, and the ache of him. Outside, thunder cracked, but inside, only the rhythm of their bodies mattered; two cynics burning through the night, lit by nothing but trouble and want.

MIDTOWN FUNDRAISER - MAY 6, 2004 - 2:48 PM

By the next afternoon, the lab ping sliced through the day like glass. CSU’s DNA match landed clean: semen profile belonged to Harlan Pierce. Not Langford. Not Griggs. Pierce. Novak’s voice on the phone was acid; Get me a warrant before Columbia buries this in committee. The administration scrambled with protocols and polished statements, but truth outran them.

That evening, chandeliers burned over Midtown, dripping light like melted wealth. The fundraiser ballroom was swollen with donors and cameras, tuxedos polished, gowns whispering across marble floors. The air smelled of champagne and self-satisfaction. At the dais, Harlan Pierce held court; mid-toast, glass lifted, smile lacquered to perfection.

Fin and Talia cut through the crowd. The press already pivoted, flashbulbs rising like gunfire. It was theatre now, but theatre with teeth. Pierce didn’t notice until Fin’s voice threaded through the noise, steady as law.

“Harlan Pierce,” Fin said, badge flashing. “You’re under arrest for the murder of Camila Rashid.”

The room convulsed, gasps breaking like glassware. Pierce sputtered, his smile collapsing into outrage. “Do you know who I am?”

Talia stepped in, voice flat, sharp enough to cut through chandeliers. “The man who thought shoes were optional for the dead.”

The silence after was thick enough to drown in. A cuff clicked, metal on marble. Flashbulbs exploded. Donors whispered, horrified and fascinated.

Pierce struggled as Fin read him his rights, voice carrying over the microphones. “You can’t do this. I’ve given this university millions!”

“Money doesn’t buy murder,” Novak called from the wings, face carved into fury.

The cuffs snapped home. The sound carried like a verdict.

Munch stepped forward, not to Pierce but to the press that surged toward the spectacle. His voice was dry stone, his eyes dark. “The higher the floor,” he said, every syllable a nail, “the harder the fall.”

The cameras ate it up. The city would play it on loop by morning.

NYC SUPREME COURT - May 26, 2005 - 9:56 AM

The People vs. Harlan Pierce
May 26, 2005

The courtroom was too warm for justice. May heat pressed through the tall windows, pooling heavy against the wood panelling. The air conditioner rattled in the corner like an old man’s cough, ineffectual against a gallery crammed with bodies. Every seat was filled.

Columbia students hunched with spiral notebooks, eyes sharp behind their caffeine. Reporters leaned forward with pencils already sharpened, waiting to slice her words into copy. In the front row, Camila Rashid’s parents sat rigid, shoulders squared as if posture could keep them from breaking. They did not look at the defendant. That restraint alone was grief enough. Strangers filled the rest, faces hungry for spectacle, the way New York always turned tragedy into theatre.

At the defence table sat Harlan Pierce: trustee, donor, predator. His cufflinks glinted under the buzzing fluorescents. His suit looked expensive enough to make its own alibi. He leaned toward his attorneys with the casual arrogance of a man certain money could insulate him from consequence.

Behind the rail, Talia sat so stiffly it hurt. Her blouse collar pressed against her throat like a noose, but she didn’t shift. She held herself still, as though the sheer force of her body could hold her brother steady, too. Ameen sat two rows ahead, waiting for the clerk’s call, tweed jacket softer than the starched courtroom air. He looked like a man who belonged behind a lectern, chalk in hand, not sworn in under fluorescent lights.

The clerk’s voice rang out: “The People call Professor Ameen Amari.”

A ripple tore through the gallery. Heads turned. Pens froze midair.

Talia closed her eyes for half a beat. She had been here before, years ago. Ameen’s silhouette at another table, another trial, when Kareem was the one whose name lived on the docket. Her own voice breaking on the stand, begging, lying, just to keep the family whole. Now she watched Ameen rise, spine too rigid, adjusting his glasses with hands that trembled only if you knew him well.

He gave his name. His position. His connection to Camila Rashid.

Casey handled him like glass; questions clipped, careful, measured. “Professor Amari, how would you describe Ms. Rashid as a student?”

“She was fearless,” Ameen said, and despite himself, his voice trembled. “She believed words could change power. And she was right.”

The jury shifted. Pens slowed. The grief in his tone filled the space more persuasively than rhetoric ever could.

“Were you aware of any conflict between Ms. Rashid and the defendant?” Casey asked.

Ameen swallowed hard. “Yes. She wrote an article critical of his role as trustee. She believed he blurred the line between mentorship and exploitation.”

“No further questions.” Casey’s tone carried respect. The defence didn’t rise. They didn’t want to touch grief; not when it spoke with that kind of clarity. Talia realized she had been holding her breath. When she exhaled, the room blurred, as if air itself had gone soft.

When her name was called, it echoed too loud.

Detective Talia Nadine Amari Volkov.

She rose. Heels on tile sounded like gunfire in the silence. She walked the aisle steady, each step rehearsed a thousand times in darker, smaller rooms. She had sworn the oath before, but never like this. Not when her own brother’s name sat in the transcripts. Not when her personal life hung like a shadow over every page.

She raised her hand, swore again. Her voice did not crack.

Casey began. Methodical. Guiding. Talia laid out the case the way she had built it: brick by brick, stone by stone, into a wall no defence could scale.

• Toxicology: benzodiazepines confirmed in Camila’s system.
• Fraternity group chat: Tyler Griggs joking about “calming the revolution.”
• Silk fragment matched to boutique line.
• Purchase records subpoenaed from the boutique.
• Gala photographs: Camila at the table, Pierce leaning in too close.
• DNA hit: semen linking directly to Harlan Pierce.

Each fact, a stone. Each stone, a wall.

Casey gave her a nod; measured, satisfied. “No further questions.”

Then came the shift.

The defence attorney rose, thin smile sharp as a scalpel. “Detective Amari, you’ve testified at length. Very thorough. But let’s talk about impartiality.”

Her jaw tightened.

“Your brother, Professor Amari, was considered a suspect, was he not?”

“He was questioned,” she said evenly. “He was cleared.”

“Cleared,” the attorney repeated, dragging the word like mud. “By the very squad you serve on. Family investigating family. Convenient, isn’t it?”

“Objection,” Casey snapped.

“Overruled,” the judge said, heavy-voiced. “The jury may weigh credibility.”

The defence pressed. “Detective, isn’t it true that questions were raised about conflict of interest in this very case?”

“Yes,” Talia said. Even. Controlled. “And those questions were addressed. Every step I took was documented, supervised, and signed off by my commanding officer.”

The smirk sharpened. “And that commanding officer, Sergeant John Munch, also happens to be…” He let the pause sharpen like a knife. “…the man you are in an intimate relationship with.”

The gallery gasped as if someone had ripped the roof open. Heads turned, not to the attorney, not to the bench, but to the gallery rail. Munch sat there, unmoving. His face was a mask carved from cynicism, every line of him saying try harder. Only his eyes betrayed him: dark, sharp, fixed on Talia.

Casey was on her feet. “Objection! This is harassment and irrelevant to the matter before the court.”

The judge’s gavel cracked. “Sustained. Counsel, one more stunt like that and I’ll sanction you.”

“Withdrawn,” the attorney said, mock-pleasant. But the seed was planted. Smoke curled in the jury’s imagination.

Talia didn’t flinch. She turned her body to the jury, voice steady as stone. “Every fact in this case comes from CSU. From TARU. From the lab. From science. Not from me. Not from my family. From the truth. That’s what I stand by.”

The jurors watched her closely. Some scribbled. Some just looked, long and quiet.

Casey stood for redirect, voice softer. “Detective, is there any evidence pointing to your brother as responsible for this crime?”

“No.”

“Is there any evidence that this investigation was compromised by personal bias?”

“No.”

“Thank you. No further questions.”

Talia stepped down. The echo of her heels seemed louder than it should have been. As she passed the rail, her eyes flicked to him. Munch gave her nothing the room could read. But his gaze locked on hers, and in that second, the noise of the courtroom fell away.

The defence delivered their closing first. Words slick as oil: troubled, reckless, political motives. They whispered “chain of custody” like repetition could conjure error. They painted Camila as dramatic, unstable, a young woman too loud for her own good.

Then Casey rose. She didn’t speak at once. She let silence stretch until it hummed in the panelling. When she spoke, her voice carried clear as cut glass. “Camila Rashid was not a rumour to be managed. She was a citizen of this city. She was twenty-one years old. Fearless. Unafraid to speak when others stayed silent.”

She paced toward the jury box, tone clipped, deliberate. “The defendant stripped her of breath. He tried to strip her of meaning. But evidence does not lie. DNA. Fibers. Toxicology. Every piece points here. To Harlan Pierce.”

She let the name land like a stone. “This case is not about bias. It is not about distraction. It is about a young woman who deserved to live, and a man who thought his name could bury the truth. Don’t let it. Return a verdict that tells this city no one is above justice.” She sat. The silence that followed was sharper than noise.

The gavel cracked. “The jury will deliberate. Court is adjourned.”

And the room erupted. Reporters surged for the doors. Students whispered furiously. Camila’s parents clutched each other, rigid but together. Ameen sat in the gallery, hands clasped, gaze heavy on the floor. Then he looked up, across the chaos, to his sister. For the first time in months, his eyes carried no accusation. Only exhaustion. Only the fragile outline of something like beginning.

Talia stood frozen, voices rushing around her. For a heartbeat, she was sixteen again; her father’s books stacked too high, Kareem’s trial unfolding, her own voice begging on the stand. For another, she was here: a detective who had built a wall of evidence, stone by stone, against a man who thought money could erase truth. Both versions of her lived in her bones.

Her eyes found him across the rail. Munch hadn’t moved. He sat calm amid the storm, hands folded, expression unreadable except for the eyes. Dark. Steady. Watching her like she was the only fixed point left in the city.

And she exhaled; for the first time since she had sworn the oath. The jurors filed out. The gallery emptied. Reporters shouted questions no one answered. She stepped down from the stand, past the railing, and walked toward him, her steps steady.

The case was in the jury’s hands now.

But hers?

They ached for his.

ASTORIA - May 26, 2005 - 8:38 PM

Astoria exhaled steam from its manhole covers, the sidewalks shining with a thin film of drizzle that caught the orange of the streetlights and turned the world into a low-lit aquarium. Outside Talia’s rowhouse, the evening smelled like rain and warm concrete and the cumin drifting from a takeout cart two blocks over. Inside, it smelled like home; like old wood warmed by bodies, like books after hands, like dogs that loved to lean all their weight into her shins until she laughed despite herself.

She didn’t stay for the judge’s final cadence. Didn’t wait for the handcuffs to clink or the cameras to swing to her face for a quote she’d never give. After cross, after the cheap shot about IAB files and the defence attorney making her relationship an exhibit instead of a life, after all of that, she walked. Her heels sounded like punctuation down the hallway and then no sound at all on the courthouse steps because rain will swallow anything if it wants to.

At home, the boys met her at the door; Ramses first, great head under her hand; then Anubis with his slow, earnest tail; Heka skidding on the runner like a child too excited to remember he had paws. “Ya ḥabibi… la, la, istanna,” she murmured, and kissed each forehead, each wet nose. She shrugged her coat onto the hook and let the silence take her by the wrist. (My love… no, no, wait / Arabic)

The prayer room had no doors to close, but it knew how to hold a secret. Whitewashed walls. A narrow shelf that served as an iconostasis: Mary with a thin, gold halo and eyes kind enough to make you ache; Christ Pantokrator; Saint Gregory; a tiny, framed photo of her parents tucked to one side, the only unpainted faces permitted to stare back. Beeswax candles in a brass cup. A little dish of frankincense and myrrh. An old fountain pen that had been her father’s, propped like a relic. A thin woven rug where she knelt.

She lit the candles, one by one: for Camila, for Leila who would have to live with her absence, for Ameen who had not deserved the suspicion but had borne it anyway. For the young version of herself who had sat in the back of a different courtroom and begged with eyes too big and hands too still. She lit the incense last. The smoke rose, a soft grey calligraphy she could read without vowels.

Her lips moved soundlessly. Cross, bow, breath: “Bism al-Āb wa-l-Ibn wa-r-Rūḥ al-Qudus.” She stayed like that long enough for the pins to sing in her knees, long enough for the candles to gutter from tall to honest. Maybe she fell asleep. The room made time a polite suggestion. (In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit / Arabic)

When her eyes opened, she didn’t start. He was part of the room, somehow, as if the walls had always had a Munch-shaped dent they’d been waiting to fill. He stood in front of her with his tie loosened and his coat smelling like rain, the street’s damp still clinging to the hem. His thumb was gentle where it caught the last salt on her cheek.

“You okay, doll?” he asked, voice low enough not to step on the moment.

“Mm.” Her mouth was cotton. “What happened?”

“You fell asleep in the middle of a theological argument,” he said, soft smile. “Incense won.”

“Oh.” She blinked, sat up, felt the little crackle of pins-and-needles in both legs and the slightly embarrassing rush of relief that he was here. “Verdict?”

“Guilty on all counts.”

She exhaled with her whole body and let her head tip to his shoulder. It fit there like something purchased not because it was on sale but because it would last a lifetime. “Good,” she said, and it sounded like a prayer someone else had already said for her.

“You didn’t want to be there for the applause,” he observed.

“They weren’t clapping for her,” Talia said, eyes fixed on the candle flame doing its small, stubborn work. “They were clapping because a story ended where they wanted it to.”

“Stories rarely end,” he said. “They just go quiet enough for someone to walk out of the room.”

She let a humourless breath escape. “And I walked.”

“You did what you needed,” he said. “You always do.”

She didn’t answer that. The silence stretched, not empty, just spacious enough to set things down where they wouldn’t be tripped over later. The dogs lay in the doorway like a living threshold, heads on paws, unblinking guards whose only doctrine was stay.

“You okay?” he tried again, not because he expected a different answer but because sometimes the point is to ask and let the question be a place to sit.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s… a lot.” Her fingers found the edge of the rug and worried at a loose thread. “He made it about you. About us. Like loving you makes me bad at my job. Like it means my hands can’t hold weight.”

“They’re terrified of women whose hands hold weight,” Munch said, dry, rueful. “They invent rules to make gravity your fault.”

“He read from the IAB file like Scripture.” She swallowed, then laughed at herself for choosing that word in a room like this. “Fine. I’ll pick the words. He read it like gossip and told the jury it was doctrine.”

“Defence attorneys are priests of the Church of Doubt,” Munch said. “Some of them even have incense.” He glanced at the slow blue coil above the coals. “Yours smells better.”

She closed her eyes, leaned a little harder. “I wanted to jump up and correct him.”

“You would’ve gotten held in contempt.”

“I’m already held in contempt,” she said. “Just by a different choir.” She opened her eyes again. “I kept thinking about Kareem. Sitting in those benches, lying to the stand with all the sincerity of a daughter saying grace. Yā bābā, sāmḥnī. I told myself it was for us. To keep us. And now…” Her voice thinned. “Now I sit closer to the front, and the lies are happening about me, and it still feels like I’m praying for the wrong thing.” (Ya Baba, forgive me / Arabic)

He turned enough that she had to look at him. He didn’t take her chin, he wasn’t that man, but his attention was a hand under her face all the same. “Doll,” he said, not as a pet name now but as a password to a room only the two of them ever entered, “you did not put that man’s hands on that girl. You did not stage her body or lace her drink or buy that tie. You did the opposite of all of that. And if a man with a perfect haircut and a dead soul stood up and tried to make your love into a conflict of interest, well. Congratulations. You must be interesting.”

Her mouth tugged at one corner. “You make everything sound survivable.”

“That’s because I’ve survived everything,” he said. “It’s a miracle I remember to die at all.”

She huffed a laugh that was almost a sob. “You’re impossible.”

“And you like impossible men.”

“I like one impossible man.” She tipped her head more firmly into the slope of his shoulder. They let the quiet sit with them a while. The candles ran shorter. The incense thought about giving up and then decided not to.

“I’m proud of you,” Munch said, which was the verbal equivalent of him taking his heart out of his chest and setting it on the rug between the icons and the ashes. “You kept your line. You didn’t let them turn you into an exhibit.”

“I wanted to break a chair,” she admitted.

“That would’ve been hot,” he said, reflex, then grimaced. “Inappropriate.”

“True,” she said anyway, and the small, conspiratorial smile that passed between them chased something mean out of the air.

He touched the inside of her wrist, where her pulse wrote its little drum solo. He didn’t crowd it; he just… listened. “What do you need?”

She looked at the wall of faces and saints and said the truest thing she had. “To not be alone.”

“I can do that,” he said. “I can do that better than I’ve done anything.”

She turned her hand and threaded their fingers. The brass of her ring was warm from skin. He watched the way their knuckles fit and felt something shift inside him that he would’ve called dread once, before this woman made the word tenderness stop sounding like a dare. He could see it all; ridiculously, clearly: her in a dress she’d pretend wasn’t perfect, him in a suit he’d pretend he hadn’t bought for this purpose. He could see Cragen trying not to smile in a church aisle. He could see Fin smirking, Olivia crying and fanning herself with a program, Elliot being elliptically sincere. He could see a gold band on her finger that didn’t need to make a sound to be loud.

The thought knocked the wind out of him. Not fear. The other thing. The good vertigo.

He thought: Ask. Right now, in this room, under these eyes, while the smoke still writes and the dogs pretend to sleep. Say the words and let them be a bridge.

But he was a man who had learned caution the hard way, who had married hope and signed the divorce papers with his own blood. He’d learned that the moments you grabbed sometimes bit you back and the ones you waited for sometimes came like saints to the door. He looked at her profile; the determined line of it, the gentleness that no case had managed to beat out of her, and he understood that he would ask, yes. But he would ask right. Not with courthouse air in their lungs. Not with a day like this still on her shoulders.

“Tell me what they said,” he asked instead, because the question was a kind of ring, too.

She didn’t pretend not to know what he meant. “That I sleep my way to the top. That I colour outside the lines because you keep the eraser. That a girl, they wanted to say girl so badly,” she smiled without humour, “that a woman my age doesn’t choose a man your age unless she has… needs.”

He made a face like the smell of something rancid. “America is terrified of women wanting things. It writes laws about it.”

“And men who love those women?”

“Get better at wanting, or get out of the way,” he said. Then, softer, “I’m not going anywhere.”

She nodded once, like they’d signed a contract. “Ana maʿāk.” (I’m with you / Arabic)

It made something flare and then settle in him, the way a pilot light catches after the fourth try. “I know.”

He reached past her and pinched out one of the candles with fingers that had done it a hundred times. She scolded him on instinct. “You’ll burn.”

“I’ve burned before,” he said wryly, shaking his hand. “But I appreciate your concern.”

“Idiot.” She smiled, fully this time. “Durochok.” Then, because the room allowed it and because he did, she edged closer until the side of her leg pressed to the length of his thigh. The warmth there was its own sermon. (Dummy / Russian)

“Tell me about the jury,” she said after a while, voice near a whisper and therefore enormous. “Did they look at him when they said it? At the trustee?”

“Some did,” Munch said. “The brave ones. Most stared at the floor like it had the answers they didn’t write on the card.” He paused. “He didn’t blink.”

“Predators don’t,” she said. “They only close their eyes to remember.”

His mouth tilted. “That’s a line for your notebook.”

“I don’t keep a notebook,” she said.

“Yes, you do,” he said. “It’s just in your bones.”

Her eyes glossed and cleared, the tide twice in a second. “I keep thinking about how she took her shoes off for someone once because she trusted him, and then he took them off to make her an idea.”

“You put them back on,” he said. “You and Fin and Novak and the entire poor, broken machine. You put her back into her body and you walked her to the door.”

Talia nodded, breath catching. She reached to the brass cup and lit one more candle from the stub of another; flame begetting flame, a small defiance. “For Camila,” she said.

“For Camila,” he echoed, and the room seemed to agree.

Behind them, a soft skitter of claws on wood; Heka could endure reverence only so long. He slipped forward on his belly and put his chin on Talia’s knee, sighing like an old man. She laughed, a sound that made the icons look a little less like judges and a little more like witnesses.

“Hey, trouble,” Munch told the dog. “You’re lucky you’re cute.”

“He knows,” Talia said, scratching the velvet head. “They all do.”

He studied her in profile again, cataloguing a thousand ridiculous, precious details; how the candlelight caught the gold flecks in her irises, how her throat moved when she swallowed, how the scar on her wrist from a long-ago kitchen accident looked like punctuation he still didn’t know how to read. He thought of all the words he had not said to the women who came before her and all the ones he would say to this one until he ran out of breath.

‘Marry me,’ almost fell out of him. It came that close, hovered in his mouth with the taste of smoke and beeswax and rain and her. He closed his jaw on it like a secret saved for the perfect listener.

Instead, he leaned and kissed the place where her cheek became her temple, one, two; litany, not hunger. She shut her eyes and let the room spin that slow, holy spin that means you’re exactly where you should be. He rested his forehead against her hair. She tucked her free hand under his coat and held a fistful of his shirt like a woman anchoring a kite.

When he finally spoke again, it wasn’t sarcasm, and it wasn’t a shield. “You’re not failing me,” he said. “Not once.”

She released a breath that felt older than she was. “Say it again.”

“You’re not failing me.” He said it like a vow and like a diagnosis, and in this house both were sacred.