The bus pulled into the Colorado Springs station at 4:17 in the afternoon. I know the exact time because I checked my phone the moment the wheels stopped, the way you check a wound to see if it is still bleeding.
4:17. Thirty-eight degrees outside. One unread message from Theo that said, I am in the parking lot, blue Honda. Please do not make a scene.
I almost sent back, Define scene. But I was tired and my back hurt from the bus seat, and I decided to save my best material for when it actually counted.
I grabbed my bag, which contained exactly four changes of clothes, a notebook, a pen, and a small Ziploc bag of fresh gloves I had ordered to the lawyer's office before my release, and I walked off that bus like I owned the station.
I did not own the station. But posture is free, and I have always been generous with it.
Theo was exactly where he said he would be. Blue Honda Civic, slightly dented on the rear bumper, engine running. He was standing outside it, leaning against the driver's door with his arms crossed and an expression on his face that landed somewhere between relieved and terrified.
Theo Marchetti. Beta, twenty-six years old. The kind of person who remembered your coffee order and your court date with equal precision. He was taller than I remembered, or maybe I had just gotten used to the compressed dimensions of a prison facility. His dark hair was longer. He had a beard now, short and neat. He looked like someone who had been quietly worrying for three years and was trying not to show how much.
He was showing it completely.
"You look terrible," he said.
"Theo, I just got off a bus from prison. What were you expecting? A spa glow?"
He made a sound that was almost a laugh, and then pulled me into a hug that was so sudden and so genuinely tight that I forgot for about four seconds to be composed. I let him. Four seconds is my limit for unexpected sincerity. Then I patted his back twice and stepped away before either of us could make it weird.
"Okay," I said. "I am going to need a real meal, a shower, and every single piece of information you have about Marcus Aldean and Naomi Fletcher's current situation. In that order."
Theo stared at me. "You have been out of prison for what, like three hours?"
"Three hours and forty-two minutes. I have been planning for longer. Get in the car."
He took me to a diner on the east side of the city. The kind of place with laminated menus and coffee that arrives before you ask for it and a waitress named Carol who called everyone hon without irony. I ordered eggs and toast and a side of bacon and ate all of it with the focused intensity of a person who had been surviving on facility food for three years and was only now remembering that flavor was a thing that existed.
Theo watched me eat with the expression of someone who had many questions and was choosing to wait. I appreciated that about him. His patience was one of his better qualities.
When I finished, I folded my hands on the table, gloves still on, and looked at him directly. "Talk."
He wrapped both hands around his coffee mug. "Marcus is pack second under Alpha Dorian Aldean. That promotion happened about eight months after your sentencing. Naomi is fully bonded to him, marked and everything. She has integrated into the Aldean pack structure pretty completely. They live in the main pack residential complex on the north side."
"Children?"
Theo hesitated. "Not yet. But there are rumors that Naomi has been pushing for a formal heir announcement. Pack politics stuff."
I filed that away. "What about the investigation? My case. Is it closed?"
"Officially, yes. Your conviction stands. No appeal was filed because —" He paused and looked at his coffee. "There was no one to file it. Your father passed eight months into your sentence. I tried to find a lawyer, but the ones willing to take on an omega wrongful conviction case against a family like the Aldeans were not exactly lining up."
I already knew about my father. The facility chaplain had told me. I had sat with that information in a very small room for a very long time. I was not going to sit with it here, in a diner with laminated menus, because grief, like everything else, had its time and place, and right now was neither.
"The lighter," I said. "The one they used as primary evidence. Do you know where it is?"
Theo frowned. "Evidence storage, probably. Why?"
"Because I never touched it during the trial. They presented it in a sealed bag. My lawyer at the time, who was underpaid and overworked, did not push for me to physically examine the evidence." I kept my voice even. "But if I can get my hands on that lighter without the bag between us, I will know exactly whose memory is inside it."
Theo went very still. He knew about my power. He was one of three people who did.
"Elliot," he said quietly, "evidence storage for a closed conviction is not exactly a walk-in situation."
"I know."
"You would need access. Legitimate access, or otherwise."
"I know that too."
He looked at me for a long moment. Outside the diner window, Colorado Springs moved around in its ordinary afternoon business, completely unaware that I was back inside its borders, eating toast and reconstructing the architecture of my revenge one careful brick at a time.
"You already have a way in," Theo said. It was not a question.
I picked up my coffee. "I know someone who works property intake at the district evidence facility. We were in the same wing for eight months. She owes me a favor."
Theo closed his eyes briefly. "Of course she does."
"Theo." I set the cup down. "I did not come back here to make noise. I came back here to find the truth and make sure the right people answer for it. Quietly. Precisely." I paused. "And maybe with a little style."
He opened his eyes and looked at me. Slowly, against what appeared to be his better judgment, he smiled.
"Same Elliot," he said.
"Sharper Elliot," I corrected.
Theo repeated it under his breath like he was testing the weight of it. Then he picked up his coffee, took a slow sip, and said, "All right. So what do you need from me?"
"A place to stay that is not connected to my name. A working laptop. And someone who will not ask me questions I am not ready to answer yet."
Theo nodded once. "I have a couch. It is not glamorous."
"Theo, I slept on a mattress that had opinions for three years. Your couch is a five-star hotel."
He almost smiled again. Almost. There was still something sitting behind his eyes that he had not said yet. I could see it the way you see weather coming over the mountains — that particular stillness before pressure changes. I let it sit. I was not going to pull it out of him in a diner parking lot. Some things needed the right room.
We paid the bill, which Theo insisted on covering, and I let him, because forty dollars in gate money was not a budget I was eager to test. And we walked out into the cold afternoon air toward his dented Honda.
That was when I smelled it.