15. Hart

When all of his affirmations and grounding techniques failed, Hart knew he was in deep trouble.

The night couldn't have gone worse.

What had started as an attempt to free Cane from the curse had actually facilitated the worsening of it. Hart had known there was a risk going in, of course. The plan was dubious at best. But the utterly defeated and pained look in Cane's eyes had compelled him to offer a solution, his hubris making him think he could keep everything under control.

He knew better.

It was history repeating. Hart falling into the same cycle. As soon as he let Cane pull him under just a little, everything spun out of his grasp. It was why he'd put distance between them in the first place. He couldn't think around Cane. He made bad choices. Selfish ones.

And now he was here. Sitting in their meeting room with a bloody Ash and a shamefaced Fix, both of whom had only just been let into the room, waiting for the rest of his team to be called in. His leg was bouncing up and down, his fingers twisted in his lap and his breath coming out in short, fast puffs.

The images behind his eyelids wouldn't settle. It was like half of his brain was looking at the scene in front of him and the other half was just stuck in that warehouse, watching blood drip from Cane's face and mouth. Watching him slowly come to the realization that the person closest to him had betrayed him and possibly cost him everything.

It made his heart ache.

Hours had passed. Hart wasn't even sure how many, but dawn had already started to creep over the horizon as Cyrus escorted them back to Cursebreaker HQ after being questioned by the police. They'd been put into separate rooms to wait.

Since the tip hadn't been about anything curse related, Cyrus hadn't been among the raiding team. Once the officers on site found out there were cursebreakers present, however, PUMA had immediately been called in.

Cyrus had looked like he'd just rolled out of bed. He'd looked downright livid.

And all Hart could do was worry about Cane.

He didn't even know where he was or what was being done to him. The last glance he'd got of him was of his arms being cuffed behind his back in a sea of chaos.

He'd tried calling out to him.

The sound had been lost before it reached him.

"Hart," Ash whispered.

Hart blinked into the present and glanced at Ash. He looked tired and in pain. The blood on his face had dried into uncomfortable-looking scabs, and bruises bloomed dark on his skin. There was no hiding the evidence of what had just happened.

"I told you no talking!" Cyrus snapped from across the table before Hart could open his mouth, dark eyes flashing in warning. "I kept you separated for a reason."

"We're not going to collaborate stories," Ash said, throwing his hands up. "We're not criminals."

"Are you sure about that?" Cyrus drawled.

Ash scowled and Fix reached across the table to calm him. Tension was high in the room. It was making the air stuffy and breathing harder than it should be.

As much as Hart usually respected the PUMA detective, he couldn't help but wish him gone.

"Okay, I think that's everyone." Taylor interrupted the moment, walking into the meeting room with Black and Wren on her tail.

Her hair was in overnight rollers and she had a pink tracksuit on and fluffy slippers on her feet. She hadn't been exempt from the list of people Cyrus wanted to talk to. She sat down with her tablet in hand, taking the spot closest to the entrance, her back turned to it. Fix was to her left and Cyrus was the imposing figure on her right.

Black perched himself on top of the desk right next to Cyrus, skipping the need for a chair. He was the one who knew the detective best, so he looked comfortable and natural next to him even though they contrasted so starkly visually.

The look Black shot Hart out of the corner of his eye told him Taylor had briefed him on everything that had happened already. Hart couldn't hide his grimace, looking away before Black could discover the reasons why.

Cyrus looked around the room, assessing each member of the team in a cutting way before speaking. "We're missing one."

"Yeah, Midas isn't coming," Taylor said, seemingly the only one unbothered by the turn their night had taken.

"And why not?" Cyrus asked, voice picking up a sharpness they'd never heard from him before in all their time liaising with him. "I said I wanted the entire team present for this."

"Because it's Midas," Taylor said, like that answered the question entirely. Hart wished he'd been born with Midas's propensity to not give a single…eff word. Hart wanted to be somewhere else too. With someone else. "He did send a message saying he agrees with whatever Wren says."

Cyrus's frown only intensified. "This isn't a friendly work chat he can just skip out on."

"He was working an entirely different case. He has nothing to do with it," Fix said reasonably. "Wren and Black too…"

"They're not going anywhere," Cyrus said before Fix could even suggest it. "I'll deal with Midas later."

Fix sighed through his nose and settled back in his seat, eyes worried. Cyrus cast another bitchy look around the room, then paused. "And where the hell is Wren? He just walked in!"

He stood up hastily before he spotted Wren tucked in the corner of the room, on the floor with a small glass tank, petting something dark green with his forefinger and ignoring everyone.

"Is that a frog?" Cyrus asked.

"Yup," Black responded for Wren. "It's new."

"New?" Cyrus asked, voice deadpan, and Black beamed at him, clearly trying to carve through the butter-thick tension by being as much of his perky self as he possibly could be.

"He just got it a few days ago," Black said. "Someone totally thought he could curse the frog into being a prince. Fairy-tale style."

"Wait," Cyrus said, turning to look at Black. "That's possibly a man?"

"Nah," Black said, waving his hand dismissively right into Cyrus's face. Hart knew it would probably have been funny if he weren't so on edge and desperate to have this over with. "I kissed it and it didn't do anything."

"You kissed a…" Cyrus said, swatting the hand away before rolling his eyes, resigned to everything that made Black…Black. He sat back down in his seat. "What am I saying, of course you did."

"Slimy," Black said in conclusion, and out of the corner of his eye Hart spotted Ash gagging where he was sitting next to him. The expression clearly pulled at one of his cuts, and he hissed loudly, cupping his face.

Hart gripped the armrests of his chair, catching Fix's eyes across the desk as Cyrus was distracted by the shenanigans. They exchanged thoughts without words.

"Okay." Fix called everyone to attention, blissfully understanding of Hart and his needs. "With all due respect to you, Cyrus, we do have cases to get back to, so why don't we do this as quickly and as painlessly as possible?"

"I missed the memo about your sudden admission to the police department putting you in charge," Cyrus said dryly. "But okay. You wanna start, let's start."

He reached for a file inside his black jacket. It was folded in half to fit in the pocket, and he straightened it out carelessly, dropping it onto the desk with a muted thud before flipping it open. Hart wanted to scoff at the drama. He also wanted to wince at the careless organization.

"So…" Cyrus said. "The raid on Cane's warehouse was interesting, to say the least."

Black leaned over to peek into the file and Cyrus moved it away.

"Show me," Black demanded, poking Cyrus in the shoulder.

Cyrus sighed, looking slightly annoyed before pushing the file over to him. "You're not gonna like it."

"No deaths?" Black asked.

"Unless your brothers have something to admit about their ‘client,'" Cyrus said pointedly, meeting Hart's gaze.

Black slid off the desk and slumped into the chair he'd disregarded, pouting up a storm while Hart glared at Cyrus for the implication.

"Where is Cane?" Hart asked sharply, his voice ringing in the quiet room.

Cyrus simply stared at him for a moment before responding. "He's being detained along with his right-hand man. They have a lot of explaining to do."

The logical part of him recognized that Cyrus was just doing his job. He was good at it, and he was fair. Hart knew all of that, but the part of him that irrevocably belonged to Cane hated the superiority in Cyrus. Hated the barely concealed satisfaction in his voice when he said Cane had been detained.

"Their business is legal." Hart pushed the words out of his mouth, knuckles white on the armrests as he fought to remain composed.

"Come on, Hart," Cyrus snorted. "We both know that's not true. Someone was stabbed there the other day. He was already under a microscope."

"He is the victim here," Hart argued, leaning forward in his chair, refusing to stand down.

"Of what, exactly?"

"That's what we were there to find out," Ash said, and Cyrus snapped his head toward him, pointing a finger at his face.

"I'll deal with you later," he said sharply.

"But—"

"No," Cyrus said. "You alone broke so many rules and laws my head is spinning. I need the full story and I need it right now from the main lead on this case."

Ash actually relented, slumping in his chair and shutting up. He was still glaring at Cyrus through half swollen-shut eyes, though.

"So…" Cyrus turned back to Hart expectantly. There was something about his eyes that said he knew, or at least suspected something. It sent Hart's anxiety through the roof. "Start from the top and tell me everything. Not the cursebreaker notes I got the other day."

"We were trying to," Hart snapped back.

"And yet it sounded like bullshit to me," Cyrus said, raising a heavy brow. "I can smell it."

"Not exactly a flex," Black said, leaning into Cyrus to deliver the words conspiratorially into his ear. "Everyone can smell shit."

"Black," Cyrus warned, voice exasperated as he ran a hand over his face. Black had the decency to shrug and sit back in his chair. "Someone start giving me the truth before I get really pissed off."

"But—" Ash perked back up.

"Not you," Cyrus said, and Ash scowled again. "Anyone else."

"Why are you so fixated on Cane?" Hart couldn't help but ask. "There has to be something deeper than just professional curiosity there."

"Psychoanalysis of me is not needed at this time, Hart," Cyrus said. "I'm doing my job."

"Interesting," Hart said, voice cynical as he tried to keep his cool and figure a smart way out of this. "Because as far as we all know here, there is no curse placed upon Cane that we have found. He's currently being detained for whatever perceived crimes the commoner police department thinks he's guilty of. Your only job here is our involvement with the fight. And yet you tabled that for later. So I'm curious, Cyrus."

Hart held his gaze without blinking, the two of them locked in a standoff with everyone else watching. Hart knew he'd hit a nerve because Cyrus looked tense…but then he smiled.

"How about I ask you the same?" Cyrus threw back. "One could say that your interest in Cane seems to exceed professional courtesy. Do you want to get into the particulars of that?"

Hart froze, mind spinning.

What did Cyrus know? What did he suspect? He'd interrupted them in the office that day, and Hart would be stupid to think Cyrus, a detective, wouldn't have noticed something.

"I feel like we're getting off track," Fix tried to defuse the situation with a calm voice.

"No, I think this is exactly the track we need to be on," Cyrus said, never taking his eyes off Hart.

"Cane is a client," Hart said through gritted teeth. It wasn't a lie. "I was doing my job." An omission of the truth.

"Look." Cyrus visibly forced himself to relax, seemingly letting Hart off the hook. He unclenched his fists and released the tight grip of his jaw. "The simple fact is Cane and his business have been a long-standing stain on the Slatehollow police department. We know it's shady. Everyone knows it's shady."

"And yet you have zero proof of it," Hart said, unable to keep from fighting for Cane even though everything was against him.

Cyrus glowered. "I have a stab victim who says differently."

"And no definitive curse to tie it to. So what does it have to do with you, specifically? You're not in the commoner department. So it is, quite literally, none of your business," Hart said, trying his best to work around semantics.

"The safety of Slatehollow is my business," Cyrus argued, voice rising in volume. "Just like it is yours. So if you're curious about me, I'm curious about you not giving a shit about seeing an asshole like that go down."

"Language," Hart bristled, releasing the hold he had on the armrests and leaning forward. "And yes, my job is the safety of Slatehollow. And you're actively preventing me from doing it by making me sit here for hours."

"There is a solution to that," Cyrus said. "You tell me what I need to know, and I'll be out of your hair."

Hart wanted to argue. He wanted to argue it and fight it until he was blue in the face. He was so frustrated and on edge. He needed a release, but it wouldn't be found with Cyrus. He just didn't know the right way to fight this. He didn't know how to push the buttons that needed to be pushed.

Nobody but Cane did.

"Fine," Hart said, feeling the others around him release relieved breaths as he stood down and relented.

"Good." Cyrus pulled out a pen and a sheet of paper from his file. "Start from the top. Even if it's stuff I already know. I want all of it."

Hart took a few deep breaths, tapping into the professional inside of him, going back to the clinical, pragmatic him who knew how to relay information without getting too tangled in needless conversations.

He needed that Hart to take over.

"A few weeks ago, Cane got in touch with Ash about a possible curse placed on his warehouse or someone in it," Hart began recounting.

"Why Ash?" Cyrus asked.

"Because his name is first alphabetically and his phone number is listed first," Hart said.

He hated Ash's secret hobby, but he wasn't about to let PUMA know he was engaging in it on the regular.

"Is that your story?" Cyrus asked dryly.

"If you don't like it, you are more than free to leave and corroborate with Cane himself," Hart said, steepling his fingers underneath his chin and looking at Cyrus challengingly.

Cyrus stared for a few more seconds but eventually waved a hand at Hart to continue. Hart had no idea what he was thinking. He could guess he wasn't totally buying all of what Hart was trying to sell, but Hart couldn't do anything else. He was never going to sell Ash out.

So Hart went back to the story. He kept it to pure, honest facts, even if some things were omitted. He never said a single lie. There wasn't a single hole in his story. Nothing that would clash with the statement he'd given after the stabbing.

Cyrus was taking notes diligently, asking appropriate questions where he saw fit, the frown on his forehead getting more and more severe.

"So, you're saying it's not a curse?" he asked when Hart finally brought them to that evening and the conundrum it had created. "That's not what you implied the other day."

"I'm saying it's not showing up in diagnostics," Hart said, "but the behavior of the people involved very much points to something."

"Something?" Cyrus said. "Well that sounds compelling, doesn't it?"

"Not all curses come with decomposing bodies and the smell of rot that guides your hand," Hart said.

"Sadly," Black pitched in.

"I've told you what we have so far. The only thing left to say is that we have invited other teams from other towns to advise on this. So far the Kinport team has sent us a bunch of their case files that might be similar to try and find something useful. We're waiting for the others to do the same. In the meantime, we're doing everything we can think of to finally stop this before it gets any worse than it is right now."

"And your idea was to get a certified cursebreaker involved with an illegal fight ring?" Cyrus asked.

"We have deduced that the curse we're dealing with, if there is one, is not sedentary," Hart said, refusing to wince and refusing to confirm or deny the allegations of legality. "It moves around from person to person in a way we're not familiar with. The fight was a setup. We tried to trap whoever was involved and catch them in the act."

"And you didn't think notifying the police or PUMA would be needed for an operation like that?" Cyrus asked the damning question.

Hart struggled to keep his expression in check because, his anger aside, Cyrus had a point. What they'd done wasn't by the book and they all knew that. That was what this boiled down to. He could talk around it all he liked.

"We needed people to show up," Hart said. "We needed people to actually attend the fight to catch them. How many of them do you think would show up with you swarming the place before it even started?"

"Not how undercover operations work, and you know it," Cyrus said.

Hart put his nose in the air, refusing to back down. "It still could have tipped them off."

Cyrus smirked. "I thought Cane ran a clean business? Why would the presence of police threaten him?"

"The business might be clean," Hart said, cursing Cyrus and his brain and the way he was outmaneuvering him at every turn. "But not everyone participating in it is. If this curse is set up the way I think it might be, that requires a very powerful caster. A powerful caster like that costs money. Money not a lot of squeaky-clean people in Slatehollow have access to."

"Right," Cyrus said, the single word like a guillotine hanging over Hart's neck. "So that's your story?"

"It's the truth," Hart said, watching Cyrus slam his file closed and rest his crossed fingers on top.

Hart swallowed, his mouth dry. His heart wouldn't stop hammering.

"Let's say I believe you," Cyrus said, after a few moments of tense silence. "For now."

The whole room was understandably shocked.

Hart was positively gobsmacked.

There was no way he was letting them off that easily.

"Splendid news, truly," Hart choked.

"The matter of Ash's involvement in all this is another story," Cyrus said.

"I thought we settled that," Hart said.

"No, I got an explanation for your thought process," Cyrus said. "Which is passable at best, if you squint. Which I am doing. I am squinting very, very hard right now. It doesn't change the fact that Ash broke several laws and cursebreaker regulations."

"But I was undercover!" Ash defended himself.

"You were unsanctioned and you are well aware of that, Ash," Cyrus said. "This will be reported to PUMA. You will be getting a file with the department and Nexus will be notified. The consequences will be determined in consensus with them."

"Consequences?" Ash asked.

"Cursebreakers aren't above the law," Cyrus said harshly. "You of all people should know that."

"But—"

"ASH!" Cyrus snapped, making the room flinch. "Be happy I'm not pushing for the entire team to be sanctioned. Because I could. Very easily."

Ash slumped back in his seat, face pinched in a worried expression as he exchanged looks with Hart and the rest of the team.

"If anyone here needs to be sanctioned, it's me," Hart said quietly, feeling guilt eat him up from the inside out. "This is my case, and it was my idea for Ash to get involved."

"Hart…" Ash tried but Cyrus waved them off.

"Maybe so, but Ash was the one exchanging punches with the owner of the ring," Cyrus said. "Your presence and Fix's can be attributed to working the case and as such, fly under the radar. Ash was caught in the act. And something tells me it's not the first time he was there."

"You can't prove that," Ash said quickly, proving Cyrus's suspicions more than anything else.

Cyrus shook his head, looking tired as hell. He picked up his file and stood up. "I'm not pursuing it, so you'll most likely get away with a record, a warning, and a slap on the wrist from Nexus. I suggest you take it as a win."

He really was letting them off.

Hart knew Cyrus had more than enough to push further. To push harder. Maybe someone else from PUMA would have. Hart didn't really understand why Cyrus was letting it go, but he was undeniably grateful.

Cyrus looked them all in the eye one by one, the corner of his lip twitching slightly at the maniacal wave Black delivered, before he walked out of the room, picking up a call on his phone as he went.

"YOU RELEASED HIM?" came the bellow from down the hallway a few seconds later, and everything inside Hart froze. "You've barely had him for six hours! I thought you had him dead to rights?"

Cane.

He knew they were talking about Cane.

Hart didn't waste a second before he tore out of his chair and bolted to the door. He could hear them all calling his name, but he didn't care. He needed to see him. Hours of pent-up anxiety and tension were crawling under his skin and only one person could cure it.

Hart ran.