By Kira Deveraux. A free reader bonus.

The Ten-Minute Clock ### A Corrigan's Girl bonus scene — Jude's POV

The van smelled like cold coffee and somebody else's cigarettes, four owners back, baked so deep into the upholstery that no amount of federal budget was ever going to get it out. I'd stopped noticing it around week two. Tonight I noticed everything. The smell, the hum of the equipment rack, the specific temperature of my own hands, which had gone cold the second Marin's voice came through clean and steady in my headset, reciting a hallway number to herself the way Colby had taught her, like a woman walking herself through a checklist instead of into a room with a man who could still, theoretically, decide to kill her.

Ten minutes. That was the whole architecture of the night. Ten minutes on a clock Delgado was running from the seat beside me, a stopwatch app on a department phone, because Anand didn't trust anything that could be subpoenaed to also be the thing keeping Marin alive.

"Zero," Delgado said, and started it.

I made myself breathe in through the nose, four counts, the way I'd taught a dozen younger detectives to do it and never quite managed for myself. Through the headset I heard a door. Then Corrigan's voice, warm, easy, the voice of a man who had never once in his life needed to raise it to get what he wanted.

"There she is. I wondered if you'd actually come find me tonight or just think about it in the car the whole way home."

I knew that voice. I'd built a file on that voice. I still felt it move through me like something physical, a hand closing slow around something in my chest, because underneath the file and the four months and the wire I'd insisted on double-redundant, that voice belonged to the one person in this operation who could still end her.

"I didn't want to think about it in the car," Marin said. Steady. Perfect. "I wanted to hear you say it wasn't as bad as it sounds."

Two minutes gone. Delgado didn't look at me. He'd learned, over four months, exactly when looking at me helped and exactly when it made the wait worse, and he'd landed, correctly, on worse.

I ran the numbers instead, the way I always ran numbers when the alternative was picturing the actual room. Ten minutes, a hard breach at the ceiling regardless of audio. Two agents dressed as catering staff eighteen feet from the study door. A third at the garden gate. Delgado and me in the van, two blocks out, exactly as far as institutional caution could put a man who had already, once, sat in a different vehicle and listened to the wrong kind of silence for twenty-nine minutes before anyone let him move.

This wasn't that. I made myself say it in my own head, plainly, the way I'd say it in a report. This wasn't that. Marin was talking. Marin was breathing at a rate the equipment could read as controlled. Marin was, as of four minutes and eleven seconds, doing exactly what she'd told me she was going to do in a kitchen on Baxter Street three weeks ago, and doing it better than half the trained assets I'd run in eleven years on this job.

"It's not as bad as it sounds," Corrigan said, and something in his voice shifted, warmer somehow, the register of a man settling into a story he'd told himself so many times it had stopped feeling like a confession. "It's not even really wrong, Marin. It's just money that's tired of being looked at too closely. Every fund this size carries something like it. Rowe's carries three."

Delgado's pen stopped moving. He'd been logging timestamps in a notebook, the old-fashioned kind, because Anand wanted a physical record that couldn't be argued was doctored, and for a second even he forgot to write.

Every fund this size. Three words that were going to reopen half the case files this task force had ever closed and never fully understood. I filed it. I filed everything, because filing was the only thing standing between me and the version of myself that wanted to be in that room instead of a van, and some part of me understood, sitting there, that Anand had known exactly what she was doing when she built this operation around my worst instinct and then physically removed the instinct's access to the building.

Six minutes. Corrigan's voice again, softer, and something in it made my stomach drop before the words even landed.

"You've been different for weeks. I notice everything about you, my girl. I built you, remember. I know your tells better than you know them yourself." A pause, the specific pause of a man deciding whether to say the rest of a sentence. "Is there someone."

I stopped breathing entirely for about a second and a half. Delgado's eyes came up to mine, fast, and away again, because we both knew exactly what four months of surveillance logs would show if Corrigan ever got a warrant instead of a hunch, and neither of us said it out loud in a van that was, technically, also recording.

"There isn't anyone," Marin said. No hitch. No tell. A woman who had spent three years learning to lie to a man who thought he could read her better than she could read herself, and who was, right now, doing it better than I would have believed possible if I hadn't watched her build to this exact moment for four months. "I've just had a lot on my mind. The audit's been—"

"The audit." He said it like he was tasting it, testing whether the word still fit comfortably in his mouth. "You work too hard. You always have. It's part of what I lo—" He caught himself. Recovered smooth, the way a man recovers who has spent decades never once being caught at anything. "It's part of what makes you good at this."

Eight minutes.

I thought about Dani in that silence, the way I always did now when the room went quiet and the clock kept moving and there was nothing left to do but wait. Four years ago I had been the one running silent, the one who let a check-in slide because the alternative felt like breaking something fragile between us. Four years ago the silence had been mine to break and I hadn't, and a woman had died two blocks from where I stood doing the math on how fast I could get to her, arriving at an answer that came too late by exactly the number of minutes I'd spent deciding whether moving would look like panic.

This time the silence wasn't mine. This time I had handed it, deliberately, to a federal agent who'd read my file and built an operation specifically designed to keep me two blocks from ever making that choice again. It should have felt like exile. It felt, instead, like the first time in four years that discipline and love had asked the same thing of me instead of two different ones, and I didn't know what to do with how much that unsettled me, sitting in a van, doing nothing, on purpose, because doing nothing was finally the right call instead of the wrong one dressed up as caution.

"I should really get back to Isla," Marin said.

The panic phrase. Nine minutes and forty seconds on Delgado's stopwatch, twenty seconds under the wire, her voice exactly as steady saying it as it had been saying everything else all night, because she'd told me once that the trick to a lie that mattered was never letting the important one sound different from all the unimportant ones around it.

"Go on, then," Corrigan said, easy, unbothered, a man who had no idea he'd just handed a federal task force forty-one million dollars' worth of his own voice on tape. "Don't keep the donors waiting. You've done enough tonight."

I was moving before Delgado finished calling the extraction, headset still on, already halfway to the door of a van I had absolutely no operational reason to be leaving yet, because the plan had never once required me to meet her at the corner instead of the safe house three blocks further. Delgado didn't stop me this time. He'd learned, I think, sometime in the last three weeks, which rules were actually load-bearing and which ones had only ever been protecting people from a version of me that no longer entirely existed.

She came around the corner two minutes later in a coat that didn't match the dress underneath it, moving fast and even, the specific gait of a woman holding herself together through sheer force of will one more block at a time. She saw me and something in her face broke open, just slightly, just enough.

"You weren't supposed to be here," she said.

"I know," I said, and didn't apologize for it, because for the first time in four years I didn't feel like I owed anyone an apology for choosing to be exactly where the person I loved was standing.

Her hand found mine before either of us decided to let it. Two blocks behind us, in a townhouse full of donors who had no idea what they'd just witnessed, Desmond Corrigan was still standing in his own study, congratulating himself on a confession he didn't know he'd made.

Ten minutes. Every second of it recorded. And not one of them, in the end, spent the way the old rule would have made me spend it — alone, at a distance, telling myself that was the same thing as safe.

It never had been. It had just taken me four years, and one woman brave enough to wear a wire into a room I couldn't enter, to finally believe it.