JUDAS (BREAKING THE DEVIL'S HALO)

The Exception

CHAPTER EIGHT

*JUDAS*

Mia found him before Sherlock came back, which surprised Judas less than it probably should have. Finding people who didn't want to be found was, as far as he could tell, the entire skill set of everyone worth knowing in this chapter of his life.

She was waiting outside the photographer's building when he stepped out for groceries, leaning against a parked car with her arms crossed.

"You look terrible," she said, by way of hello.

"Thank you."

"I mean it. When's the last time you slept somewhere for more than one night in a row?"

Judas didn't answer that, which was its own answer.

"How did you find me."

"I'm a reporter, Judas. Finding people is the job." She fell into step beside him, uninvited. "Your paper's gone unusually quiet on a story with your own byline attached to it. Either Priya's sitting on something enormous, or you two have gone completely dark for reasons neither of you is telling anyone. I know Priya. She doesn't sit on stories this size without a reason."

"Maybe there's a good reason."

"There's always a good reason with you people. I'm asking if I can help with it."

"You can't."

"Try me."

"It's already gotten people hurt. I'm not bringing you into that because you asked nicely on a sidewalk."

"I don't believe a word of that wire story, and I'm not asking you to trust me blind. I'm asking you to let me earn it." Something sharpened in her voice, eleven years of watching men half as good as her get promoted past her for being louder about less. "I'm not looking for careful right now. I'm looking for the story that's actually worth the risk. Let me see what you've got. If it's nothing, I walk and you never hear from me again."

Judas stopped walking. It was, he realized, the first offer anyone had made him in two weeks that came with an actual exit built in. Priya wanted airtight. Kai wanted invisible. Sherlock wanted proof. Mia wanted a look, and was willing to leave empty-handed if it wasn't there.

"One condition," he said. "You see it. You don't run with any of it, not a sourced line, not a hint, until I say so. If you break that, I will make sure you never get another word out of me or Kai as long as I'm alive to stop it."

"Deal." She didn't hesitate, which told him either she meant it or she was very good at sounding like she did.

He brought her back to the apartment against every instinct telling him it was a mistake. Kai's face, when Mia walked through the door, made clear he wasn't the only one with reservations.

"You brought a reporter," Kai said, flat.

"She already knows we've gone dark. Better she hears it from us on our terms than pieces together a worse version on hers."

"I'm standing right here," Mia said, unbothered, already scanning the room, the laptops, the filings taped to the wall, with the hungry attention of someone cataloguing a story's raw materials. "And I wouldn't have pieced together a worse version. I'd have gotten it faster and cleaner."

Judas laid it out himself this time, not Kai, choosing what she got and what she didn't: the shell company, the buried trial data, the chase four nights ago, nothing yet about Sherlock beyond the fact that someone with field experience had agreed to help them survive it. He stopped twice, mid-sentence, when he decided a detail wasn't hers to have yet.

Mia took almost no notes, the kind of reporter who trusted her memory over paper that could be subpoenaed. When he finished, she exhaled slowly.

"This ends careers. Possibly the company. Possibly worse than careers, if that chase was real." She was already moving toward the window, phone half out of her pocket. "I know a researcher at the state health board who's been circling Apex's filings for a year without knowing why. One call, off the record, just to see if the timeline lines up with what you're telling me—"

"No." Judas crossed the room and put his hand flat over her phone before she'd fully raised it. "That's exactly what I said no to ten minutes ago."

"It's not running the story, Judas, it's one background question to someone who already—"

"It's a phone call that puts my name and this address one degree away from a state employee whose calls might already be watched. You agreed. Not until I say so means not until I say so, not until you decide the exception doesn't count."

Mia held his gaze a long moment, and he watched something calculate behind her eyes, weighing whether pushing further here cost her more than it gained. It was the first time he'd seen her actually stop.

"Fine." She put the phone away. "But you're burning time you don't have."

"That's my risk to take."

"It's not, actually. It's Kai's too, and whoever else ends up standing next to you when Apex decides careful isn't working on you anymore." She said it without cruelty, which somehow made it land harder.

Kai pulled Judas aside once Mia stepped into the hallway to actually take a call, this one real, his voice low and urgent by the kitchen doorway.

"You saw that."

"I saw it."

"That's what I meant. Not that she'd sell us out for money or spite. That she'll talk herself into an exception being different from breaking the rule, every single time, right up until the exception is the thing that gets somebody found." Kai glanced toward the door. "She stopped tonight because you were standing right there with your hand on the phone. I won't always be standing there. You won't either."

"So what do I do. Cut her loose."

"No. You just stop assuming a deal she agreed to once is a deal she'll keep agreeing to every day after, with nobody watching." Kai's voice had gone quiet, serious in a way it rarely was. "Today you were fast enough. Build for the day you're not."

Judas didn't have a good answer for that, mostly because he'd felt it too, the half second before he moved, how close fine had come to being too late. He'd held the line once. That wasn't the same as trusting himself to hold it every time nobody was looking. Priya was thorough. Kai was cautious to the point of paranoia. Mia was fast, and hungry, and exactly the kind of ally who could turn fragments into a story the world couldn't ignore, right up until the day she decided ignoring the rules mattered less than winning.

He went to let Mia back inside anyway, because the alternative was doing this with only two people, and two people, four nights ago, had nearly not been enough.