Revenge11 min read
I Put the Handcuffs on the Man I Never Loved
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They told me what would happen if I loosened my grip: a dozen men would die. They also told me what would happen if I tightened it: my heart would break over and over until it was empty. I chose the first option and wore my uniform like armor. I chose the second one because it was easier to play a fool.
"You look thin," Cade said the first morning he woke up in my apartment.
"Thanks," I said, and lit a cigarette for the camera I had secretly planted in his coat. "Sleep well?"
He didn't answer. He only watched me with those black, unreadable eyes. He always watched. That watching was part of my evidence.
"You shouldn't smoke," he said at last.
"It's not like you can stop me."
He leaned closer. "You're stubborn," he murmured.
"I know."
That was our first real exchange. After months of scripted small-talk under neon convenience-store lights, after the "rescue" we staged on a dump heap, those few words felt like a confirmation. He didn't know I was wearing a wire. He didn't know the powder on his sleeve would be a sample for the lab. He didn't know the bruise I kept hidden under my collar came from a staged scuffle we timed to make him vulnerable.
"I'll call you 'my girl' if you like," he said once, half-joking, half-serious. "But don't ask me to say love."
"I won't," I said.
I lied.
"You saved me," he told me the night he first slept on my couch, wrapped in my blanket, his head on my knees. "If anything happens to you, I'll…"
"You're not a savior," I told him, and under the fluorescent light, he looked like a boy.
He was many things: brilliant at logistics, careless about bodies, narrow as a needle where tenderness was concerned. He had been small and rough and taken by other men at a younger age. He learned how to make people do things, and when I touched his scarred hands, I cataloged how he answered pressure. I fed him curry shaped like bears and wrapped bandages into butterflies. I learned his pauses. I learned the moment he softened when I reached out a hand.
"You are not like the others," he said once, his voice thin with something that might have been affection.
"I am an easy woman to keep," I answered. That was the lie I told myself in the mirror.
"Promise me you won't leave," he said.
"I won't," I said.
That promise was a trap I had set for him, and for me.
The first time they put cuffs on him I felt something like relief. I had worked two years to build the chain that would finally link him to charges. "Cade Lindgren," I read for the record while Preston Watkins adjusted the cuffs. "You are under arrest—"
He looked at me. "Ginevra," he said.
"You're under arrest," I repeated, softer.
"Did you ever—"
"Did I love you?" I finished his question with the answer before he could. "No."
He stared, then laughed, bitter and short. "Good," he said. "Eat your medals."
I slid a silver band over his wrists. The flashbulbs of the task force camera made a staccato heartbeat. I felt at once triumphant—and terribly empty.
"Goodbye," he said, tilted his head as if studying a specimen.
"Goodbye," I said.
He escaped three days later. They made him the escape everyone would remember: a convoy stopped under a false flag, a bomb, a smoke that rose like a lie. The city leaked news for hours. We watched as a man who had gathered half the police force into a trap walked out of a cage we thought locked.
"We lost the citation," Preston said that morning, and he rubbed his eyes.
"I can live without a medal," I answered. "I can't live without that boy's life."
The boy was my nephew, Brady Vincent. He was supposed to be safe behind the ring of our watch, but the next call came with a voice that belonged to a surgeon and a smell of sick. Brady lay in surgery with needles puncturing his limbs, needles that had loaded poison into a child’s small body.
"Why would he do this?" I said to Gerald when we sat outside the emergency ward.
Gerald Saito—my partner in the field, my friend who smoked too much to hide the worry—put a thin hand on mine. "Because he can. Because he hates you. Because you made him handcuffs. Because he always keeps score."
"You promised me he won't touch my family," I said. My voice was a rusty hinge.
"We promised a lot of things," Gerald said. "But we didn't promise the world."
When Brady survived, when the machine finally whispered a steady rhythm, the note Cade left in that boy's pocket made my blood run cold. "Don't refuse me," the handwriting said. He had always written like a blade.
They wanted me locked away then, under protection. They wanted me out of reach. But every measure we took only made him more furious. He wanted me to suffer in public. He wanted me to feel the burn of exposure the way he had felt hunger as a child.
"He will show up where you live," Gerald warned. "If you're kept in a hotel with men at the door, he will find a way. He always does."
"If he burns his bridges, he will burn his cities," I said. "Let him. I'll pull him into the light."
"You can't pull an inferno," he said.
"Maybe I can," I answered.
So we set the stage. They gave me a room, fake credentials, a collar microphone, and a team that could surround the rickety factory in the East District with armored cars and drones. I was bait, and I wore bait like a ribbon.
"You afraid?" Gerald asked as I lay on the cot with my hands bound.
"No," I told him. I lied.
"Say you'll come see me afterward, if you make it," he said.
"I will," I promised, and he placed a cigarette between my fingers like a charm against fear. Then he wrapped the black cloth over my eyes and led me out into a night that smelled of wet iron.
"I'll be outside," he told me. "If anything happens, whistle. Not the ones you used with the team. A real whistle."
"You call?"
"On the old river bell outside the warehouse."
"I'll use it," I said.
They left me in the dark with one thousand square feet of emptiness and a sound loop of distant traffic. The factory smelled of oil and old things. I waited. The hours scraped by until an explosion opened the night and the world turned into flame and smoke.
They had said he would take me clean. They lied. He wanted a show.
When the first bomb detonated in the East Grove, the signal came in a voice that was not his. Men shouted into the radio. Drones spooled outward. I heard the reported blasts as if someone else were describing them. Then came the steps in the corridor, heavy and steady.
"I thought you said he wouldn't bring so many men," I whispered through the gag.
"He didn't," a voice said—Esteban Cardoso's—another undercover who had been planted as a crewman on the cruise, now part of the backup. "This is different."
When the door crashed inward, a pair of shoes appeared in my periphery. I tried to move. The room tilted like a ship. I smelled a metallic tang.
A voice, low and calm, at the edge of recognition. "Good girl," Cade said.
"Don't touch me," I said.
He touched the inside of my arm like someone testing a watch. "You are mine," he murmured. "You have always been mine."
Someone put a tube against my vein. The needle glinted. Pain flared, then a hush. I felt a warm, poisonous ribbon go inside me. My limbs turned leaden. The room drew away.
"What did you give me?" I managed.
"Heroin," he answered, almost tender. "A small dose. You'll be awake. You won't be free."
He kissed the corner of my mouth when I couldn't look away. "Be good," he whispered. "Don't scream. Don't die."
I did not die that night. I shattered.
When I could speak again, my voice thin as wire, he stood beside the bed like a sentinel.
"What did you put in me?" I demanded.
"Enough," he said. "Just enough to bind you to me."
"You bastard."
He smiled at that word the way a man admires a coin. "You were always clever," Cade said. "But you never lay a hand on me that wasn't to lock me up."
"I put those cuffs on you," I said. "I arrested you."
"And you lied," he replied.
Our roles twisted. He wanted me drugged. He wanted me to beg. He wanted the proof that I would never be able to refuse him again.
"Tell me," he said one night, setting another syringe on the table. "Do you love me, Ginevra?"
"No," I said, and watched his face. He took the denial like a blow he didn't know how to feel.
"Good," he said.
He had me sign a marriage certificate he printed on a stolen printer. He called me his wife; he signed our names with a flourish and a cruelty that had nothing to do with law. He placed a red stamp on fake paper and called it a bond.
"You're my wife now," he said, tucking the certificate into his coat. "If you run, if you leave—I'll take everything."
"Don't imagine you can own me," I whispered.
He kissed my hand. "You already belong."
I didn't belong.
I belonged to a mission. I belonged to the files in Preston's locked drawer. I belonged to the box of cigarette butts he left on his kitchen table so I could take samples. I belonged to the night Gerald kept his radio on low so he could hear me.
And then Gianna Ayers made the mistake of thinking she could perform her way into his arms.
"You and I should talk," she said to him on the cruise, loud enough for everyone to hear.
"Not now," Cade told her.
She shrugged, bright and venomous. "Not now," she repeated, and put her hand on his arm in front of the crowd.
I watched the whole thing through a camera I had positioned in the vent. She provoked him, nudged him, and leaned her head against his shoulder like a prize. He didn't say no. He didn't say yes. He only twisted his lips as if tasting bitterness.
That night on the ship he shut me away in a room and asked me to swear I loved him.
"I swear I've never lied," I said, keeping close to the script we'd rehearsed.
"Say it," he said.
"I swear I didn't lie."
"Say it right."
"I did not lie," I said again.
He shoved me out of the room and slammed the door.
Gianna was the silver needle in his life: beautiful, venomous, dangerous. She wanted dominance. She wanted him as a stepping stone. She thought she could rise and leave me wrecked and useless.
She was wrong.
Because when we finally took the gang down, the evidence on her table was pristine. The phone logs, the ledger, the shipping manifests… all faintly connected like the threads of a net. Preston and Johann worked a public sting that exposed more than Cade's ring. It exposed the web. They found warehouses, they found accounts, and then they found the bar on Harbor Row—Gianna's bar.
When the city learned what Gianna did, they did not whisper. They televised it, because a public punishment needs eyes to be sharp.
"Come forward," Preston said at the press conference, and his voice was cold as a bank vault. "Gianna Ayers, you are under arrest."
The press room filled until it should have burst. Cameras blinked like insects. The mayor was there, and the chief. Journalists jostled for a line. I watched on a monitor, my hands still numb from the injections, as they pushed toward the woman who had once laughed in my face.
She stood in the middle of the room, hair arranged, lipstick bright like a gun. They led her to the podium and unlatched a microphone.
"Why are you doing this?" she asked with a smile that did not reach her ears.
"Because we will show people who profits off their city's poison," Preston said. He set a folder on the podium.
Johann Rice, the forensic analyst, stepped up and clicked the projector. Images of stacks of bills, flashy parties, hidden rooms—evidence sprawled across the big screen like a crime scene.
"This is the inventory list," Johann said. "This is the ledger of transfers. This is a ledger where your name appears as a recipient. This is a photo where you stand with the man we all just detained. These shipments moved through your bar."
Gianna swayed just a fraction, then straightened.
"I run a business," she said. "You have no proof this ties me to drugs."
"We have intercepted phone calls," Preston said. "We have witnesses. We have ledgers. We have shipping manifests. We have your signature. We have the account activity. You will be charged."
The crowd shifted. Pens scratched. A cameraman snapped a photo. A woman in the back whispered, "Finally." Another man said, "She always looked too bright."
Gianna's face did something that people do when they're unmasked. It flickered through shades—denial, rage, bargaining, collapse.
"This is a setup," she spat. Her voice shook. "You people—"
"You're under arrest," Preston repeated. "For trafficking, for money laundering, for conspiracy."
They placed handcuffs on her. The metal clicked with a severe finality. Gianna's eyes widened like someone who had misread the world. She looked at the cameras as if pleading. The reporters surged forward; someone called out questions. The chief read the charges aloud.
"No," Gianna whispered. "You don't know—"
"You thought you could hide," Johann said, almost quietly. "But the ledger doesn't lie, and neither does the bank."
A cluster of onlookers pushed their phones forward. Someone filmed her as the officers led her away. Her expression crumbled into something quieter than rage: stunned shame. She looked like a woman stripped to the bone in public.
"You'll go to prison," someone called. "Shame on you."
"It's over for her," the mayor said.
When the world watched, Gianna's bravado shattered like thin glass. She was escorted through the press line. She turned her face to the crowd once, and then turned away. A child in the audience clapped, not understanding why. An older woman turned her head as if to look away.
"Why did you do it?" a reporter asked.
Gianna stopped. Tears suddenly leaked down her face, but they had nothing to do with regret and everything to do with the sudden loss of a role she'd perfected.
"You think I wanted this?" she said. She tried to make her voice steady, then broke. "You think I'm some kind of monster? I had to survive. I had to—"
"Survival doesn't excuse murder," Preston said.
They shoved a microphone into her face as she was taken away. "Is Cade Lindgren the one who ordered it? Is he your partner?"
She swallowed, and her throat moved like a fish. "I—" she started. Then she stopped. The cameras hummed. The crowd leaned forward on a wave of voyeurism and righteousness.
Gianna's fall had stages. At first she denied. Then she lashed out, asking why the police always hunted her. Then, during the long handcuffing, as officers clicked the metal, she flinched and finally sobbed. Around her, the room murmured—condemnation, curiosity, vindication.
When they led her out, someone in the crowd muttered, "She was pretty."
"Pretty can kill," another man said.
"Doesn't matter," the reporter said into her recorder. "She will be prosecuted."
The punishment was public, and it was thorough. The cameras recorded her humiliation. People took photos, and those photos would live a long life. Gianna Ayers, who once strutted under neon and thought power was an emotion, left in cuffs and a white blouse rumpled.
I watched the feed with a thin smile. I had helped prove that an empire didn't rise on one man's back alone. It rose on many hands, including hers. The public humiliation of a second villain did not erase the one who had escaped. It did not save Brady from the nights of needles. It did not stop the man who would not stop.
But it felt like a small justice.
They tallied the damage. The raid took nearly five hundred kilograms of narcotics out of the city. A hundred suspects were rounded up. Sixteen officers died in the operation that sealed the net. They wrote citations and printed names. My father's face was in an old photograph beside the list of honors. Kenneth Clement had loved the city like a ledger, and he had given his life to it. His photo was pressed into the file I kept beside my toothbrush.
The final act came like a play that refused to quit. Cade found a way to lure me into a room with gasoline and a match. He said he would run with me, he said he would protect me from my own law. He wanted me to choose him finally.
"You told me you never loved me," he said, and his fingers were warm, shaking almost childlike.
"I told you I arrested you," I said, and I struck the match.
His face shifted through incredulity, then hurt, then a slow, terrible understanding. He tangled in the flames I had hoped would burn him alone. He coughed. He reached out toward me with hands that had once held only his own future.
"Why?" he choked.
"Because you never loved anyone," I said.
"You think you can burn me, Ginevra?" he rasped, voice raw with flame and smoke.
"I think we both burn tonight," I answered.
We did. The fire took us both. It took my last breath with a sound like paper tearing. I remember my father's face in the flames as if he had come to the doorway to watch me finally take the honor he could not keep. I remember Preston's voice somewhere outside like a radio caught in static.
Afterward, papers wrote about the hero who had infiltrated the ring and paid with her life. Preston read Ginevra's file aloud in the city hall as the mayor pinned a posthumous award to a case folder. The city lit candles and printed photos. The record recorded a name for bravery and a list of seizures.
I had wanted the cuffs on him. I had wanted to make him taste the shame of being tied. I had wanted Gianna to be exposed. I had wanted my nephew safe. I had wanted my father to be proud. I had wanted the ledger to be closed.
In the end, I got a medal in a box and a seat at a ceremony I could not attend. People clapped. They read my report. They told the story in a thousand small rewrites.
They call it justice. They called it closure.
I call it the truth I was willing to pay for.
The End
— Thank you for reading —