Carmen’s brow creased. “You think it’s about the cases, or about you?”
“It’s always about me,” Nina said, folding the clipping in half and tucking it into her blazer pocket. “Let’s keep moving.”
By morning, the rain had burned off into a sky streaked pale gold, the deceptive brightness that felt like a dare. The three of them walked into the courthouse shoulder to shoulder, the echo of their heels in sync. The marble lobby buzzed with chatter, the smell of burnt coffee drifting from the kiosk by the elevators.
Kavanagh’s mother was waiting in the hallway outside courtroom three, hands twisting in the strap of her handbag. Her face was pale, but her eyes locked on Nina like she’d been holding herself together for this.
“They’ll listen,” Nina told her quietly. “And if they don’t, we’ll make them.”
Inside, the courtroom was already half full. The prosecution had stacked their side with uniformed officers, the unspoken intimidation that seeped into jurors’ bones even if no jury sat today. Sean sat at the defence table, shoulders tense, eyes fixed on the grain of the wood in front of him.
Nina leaned in as she sat. “When the judge asks, you answer clearly. Yes, ma’am. No, ma’am. Don’t rise to bait.”
He gave a tight nod.
Judge Keane took the bench, gavel rapping once. “Bail hearing for Sean Kavanagh. Counsel?”
The prosecutor was a heavyset man with a voice that rumbled low and mean. “Your Honour, the defendant is currently on licence for a prior conviction. The assault in question was captured on CCTV—”
“There is no CCTV,” Nina cut in. “Only a blurred image of a man in a hooded sweatshirt, taken from across the street. The Commonwealth has no direct evidence tying my client to this assault.”
The prosecutor’s lips curled. “The victim identified Kavanagh by voice.”
“An identification made while he was concussed in hospital,” Nina said, her voice a whip-crack. “And my client has a verified alibi.”
The back-and-forth stretched, the air thick with argument. Keane’s eyes moved between them, weighing, measuring. Finally, she leaned back.
“Bail is set at ten thousand. Defendant to be released upon posting.”
Sean’s shoulders sagged. His mother pressed a trembling hand to her mouth.
When court adjourned, the three women moved fast, slipping out a side exit before the press could pounce. The alley smelled of damp brick and cigarette smoke, puddles gleaming under the weak sunlight.
“That’s two in two days,” Carmen said, lighting a cigarette. “You realise what we’ve started?”
Nina met her gaze. “A pattern.”
Maya’s phone buzzed again. She read the message, jaw tightening. “We’ve got another one.”
“Another case?” Carmen asked.
“Another warning.” She turned the phone to show them a photo—Nina’s apartment door, a strip of paper taped to it. Lines get crossed in the dark.
The words sat black and heavy in Nina’s mind, a threat wrapped in something almost philosophical. She didn’t flinch.
“Then we keep the lights on,” she said.
They regrouped at the office, the afternoon light slanting low through the blinds, striping the floor. The Kavanaghs sat together on the worn sofa, cups of tea cooling in their hands. Jorge Rivera was gone—posted bail and vanished into the arms of his waiting family—but his file still lay open on the desk.
Maya poured herself a coffee, black, no sugar. “We need a plan for the press before they twist all of this into something we can’t control.”
“I’m not here to make friends with journalists,” Nina said.
“You’re here to win,” Maya countered. “And winning sometimes means controlling the story.”
Carmen stubbed out her cigarette in the tray by the window. “We start with a name. An official name. No more three women in a borrowed office.”
Nina looked at her. “Brightline?”
Carmen nodded once. “Brightline.”
Maya set down her cup. “If we’re doing this, we need to move fast. Website, press release, something that makes us look like we’ve been here for years.”
“We haven’t been here for years,” Nina said.
Maya’s gaze was steady. “We’ve all been here, in our own ways. Now we’re just doing it under one roof.”
Nina let the words settle. She thought of prison walls, of campaigns run in the shadows, of courtrooms that stank of sweat and fear. Brightline wasn’t a beginning—it was a reveal.
They didn’t leave the office until after dark, the city lit in sodium orange and neon. The air was cooler now, the day’s tension softened but not gone. Nina walked alone toward her apartment, the hum of streetlights in her ears. A man stood at the far end of the block, leaning against a lamppost, hood pulled low. She slowed, watching him. He didn’t move.
By the time she reached the door, the lamppost was empty. But taped to her mailbox was another strip of paper, the handwriting the same as in the photo Maya had shown her.
Even the bright line can blur.
She stood there in the wash of the streetlamp, the paper fluttering faintly in the night breeze, and felt the old courtroom chill seep back into her bones.
2500
Nina left the note where it was, the cheap tape glinting under the lamp, and keyed herself inside without looking over her shoulder. The stairwell smelled of damp plaster and someone’s half-burnt toast. She climbed in silence, each creak of the treads whispering old habits—never turn your back, never linger on landings, always listen for the pause in someone else’s breathing. The light on the second-floor landing flickered twice before steadying. She didn’t wait beneath it. She kept going.
Inside the flat, she shut the door and set the chain, then stood with her palm flat to the wood, counting her heartbeat until it slowed. The rooms held onto the day’s damp—a faint chill clung to the paint like a memory, the window glass beaded from an earlier fog. She toed off her shoes and lined them along the skirting board beside a second-hand bookshelf she’d built herself on a Sunday she couldn’t bear to be outside. The place had been furnished in pieces like a case put together: a table sanded back to bare grain, a chair with a missing rung that she’d repaired with twine and stubbornness, mugs that didn’t match on purpose.
She didn’t switch on the overhead light. She walked the rooms by touch, as she always did—the low scrape of her fingertips along the wall, the counting of steps, the brush of the rug’s edge at her toes. She hung her blazer on the back of the chair and set her briefcase on the table. The kettle clicked when she thumbed it on. Ordinary domestic noise, the kind you didn’t get on the inside. The kind that could save you.
Her phone buzzed on the table. Maya: You home?
She typed with one hand, the other out for the tea tin. Yeah.
A pause. You alone?
She glanced at the door she’d chained and at the gap at the bottom where hall light spilled in a thin blade. For now.
A longer pause this time. Don’t be a hero. Call me if anything feels off. I can be there in ten.
I know. She added a full stop, because it made something in her chest unclench. The water boiled. She huffed a laugh at herself, poured it over a bag, watched brown bloom through the steam. “Aye,” she said to the empty room, and rolled the word on her tongue, a Belfast lilt threaded through her vowels like a stitch she couldn’t pull free.
The knock made her flinch enough to be furious with herself. She set the mug down hard enough to slop tea over the saucer and walked to the door. She didn’t ask who it was. She looked through the peephole. Mrs. Duffy from 3B, her silhouette unmistakable—a thick cardigan, hair like a grey storm cloud, a plastic grocery bag bunched in one fist as if she’d never arrived any place with empty hands in her life.
Nina unhooked the chain and opened the door.
“Evenin’, pet,” Mrs. Duffy said, peering around her like she expected to catch the flat in misbehaviour. “Saw the light. Thought, that girl’s not had a hot bite this night with the way she was trotting about. Brought ye a bit of stew.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Course I don’t. That’s not the point,” she said, shouldering past her with the authority of old Irish women everywhere, the bag swinging. She clicked her tongue at the sight of the single mug on the table. “You’ll take more tea in ye. That’s what you’ll do. You look peaky.”
“I’m grand,” Nina said, but her voice softened on the second word without permission. She took the bag, warm through the thin plastic, and felt something in her throat want to give. “Thank you.”
Mrs. Duffy’s gaze snagged on the blazer draped over the chair. Her expression flickered—curiosity, concern, calculation—then smoothed into a gentler thing. “Busy with your… work?”
“My work,” Nina said.
“Aye,” Mrs. Duffy said. “Well. The fellas downstairs were mouthin’ about a paper left on your box. Dirty scut of a thing for whoever did that. You want me to go down with a brush and wash it off the lot of them, you just say.”
Nina almost smiled. “I’ll manage.”
“I’ve no doubt.” Mrs. Duffy patted her arm like blessing and threat both. “I mind you’re never alone, love. There’s always one that sees. We’re none of us ghosts.”
After she’d gone, the flat felt different, held in the shape of another person’s care. Nina ate by the window, the stew thick with pearl barley and patience, the taste of home sneaking up on her like a song she hadn’t meant to hum. She rinsed the bowl, set it to dry, and carried her tea to the window. Outside, the street had emptied except for a pair of teenagers sharing a hood against the drizzle. Their laughter reached her in soft bursts—bright, reckless, unafraid.
Her phone buzzed again. Carmen this time. You sleep?
Nina typed, Not yet.
Good. Check your email. We might’ve found our first brick.
She opened the laptop and the light of it stung her eyes. An email from Carmen with a single attachment: a still image from street camera footage, the slightly skewed angle that made everything in the frame look like it was leaning away. A figure in a hoodie sprinting out of a pool of light in front of the Harland Bar. The time-stamp matched the assault night down to the minute. The runner was slim and long-legged. What mattered wasn’t the shape, though. It was the shoes: white trainers with a black diagonal knife of a stripe that bled into the sole.
Nina zoomed. The image pixelated into a mess and then back into a shape. You could fake a hoodie. You could swap a jacket. You didn’t usually bother about your laces. She typed, Where did you get this?
Carmen: The chipper two doors down keeps their own camera on because some eejit keeps nicking their mayo pump. I told them we were trying to save a boy who doesn’t deserve to rot. They gave me the full pull.
Nina: You’re an angel.
Carmen: I’m an efficient sinner. We’ll go over it frame by frame in the morning. For now, lock up.
Nina closed the laptop. She did a second walk of the flat—a habit she didn’t pretend she didn’t have—checked the windows, the balcony door, the stove. When she lay down, she left the bedroom door half-open and the hall light on, the way you did for a child who knew monsters were real and needed to see them coming.
When sleep found her, it came thin and bright-edged, full of doors that wouldn’t open and a gavel that never struck.
She woke before dawn, dragged out of a dream by the pinprick sense of being looked at. The flat was quiet but for the soft hum of the fridge and the distant shush of early traffic. Her phone face-down on the bedside table glowed a smear through the case. She turned it over. A message from an unknown number, the green bubble smug as a bruise.
Do you sleep easy, Princess?
She didn’t bother to answer. She set the phone down like she was placing a glass on a table she didn’t own and swung her legs out of bed.
The morning opened clean and hard. Cold water on the face, hair shoved back, the taste of toothpaste and determination. She put on a white shirt and a black skirt that fit like decision, shrugged into the blazer, and laced her boots tight. The city outside the window was still blue with early. She texted Maya: Coffee? On my way.
By the time she reached the office, the kettle was already singing. Maya was in a navy suit the colour of stormwater, her hair knotted at the nape of her neck. She handed Nina a mug one-handed while her other scrolled headlines.
“You’re trending,” she said, deadpan.
“God save us.”
“Maybe not Him. But someone.”
Carmen came in with the morning on her coat and a bag of buttery soda farls wrapped in paper. “Breakfast. If we’re starting with footage, no one’s looking at a screen on an empty stomach.”
They ate with the hunger that had nothing to do with food, standing, crumbs a consolation on the tongue. Then Carmen opened her laptop and spread the Harland clip across the screen. The frame held the run of pavement, the bar door, the lamplight making a pie slice of brightness that the night licked at the edges of.
“Start here,” Carmen said, tapping the trackpad. The video stuttered into motion. A figure stepped out of the bar—dark jacket, shoulders bunched with adrenaline. A second figure followed, stumbling. The camera caught the flash of a face for a half-breath: a man, early thirties, cheek split. Then a third figure lunged into frame. Hood up. Quick as a bad decision.
“There,” Carmen murmured. “Freeze.”
The pixelated blur held. Nina leaned in. The hooded figure’s head was tilted away. Shoes caught the light. White with the slash of black.
“That’s not Sean’s make,” Nina said, not trusting her relief enough to let it into her voice. “He’s always in those cheap black trainers with the flappy heel.”
“And this lad runs like he does it for sport,” Maya added. “Sean looks like he’s trying to fight the ground.”
“Where’d you see him run?” Carmen asked.
Maya didn’t answer. Nina did. “Court corridor. He kept pace with my temper,” she said, and it came out softer than she meant, almost fond.
They ran the clip again. The hooded runner shoved past the bleeding man, and the camera caught a glint in his hand like a coin or a ring. He vanished into dark. A moment later, two more bodies spilled out of the bar—one woman crying, one man laughing the wrong way. The streetlight flared and dimmed.
“Enough for reasonable doubt,” Carmen said, but her mouth held a caution. “Not enough for truth.”
“Truth doesn’t keep boys out of cells,” Nina replied, and felt the old bitterness sit up and stretch in her like a cat.
Maya’s phone chimed. She glanced down and swore softly. “We’ve a visitor. With a camera crew.”
“Of course we do,” Carmen said. “Smile wide, say nothing.”
They didn’t make it to the door before it opened. The reporter who stepped in wore a red trench and a matching mouth, flanked by a cameraman with a cavalryman’s stance, the camera perched on his shoulder like a weapon.
“Morning,” the reporter said, brightness weaponised. “I’m Celeste Quinn, DC Daily. Thought we’d pop by to see the new outfit everyone’s whispering about. Mind if we chat?”
“We mind,” Maya said. “But we’ll do it anyway if you put the camera down.”
Celeste’s smile sharpened. “We can blur the lens if it makes you feel safer.”
“Blur your script instead,” Carmen muttered.
Nina stepped forward. “You can ask three questions. You get one follow-up. You misquote me, and I use your bones for paperweights. How’s that for safe?”
Celeste blinked and then laughed, delighted. “Oh, they weren’t lying about you.” She tilted her head at the cameraman. “Down.”
He lowered the camera. The room exhaled. Celeste pulled a notebook and a pen that looked too delicate for the world. “Brightline,” she said, tasting it. “What is it?”
“A promise,” Nina said. “We don’t take easy cases. We don’t take pretty lies. We take what looks lost.”
“And what do you get out of it?” Celeste asked. “Besides the thrill.”
“Sleep,” Nina said. It wasn’t a line. It was the most honest thing she had.
Celeste’s gaze flicked to Maya and Carmen. “You two look like women who don’t sleep much.”
“Your three questions are up,” Maya said smoothly.
“That was two,” Celeste argued, laughing with her eyes. “I asked what it is and what you get. Third: who left a clipping about your conviction at your door last night?”
The room cooled a degree. Nina didn’t let it touch her face. “You tell me.”
“I have ideas,” Celeste said, opening her hands like offering bread. “The prosecutor whose win record you dented yesterday. A cop with a grudge. Someone who loves a man who’s not coming home because you’re right. Or,” she added, and her voice dropped to a friendlier register, “someone who’s protecting what you’re about to kick over.”
“We’re about to eat our breakfast,” Carmen said. “Join us if you’re staying. Otherwise, I’ll pack you a farl for the road.”
Celeste’s smile warmed. “Another day. Thank you for your… promise.” At the door, she looked back. “And Ms. Daley? Don’t let them make you smaller because it makes them feel better.”
When they’d gone, Maya leaned her hands on the desk and breathed out. “She knows something.”
“She knows plenty,” Nina said. “But she wants us to know she knows. I’m not dancing for it.”
Carmen tapped the screen. “Keep the dance for the lad with the black-stripe shoes. We need him.”
They spent the next hour combing the footage—zooming, pausing, tracing—until their eyes hurt and the clip’s edges were ghosted on their lids. Finally, they had three stills clean enough to print. The runner’s shoes. The glint in his hand. The angle of his jaw caught on the turn, shadowed but there if you knew to look.
“We take it to Keane,” Maya said. “Pressure the prosecutor to stop preening and start investigating.”
“Aye,” Nina said. “But first we find someone who knows that jaw.”
They took the stills to the Harland. Daylight made the bar look smaller, its edges battered in ways you didn’t notice when it was full of noise. The bartender recognised Carmen—everyone recognised Carmen—and poured them water without being asked. “What’s the trouble?” he asked, like he wanted to be sorry.
“Trouble’s already happened,” Carmen said. “We’re just trying to name it.”
He squinted at the printouts, shook his head. “Half the lads come in here with their hoods up. Could be anyone.”
“We’re not looking for anyone,” Nina said, keeping her voice soft. “We’re looking for the one.”
A woman at the end of the bar put down her glass. She had a nursery teacher’s cardigan and a face that had learned to keep its own counsel. “He runs like Kenny Harper,” she said, half-apologetic. “Played wing for St. Mary’s. Thinks the sun shines out his arse.”
“Does he?” Carmen asked. “Then we’ll stand behind him and get a bit of heat.”
They found Kenny Harper three blocks over, outside a vape shop, laughing with his mouth too wide. The white trainers with the black slash were dirty now, but they were the same make, the same swagger. He clocked them approaching and straightened like he was bracing for applause.
“You Brightline?” he asked, pure mock. “Heard you were the saints come marching.”
“We’re the ones who’ll get you to march inside if you don’t answer a few questions,” Maya said.
Kenny flicked his chin at Nina’s printouts. “That me?”
“You tell us,” Nina replied.
“Could be,” he said, all shrug. “Lots of lads got trainers with stripes.”
“You’ve a nick on the sole there,” Carmen said, pointing. “Matches the shadow in frame three.”
Kenny smirked. “What do I get if I say I was out for a run and saw nowt?”
“You get to keep all your teeth for one more day,” Carmen said sweetly, and Kenny’s smirk faltered enough.
“We can do this easy,” Nina said, taking a half-step closer, enough for him to see that she didn’t plan to blink first. “Or we can do it loud. Name, Mr. Harper.”
He rolled his eyes. “Kenny. Kenny Harper. Aye.”
“Where were you night before last?”
“Out.”
“Where?”
He hesitated, then: “Harland.”
“With who?”
“Just myself.”
“You always run alone?” Maya asked. “Boys like you love a crowd.”
“I like the air,” he said, and his eyes flicked to the side, betrayals crossing.
“Who were you fighting?” Nina asked, and his head snapped back.
“I wasn’t fighting nobody,” he said quickly. “That was them other ones. Fella got lippy over a lass.”
Nina didn’t look away. “And the thing in your hand?”
“What thing?”
“The one you’re still fidgeting for,” Carmen said, watching his fingers twitch. “You missing something shiny?”
He swallowed. “Ring.”
“Yours?”
He glanced down at his bare finger and swore under his breath. “Was. Slipped when I ran.”
“Show us where,” Nina said.