Pushing open the door, Ryan peered into the dark room, lit only by the blue glow of several television monitors. Hawkins was reclining in a swivel chair, her feet kicked up on the desk, the fine dress bunched up underneath her, watching the monitors. Ryan sighed; of course, she would be in the security room.

“If you are going to come in, do it quickly and shut the door,” she instructed, without looking over.

Ryan complied.

“Are you wearing shorts under that dress?” he stared incredulously.

“Obviously. Otherwise, this would be a pretty scandalous position, wouldn’t it?”

“Obviously,” Ryan took a deep breath. “What are you doing in here?”

“I love the décor,” she rolled her eyes. “How did you find me, anyway?”

“Where else would you be? It was either here or the kid’s room. And I was really hoping it was here, because Alex is sleeping in his room, so that would have been very creepy.”

“Good point.”

“That brings me back to my original question though: what are you doing here? You are supposed to be out there, mingling.”

“Oh, no one will even notice I’m missing. Hell, you didn’t, and it was your job to watch me,” she shot him a mischievous look.

“You aren’t a child, I should be able to take my eyes off of you for a minute,” she was absolutely exasperating sometimes.

“In either case, no one is going to care, and technically I haven’t left the party. So, there’s no problem.”

“That really isn’t the point,” Ryan griped, flopping down in the swivel chair next to her. “And where is the real security guard? Shouldn’t he be watching the monitors?”

“He went on his dinner break. I said I’d hold the fort for him if he didn’t tell anyone I was here. I am a bona fide law enforcement officer, you know. He seemed to think I was qualified.”

“Well, you get points for creativity,” Ryan chuckled, conceding defeat. “You found a nice little temporary office here. Find out anything useful?”

“Not really. I saw you do your little song and dance out there, though. It looked like it went pretty well.”

“Yeah, they at least seemed interested.”

“Oh, and I did learn one odd thing, though it probably isn’t relevant.”

“What’s that?” Ryan leaned back and sipped his drink.

“Did you know that the NIA inspected the installation of this security system?”

“Really? We do that?”

“Apparently. I was surprised too. Frank told me that when the system was installed it was NIA’s security division that came in and ensured that everything was done properly and that it was adequate for the estate. Apparently, the NIA does system inspections by request for people they consider ‘high profile targets’. They call it ‘community outreach’, you know, stop the crime before it occurs, that kind of thing.”

“Frank?”

“Oh, he’s the security guard. When I came in and flashed my badge, he said it reminded him of the day they inspected the alarm system. Interesting, eh?”

“Yeah. But you’re right, it probably doesn’t mean anything.”

“Probably not,” Hawkins reached over and took a bite from a piece of cake sitting on the table.

“Ooh, where’d you get cake? That looks good.”

“Took some from the buffet before I came down here.”

“Can I have a bite of that? I didn’t see cake anywhere.”

“Oh, come on, get your own,” she took another bite.

“I’ll trade you, this is really good brandy, high end stuff.”

“No way,” Hawkins shook her head. “I love cake, and I already told you I don’t drink.”

“That’s true, you did say that didn’t you?” he remembered. “Why?”

“Does it matter?” she popped the last of the cake in her mouth.

“Not really. But I mean seriously, you don’t drink, you do nothing for fun, you dislike people so much you’d rather spend the evening in a closet. Sometimes I wonder where you plug in to charge at night.”

Hawkins cracked up,

“You know, I’ve been called an ice queen before, but I’ve never gotten robot. I actually kind of like that.”

“Well, you do look human; I guess that fools most people. But I’m not buying the act,” he joked.

“I just… like to be in control,” she shrugged. “You never know when you’ll need your wits about you.”

She watched the screens, the eerie glow reflecting in her eyes. Ryan could see people mingling near the buffet on one monitor. And there was still cake.

“We really should show our faces out there,” he decided to give it another try.

“Oh, I am not going back out there,” she replied. “I already used up all my self-restraint and besides, I am still filling in for Frank; I can’t leave the mansion unprotected, can I?”

“Collins will kill you, if he finds out about this,” Ryan muttered darkly.

“Oh, Collins can go screw himself,” Hawkins retorted exasperatedly.

Ryan was surprised by the venom in her voice. He finally had to ask,

“What is your problem with Collins anyway?”

“Why do you care?”

“You obviously hate him, and you don’t seem to be the type to dislike someone so intensely for no reason. So, what did he do?”

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

“I don’t like incompetence. Isn’t that enough reason?”

“I know he’s a bit of a stuffed shirt, but…” Ryan trailed off, hoping to prompt Hawkins to finish the thought.

“He’s worse than a stuffed shirt,” she snapped.

Ryan raised an eyebrow. Hawkins sighed deeply,

“Look, if you really want to know, I guess I could explain. Most of it’s in my file anyway, if you’d bothered to finish it. But it is a long story…”

“I’ve got time, apparently,” he replied.

“Alright. But don’t blame me if you don’t like what you hear,” she leaned back further in her chair and closed her eyes. “My mother was an NIA agent, you know? Ever since I was a kid, this is all I wanted to do. When I graduated from university, I got a job in the NIA biology department, doing DNA testing. But what I really wanted was to do investigative work, so I did all the training, took all the courses, bided my time. Eventually, I was approached and asked if I was interested in doing an undercover assignment. Of course, I jumped at the opportunity. The owners of a strip club were believed to be involved in human trafficking, and we needed someone on the inside.”

“Why did they go to you?” Ryan interrupted. “I mean, you had no experience.”

“Well, I was 22 at the time, which meant I was young enough to play the role they had in mind: the college student, stripping to support herself. There weren’t many agents who were that young, even less who had done the undercover prep, and no one really knew my face because I had never left the lab.”

Ryan nodded to himself. Not to mention that it took a certain personality to go undercover, most people weren’t suited to it.

“Anyway, I was close enough to what they were looking for, a fit, college age woman who was desperate to earn some money to pay her way through school,” she continued. “So, I started working in the club as a dancer. My handler was an agent named Harrison Blake. Blake posed as my boyfriend, which made it easy for me to meet and go places with him without drawing suspicion. No one would think twice about him coming to the club or me leaving the club with him. And at first, everything went as planned. I became a part-time dancer and started making friends with the other girls. I didn’t have much to report, but I still met regularly with Blake. He insisted that frequent meetings were necessary to cement our partnership. I trusted him. Perhaps there were signals that I should have noticed; maybe I missed them because I was inexperienced. I don’t know. But the fact remains that I didn’t see it coming.”

She paused, shook her head. The memory was clearly an unpleasant one.

“One day, about a month in, we went back to my crummy little apartment after one of my shows; Blake said he needed to discuss something with me about the case, there was nothing unusual about that. And, for a while, that is what we did; he gave me instructions about how I should proceed in getting closer to the illegal end of the operation, how I could convince them to give me more work. He was sitting next to me on the bed, which was really the only place to sit in that rat trap, and we were talking about my act. He complimented my performance that night, then he put a hand on my thigh. I should have done something, but it was so unexpected, I just… froze. Blake acted like he didn’t even notice. Just kept talking about my body. Then, he leaned over and kissed me on the mouth. That was what snapped me out of it, I asked him what he was doing and pushed him away. He told me not to be uptight, that this would be a good for ‘us’. We were supposed to be in a relationship, after all, this would make it ‘more convincing’. I told him I wasn’t interested, that he needed to back off. That’s when he smacked me in the mouth, told me to shut up and not talk back to him. He said he was in charge, and I was to do what he told me, and he pushed me down on the bed.”

Hawkins paused. This was certainly not the story Ryan had expected when he had asked the question.

“What did you do?”

“Well, I was younger and more timid back then. He was my partner; I was supposed to be able to trust him. So, I tried to talk sense into him, to convince him to stop. For some reason I figured I owed him that much, that if I could just find the right words, I could make this alright. I should have known better,” her lip curled in disgust at the memory. “He, of course, ignored me, and proceeded to tear my shirt off. When he reached under my skirt, that was the final straw. I shoved him, he hit me, so I grabbed the bedside lamp and I cracked him over the head. Broke his jaw. I might have also kicked him a few times, just to get him to stay down. They told me later that he needed to be hospitalized for a week after the… incident,” she shook her head. “I had a black-eye and a few bruises and scrapes from the fight, but I had a shift at the club the next day. I thought that working would be the best way to cope, and I wasn’t going to scrub the whole operation because of him. So, I called the agency, reported what had happened and had them remove Blake from my apartment. Then I put some makeup on to cover up my injuries and went to the club. People asked about the bruises, of course, I told them that my boyfriend beat me up, and he ended up in jail. It was true enough. That tied up all the loose ends and it neatly explained why Blake wouldn’t be showing up again. No one asked many questions. It wasn’t an unusual situation, unfortunately. The agency sent in a new guy to be my handler, I called him my new boyfriend, and no one batted an eye. Everything went back to normal, and I figured, at this point, that everything was fine, all taken care of. Surely, when I went back to the agency, the matter with Blake would be dealt with, too. I focused on my assignment. It helped, not to think too much about it, you know? It took several more months of hard work, but we eventually shut down the trafficking operation and took down the owners. It was my first case, and I was damn proud of how it turned out. But the real trouble started when I got back to headquarters.”

She paused again, clearly struggling with what she had to say next.

“God, Hawkins, I am so sorry. I should never have asked about this.”

“Why not?” she shrugged. “You didn’t know. It was a perfectly reasonable question, and I didn’t have to answer you, did I? Now are you going to listen to the rest of the story or not?”

Ryan nodded silently.

“Good. Well, obviously by the time I came in from the field, Blake was out of the hospital and a disciplinary committee had already been convened; Collins was the head of that committee. The real surprise was that the committee had been convened for me, not for Blake. They said that it wasn’t a sexual assault, just a ‘misunderstanding’ between colleagues. He fed them some load of crap about how he must have ‘misread my signals’, told them he felt terrible about the whole silly thing. I tried my best to convince them that I had been abundantly clear about what I wanted, and that he knew exactly what he was doing to me. But Blake had been telling them tales for months, and it was obvious that they had made up their minds long before I even had a chance to give my side. In the end, Blake was reprimanded for making ‘inappropriate advances’ and violating the agency code of conduct. He was transferred to another division. I was officially reprimanded and written up for using excessive force. I was suspended and forced into mandatory anger management therapy. It was a joke. Before that day, I had had a certain amount of faith in the system, I had expected him to be fired, to be sent to prison, not to get a slap on the wrist. I was angry.”

“I can’t say that I blame you,” Ryan murmured. What else could he say?

“I told Collins that he and his kangaroo court could go fuck themselves and that he was worse scum than Blake for covering up his crime and I stormed out. As I was leaving, somebody grabbed my arm. It was Harrison Blake. You know what he told me? I remember the exact words to this day: ‘One day, I’ll finish what I started.’ I told him if he tried it, then I would finish what I had started, and he’d end up in the morgue, not the hospital. Then I shook him off and left. How I kept my job after that, I will never know. I’d like to think that it’s because they knew they were wrong, but it’s probably because they figured if they fired me, I would have raised hell about it. Nobody wanted the bad publicity. The whole thing got swept under the rug. I never did see Blake again, though he still works at the Agency, but Collins I see almost every day. He let Blake get away with what he did to me. I know that I can’t trust Collins’ judgement or his integrity, ergo I can’t trust him. And it would probably be an understatement to say that I don’t really like him much as a person, either. He certainly doesn’t like me any better,” Hawkins took a deep breath. “Does that answer your question?”

“Yeah, I that would explain it. I guess I… um…” Ryan was momentarily lost for words. “I don’t know what to say. I’m just… sorry.”

“Hey, don’t worry about it. It’s not like I did anything to be ashamed of. Blake and Collins are the ones who should be ashamed, not me,” she stated matter-of-factly. “Though I will admit it took a lot of time in therapy to get me to that point. Hopefully, someday, they will both get what they deserve.”

They both sat in heavy silence, watching the party guests flitting across the security monitors. It was no wonder she refused to trust her partners, especially since Collins was the one who assigned them all to her. Hell, he was reporting her every move back to Collins. Why should she trust him? He was part of the problem. Ryan swallowed hard.

“You know, I get why they didn’t fire you, but why did you stay? You could surely get a job at another agency. After all that I don’t think I could have…” he trailed off.

“I had to stay,” Hawkins replied. “There is something I need to do, here at the NIA. Something important. And whatever else happens, I can’t leave before it’s done.”

He was about to ask what could be so important, but at that moment, the door opened, and light flooded into the room.