No one spoke.
Jude watched the two men. Butcher's hands were balled into fists, and Frenchie's head hung low. Whatever Frenchie had claimed earlier about it not being his fault, he clearly didn't believe it now.
I'm starting to regret this, Jude thought.
Not the trip to Pennsylvania. But the fact that he'd stood three meters from Lamplighter in a corridor, walked past him, and just kept going.
He looked through the workshop's upper window at the Vought building across the skyline. Its glass tower glowed gold against the night sky. It was designed to look like a permanent, immovable part of the city.
A serving military officer's grandchildren had been murdered in their beds. The only reason no one had answered for it was that Vought had buried the incident. He tucked this fact away. Trying to use ordinary legal channels against Lamplighter would be as useless as they were for any other Vought-related crime. That particular debt would need to be settled through a different mechanism. Jude was not a lawyer, but he knew what Lamplighter had done was not a complicated case.
He pulled his attention back to the room.
"Frenchie," he said, keeping his voice steady. "Where did you go for those thirty minutes?"
Frenchie said nothing.
"I'm asking," Jude continued, "because the man was at a party. A party doesn't have many ways out. For him to disappear for thirty minutes, something had to create an opening. I need to understand what that was."
"That opening was that bastard deciding that a mission involving Mallory's grandchildren was the perfect time to go AWOL—" M.M. stopped, his voice filled with a familiar, cold bitterness that had been sharpening for eight years.
"I heard you the first time," Jude said. "I'm asking him."
M.M. looked at him, then went quiet.
"Frenchie."
Jude waited. "We're trading information. That was the deal. I gave you Sage Grove—the address, the files, the records. I need to know about those thirty minutes. It's a simple trade."
He checked his watch.
"And Sherry should be back soon from getting dinner."
Frenchie's face changed. He stayed silent for nearly a minute. Then he began to speak.
"I was following Lamplighter. I wasn't going to leave—I was doing exactly what Mallory told me to do. I had eyes on him."
His voice was flat, like he was reciting a report. "When he came out of the party, Sherry called me. It was Jay. He'd overdosed. He was unconscious and she didn't know what he'd taken. She couldn't give him first aid, and she was panicking."
He paused.
"Jay came to America with me and Sherry. The three of us, from France. For a long time, we were all each other had." He looked at the floor. "I joined the Boys, which gave me a purpose. They didn't have that."
"So you left the mission," Butcher said.
"I left the mission. I went to Jay. When I got back, Lamplighter was gone from the party." He stopped, then added, "That's what happened in the thirty minutes."
The room went quiet.
"How is Jay?" Jude asked.
"He survived that night." A pause. "A few months later, he overdosed again."
Frenchie's hands rested limply in his lap. It was harder to watch than if he'd been shaking.
"That time, he didn't make it. I don't even know what saving him the first time accomplished. He was going to overdose again regardless. If I had stayed at the party..." He stopped. "I don't know if what I did was right. If I had left him alone that night, maybe I could have saved two children. I don't know."
M.M. looked at him across the table. The anger was still there, but it had shifted, aging into something older and harder.
"Why didn't you say so? All these years—"
"What would have been the point?" Frenchie's voice was barely a whisper. "The dead can't be brought back. It was my fault regardless."
Jude stepped over and placed a hand briefly on Frenchie's shoulder.
"That's all," Frenchie said. "I've told you everything."
"I know," Jude replied. His expression remained neutral. "And I'm telling you—if I ever see you using, manufacturing, transporting, or selling drugs again, I will break both your hands."
Frenchie looked up.
Jude wasn't joking.
Frenchie held his gaze. Whatever was behind his eyes, it wasn't defiance or resentment. Jude noted it and moved on.
Butcher watched the exchange but kept silent. He was thinking about something Jude had said weeks ago, something he had dismissed as self-righteous. Something about breaking a man's arm if he caught him dealing. Butcher had never cared about that sort of thing—his people weren't saints. Flexible principles were the only way to survive.
But Frenchie had been flexible. Frenchie had weighed two futures—the mission or Jay—and chosen the human thing to do, because nobody in their operation had ever drawn a line on what being human was allowed to cost.
If someone had been firm about that years ago, Butcher thought—if Frenchie's life hadn't been the kind where Jay's overdoses were Frenchie's burden to solve at midnight—the choice might never have existed in that form. Mallory's grandchildren might have been a different tragedy.
He had spent his life operating on the theory that rigid standards were a liability, that people who kept them couldn't keep up. He still wasn't sure he was wrong. But for the first time, he felt genuinely uncertain.
Only after the damage is done do you ask if you could have prevented it. He looked at Frenchie's slumped shoulders. Vought's supes operated by the same logic—they caused something irreversible and decided they had the right to. The scale was different, but the math was the same.
He kept these thoughts to himself. Butcher rarely admitted that someone else's approach had merit.
Jude copied the Sage Grove documentation onto a drive and left it on the workbench. Files, photographs, the facility address, the floor layout. Everything he had taken from the cabinets and the notebook.
"The information on the drive covers the facility operations, the Compound V batches, the subject records, and Lamplighter's logs. Work out what to do with it. I'll be back."
He stepped outside.
The air was sharp—New York in the late hours, a mixture of exhaust, river water, and the metallic tang of a city that never really slept. He found a spot with a clear signal and placed the call.
Clark picked up.
Jude held the phone close and spoke toward the microphone he had left in the room—their established method, voice through the line, response through the air in a spot far enough from Vought that Homelander's range couldn't reach it. He laid it all out: the Sage Grove facility, the Compound V batches, the high mortality rate for adults, Storm's notes, the prisoners. Lamplighter's records. The three-layer corporate structure. What the stable infant formula meant for every supe walking around claiming their powers were natural.
He could hear Clark listening—that complete stillness of someone absorbing information while choosing not to show the reaction on the outside.
When Jude finished, there was a pause.
"I'll look into what I can from the inside."
"Don't move yet," Jude said. "We need the right moment and the right mechanism. We have evidence. We need a delivery system Vought can't kill before it hits the light."
"I understand."
Clark's voice was steady. But Jude had spent enough time with him to recognize what the steadiness was hiding.
"Clark."
"I'm fine."
"I know you are. Go get some sleep."
Clark was not sleeping.
He stood at the window of his Vought-assigned residence, looking at the city, when Maeve appeared.
She read the situation instantly—the stillness, the posture of someone who wasn't seeing what was in front of him—and came to the obvious conclusion.
"Window shift," she said, standing beside him. "Did your x-ray vision pick up something again?"
"No."
Clark turned. "Just the weather tonight."
Maeve looked at the clear sky and then at Clark. She didn't press.
"I came to give you a heads-up," she said. "About Madelyn."
"Regarding?"
"The uniform situation. Starlight's uniform." She glanced at him. "Someone apparently used their contract status to make it very clear they had opinions about that request. Madelyn backed off." A pause, with a tone warmer than Maeve usually allowed. "You actually did something."
"Annie should be able to do her job without negotiating her costume."
"Right. Great hero, sincere answer, noted." She crossed her arms. "Be careful. Madelyn doesn't let things go. She'll come at it from a different angle. She always does."
"I'll keep that in mind." Clark looked at her. "Although, isn't Homelander also known for holding grudges? I've noticed he doesn't like it when you come to talk to me." He kept his tone even. "Doesn't that concern you?"
Maeve considered this for a moment.
"I'm counting on you to save me," she said.
She said it the way Maeve said most things—lightly, with a layer of deflection wrapped around it. But it wasn't entirely a joke, and they both knew it.
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