A domestic complaint from an unstable wife won’t hold up anywhere.”

“This isn’t a domestic complaint.” Detective Nakamura stepped in behind me, holding a stack of warrants signed by a federal magistrate.

“This is a joint federal indictment.” I opened the binder — financial logs, intercepted messages, surveillance stills from the guest house where they had held my daughter — and I let them look.

I had thought, on the drive to their headquarters, about how they would try to fight it, and I had prepared for all of it, but in the event they barely tried, because the ground had shifted so completely beneath them that their whole vocabulary of power had stopped working.

Watch what happened in that room.

Vivienne reached, first, for jurisdiction — your authority ends at the gate — the same line she’d used in the hospital, still believing this was a contest between her civilian world and my military one, two spheres she could keep separate and play against each other.