loyalty | s. scola

- ONE

NEW YORK, NEW YORK.
OCTOBER 1ST. 2019.
5:56 AM.

The sight of her office is enough to have the exhaustion that had been nipping at her heels flood her. The ugly puke beige walls had never been more comforting as she slouched down in her chair. Deliberately ignoring the stack of cases and paperwork to her right, she rolled her shoulder and leaned her head back, sighing.

The peaceful quiet lasted all of seven minutes, when there was a knock on the frame of her office door. She groaned, squeezing her eyes shut even tighter. "Go away, I'm not here," she calls, a yawn breaking up her words. When she did open her eyes, should her section chief Jason Dexter leaning against the doorway, biting back a smirk.

"You know you're allowed to go home, right?" He says. "It's actually encouraged."

She waves him off, yawning again, "I was just resting my eyes."

"You look like crap, Lon," he says, "How do you feel?"

"Like I just ran a marathon." She hums, sitting up in her chair and bringing a hand up to rubs some sleep out of her eyes. "What did you need, sir?"

He drops a file onto the desk front of her. Under the curtain her hair provides, she sighs, eyes shutting. There's always another case, and don't get her wrong, she loves her job, she loves bringing people home to their families, but every time she turns around there's a new case, a new person vanishing off the face of the earth. She sleeps on the jet more than she sleeps in her own bed.

She grabs it, flipping the file open and staring down at the picture of a little blond boy. The file is practically empty, holding nothing but a copy of an incident report. She reaches for the phone on her desk, brushing her hair to the side as she goes to recall her team. Most of them aren't even home yet, and she knows before she even picks up the phone that they'll all be short with her.

"I'd hold off calling the team." Jason said. Ava pauses, phone halfway to her ear, and looks at him. "This isn't our case?"

He shrugs, shaking his head. "It's not kidnap and ransom's case, but it is your case."

Ava slowly lays the phone back on the receiver, leaning back in her chair again, eyebrows climbing up her forehead. Jason sits down on the edge of her desk and tells her, "You've been transferred, Ava."

"Excuse me?"

There's no way she heard him say what she thinks he did. That he's telling her what she knows he's telling her. She's spent the last eight years in this unit, was the unit chief for the last four of them. She cultivated one of the best teams in the bureau. She's good at her job. No, scratch that, she's great at her job. Why the hell would she be transferred?

"You're being transferred." He repeated.

She gnaws on the inside of her cheek, shaking her head, "Why? Have I been a subpar unit chief?"

"It's not that." He assures her, raising his hand up slightly. "Trust me, if I had my way you'd be here until you could take my job. This order comes from above."

"What order?"

"SAC Isobel Castille recently took over a task force at Twenty Six Fed. With her new title, she's decided she wants fresh blood. She put in a request to have you on her team."

"And the Director just... Agreed?"

"On a trial basis, yes. You're going to work this case," he taps on the picture of the little boy attached to the file, "with them. They still want a member of kidnap down there to make sure things go okay. But the Director knows the value that you have leading this team, and he's leaving it up to you. If you decide that you don't want to, that you want to stay here, then you don't have to be transferred."