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Without a word, Pierce crouched in front of him, placing the notepad and pen on the ground between them.
“I need answers.” He tried to speak, but his voice came out in a rasp of a whisper.
And, fuck, it hurt.
He wanted to do this without relying on the notepad and pen, wanted to use the voice that was stolen from him to find out exactly why, but when Gareth’s eyes narrowed in confusion, he realized it wouldn’t be possible.
Mentally cursing at himself, he quickly scribbled the same message on the notepad and held it up for the man to read.
Gareth’s lips twitched as if fighting a smirk. “Sorry, I don’t have any.”
Pierce stared at him, unfazed, and wrote:
Is your name Gareth Lawrence?
Gareth took his time responding. “Yes.”
He was lying, but Pierce hadn’t expected to get the truth from him. He gave Gareth a long, unblinking look before scribbling another note.
Who sent you?
Gareth read it and scowled. “No one sent me. I told you, I was just passing through. I stopped here to use the restroom and stretch my legs and got trapped when the ceiling collapsed on me.”
What were you doing in the employee-only hallway?
“I just told you. The lady behind the counter told me to use the restroom back there because the men’s room was out of order.”
Pierce studied the man, watching for any flicker of untruth. With his trained eye, he could detect the smallest signs of deceit: a telltale shift in gaze, a nervous twitch, a pulse throbbing too rapidly under the skin. But Gareth was unreadable. His expression remained calm and detached.
Who do you work for?
There. Something flickered in Gareth’s expression—a shift, a guardedness that wasn’t there before. “I’m unemployed.”
Pierce didn’t buy it for a second. His fingers gripped the pen a little tighter as he wrote:
You’re lying. You have a map of my apartment and my place of employment. You’re with Halston. If you know who I am, you know I can make you talk.
Gareth’s expression darkened. “Yeah, I know you. You’re Pierce.”
He didn’t see the need to confirm it and just waited, letting the silence hang heavy between them.
Gareth grunted and shifted positions, pressing a hand to his ribs as he sat up straighter. “Yeah. Halston’s golden boy gone rogue.”
Pierce flipped to a clean page in his notebook.I wasn’t their golden boy. I never worked for them.
Gareth raised an eyebrow, a hint of amusement in his otherwise impassive expression. “But you worked on Project Iron Horizon, and they were heavily involved, weren’t they?”
Everything in him went cold at the mention of that project. Images flooded his mind—a swirl of blueprints and diagrams, late nights in the lab under harsh fluorescent lights, failure after catastrophic failure... until one day, it worked.
The Tectra-X weapon.
A horror of his creation.
His grip on the pen faltered, and he inhaled deeply, fighting back the wave of panic that threatened to consume him. When he trusted himself not to hyperventilate, he wrote:
Why are they searching for me now?
“They’ve been looking for you from the moment you disappeared on them. People don’t just drop off their radar without consequences.”
