Page 153 of Only the Hunter

I follow his gaze.

It’s just the wall.

I look back at him.

He doesn’t look back at me.

I’ve had Atlas for four years. I know the difference between him watching a wall because there’s a shadow and him watching a wall because he’s bored. Creatures possess a fight or flight instinct. Atlas will choose flight. His whole body has a quality of attention I don’t have a word for—the specific stillness of a creature that has not yet decided whether to run.

I open the recording app on my phone. The one I downloaded two days ago and haven’t used, because I’m a DOJ attorney and I understand evidentiary chains and I knew, when I downloaded it, that there might be a moment.

I tap record. Set the phone face-up on the desk, angled away from the doorway, close enough that it will catch everything.

Then I hear it.

Not at my door. Below it—from the staircase. A sound that isn’t the building settling. A building settling is random, asymmetrical. This is deliberate. The particular quality of someone taking stairs one at a time with their weight distributed carefully, committing to each step before lifting the next foot.

They’re already inside.

I heard this sound once before. A corridor outside a hotel room. I didn’t know what it was then.

I know what it is now.

“Evie.”

Gabe’s voice in the earpiece. Quiet. The particular register he’s using feels like he’s trying to not alarm me, which perhaps should alarm me most.

“Don’t open the door.”

“Someone’s in the hall,” I say. My voice comes out steadier than I expected.

“Stay in the room. Lock the door.”

The handle lock on my office door is original to the building—a standard pin tumbler, old enough that the mechanism sticks if you turn it too fast. I cross the room and turn it slowly and feel it catch.

Then I move to the wall beside the door. Not in front of it. The spot where, if the door opened, I wouldn’t be the first thing visible. Two feet of plaster and the sound of my own pulse between me and whatever is happening in the hallway.

Atlas has not moved.

What does he see? I almost ask Gabe, and stop myself, because the answer is that he sees someone who got into the building without triggering a perimeter alert, which means they were already inside before the perimeter was set, and I don’t want to hear that out loud right now.

Then the sound arrives at my door.

Soft. Low. The specific, almost delicate sound of someone working a lock with tools rather than a key—careful, practiced, unhurried. They’re not forcing it. They’re picking it. Clean entry. No evidence of intrusion.

Because the scene they’re planning to leave behind doesn’t include a broken lock.

I understand, in the length of a single breath, exactly what they came here to do.

“Gabe—”

“I’m here. How long since it started?”

I check the recording app.

“Forty seconds.”

A pause.