Page 10 of The Guarded Monster’s Truth

By afternoon, she stops asking me questions.

Not because she's given up. I've watched enough people go quiet to know when someone's backing off versus figuring out a new angle, and Ava White doesn't back off. She sits at the kitchen table with her transcription notes spread in a half-circle around her coffee, and I sit at the counter with my scanner running low.

No recorder angled at my face. No probing looks aimed at cracking loose a confession. She works and so do I. The kitchen settles into a quiet I've only ever found alone in my apartment at 3 a.m., and finding it here—with another person in the room, with her pen scratching against paper and my scanner clicking through empty channels—breaks loose a sound I've spent eleven years keeping buried.

The purr builds under my ribs. Low and involuntary, vibrating outward through muscle and bone until the frequency hits the air between us. I choked this sound at the waterfront when she asked about the carvings. I've been choking it every day since.

This time I don't choke it.

She looks up from the page. Her eyes drop to my chest, where the vibration hums loud enough to carry across the table. Her eyes stay on my chest for a beat, then she goes back to her notes.

She doesn't mention it.

The scanner catches it at 4:17 p.m. A sedan crossing the bridge. Dark, clean, rental plates from a Portland agency. Nothing about it fits a tourist or a local. I run the plate and trace the corporate card back to Ridgeline Strategic, the same Virginia consulting firm I flagged in Church. The one her editor came from.

I pull up the bridge camera. Two occupants. I run the driver through facial recognition.

The facial recognition takes four seconds. James Heckland. My former handler, the man who recruited me at twenty-two out of a Montana ranch and gave the order to infiltrate the Feral Sons. The man I burned when I chose Knox's table over his leash.

Heckland is here. Running an operation through Ridgeline Strategic. The same Ridgeline Strategic that placed David Harlow at a regional magazine six months ago and aimed a journalist at my compound.

The woman sitting on the bed in the guest room with her notes and her silence might not know who sent her here. Or she might. Either way, Heckland is in my town, and that means her assignment and my past just landed on the same page.

I call Knox. He picks up on the first ring.

"Government sedan, two occupants. Crossing the bridge now. It's Heckland."

The pause lasts one breath. "Full lockdown. Nobody in, nobody out."

The guest room door is open. Ava sits cross-legged on the bed, transcribing Finn's interview. Her bags sit half-unpacked beside her.

"You need to move."

She looks up. "Move where?"

"My apartment. There's a reinforced door, better sightlines, more cameras."

"I'm fine in here."

"You're not. They assigned me to this compound. He knows the layout—every wing, every blind spot. The guest room is the first place he'd look, and this room has one window, a lock I could break with my shoulder, and minimal camera coverage. You're moving."

The guest room lock works. I know it works—I installed it. But the part of me making this call isn't thinking about locks. It's the part that put scent on her skin for days and is now clawing at me to get her behind my door, in my space, where I can hear her breathe. Every minotaur knows this pull. I've watched it take Garrett apart, watched him rearrange his whole life around Nina without deciding to. I never expected it to find me. The word mine hits.

She closes her notes.

"I'm not sharing a room with you, Bruiser."

"You're staying in the safest space in this compound while I handle a threat." I pick up her bag. "I'll explain later."

She grabs her recorder and follows.

She steps inside my apartment and stops. I watch her stand in the doorway and take it in: three walls of corkboard covered in push-pinned printouts, red string connecting faces to organizations to funding sources. The frequency scanner scrolling green lines across black. The facial-recognition database feeding four monitors. Eight years of threat mapping, every name and face I've tracked since I went rogue, pinned and connected and cross-referenced against the day the agency decides to come collect the operative who stopped answering the phone.

Her wall is on the left. Her byline photograph printed in high resolution. Her publication history in chronological order. Her editor's name circled in red. The timeline I built: October festival, April assignment, the phone call I intercepted on her drive down.

She stares at it. I can't read her face, and that tells me enough.

"How long?"