Page 16 of The Guarded Monster’s Truth

Nobody says what I'm thinking.

Ava sits on the bed with her notebook open, pen moving across the page. She doesn't ask where I went.

I sit at the desk and open the drawer where I keep the carving tool. Tungsten-tipped, fine point, the handle wrapped in electrical tape for grip.

The tip finds my left horn. The watchtower mark sits at the base, deep and old, the first symbol I carved when I went rogue. Above it: eight years of closed circles, one for every year I've kept my seat. Crossed lines for threats identified. Open eyes for the ones I saw coming.

The new symbol forms under the blade. A closed eye. They found me. The tool scrapes against living bone and the sound fills the apartment, a high thin note that vibrates through my skull and down my spine. I've carved every mark on these horns alone. The minotaur's autobiography, cut into the only surface nobody else can reach.

The scrape registers in my chest. Every new mark changes the weight I carry. The horns tell the truth. They've told it longer than I have.

The tool finishes the line. I blow the dust from the groove and run my thumb across the raised edge, clean and permanent. The closed eye rests above the others, and when the brothers see it tomorrow they'll know what it means without asking.

Ava leans against the doorframe. Her pen hangs loose in her hand, her notebook pressed against her chest. She watches me hold the carving tool against my horn, metal against bone, a man writing his life into his body.

She doesn't say anything. She looks at the horn, at the fresh mark, at me. And the way she looks at me holds no pity.

Chapter 7

Ava

Knox confirmed the CIA sedan left the motel last week. Bruiser cleared me for town visits with an escort—him or Rex, nobody else, until Heckland is confirmed out of the county. The brothers move freely. I move with a minotaur two steps behind me while I take notes.

I spent the morning at the festival with Bruiser parked at my shoulder. Holly Summers at her photography station, repositioning a tripod for the fourth time while Lily angled reflector discs without being asked. Diesel nearly electrocuting himself with string lights. Betty arranging pies on a trestle table outside the diner while Gerald carried napkins behind her. Monsters and humans sharing a sidewalk, sharing a holiday, sharing a town that fights over them and for them in the same breath.

The recorder in my bag captured three hours of usable audio. Enough to build the profile Harlow assigned me, if Harlow turns out to be real.

Now I'm back at Bruiser's desk with that thought sitting in my chest like a splinter.

I pull my phone from the nightstand and text Ellie. We've been talking since I wandered into the library my second week here looking for back issues of the local paper. She'd already pulled them. Two coffees later, the text doesn't need an introduction.

Can you run a background search for me? Public records only.

Then I turn my chair to face the wall behind the monitors.

My photograph hangs in the upper left corner of Bruiser's corkboard, pinned with two thumbtacks and a strip of red string connecting it to a name circled twice in red. David Harlow. My editor. The man who bought me coffee at a Portland café, pitched the Nightfall Cove story like it would save my career, and set me on a road that ended in a minotaur's apartment because I needed this story more than I needed to ask why it fell into my lap.

My phone buzzes.

Ellie's reply comes in twelve minutes. A link to the state business registry, a second link to an archived LLC filing, and a note: The library database is better than Google.

Harlow's name pulls up in the registry. The digital footprint runs shallow enough to read in under a minute. LinkedIn account created eighteen months ago. No social media presence before 2024. An address in Arlington that traces to a P.O. box, not a residence. Previous employer listed as Ridgeline Strategic Consulting, LLC.

The same firm Bruiser flagged on his boards. The same Virginia address. The same eighteen-month window.

Ridgeline Strategic exists. A website with stock photography of conference rooms and a mission statement that uses the word "solutions" four times without specifying a single one. Incorporated in Virginia eighteen months ago. Same quarter Harlow's LinkedIn appeared, six months after he took over the Pacific Northwest desk. My editor existed at the magazine before his own digital footprint did.

No hard proof. What I have is the smell of a front, and I've covered enough shell organizations to recognize one when the paint's still wet.

The findings print on Bruiser's secondary terminal.

He finds me an hour later, standing at the corkboard with Harlow's background printout tacked beside his red circle.

"Your red circle was right." I tap the printout. "The editor's a shell. LinkedIn, eighteen months. Address, a P.O. box. Previous employer, a consulting firm with a stock-photo website and a founding date that matches his hiring window."

Bruiser crosses the room and reads the printout without touching it. His shoulders tighten as he gets to the bottom of the page.

"I've had his name on this board for three months," he says. "I didn't think to check the business registry."