Page 28 of The Guarded Monster’s Truth

"She's never given me a specific day before. It's always 'whenever,' or 'I'll let you know,' or just a look that means stop talking. This time she said Tuesday." He leans against the rail. "She asked about the club. About Knox, about the agency, about all of it. Like she'd been following the whole thing."

"She lives in town," Steel says. "Everybody followed it."

"Not like that. She asked real questions, Steel!" Diesel rubs the back of his neck. "And she asked if I was alright. Not the club. Me."

He's not talking about the compass rose anymore.

Knox orders us to go to the Montana safehouse for two months. Not because we're running. The inspector general's investigation will grind on for months, and the agency's interest didn't die with Heckland's disavowal. But visibility is the shield, and the compound will draw the wrong kind of it—media inquiries, federal response teams, follow-up attention that stacks up at the gate and doesn't leave. Ava needs distance from the noise to write the follow-up pieces without fielding questions between paragraphs.

And I need the time. Knox said it was "precautionary." He meant something else. Years of watching me cycle through those feeds at three a.m. taught him that I won't release this desk clean. Montana gives me room to figure out what my hands do when they stop reaching for a scanner.

The truck sits packed in the lot since dawn. Two bags and a laptop. The apartment stands behind me. Bare cork, bare desk, the monitors cycling in their loop. Colt will manage the feeds while I'm gone. He doesn't need my scanner frequency list, but I taped it to the desk anyway.

The brothers line the driveway.

Knox grips my hand and pulls me in, his palm flat against my back. He doesn't speak.

Sarah hugs Ava and presses her mouth close to Ava's ear. Ava's eyes go bright before she blinks it down.

Finn shouts from the garage doorway, an obscenity about whiskey that I'm choosing not to repeat. Jess elbows him hard enough that he coughs.

Garrett stands beside his bike, arms folded. His chin drops when I pass—the same nod from this morning, carrying the same weight. Two minotaurs. No translation needed.

Lily waves from Colt's porch, her legs swinging from the railing. Ellie lifts a hand beside her. Colt stands behind them, and the calm in him reads from fifty feet. The man who rebuilt his world around a library and a kid who needed someone to argue about books with stands on his porch with his hand on Ellie's shoulder. I hold the image for a beat longer than I need to because it answers a question I've carried for eight years. Ava told me the club doesn't keep me for my boards. She's right. I'm a brother. The intel never had anything to do with it.

Ava climbs into the passenger seat with her laptop open before I turn the key. She's drafting the congressional response angle. I can tell from the speed of her typing that the lede found her before she reached the truck.

The engine turns over. I reach for the scanner app on the phone mounted to the dash. The channels open. The chatter fills the cab. Tonight it sounds like noise, not necessity.

Highway 101 drops south through the coastal pines, and I take the turn toward the mountains.

Her hand reaches across the console and settles on my arm.

My scent sits in her skin. Days of contact, proximity, sleep—the transfer finished sometime in the last forty-eight hours without a moment I could pin to a timestamp. She carries my scent the way I carry hers now. Biological. Permanent.

The horn pendant catches the dashboard light at the hollow of her throat. She gave me her story. I gave her a piece of myself. Both permanent.

The road carries us toward the mountains. The story runs behind us, doing what years of hiding never could.

Epilogue

Ava – 6 Months Later

The ridge house has fourteen cameras and a bookshelf for every room. He designed the security. I designed the shelves. The compromise fills every wall.

Six months turns out to be enough time to learn a man's patterns without needing to change them. Bruiser runs his nightly sweep at ten, checks the perimeter locks at midnight, and sleeps with his phone on the nightstand with the scanner app cycling on low volume. I stopped asking him to turn it off in September. He stopped apologizing for it around the same time. The hum through the dark bedroom has become the white noise I fall asleep to, and the night he forgot to charge his phone I lay awake until two.

Montana lasted two months. Knox ordered it as a precaution, but the real reason came clear around week three, when Bruiser sat on the cabin porch and didn't reach for a scanner for the first time since I'd known him. After ten minutes he said, "I don't know what my hands are supposed to do." I told him they could hold a coffee. He said that wasn't funny. I poured him one anyway.

We came back to Nightfall Cove in July. I broke my lease in Portland.Bruiser moved out of the compound apartment for the first time in eight years, and we bought a house on the ridge above town the following week. The landlord, a retired fishing captain who moved to Medford, asked what we needed three bedrooms for. "Books," I said. "Equipment," Bruiser said. The captain took the offer without another question.

The column goes out monthly through the same editor who published my Ridgeline piece, a woman who's trusted my sourcing for six years and knows that Bruiser's documentation makes every piece airtight. We work the same way every time. He pulls the intel, I build the narrative, and the byline reads "Ava White" because the source who feeds me declassified operational data prefers to stay off the record.

Seven instalments so far. A detention facility in eastern Oregon medicating monster detainees without informed consent. A school district in Northern California routing integration funds into a superintendent's personal accounts. A logging company in Washington using troll workers below minimum wage and housing them in shipping containers padlocked from the outside.

The column header reads Overwatch.

He named it. I let him.