Page 32 of Hunted in the Silence

She forced herself to meet his unwavering stare. The overhead light was behind him slightly, softening the sharp lines of his face, and the gray-green of his eyes was steady on hers. He was close enough that she could have reached out and touched the front of his jacket. She was aware of that with a precision she’d stopped being able to attribute entirely to anything professional.

“You’re not wrong,” she said quietly.

He held her gaze, his expression controlled yet filled with awareness, and he wasn’t exactly trying to hide it.

“Brynn,” he said.

Just her name. The same as before, but this time the weight of it was different. Fuller. She felt it move through her the way the cold did, through the gaps in things she’d built to keep drafts out.

She held his gaze for one long moment.

She could have stayed there. She understood, in that moment, with complete clarity, that she could have stayed there and let the few feet between them become less, and that he would not have stepped back, and that some part of her that she’d been keeping carefully locked behind glass wanted that with an urgency that surprised her.

She took a small, shuddering breath.

“Six a.m.,” she said. Her voice came out level. Thank God. “Get some sleep.”

Something shifted in his expression. Not hurt exactly. Something more like acknowledgment. He’d received a clear message and respected it.

“Six a.m.,” he said with a slight nod.

She picked up her bag and walked to the door. At the threshold she stopped, not turning fully, just enough to say over her shoulder, “Cole.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m glad you’re here. On this case.” She paused, stuck on the last bit she wanted to say. She forced it out. “I’m glad it’s you.”

She didn’t wait to see his face change. She walked out into the cold night and got in her car and drove to her colleague’s spare room and lay in the unfamiliar bed and stared at the unfamiliar ceiling.

She thought about the inches that had separated them and the moment she’d chosen to step back from.

She thought about how long she’d been choosing versions of that retreat and how it had always felt like the right thing and how tonight, for the first time, it had also felt like loss.

She closed her eyes.

Thursday was four days away. Caitlin Marsh was in a building on Miller Road.

There was work to do.

She held onto that, the way she always had, and eventually she slept.

Chapter 11

She was already there when he pulled up.

Of course she was.

Brynn was standing on the corner of Miller Road and Fifth, hands in the pockets of a dark jacket, wearing jeans and worn boots and a wool cap pulled down over her ears that had compressed her dark auburn hair into a loose wave along her jaw. She looked like someone waiting for a bus. She looked like she belonged on this street at six in the morning in the gray pre-dawn cold, which was exactly the point and exactly why she was good at this.

She glanced at him when he came up beside her and gave his clothing a brief once-over. Dark jeans, a canvas work jacket, a cap of his own. The corner of her mouth moved.

“Jury’s back,” she said.

“And?”

“Not guilty.” She turned and started walking and he fell into step beside her, matching her pace, which was unhurried and deliberate, just two people with somewhere to be.

The Miller Road industrial corridor in the early morning was its own kind of world. The freight companies and machine shops that ran legitimate operations were just waking up, the first trucks pulling out, a loading dock three buildings down already active with the sound of men working and equipment moving. The air was filled with a mix of diesel and cold metal and the sharpness of winter air that hadn’t been touched by sunlight yet. Cole had been in a lot of industrial districts in a lot of cities, and they all shared the same early morning, gray aliveness, the world of physical work coming online before the rest of the city had finished sleeping.