Page 39 of Hunted in the Silence

She put it away and turned from the board.

Cole was finishing the call, writing something in his notepad, his dark head bent over the page in deep concentration. He looked up and caught her watching him, and she held his gaze without pretending she hadn’t been, because she was tired of pretending.

He held it back, quiet and steady in that way of his she’d grown used to.

“The safe house is ready,” he said gently. “I’ll drive you.”

“I have a car.”

“I’ll follow you then.” He held out the paper he’d been writing on, and she took it, noting it had an address in his bold, slanted scrawl.

She picked up her bag, almost smiling at how smoothly he’d pivoted around her. But there was nothing to smile about tonight.

“Thank you,” she said softly. “For coming when I didn’t ask you to.”

“You didn’t have to ask,” he said. “That’s the point.”

She looked at him for a moment. At the honest simplicity of his response. At the way he never asked for anything in return.

She walked to the door. “Let’s go,” she said. “We’ve got a long day tomorrow.”

He followed her out, and she locked the center behind them. They walked to their cars through the cold evening dark, and she felt the foot of space between them—how it had narrowed since the night she’d first held a door open for a man in a dark suit who moved like he’d lived through difficult things and kept showing up anyway.

She got in her car.

He waited in his until she pulled out of the lot, and then his headlights came on behind hers, steady and unhurried, exactly where they said they’d be.

Two days, she thought.

Then they’d see what came after.

Chapter 13

Silas Kane arrived at the field office at nine in the morning with a coffee in each hand and a commanding presence that made the room feel smaller.

Cole had worked with him twice before, briefly, on consults that had each given him something useful enough that Cole had put his number in his personal contacts rather than running the request through the “proper” channels.

He was the kind of man you wanted to be able to reach directly.

He set one of the coffees on Cole’s desk and looked at the board.

He looked at it for a long time. No notepad, no phone out, no visible sign that he was doing anything other than standing there looking at the wall. Cole knew his method and knew well enough to leave it alone. Silas Kane thinking looked like Silas Kane doing nothing, right up until the moment it didn’t.

Olivia came in, greeted him with a nod he returned, and settled at her desk without breaking the quiet.

After a few minutes, Silas said, “Tell me about the ledger.”

Cole walked him through it. Brynn’s description of Devlin’s habits, the grid-paper notebook, the way it never left his immediate reach. The conclusion they’d drawn that finding the ledger meant finding Devlin. The possibility Brynn had raised two days ago, that when Devlin moved against her he’d have the ledger with him because he’d be wrapping up his time in Blackridge.

Silas listened with the same eerie stillness he’d brought to the board. When Cole finished, he was quiet for another moment.

“She’s right about the ledger,” he said. “And she’s right about why he’ll have it with him.” He turned from the board and looked at Cole directly. His eyes were a pale blue that was almost colorless in certain lights and razor sharp in all of them. “Devlin is not a man who runs. I want to make sure you understand that before tomorrow.”

Cole looked at him. “Walk me through it.”

Silas pulled the chair from the nearest desk and sat down, which was the first time he’d seemed almost human since he’d walked in. He set his coffee on the desk and leaned forward with his forearms on his knees, looking like he was about to say something he needed Cole to actually hear.

“Men like Devlin build systems,” he said. “Not just criminal systems. Systems of meaning. The operation isn’t just how he makes money. It’s how he understands himself. It’s proof of what he believes about his own intelligence, his own control, his own superiority over everyone around him.” He paused. “When that system is threatened, a man like this doesn’t calculate the odds and decide to cut his losses. He doubles down. He moves to reassert control. Because the alternative—admitting the system is vulnerable, admitting someone got the better of him—is something he literally cannot process.”