Page 5 of Hunted in the Silence

“These are agents from the FBI,” she told Mia. “They’re here to help us. To find the men who hurt you and make sure they can never do it again.”

Mia’s eyes traveled to him and held, measuring. Cole had been on the receiving end of that look before. The look of someone who had learned to treat every person as a potential threat and was deciding, with great reluctance and great stakes, whether to make an exception. He kept his expression open and still. Not warm exactly, because warmth could read as fake. Just present. Just there.

“You’re really FBI?” she asked finally. “Like on TV?”

Something eased in him fractionally. “Not quite like on TV. Less explosions, more paperwork. But the part about catching bad guys is accurate.”

And then Mia looked at Brynn the way a person looked at the one fixed point in a tilting room. And Brynn, without being asked, leaned in and murmured something Cole couldn’t catch. He watched Mia’s shoulders lift, her chin come up a degree. Whatever Brynn had said, it had been exactly right.

“I’ll tell you everything,” Mia said, and did.

Cole had trained himself not to flinch. He sat across from Mia for the next two hours and listened to every word she said and let none of it show on his face, because flinching would have been about him and this was not about him. He felt the rage building in him—slow and methodical, layering itself into something cold and purposeful. And he used it as fuel rather than noise.

Beside him, Olivia took careful notes. Her pen moved steadily even when her jaw was tight.

But it was Brynn he kept returning to. The way she held Mia’s hand through the worst of it, absorbing it like she was drawing the pain out by proximity, her face never going empty or professional. Present the whole time, unflinching, her dark eyes wet but clear. It wasn’t performance and it wasn’t training. It was something harder won than either of those things.

At some point in the second hour, Mia’s voice gave out entirely. The words ran dry and left only the tears, great heaving sobs that she pressed into Brynn’s shoulder while Brynn held her and said nothing at all, just kept her hand moving in those slow circles on Mia’s back.

Cole looked away. Studied the print on the wall—a watercolor of birds in flight, generic and cheerful, selected with some care for a room where people needed to be able to look at something neutral while they talked about unbearable things. He was aware that his throat was tight. He was aware that the image of Mia’s face, when she had described certain things, was going to live in him for a long time.

He thought about Abby, briefly and then not.

When he looked back, Mia had cried herself out and gone quiet, her eyes at half-mast, her breathing slowing toward sleep. Brynn eased her down against the cushions, tucking the blanket up around her shoulders, and then sat back and let out a breath that she’d clearly been holding for a while.

Cole and Olivia rose. They moved out into the hallway by unspoken agreement, leaving the door cracked so they could hear if Mia stirred.

For a moment, no one said anything. The two of them stood in the quiet hall while the building settled around them, and Olivia pressed her fingertips briefly to her eyes in a gesture that was the closest she ever came to showing what a case cost her.

Then Brynn stepped out behind them and pulled the door nearly closed, and Cole turned to look at her in the hallway light.

She looked the way he felt. Wrung out, sharp-edged underneath it, running on something fiercer than adrenaline. Her braid had come fully loose on one side, a wave of dark auburn along her jaw, and she’d been pressing her nails into her palm hard enough that he could see the half-moon marks on her skin.

“You’re incredible,” he said, and immediately heard how insufficient it was. But it was honest, so he let it stand. “What you do for them. What you just did in there. I’ve worked with a lot of advocates, and I’ve never seen anyone do that the way you do.”

Something moved through her expression—briefly, carefully controlled, there and gone. He’d surprised her. She wasn’t used to that kind of directness, or wasn’t used to accepting it gracefully, one or the other.

“I do it because I understand it,” she said. “That’s all.”

“That’s not all.” He held her gaze, and she held his back, and for a moment neither of them looked away. “Understanding it from the inside and choosing to walk back into it every time someone calls? Those aren’t the same thing. What you did tonight took something.”

She looked at him for a beat longer than was strictly comfortable, those brown eyes steady and evaluating. Then she nodded once, something settling in her expression. Not gratitude exactly. More like acknowledgment passing between two people who’d each recognized something in the other they weren’t ready to give voice to yet.

“We should move quickly,” she said. “Mia gave you enough to start. I can walk you through everything I know about the tattoo, the methods she described. I’ve seen this pattern before.”

“I know,” Cole said. “I want to hear all of it.”

Olivia glanced between them and said nothing, which was its own kind of comment.

They moved toward Brynn’s office, and Cole followed a step behind, aware that the evening felt like it had shifted slightly on its axis.

He’d been doing this job for six years. He knew how to leave things at the door.

So that’s exactly what he did and focused on the case.

It was, for now, the only thing that mattered.

Chapter 3