Page 59 of Hunted in the Silence

At ten-thirteen, the wire went dead.

Not static. Not interference. Silence, sudden and complete. He’d found the device and disabled it. Cole was already moving, panic racing through his veins, when Finn’s voice came through the radio. “West door just opened. Someone exiting west. Wait, they’re going back—” A burst of static. Then nothing.

Cole hit the front door at a run, his heart threatening to burst through his chest.

The front room was empty. Shelving units along the walls, the ghost of the printing company’s equipment outlined in dust on the floor, two bare bulbs casting more shadow than light. A hallway leading back into the building. He moved down it fast with his weapon up and his trigger finger ready. Carson was through the front door behind him, and they cleared three rooms in seconds, each one empty, each one filled with stillness.

The last room at the rear had a trapdoor in the floor. Open. The ladder below it descended into dark that smelled like old concrete and standing water. Cole didn’t take time to think. He dropped through it without stopping. The tunnel was low and narrow, made of poured concrete, something that didn’t show up on blueprints because it had been built privately and deliberately kept off the record. His flashlight showed twenty feet before a turn. He ran down it bent forward, the ceiling brushing his shoulders. Carson’s footsteps sounded behind him, and around the turn he found a steel door standing open and through it a loading dock behind a warehouse on the next block, empty, the dock door rolled up and the cold night coming in hard.

On the concrete floor, a length of cut zip tie.

Cole stood on the dock and knew without a doubt that it had been around someone’s wrists. He got on the radio. “All units. She’s gone. He moved her through a tunnel to the adjacent block. I need eyes on every vehicle that left this area in the last four minutes.”

Responses came back fast and none of them were what he needed. Olivia’s van had been positioned for the south property, not the warehouse behind it. The two-block radius Carson’s people covered hadn’t extended to the loading dock. It was a gap, narrow and specific, and Devlin had found it and walked straight through it.

Cole didn’t stay on that dock. He couldn’t. The moment the wire went dead, something inside him snapped tight and mean, and he was already moving, already barking orders, already tearing through the next forty minutes like a man trying to outrun the worst mistake of his life.

They had the tunnel documented. The loading dock processed. Every traffic camera within six blocks pulled. Olivia had tech running Brynn’s phone, but it had gone dark at the same second as the wire—shut off or crushed—and either way it meant the same thing.

No signal. No contact. No Brynn.

His fault. All of it. He’d let her walk into this case. He’d let himself believe he could keep her safe. He’d let himself believe Devlin wouldn’t get another shot.

And now Devlin had her.

Cole stood in the south property’s front room with the map spread across a folding table, staring at the six-block radius like he could will it to give her back. Every detail he knew about Devlin, every word Brynn had told him, every warning Silas had given him—none of it mattered. None of it stopped this.

He reached for his phone to call Silas, hand shaking, and stopped.

Something was on the floor near the hallway entrance. Just inside the reach of the nearest bare bulb. A folded piece of paper. The same neat crease as the note in the residential building. The same deliberate placement.

His stomach dropped. His vision tunneled.

Devlin had been here. Devlin had been close enough to leave this for him.

Ignoring the tight, choking constriction in his chest and the violent pounding in his skull, Cole pulled on a glove and picked it up. Opened it.

One line. The same unhurried hand.

You should have let her come to me alone the first time.

The words hit him like a blade.

He’d done this. He’d put her in Devlin’s path again. He’d given Devlin exactly what he wanted.

Cold fury shot through his veins, but underneath it—deeper, sharper—was the sickening truth he couldn’t outrun:

He might have just cost Brynn her life.

Carefully, he folded the note. Bagged it. Handed it to Carson. Then he called Silas, because if he didn’t move, didn’t act, didn’t fix this—

He would never forgive himself.

Chapter 19

The room smelled like dust and metal and the musty staleness of a space that had been sealed for years. A lantern on the floor threw unsteady light across concrete walls, and a ceiling with a water stain spreading from the corner like a dark map of somewhere she didn’t want to go. One window had its glass intact but filmed with grime, and the fire escape was visible through it as a shadow against the lightening sky outside.

Brynn sat on the floor with her back against the wall and her zip-tied wrists in her lap and looked at Andre Devlin and thought about everything she knew about him.