Page 64 of Hunted in the Silence

But up here, on this landing, everything slowed.

Everything softened.

Everything settled.

Cole opened his eyes and looked at her again, and she saw it—saw all of it. The fear. The fury. The relief. The love he wasn’t saying but wasn’t hiding either.

And she let herself feel it back.

For the first time, she didn’t fight it.

Chapter 20

Brynn was sitting on the hood of Carson’s unmarked car with a thermal blanket someone had produced draped over her shoulders, her dark auburn hair loose around her face, the cut on her cheekbone cleaned and covered with a butterfly strip from the first-aid kit Finn kept in his glove box. She had a cup of coffee someone had handed her, both hands wrapped around it, and she was watching the activity unfolding around her, calm and collected, even when she had every right not to be.

She had been taken. She had been alone in a building with the man who had stolen three years of her life and watched other women’s lives burn from a careful distance. She had faced down Devlin with a courage that floored Cole, made him admire her even more than he already did, and then she’d handed him her trust like a gift that he wasn’t sure he deserved.

He’d failed her, and the only thing keeping him sane right now was the fact she was safe and they’d gotten their man.

His gaze stayed on Brynn, sitting on the hood of a car drinking coffee as she watched the scene wrap up.

The full weight of the past two hours moved through Cole all at once, the staunch agent persona falling away and allowing the human side to step forward again. His hands were not entirely steady. But he ignored it and crossed the lot to her.

Brynn looked up when he got close. The cut on her cheekbone was going to bruise badly by morning, the skin around the butterfly strip already darkening. The marks on her wrists from the zip tie were visible in the building’s low light. She had a scrape along her forearm from the window glass that nobody had gotten to yet.

He stopped in front of her and looked at all of it and allowed himself to soak in the full weight of reality.

“You should have a paramedic look at that arm,” he said.

“I will.” She looked at him over the coffee cup. “Are you all right?”

The question hit him squarely in the chest, and he knew he couldn’t hide anything from this woman.

“No,” he admitted. “Not entirely.”

She nodded once, accepting that without trying to fix it. He sat on the hood beside her, and she shifted the thermal blanket and put half of it over his shoulders, and they leaned into each other, sharing their warmth.

They watched the evidence team work for a few minutes in comfortable silence.

Brynn was the first to break it. “He told me he let me go.”

Cole glanced at her, the best he could being so close.

“The escape I planned. He knew about it the whole time and he left the door open on purpose.” She gripped the coffee cup in both hands and stared into the space in between. “He’d done it before. With other girls. Let them go to watch what his work had done to them.” She grew quiet before she continued. “Two of them are dead.”

Cole was quiet, understanding her need for him to just listen as she worked through everything.

“He wanted to see if I’d break the same way,” she continued. “That’s why he watched me all these years. He was waiting to see when it would happen.” She swallowed thickly. “He couldn’t understand why it hadn’t.”

“Because he underestimated you,” Cole said.

She turned her head to look at him.

“He thought he was measuring the damage he’d done,” Cole explained. “He was actually watching you build something. Those aren’t the same thing, and he never understood the difference because he’s never built anything in his life. He’s only ever taken things apart.” He held her gaze. “He couldn’t read what you were doing because he has no frame of reference for it.”

Brynn stared into his eyes for a long moment. “I thought about that,” she said quietly. “While I was in there. About what it meant. And what I kept coming back to was the center. The two hundred and seventeen women and girls through our doors.” She looked out at the expanse of night, through the activity still moving around them. “He watched me build that and called it an anomaly. Something he couldn’t account for in his data.” The corner of her mouth curved up in a humorless smile. “I want to put that on a plaque.”

Cole felt something loosen in his chest. “I’ll commission it.”