Page 7 of Hunted in the Silence

“His name is Andre Devlin.” Her voice came out steady, which cost her something she didn’t show. “And I know his walk because I watched him pace the hallway outside our rooms for three years.”

Cole didn’t flinch, didn’t reach for her, didn’t rearrange his expression into something careful and compensating. He held her gaze and nodded once, slow and deliberate, and she understood that the nod meant I hear you, I believe you, I’m not going to make this about how you’re doing right now because I know you need me to make it about the case. She wasn’t sure how she understood all of that from one small movement, but she did, and it mattered more than she expected.

“Tell me what you know about him,” he said.

So she did.

She told him what she’d never put in any official report, never disclosed to any of the officers and social workers and prosecutors she’d worked with over the years. The way Devlin operated—patient, systematic, unhurried. The way he built structures of dependency and isolation around the girls he took, layer by layer, like a man who understood the architecture of control the way a carpenter understood wood. The way he used other people as buffers, never getting close to anything that could be traced directly back to him. She had been fourteen when he found her and seventeen when she’d gotten out, and in those three years she had watched him build something with the cold, deliberate efficiency of a man who had been doing it long before her and fully intended to keep doing it long after.

She told Cole all of it. She was aware, somewhere under the clinical recitation of facts, of his complete, unhurried presence. He wasn’t waiting for her to finish so he could speak, but simply receiving everything she said and holding it carefully. His gray-green eyes stayed on her face the whole time. Not analyzing. Not assessing. Just there.

At some point she became aware that her coffee had gone cold again and she was gripping the cup harder than necessary and her voice had roughened slightly around the edges without her permission.

She stopped. Cleared her throat. Made herself ungrip the cup.

“He’s been looking for me,” she said. “I was the only one who got away without him sanctioning it. That matters to a man like Devlin. I always knew, in the back of my mind, that if he was still operating, he’d eventually circle back.”

Cole was quiet for a moment. Outside her office window, Blackridge was waking up—a car, a distant truck on the highway, the gray November light strengthening toward something that wasn’t quite morning yet.

“I need you to understand something,” he said finally.

She looked at him.

“This information changes the shape of this investigation significantly. It also changes the risk profile. Specifically yours.” He held her gaze with a calm, direct steadiness that she found she couldn’t look away from easily. “I’m not going to tell you to step back from this case. I don’t have the authority to do that, and frankly I don’t think it would stick. But I need you to tell me things as they come to you. Not filtered, not edited, not decided in advance that it’s too personal or too small. Everything.”

“Everything,” she repeated, wondering if she could follow through, but wanting to. When he looked at her like that…well, she found she didn’t want to disappoint.

“I mean it. If you remember something at two in the morning, you call me.” He pulled a card from his pocket and set it on top of the file between them. It had his cell number written below the office number in a neat, economical hand. “Not the field office. Me.”

Brynn looked at the card for a moment. Then she picked it up, and tucked it into the file, and looked back at him. “You trust survivors’ intel.”

It wasn’t quite a question.

“I’ve found it’s the sharpest kind there is,” he said simply.

She had spent ten years building professional relationships with law enforcement. She had worked with agents who were brilliant, dedicated, and genuinely good at their jobs. She had also spent ten years navigating the specific and consistent way that many of those agents—even the good ones—subtly repositioned her from resource to subject the moment her personal history became visible. The slight recalibration of tone. The way their eyes changed. The careful, managing helpfulness that meant they’d started thinking of her as someone who needed handling rather than someone who was useful.

Cole Maddox was doing none of that. He was looking at her exactly the same way he’d been looking at her since he walked in with the coffee.

She wasn’t sure what to do with that, so she focused on the work.

“Mia mentioned three locations,” she said, pulling a fresh legal pad toward her. “Let’s start building the geographic picture.”

He leaned forward, and they got to work.

She was three pages into her notes, Cole talking through a financial thread Olivia had already started pulling on the Barton Industrial connection, when she glanced up to ask him something and found him already looking at her. Not obviously, not lingeringly. He looked back at his phone in the same moment she looked up. But she’d caught the edge of it. The quality of it.

She kept her expression entirely neutral and asked her question about Barton Industrial, and he answered it, and neither of them acknowledged anything.

But she felt the warmth in her face for a moment afterward, brief and inconvenient, before she put it away where it belonged.

There is work to do, she told herself, the same way she’d told herself everything difficult for the past ten years.

She picked up her pen and kept going.

Chapter 4

The Blackridge field office was a converted storefront on the east side of downtown, squeezed between a dry cleaner and an optometrist, with a glass front that had been frosted over and a sign that said FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION in the same font the Bureau had used since before Cole was born. It was not impressive. It had four desks, two interview rooms, a printer that jammed every third document, and a whiteboard that someone had apparently tried to erase with the wrong kind of marker, leaving a ghostly shadow of old case notes underneath every new thing written on it.