“No,” I said quietly. “He’s lucky you were. He can’t stay here. They’ll try and shut him up.”
He didn’t argue, which somehow made it worse.
Across the hall, Aaron and Jace were talking to the sheriff, their voices low but sharp. Miles was somewhere near the security desk, running background checks on every deputy in the building. The air felt charged—too many secrets bouncing off the walls.
Hawk crouched beside me, resting his forearms on his knees. “They’ll keep Frank sedated for a few hours. When he wakes up, we’ll get names. Then he’ll go with Delta Five, and they’ll keep him safe.”
I shook my head. “It has to be Torres. Whoever set this up knew how to cover tracks.”
“Then we dig until they run out of places to hide.”
I stared at him. “You always make it sound so simple.”
“It is,” he said softly. “You just have to want it bad enough.”
For a moment, neither of us spoke. The hum of the machines filled the silence.
Finally, I whispered, “When I saw him fall…I thought we’d lost him.”
“You didn’t lose him,” he said. “Did you call your aunt and uncle?”
I looked up. His eyes held mine, steady, unflinching. Too much there—loyalty, guilt, something deeper that scared me more than bullets ever could.
“Hawk—”
He stood abruptly, tension breaking the moment. “Come on. Aaron wants you to see something.”
They’d setup a temporary ops room in one of the hospital conference suites. Monitors glowed against dark windows,displaying data feeds from the sheriff’s servers. Miles pointed at one screen where a file had just appeared.
“Deputy Torres logged in less than an hour ago. Tried to access Frank Marlow’s personnel record.”
Aaron’s jaw tightened. “He’s covering his tracks. Where is he now?”
“Last GPS ping from his patrol cruiser shows him headed south on Route 11.”
“That’s twenty minutes from here,” I said, already reaching for my jacket.
Aaron started to object, but Hawk cut him off. “She’s coming.”
“Fine,” Aaron said. “But we do this clean. No sirens, no lights.”
The night stretched ahead,blacktop slick with rain. We followed Torres’s signal down twisting roads until it disappeared near the old water-treatment plant—the same plant that had been decommissioned after the mine closed.
Boone’s voice came through the comms. “Thermal shows one vehicle inside the fence. No movement yet.”
Hawk parked behind a stand of trees. “Julia, stay behind me.”
“Not this time,” I said. “He tried to kill my cousin to cover his ass.”
He hesitated, then nodded once. “Together, then.”
We moved through the mud toward the building. The air stank of rust and stagnant water.
Inside, Torres was bent over a table covered in files and a laptop. He looked up, startled, when our lights hit him.
“Torres!” I called. “Step away from the computer.”
He froze, eyes darting between us. “You don’t understand—”
