I didn’t go back to my team. I didn’t call Mallory. I didn’t call Hale, or Washington, or anyone who would ask me to be human about this. I went to the quiet room down the hall—the one with the locked file cabinet and the terminal that didn’t connect to anything public.
I pulled up Colin Thorne’s file.
His name stared back at me in a clean font.
A man reduced to facts.
I clicked through the photos again. The ledger. The placement. The timestamps. The way the parking structure camera cut just before the ledger entered the frame.
Deliberate.
I stared at the sequence until my eyes started to burn. Not because it was graphic. Because the killing was neat. Because the decision had been easy.
I shut the file and sat back, letting the chair creak in the empty room. They always assumed control slipped by accident. They thought the problem was that the Auditor was losing control.
They thought the danger was an escalating killer, an unraveling pattern, a public narrative spinning too fast to contain.
They were all looking for chaos. That was what made them easy to manage. The problem wasn’t that the Auditor was losing control. The problem was that someone else had decided it was time to take it.
Once control changed hands, it didn’t matter who thought they were in charge. It only mattered who was willing to burn everything down to prove it.
Chapter
Twenty-Eight
FLINT
Mallory arrived at the studio flanked by two FBI agents who looked like they’d been told, very explicitly, what would happen to them if anything went wrong.
Neither of them was Brewster. That was the first problem, though, it pleased me more than it should. The guy was doing his job, but he rubbed me the wrong way.
The second problem was thatshedidn’t look bothered by it. I might not like their relationship, but I also had no idea what the hell was going on.
Mallory and her escort parked in the garage beneath the building. My paranoia had the cameras up everywhere—including there. It was how I knew she’d arrived.
She stepped out of the black SUV with the same controlled economy she always had—chin level, shoulders squared, posture tuned to cameras even when there weren’t any aimed at her yet. The agents flanking her were competent enough, but they didn’t know her. Not really. They watched the perimeter. She watched the elevator bank.
Different instincts. Different stakes.
They bypassed the standard elevators and went straight to the executive, It allowed her to bypass stops at every other floorand limited her exposure. It would bring her all the way up to me. I left my office and headed straight for the hall and the elevators. Staff was limited on the executive and studio floors and we’d been vetting the staff.
Once the doors opened to reveal her and the team, I met her gaze. “Mallory,” I said, keeping my voice even.
For a fraction of a second the mask slipped. It wasn’t fear, relief, or grief—it wasexhaustion.Then a flicker of a smile touched her lips. “Flint.”
Just my name. No qualifier. No question or answers about Brewster’s locations. The omission seemed significant, but I wasn’t going to ask.
“You okay?” I asked.
She gave me a wry look as I motioned her toward the conference and the coffee, as well as food, I’d already had brought in for us. “Define okay.”
Fair.
The agents hovered, uncertain whether they were supposed to follow or wait. Mallory glanced back at them, then at me.
“I’m with him,” she said calmly. Not asking. Telling.
One of the agents hesitated. The other checked his earpiece. I watched the calculation play out—protocol versus optics versus the reality that Mallory McBryan was not a woman you physically corralled without consequences.
