The sound lingered longer than it should have.
I stayed where I was, listening to the house breathe itself back into stillness. Systems humming. People moving at the edges. Somewhere on the other side of the house, Mallory was behind a closed door down the hall, pretending—convincingly—that she was resting.
Flint thought he’d drawn blood.
He hadn’t. What he’d done was identify the pressure point—and mistake it for weakness. It was good that he’d given me the heads up. It meant I could deal with it.
He was right about one thing: I didn’t have a timeline. Not in days or weeks or neat operational phases. Cases like this didn’t resolve on calendars. They resolved when leverage shifted. When someone misstepped. When momentum tipped just enough to expose a seam.
Mallory was a seam.
Not because she was fragile. Because she was precise. Because she understood timing instinctively and refused to be sidelined once she sensed the clock had started.
Flint wanted containment. Predictability. The comfort of believing that if he stayed close enough, watched carefully enough, he could keep the story—and her—inside acceptable margins.
That was never how this was going to end before we arrived. It wouldn’t end that way now. All I could do was use the situation to our best advantage and close the trap around the Unsub.
I crossed to the window and checked the perimeter out of habit, even though I already knew what I’d see. Darkness. Motion sensors. Agents in shadows. A glance at my watch told me it had been a couple of hours since we got back from the broadcast.
The unsub hadn’t responded yet. I hadn’t expected him to leap. He had to analyze her response, consider it, figure out what he wanted to say to her and how he wanted to say it.
Like Mallory, the Unsub was listening.
Whether Flint liked it or not, this wasn’t a question ofifshe’d step forward again—it was when, and who would be standing close enough to shape what happened next. Right now, that was me.
And I wasn’t close to done.
Chapter
Sixteen
MALLORY
By the morning of the third day, the safe house had developed its own rhythm. One I had learned to loathe almost as soon as it registered.
Not because it was chaotic—because it wasn’t. Because it worked.
Lights clicked on at the same time. Coffee appeared like a courtesy and a warning. Voices stayed low, shoes stayed soft on the floors, and the agents moved with that practiced economy that made everything feel contained. Managed. Controlled.
Safe.
Sixty-some hours since I’d gone on air. Give or take. Long enough for the adrenaline to burn clean out of my bloodstream and leave behind the restless grit that always followed a win that didn’t resolve anything.
Long enough for thelackof response to become its own kind of noise. A low, irritating hum that rasped against my nerves.
I sat at the small dining table in my sweatpants and a borrowed oversized sweatshirt, laptop open, phone beside it like a second heartbeat. The morning light through the blinds was thin and gray. It made everything in the room look washed-out, including me.
I refreshed the same feeds I’d refreshed a hundred times.
Nothing.
No new message. No copycat line. No obvious echo. No signal I could point to and say,There. That’s him.
The Auditor—I doubted he called himself that since I was the one who dubbed him—had gone dark. The same could not be said for all of the other outlets online and off. Broadcast, print, and digital were generating hours of coverage all based in speculation.
A part of me was forced to wonder whether the Auditor had simply not surfaced or had, but had just gone about his business without any contact. Maybe he decided I wasn’t worth the effort.
I didn’t know which possibility I hated most.
