I stepped forward to pass him.
He didn’t move.
It happened so fast I couldn’t have said who adjusted first—only that suddenly there was no room left. My shoulder brushed the doorframe. His hand came up, not touching me, but braced against the wood beside my head. A barrier. A pause.
My breath caught.
Chest to chest, close enough that I could feel the heat of him through the thin cotton of my sweatshirt. Close enough that my body registered him before my mind caught up. His gaze dipped, just once—down, then back up—measuring distance, choice, consequence.
“Be very careful how you decide to play this, Mallory,” he said softly. Not a command. Not a threat. A calibration. “You want to keep me as your ally.”
The words slid under my skin.
I swallowed. “Is that a warning?”
For half a second, the world narrowed to the space between us. His eyes dropped again—this time to my mouth. Just long enough for the awareness to spark. Then he looked back at me, a bare hint of a smile at the corner of his lips.
“Yes,” he said.
Then he stepped away.
Just like that, the doorway cleared. The pressure vanished. The house rushed back in around us—air, space, sound—but something fundamental had shifted. My pulse was still racing when he turned and headed down the hall, already composed, already in control.
I followed a beat later, shaken in a way that had nothing to do with fear. The power of it. The precision. How little he’d neededto say. The fact that he’d saidally—and made it sound like a privilege.
Brewster wasn’t just offering to watch my back—he was daring me to keep up.
Lethal.
Chapter
Eighteen
THE AUDITOR
Inoticed her absence while I was doing something else. That was what bothered me later—not that she was gone, but that I hadn’t been aware of it.
I was at the table, sleeves rolled up, papers spread in a loose order that only looked chaotic if you didn’t know how to read it. A map half-folded. A list I’d already revised twice. Notes in different inks, not for emphasis but for memory. The coffee beside me had gone cold because I’d forgotten it was there.
That happened when I was focused.
The television was on in the background, volume low. I didn’t need the sound. I read faster than they spoke, and captions were cleaner than voices anyway. The screen flickered through the usual cycle—analysis, speculation, concern dressed up as authority.
That was when it registered.
She wasn’t there.
Not teased for later. Not referenced as “continuing coverage.” Not even filling space while someone else talked around her work.
She was simply… gone.
I stopped writing. The pen hovered over the page.
I didn’t rush the thought. Rushing was how you missed things. I finished what I was doing first—drew a line through a name, shifted a page, aligned the stack with the edge of the table. Only then did I lean back and give the absence my full attention.
It had been a week.
Seven days since she’d looked straight into the camera and spoke to me.
