She forced herself to look at him and found his eyes already on her face. Reading. Analyzing. Seeing far too much.
He held her gaze, hiding his own thoughts. "Who are you, really?"
26
The minutethe words were out of his mouth, Gabe wished he could pull them back. The question hung between them in the truck's darkness, heavy with implications he wasn't ready to deal with now. Or maybe ever.
The dim glow from the dash highlighted the conflict playing across her features. Fear warred with calculation. She was weighing how much truth she could afford to give him.
"I had a life before Haven Cove," she answered finally, her voice steady even though her hands trembled against her thighs. "A dangerous one. That's all you need to know right now."
She'd picked a lock in under thirty seconds, scaled an eight-foot fence like it was a bump in the road, and moved through that warehouse with the kind of skill that came from real experience, not amateur luck.
Those skills required years of training. Law enforcement, military, intelligence work, or something else he couldn't quite categorize yet, something less-than-legit, probably.
But the way she'd reacted when cornered, the bone-deep fear in her eyes when he'd pressed for answers, told himsomething crucial: whatever she was running from was dangerous enough that exposure could get her killed.
His counter-intelligence background had taught him when to push an asset and when to give them space. When immediate answers mattered less than maintaining operational effectiveness.
Right now, finding David mattered more than solving the mystery of Cara Sweet. "I'm not blind. Those aren't skills you picked up from YouTube tutorials. But I also know you risked everything tonight to help me find my brother. That counts for something."
She turned to look at him, surprise flickering across her face.
"We'll table this conversation for later," Gabe continued. "Dissecting this phone is our top priority."
Relief and confusion fought across her expression. "You're not going to investigate me?"
"My brother's in trouble and I have about a day and a half before my career implodes," he said bluntly. "I don't have time to run background checks when you're the best asset I have for finding David alive." He met her eyes. "Besides, whatever you're running from, it's not connected to my case. Those men at the warehouse were hunting for David's evidence, not for you."
She studied him for a long moment, like she was trying to figure out if this was some kind of interrogation tactic.
"Okay," she said finally, and some of the tension drained from her shoulders.
He slowed for a sweeping curve. Everything else was secondary until his brother was safe.
They parked behind the bakery and climbed the exterior stairs to Cara's apartment. Light glowed warm in the windows above, cutting through the fog-laced dark.
Tom opened the door before they could knock, his expressiontight with concern that relaxed when he saw them. "No blood. That's always a good sign."
"We're fine," Gabe said, stepping inside. "Close call, but we made it out clean."
Piper looked up from her position on the couch, her teenage face pale with worry that she was trying to hide behind her phone. "So did Wade and Reagan."
The apartment felt crowded with four of them in the small kitchen. Tom's laptop sat open on the table, displaying multiple windows of police scanner feeds and what looked like traffic camera access that definitely shouldn't be available to a civilian.
"What did you find at the warehouse?" Tom asked.
Gabe pulled out the burner phone and David's handwritten notes, spreading them across the table. "David was using the warehouse as a base of operations. He left this phone behind, probably when he had to run three weeks ago."
Tom picked up the phone with careful precision, handling it like the evidence it was. "Battery's almost dead again."
"There's a draft message," Cara said. "Unsent. Dated the night David disappeared."
Tom navigated to the messages while Piper abandoned her phone to lean over his shoulder and read. Her eyes widened as she processed the truncated text.
"He was meeting someone at two in the morning," Piper said. "Someone saved as just 'M'."
"Marco Ruiz," Gabe said. "The private detective David hired. We already know that from the files on the flash drive. But the message got interrupted before David could explain what he wanted to tell me."
