Page 152 of Only the Hunter

Now there’s a van backed up to it.

My hand moves to my earpiece.

“Quinn.” My voice is level. “Gray van, south block. Run the plates.”

A beat.

I watch.

Quinn’s feed stutters—half a second of static—then recovers. I make note of it.

“Registered to a catering company in Annapolis. No activity logged in the past six months.”

Six months dormant.

Repositioned tonight.

Facing our secondary exit.

I key the channel again.

“Change of plan.”

Chapter 30

Evie

I’ve prosecuted enough cases to know what waiting does to people.

Witnesses fall apart in the hallway outside the courtroom. Not from fear—from the space between knowing what’s coming and having it arrive. The mind fills that space with everything it can’t control. I’ve watched composed, intelligent people dissolve in forty-five minutes on a hallway bench.

I always thought I was different.

I’m not.

The drive home was the worst of it. Ten minutes of performing normalcy—signal, turn, park, keys, door—knowing that if anyone was watching, they needed to see exactly that. A woman coming home. Alone. Nothing unusual. If they’ve made Gabe at all, they’d expect him at his own place tonight, not stationed outside mine—which is exactly why he isn’t, not visibly. I took off my jacket in the entryway the way I always do and hung it on the hook by the door and reminded myself that every ordinary thing I did was the operation working.

It helped, a little, right up until I closed the door and was alone.

Gabe’s voice came through the earpiece before I’d made it to the stairs: Visuals are good. Stay off the windows. Check in every fifteen.

Check in. Which is why, seven minutes ago, I tried to send a message and watched it sit undelivered.

I’m on one bar. Sometimes less. I try again from the chair by the window—better signal there, marginally—and watch the icon. Nothing sends.

The unease that’s been living in my sternum since I pulled into my parking spot shifts into something unruly.

KOAN wouldn’t use faulty apps.

I set the phone face-up on my desk. The back office has always been patchy—that’s true, that’s real, and it’s also not something I believe, not tonight, not with everything that’s led to this moment. I’ve been handed a mundane explanation before. Brake lines that failed too smoothly. Files that vanished with no access log. A particular quality of being watched that I couldn’t prove and everyone politely refused to believe.

I’ve been right every time I refused to believe the mundane explanation.

I’m not about to start believing one now.

Atlas is on the desk beside the laptop. He came in when I did, which he never does during his late-afternoon sleep—he has opinions about schedules that I’ve come to think of as aspirational—and he’s been here ever since, not settled, just present. His tail moves in a slow, deliberate arc. His ears are forward.

He’s watching the wall that faces the hallway.