Page 22 of The Guarded Monster’s Truth

Confirmed. HF funding traces through Ridgeline Strategic to a Virginia operating account. Same routing as Harlow's consulting fees. Procurement records match the batch Bruiser pulled from the transmitter. Full chain.

I read it twice. The words connect the last gaps in the picture I built since I pinned Harlow's printout to Bruiser's corkboard.

One operation. The same consulting firm that placed my editor at the magazine funded Humans First's expansion into Nightfall Cove. All of it aimed at one rogue operative who wouldn't come in.

They didn't send extraction teams. They didn't send another handler. They sent me. A freelance journalist with a dead career and a need for the byline that would rebuild it. A woman Harlow cultivated for two years, building trust through assignments and coffee meetings and editorial feedback that made me feel seen after the Daily Record made me feel disposable.

They chose me because I'd walk into the compound with a recorder and a notebook and the conviction that the story mattered more than the man behind it. They chose me because I'd get close. Because what they feared about Benjamin Walker—what eleven years of phone calls and blocked numbers and a sedan at the Rusty Anchor couldn't solve—is that someone might look at him and see a person instead of an asset.

They didn't need me to betray him. They needed someone inside the compound. The recorder did the rest—every room, every conversation, every routine fed back to an agency that spent years watching from a parking lot and couldn't get past the gate.

I hand Ellie's phone back.

"The story isn't about a surveillance program," I say.

Ellie folds her hands over the phone. "What's it about?"

"An agency that would rather dismantle a man's life than let him live it."

Three a.m. The library sits dark except for the desk lamp and the green exit sign above the back door. Ellie left at midnight with instructions to lock up and slide the key under the mat. Ellie's laptop sits open on the reading table. She left it without being asked.

My notebook lies open beside the keyboard. Three weeks of notes in handwriting that gets messier as the entries get more important.

I type the first paragraph.

Not the integration piece. Not the profile David Harlow pitched me, the one about monster-human communities and Founder's Day and what healing looks like in a small town. That assignment died on Bruiser's desk beside a dismantled recorder.

This will make us targets. Bruiser told me that, and he's right. The agency won't fold because a magazine prints their methods. They'll adapt. They'll come from angles I can't see yet.

I type the second paragraph anyway.

Chapter 10

Bruiser

A clean square on the corkboard marks where Ava's photograph hung until two a.m., when I pulled the pin and slid the print into the drawer. Six hours later, the adhesive shadow is the most honest thing on my walls.

I've turned the tracker over in my hands nine times since she walked out. Publish or hide. The training says hide, and the training has kept me alive for eleven years. But alive and free aren't the same thing, and the woman who closed my door last night told me which one matters before I could figure out how to hear it.

I run my thumb along the base of my right horn. Eighteen marks carved into the keratin since the agency recruited me, each one a debt paid, a threat neutralized, a reason the club let me stay. The first six I cut at the safe house in Virginia with a pocket knife and the conviction that if I proved my value fast enough, the seat at the table would stop feeling borrowed. The next twelve came in Nightfall Cove. One for every year the compound stood because I watched, because Benjamin Walker earned his chair by never sleeping and never letting himself believe he'd earned it for good.

Eighteen marks. Not one of them means I belong here. They mean I earned another day.

She asked me not to lock her inside my walls. And instead of hearing that, I handed her the same choice her old boss did—bury it, keep your head down, let me decide what's safe.

I set the tracker down and walk outside.

The compound porch faces east, and the morning sun turns the coffee in Knox's mug the color of motor oil. He fills the wide chair Sarah dragged out here last summer. Reeve's plastic trucks scatter across the deck. Sarah's cardigan hangs from the railing, left there since yesterday, and Knox hasn't moved it because Knox doesn't move the things that remind him she's close.

He looks at me when I sit. The coffee steams between his hands, and he waits.

"She left," I say.

"I know."

"I asked her to kill the story."

Knox drinks. Sets the mug on his knee. "Yeah and how'd that go."