Page 28 of Hunted in the Silence

“Like you did.”

“Like I did.” Something moved through her expression, brief and fierce. “She’s not passive, Cole. She’s the girl who got herself out of a locked location at fourteen and ran until she found a hospital. She’s been in that building for four days and she’s been paying attention the whole time. I’d bet on it.”

He believed it. He believed it the way he believed everything Brynn told him about these girls, with the weight of someone trusting a source that had never once been wrong.

“Five days,” he said. “Then we go get her.”

Brynn nodded once. It was a commitment.

He gathered his notes to leave, and as he reached across the desk for the Barton cross-reference she’d made him a copy of, he got a clear look at the book on the corner of her desk.

The spine read Justice Delayed: The David Barrett Investigation. The cover was worn at the edges and there were two Post-it flags protruding from the pages. Below the title, in clean print: Quinn Barrett.

He looked at it for a moment.

Not a romance novel.

Nothing that he had expected at all.

He looked at Brynn, who was writing something on the legal pad and hadn’t noticed him notice.

He kept the information close, treating it like something fragile, and said nothing. “I’ll call you after I talk to Finn Steele tonight,” he said.

“I’ll be up,” she said, not looking up from the pad.

He let himself out. In the hallway, he passed the small shelf near the break room—the one with the donated books and the box of tissues and the spare phone chargers that lived there for whoever needed them. There was a second copy of the same book on the shelf, face out, the cover worn in the same way. Well-read and deliberately placed.

Of course there was.

He walked out into the November cold and sat in his car for a moment, looking at his phone. He had Finn Steele’s number from Carson, had the Harlan Investment Group preliminary from Olivia, had six items on his list that needed attention before tonight.

He typed a short text to a contact he hadn’t used in months.

Quinn. Long shot, but are you planning to be in Blackridge anytime in the next few weeks?

He set the phone in the cupholder and pulled out of the lot.

The response came before he reached the end of the block.

Actually yes. Dax has some things at BPD end of the month. Why?

Cole looked at the message at the next red light.

I’ll explain later. Don’t make other plans for that evening if you can help it.

He set the phone down. Looked at the road ahead.

It was a small thing. A very small thing, in the context of a trafficking investigation with five days on the clock and a fourteen-year-old girl in a building on Miller Road. It was the least urgent item on his list by a significant margin.

Still…

He thought about a worn paperback with two Post-it flags in it, sitting on the corner of a desk belonging to a woman who allowed herself very few soft spots.

He thought about promises. The small ones, the kind you made quietly and without announcement. The kind that cost nothing to make and meant everything to keep.

The light changed.

He drove.