Page 56 of Hunted in the Silence

“All three,” she agreed, releasing a breath.

His eyes snapped up at her response.

“Your words,” she said. “From Thursday morning. All three.”

Something moved through his expression. He shook his head once, not in refusal but with the exasperation of a man who had been quoted and had no good response to it. He dialed Carson.

Brynn let out a slow breath and looked at her legal pad and the notes she’d taken during Silas’s call, and underneath the focused, forward-leaning readiness of it she felt…not fear exactly. Awareness of the cost. The risks involved and the decision to pay the price anyway.

She thought about Caitlin Marsh saying it’s okay, we can go. About Dana Pryce who had been funny and done impressions and disappeared for talking to a social worker. About every girl whose name was on her board and every girl whose name she didn’t have yet.

She picked up her pen and got back to work.

***

Carson swept the center at nine-thirty with Finn and two plainclothes officers who moved through the building quickly and efficiently. The main space was clear. But in the small storage room at the back of the building, behind a shelf of donated winter coats, Finn found a device the size of a thumb, matte black, flush against the baseboard where the shelf met the wall.

A listening device.

Brynn stood in the doorway of the storage room and looked at it in Finn’s gloved hand and felt a chill from knowing he had been inside her building skate down her spine. Inside the space she had built and worked in. Inside the place where survivors came because it was safe.

“How long?” she asked, choking back the emotions flooding her.

“Can’t say for certain without running it,” Finn said. “Days, minimum. Possibly longer.”

She sucked in steady, deliberate breaths, the same way she did with everything that tested her. Then she looked at Carson, resolved. “Leave it.”

Carson gave her a puzzled look.

“Leave it in place,” she said. “If he’s monitoring it and it goes dark he knows we found it. If it stays live, he thinks he still has ears in here.” She paused. “We just have to be careful what we say in that room.”

Carson shared a look with Finn. Finn looked at the device. “She’s right,” Finn agreed.

“Leave it,” Carson confirmed.

Cole appeared in the hallway behind her. He’d been on the phone with Olivia outside while the sweep happened. She turned and looked at him, and he read her face instantly.

“The storage room,” she said. “Listening device. We’re leaving it in place.”

The same cold she’d felt and redirected moved through his expression. He nodded once. “Olivia’s van is at the end of the block. I’m in the parking lot. Carson’s people have the surrounding streets.” He held her gaze. “Finn is in the break room. You don’t go near the storage room, you keep your phone on and the line to me open, and if anything feels wrong—”

“I’ll say so,” she said. “I promise.”

He looked at her for one more beat. Then he reached out and adjusted the collar of her jacket, a small and deliberate gesture, his hand staying at her shoulder for a second longer than necessary.

“I’ll be right outside,” he said he said softly.

“I know,” she said. The moment was thick, the desire to lift to her toes to kiss him strong, but they both knew better than to act on it. “Go.”

With a quick nod, he went.

Brynn straightened her jacket, walked to her office, sat down at her desk, and opened her laptop. Her staff were in their spaces, told only that there was an active situation and to behave normally. They were good people and they trusted her, so the center moved through its morning the way it always did, the phone ringing, the appointments running, the ordinary and necessary work of a place that existed to hold people up when everything else had let them down.

She worked. Real work. There was always enough of it, and today was no different. She returned calls, reviewed case files, responded to the hospital coordinator about the three girls from the Harlan building who were moving into the next phase of their care. She worked diligently, just as she always had, and aside from her eyes moving to the window every twenty minutes and her phone staying face-up at the corner of the desk with Cole’s number one tap away, she could almost forget that this wasn’t an ordinary day.

At just after two in the afternoon, her phone rang from an unknown number.

She stared at it for a beat before answering.