Page 44
It’s Baryn.
His hair is a mess, his glasses slightly crooked. Without the button-down, he looks less like someone who makes a living asking intrusive questions and more like someone I might voluntarily allow within six feet of me.
An alarming development.
From a purely evolutionary standpoint, one would expect attraction to be triggered by markers of resource acquisition or high-status posturing—the very qualities his usual attire effectively communicates. Yet the introduction of fleece-lined joggers and a loose-fitting hoodie seems to trigger a completely different neurological pathway.
The lack of sartorial structure suggests a removal of the social armor he typically wears. It signals a state of vulnerability that, for reasons I cannot reasonably justify, is intensely compelling.
It’s an anomalous shift in the stimulus-response dynamic, and I am finding it singularly difficult to recalibrate my internal baseline in his presence.
My stomach does something undignified involving lepidopterans.
This man in a suit is a challenge; this man in a hoodie and slutty little sweatpants is a trap.
And with the glasses? I’m done for.
“Serena,” he breathes, steadying me with a hand on my forearm. He blinks down at me, then glances toward the dark hallway behind me like he’s trying to determine where exactly I came from. Then his mouth twitches.
“It’s two in the morning. Please tell me you were headed to my room to demand what information I have and not just wandering the inn like a Victorian ghost.”
“I was looking for a snack. Marj has those little oatcakes, and I wasn’t sure if they were restricted to breakfast hours or if there’s some kind of open-access policy. Not that I’m particularly hungry. My room smells aggressively of lavender, Tamsin’s snoring is somehow traveling through two walls and a ventilation system, and I’ve reached the point where remaining horizontal feels counterproductive. So, really, the oatcakes are incidental,” I trail off, the babble dying in my throat as I realize I’m staring at the way the light hits the stubble on his jaw.
I blow out a breath. “Wait. What the fuck are you doing wandering the halls?”
“I was going to the vending machine.” His eyes flick briefly in the direction of the stairs before returning to me. “Then I heard someone attempting to pace straight through the floor.”
“I was not—”
“The files are in my room,” he cuts in, the corner of his mouth twitching again. “If you’re going to be awake anyway, we might as well make poor decisions productively.”
He tilts his head toward the end of the hall. I hesitate, my internal stranger danger sensor flickering feebly against my need to know drive.
Would Lila approve?
She absolutely would not, but not because he isn’t safe.
She doesn’t have to know.
“Is this the part where you lure me in with the promise of long-dormant investigative leads and then I end up as a Jane Doe in your next episode?” I ask flatly.
Baryn lets out a short, dry huff of a laugh. The sound is gravelly and far too charming for this hour. “Serena, if I were going to kill you, I wouldn’t do it in a building owned by a nosy old lady who somehow already knows my shoe size and my mother’s maiden name. Marj would have my DNA sequenced and my motive mapped out before I could even clear the driveway.”
I step into the room expecting the mundane clutter of a hobby sleuth—a discarded laptop, maybe a stray notebook or a half-empty coffee cup. Instead, I stop so abruptly my heels nearly skid on the hardwood.
The far wall is a masterpiece of obsessive brilliance.
He’s erected a pair of collapsible, black tension-rods between the floor and the ceiling, stretching a heavy dark canvas between them. It’s a freestanding barricade against the inn’s offensive floral wallpaper, and pinned to it is a visual representation of a mind that works exactly like mine, but with a much higher budget for high-resolution printing.
It’s a literal murder wall and it’s beautiful.
Red string crisscrosses between photos and police logs, creating a web of connections that makes my pulse accelerate to a precarious BPM.
There are maps of Stillwater layered with hand-drawn thermal overlays, pinpointing elevation changes and drainage basins. Topographic markers are color-coded by date, and I can see where he’s mapped the intersection of the robberies and Casey’s final known coordinates.
It’s a forensic sanctum hidden inside a bed and breakfast.
I feel a strange, fluttering sensation in my chest that I can only identify as awe. It’s the feeling of finding a peer in a room where you expected only strangers.
