Silent as Sin (Sins of the Patch #4)

Chapter One

SOMEWHERE OUTSIDE CINDER Creek, Arizona

The ranch looked dead.

It should’ve been. After the raid, after the screaming and gunfire, after Emmaline walked out of here with her eyes wide and the world a mile away from her, this place should’ve been nothing but dust in the desert wind.

But my gut wouldn’t let me ride.

“Place is cleared,” Warden said, his voice quiet, careful not to wake ghosts in a house that was entirely too dark for daytime. His flashlight cut across a bare mattress and the length of chain bolted to the floor beside it. The links were black with rust. “Why you’d drag me back here?”

“Humor me,” I said.

He sighed like a man clocking in for overtime and followed anyway. That was Warden, he’d bitch about the hours and keep pace the whole way.

The house breathed heat. The kind that crawled down your throat and made your tongue taste like copper.

Dust motes floated in the beams of our lights, drifting like snow in a place that forgot winter.

The hall smelled like bleach over old sweat, like somebody had tried to scrub sin out of drywall with a bucket and prayer.

We moved room to room. Bathroom with shattered tile. Bedroom with a dresser tipped on its face, drawers yawning empty. A pantry that had held more empty shelves than food. My boots found a spent zip-tie under a table and the stiff crackle of it snapped something loose in my chest.

Emmaline’s face flickered up, pale, blood at the corner of her mouth, the way her fingers shook while Chaos held her. Venom deserved more than the fast death Chaos gave him. Chaos. That was another fucking thing that pissed me off. What was Emmaline thinking?

I swallowed it down, and kept walking.

The hallway tightened at the end, like the house didn’t want us in the last door.

Warden swung his light across busted glass and a slumped bookcase.

The closet door beyond it was the same half-rotted wood as the rest, paint crazed into a hundred little fractures.

Nothing special. But the noise in my gut got louder, like road grind beneath the tires when you’re going too fast to stop.

“Ashen,” Warden said, reading me. “We’re burning daylight we don’t got.”

I wrapped my hand around the knob. Turned. The door gave easy, hinges whining like they hadn’t been touched in a decade. Shelves. Moldy blankets. A stack of plastic storage bins collapsed under their own weight. Nothing.

Warden huffed, smug as a cat. “Happy now? We—”

“Shut up a second.”

I killed my light and stood still. The house hummed with that deep desert quiet, wind through broken window screens, a fan somewhere clicking as it tried to turn on a dead circuit. Beneath it, a small sound. Not words. Not crying.

Paper. The dry whisper of it bending and creasing.

My light snapped on. The beam crawled over the back wall, and I finally saw it, one strip of trim that didn’t match the others. It was newer. Nails countersunk too clean. I slipped my knife under the edge and pried. The board popped, and the hollow sound behind it told me everything.

There was a seam cut into the drywall. A square where there shouldn’t have been one.

And on that square, recessed into a steel plate, sat a heavy hasp and a laminated padlock, the kind you buy when you want to keep a thing shut forever.

Someone had painted the metal to match the wall.

If you weren’t looking for it, if you didn’t get that itch between your shoulder blades that says look closer, you’d walk right past.

“Son of a—” Warden breathed. He crouched beside me, ran his thumb over the lock. Fresh oil glistened in the hinge like a smear of black honey. “They kept this one greased.”

“Yeah,” I said. My voice sounded like gravel. “They did.”

Warden jerked his chin down the hall. “Bolt cutters are still on the bike.”

“Go.”

He went. The house settled around me, all its heat pressing in, waiting to see if I was going to earn the right to open it. I tucked the knife away and pressed my palm flat on the plate. Cold. Colder than the room. Behind it… the paper sound again, steady as breathing.

I leaned close. “Hey,” I said, my voice soft like I was talking to a skittish colt. “We’re here.”

No answer. Just that crisp whisper, fold on fold.

Warden thundered back inside, boots loud to warn me he wasn’t a threat. He shoved the cutters into my hand, jaw tight like he wanted to spit. “If the sweep missed this, they’re gonna catch hell.”

“Later,” I said.

The cutters bit the shackle. I had to brace my knee against the wall and put my back into it, metal protesting in a high, strangled squeal. Then the lock coughed apart, a bright, ugly sound in all that heat. The hasp dropped, swinging, and the door didn’t open on its own.

“Help me,” I said.

We got our fingers behind the edge and pulled. The panel wasn’t wood, it was steel skinned with drywall. It dragged out of the frame like it didn’t want to give up its secret, hinges groaning, sheetrock dust falling in a soft cloud that stuck to our sweat.

Behind it, a black mouth breathed out stale air and something sour, old fear, old bleach, old piss.

A crawlspace no bigger than a walk-in shower, framed in studs and lined with more steel.

A vent cut high and crooked in the back wall whistled a thin line of heat.

A ring bolt in the concrete floor, scuffed shiny.

A plastic bucket. A threadbare blanket spread thin as paper.

And her.

She sat in the corner with her knees hugged to her chest, bare feet tucked under the hem of a too-big T-shirt that had once been white and now was the color of old bones.

Her hair fell forward in a black curtain, tangled, hiding half her face.

Her hands were small and steady. In them, a scrap of torn magazine.

Fold. Crease. Smooth. Again. On the concrete around her, a scatter of little birds—lopsided, crimp-winged—like a flock that forgot how to fly.

“Holy hell,” Warden whispered. He shoved the light a fraction lower, so it didn’t hit her straight on. “How the fuck—”

“Quiet,” I said, but it came out as a plea, not an order.

Her eyes lifted. Dark blue. Too big in her thin face, pupils huge from all that dark. Not fear. Not trust either. Just… waiting. Like she was a dead ocean measuring the weather by the way your boat rocked.

My mouth went dry. If we’d ridden out, like any sane men would after a cleared sweep—if I’d ignored the itch, the memory, the knot in my gut—she would’ve stayed in that hole. She’d have run out of more than paper one day, and then what? Death. Slow and painful.

Not this time.

“Hey,” I said, crouching slow, keeping my hands where she could see them. “I’m Ashen Graves. This is Warden Rourke. We came back to make sure nobody got left behind.” I nodded at the lock, at the metal plate. “They’re not getting to you again.”

She watched my mouth move. Her fingers paused on the last crease and then set the bird carefully on the floor, like she was adding it to a count only she knew.

“Do you have a name?” Warden asked gently.

I shot him a look. He lifted a shoulder: Worth a try.

She didn’t answer. She didn’t try. She looked at the open square we’d pried into the world and then back at me like she was testing air with her eyes.

“Can I come closer?” I asked. “It’s hot as hell in there.”

No flinch. No nod either. The vent whispered. Sweat ran down my spine in a single line that felt like a blade.

I eased onto my knees and set the bolt cutters on the floor where she could see them.

The concrete was warm through my jeans. Up close, I saw the little things that got lost in the beam from the door, the thin scar at her temple lost under her hair, a bruise fading yellow on her cheek, the way her right thumb nail was chewed raw.

The ring bolt in the floor wasn’t empty. A chain lay coiled beside it like a dead snake, the cut end bright where a saw had kissed it clean. My jaw locked.

“We’re taking you out,” I said. “Now.”

Her gaze flicked to the chain. Then to my hands. My patch. The little square of The Devil’s House on my chest. I could see the math she was doing, danger on one side, danger on the other, which kind came with water.

“Got a bottle,” Warden said, reading it too. He fished in his vest and came up with a half-warm bottle. “It’s not cold.”

“Give,” I said.

I uncapped it and took a small drink first, let her see me do it. Then I held it out. Not too close. “You can have all of it.”

She didn’t reach, not at first. Her eyes traced the bottle like it was a trick. Then her hand came up, soft, quick, like a bird landing. Our fingers didn’t touch. She took two sips. Stopped. Took one more like she had to earn it. Handed it back, eyes on my throat like she could hear my swallow.

“You got shoes?” Warden asked, trying for light. “Feet are gonna hate this floor.”

Her gaze dropped to her toes, dirty lines across the knuckles where dust had settled. She tucked them deeper under her shirt.

“Blanket,” I said. Warden peeled the threadbare thing up from the concrete and shook grit loose. I laid it across the threshold so when she scooted forward, she wouldn’t have to touch the frame.

She didn’t move.

“I know,” I said, softer. “Out there is just another kind of unknown. But this one’s got air that doesn’t hurt to breathe. And water. And people who’ll stand in the door and tell the dark to fuck off.”

Her eyes lifted, slow, like the sun dragging itself up. She watched my face as if she was deciding what kind of liar I was. I let her look. She’d see the truth.

She reached to her side and looked over the birds and took just one. The last she’d made. She held it in her palm like a weightless thing, stared at it a long breath, and then set it on the concrete beside her knee. Like leaving a marker. Like telling the space it could keep a piece of her.

Then she moved.