Chapter 13
THIRTEEN
Trent didn't hear the door open.
He stood at the kitchen sink with his bloody hands in soapy water, watching it swirl pink and then clear, rehearsing under his breath.
“The brother's a nurse. Lives off the grid outside Agua Dulce. No public records, no listed address.” He paused, adjusted. “You need my help to find him.”
He said it again, softer, trying to strip the desperation out of it and leave something that sounded like actual leverage.
“I don't need you for anything, Officer Haley.”
Trent turned so fast his elbow cracked against the counter. He barely felt it.
A woman stood in the kitchen archway, still and composed, watching him with the patience of someone who'd been there long enough to hear everything she needed to. She wasn't an imposing figure. But somehow, she seemed to take up space in the room like someone far larger.
“How did you—” The question died on its own. The front door. He'd left it wide open. He'd been too busy washing blood off his hands and practicing speeches to think about the possibility that the people he'd texted might come to him instead of waiting for a meeting.
His hand dropped to his hip.
The holster was empty. He’d left his gun…where?
She lifted his Glock slightly, held loosely between two fingers, and slid it across the counter toward the sink. It came to rest a few inches from his wet hands. Close enough to reach, far enough to make a point.
“Sit down,” she said.
He didn't sit. He couldn't. His legs had locked.
She moved forward, her gaze dropping briefly to the dried blood on his uniform pants, then back to his face. She didn't comment on it.
“Agua Dulce, huh? That’s a small town. We'll have his address before the end of the day.”
Trent felt the floor shift under him. The entire framework he'd built in the last hour, the pitch, the leverage, the idea that he held a piece they couldn't get without him, came apart in a single sentence.
“That's—” he started. “You don't know which—”
“Actually, we knew before you sent your message.”
That wasn't true. He was almost certain it wasn't true. But the certainty in her voice was so complete and he couldn't find the words to push back.
She studied him. “So tell me. Why are you still talking?”
Trent's mouth opened, closed, opened again. He could hear his own breathing, too loud in the quiet kitchen.
The rehearsed version was gone. The polished pitch, the careful framing, all of it had been built on the assumption that he had something they wanted. Now he was standing in his own kitchen with wet hands and no weapon.
“I can do things you can't,” he stammered.
“Not the brother. Forget the brother. I'm talking about the roads.
Traffic cameras, dispatch systems, patrol schedules—I can see where every unit in this county is at any given moment.
I can flag Castano's car without filing a report. I can push patrols away from wherever you need them not to be.”
She didn't react. He kept going, talking faster now, the desperation visible and no longer something he could disguise.
“You don't want uniforms stumbling into this.
You don't want a traffic stop that turns into a standoff.
I can keep the path clear. That's not something you can get from anyone else. That's someone on the inside.”
The silence that followed was long enough for him to hear the refrigerator humming.
The woman’s expression hadn't changed, but something behind it had shifted. A recalculation, subtle enough that he almost missed it.
“You want the girl back,” she said.
“I want her safe,” Trent replied. The lie came so easily it almost convinced him.
She held his gaze, and he understood, in a way that went beyond words, that she knew it was a lie and didn't care. His motives were irrelevant to her. Only his access mattered.
“You'll go to your station,” she said. “You'll work your shift. If that car moves, you call the number on Ramos’s phone. Nothing else. No texts, no messages, no written record.”
“And if I find them?” he asked. “What happens to her?”
The question was a test, and they both knew it—his last attempt to feel like he had a say in what came next.
“You'll call the number,” she repeated, as if he hadn't spoken.
She turned toward the hallway, already leaving, and then paused, not fully turning back, just half-angled in the doorway, like a thought had caught up with her.
“Don't improvise,” she said. “You watch, you report, you wait. That's all. The Russian doesn't tolerate freelancing.”
And then she was gone, as quietly as she'd arrived.
Trent stood in the kitchen, his Glock still sitting on the counter where she'd left it.
He dried his hands, then picked up the gun and slid it back into his holster. His fingers were shaking, but less than they had been. The fear was still there, but something else was settling in over top of it: the familiar warmth of feeling like he mattered again.
She'd given him a role. That meant he was in, and being in meant he could steer this.
He just had to stay ahead of it long enough to take back what was his.