Chapter 16
Chapter
Sixteen
MALLORY
By the morning of the third day, the safe house had developed its own rhythm. One I had learned to loathe almost as soon as it registered.
Not because it was chaotic—because it wasn’t. Because it worked.
Lights clicked on at the same time. Coffee appeared like a courtesy and a warning. Voices stayed low, shoes stayed soft on the floors, and the agents moved with that practiced economy that made everything feel contained. Managed. Controlled.
Safe.
Sixty-some hours since I’d gone on air. Give or take. Long enough for the adrenaline to burn clean out of my bloodstream and leave behind the restless grit that always followed a win that didn’t resolve anything.
Long enough for the lack of response to become its own kind of noise. A low, irritating hum that rasped against my nerves.
I sat at the small dining table in my sweatpants and a borrowed oversized sweatshirt, laptop open, phone beside it like a second heartbeat. The morning light through the blinds was thin and gray. It made everything in the room look washed-out, including me.
I refreshed the same feeds I’d refreshed a hundred times.
Nothing.
No new message. No copycat line. No obvious echo. No signal I could point to and say, There. That’s him.
The Auditor—I doubted he called himself that since I was the one who dubbed him—had gone dark. The same could not be said for all of the other outlets online and off. Broadcast, print, and digital were generating hours of coverage all based in speculation.
A part of me was forced to wonder whether the Auditor had simply not surfaced or had, but had just gone about his business without any contact. Maybe he decided I wasn’t worth the effort.
I didn’t know which possibility I hated most.
Waiting had never been natural for me. I wasn’t sure if it was growing up with brothers who would eat everything if you didn’t grab your own, or with parents who said if you weren’t winning you were losing, or if it was some other psychological bullshit. I despised waiting.
Waiting resulted in a loss of position. Waiting let someone else decide the pace. Waiting allowed the story to bleed out in front of you while you watched the moment pass.
Waiting was where stories went to die.
I clicked through a few more tabs anyway, like my willpower alone could force a headline to appear.
Network sites first. The big ones. The ones that had been forced to acknowledge the situation when I went live, then pretended it was their idea all along.
“Is McBryan Being Sidelined?” one chyron teased under a smiling anchor’s face, the words framed like concern but sharpened like a knife.
“Sources: Network Under Pressure After On-Air ‘Message’” another site claimed, the article written in that breathless tone people used when they wanted everyone to think they were “in the know.” Posers.
A media blog I’d never heard of ran a screenshot of my face mid-segment—eyes narrowed, lips parted—like it was evidence.
She knew.
You can see it.
She was talking to him.
The comments beneath were worse.
Half of them called me reckless. The other half called me brave. A few called me “hot” like that was the only metric that mattered. A surprising number were convinced the entire thing was a stunt. Oh, and my favorite—I was a bitch just out to make some poor dude look bad.
Kill me.
A “true crime” TikTok account had clipped my line—what you refuse to rush—and layered it over ominous music with a slow zoom, as if I was the killer and not the one standing in front of a camera trying to keep my own pulse from giving me away.
I closed the tab. Opened another. Then another. The same cycle, different fonts. They were filling the void because there was nothing new. Nothing to highlight and say “breaking development.” So they speculated. They invented. They built narratives out of the absence of one.
The worst part of the whole damn thing, they weren’t wrong. If you didn’t feed the machine, it ate you. Behind me, the kettle clicked off with a soft mechanical finality.
Despite giving a little jerk, I didn’t turn. I didn’t have to. Other agents might come and go, but the only constant had been Brewster. He slipped in and out, stealthing around on silent feet and barely audible breathing.
It was like having a ghost for a roommate.
An irritating one.
Because once I knew he was there, it was impossible to ignore him, whether he said anything or not.
He set a mug on the table near my elbow without comment. Black coffee. No sugar. No little packet of fake cream. He’d noticed how I took it on day one and never asked again.
That should’ve been nothing. It wasn’t.
“Morning,” I said anyway. My voice sounded rougher than I wanted.
“Morning,” he replied, calm as if the last three days hadn’t happened.
That calm made me want to throw my laptop. At him. Or at least swing it, so I had a solid chance of hitting him in the head. Luckily for him, I didn’t.
I took a sip. Bitter. Hot. Functional.
“Any updates?” I asked, and hated that I sounded like I was asking permission to hope.
“No,” he said. Then, because he was annoyingly precise, “Nothing we can see.”
The words hung between us like smoke after a shot fired—no proof it had hit anything, just the raw certainty that someone had pulled the trigger.
Not nothing. Just nothing visible.
I stared at my screen again, as if I could conjure a response through sheer resentment. My browser was a mess of open windows. Clips. Threads. Speculation. Commentators turning my face into a Rorschach test.
To some, I looked defiant, daring him to answer. To others, reckless, high on my own proximity to danger. One man with a podcast and no qualifications called it “seductive provocation,” which told me far more about him than it ever would about me.
A panel froze a still frame mid-blink and argued over whether my eyes showed fear or calculation.
Another slowed my voice to half-speed, dissecting pauses like they were accidental confessions instead of deliberate restraint.
Body-language experts—self-appointed and aggressively confident—declared my posture either too relaxed to be afraid or too rigid to be honest.
Everyone saw what they wanted. Everyone heard what fit their narrative.
The worst part was that after the fiftieth take, the hundredth replay, I could feel it working. Not doubt, exactly—but erosion. The kind that doesn’t ask permission. The kind that makes you wonder, briefly, whether your face had betrayed something you thought you’d kept contained.
Congratulations, Mallory. No response, no new facts—and somehow you were still being explained to yourself by men monetizing their so-called expertise, narrating your intentions in hour-long videos with the confidence of people who believed access was the same thing as insight.
I clicked to a local news site. Then another. Then I went smaller—city blogs, neighborhood forums, the kind of places where people posted grainy security footage and asked strangers if they recognized the man in the hoodie.
Then, because apparently I had no remaining self-respect to lose, I opened the police blotter.
I started local and pushed outward—county, state, anything that might plausibly intersect. It was a compulsion I didn’t like admitting to even in my own head. The kind you dressed up as diligence when it was really just hunger.
The list scrolled on, dull and ugly in equal measure. Assaults outside bars. Domestic calls logged and cleared. Drunk drivers. Shoplifting. A stabbing that looked personal and therefore uninteresting to anyone like him. A body found in a park that turned out to be an overdose.
Tragic. Ordinary. Closed.
No patterned language. No signatures. No artfully staged scene screaming to be noticed. No one dead in the way that mattered to my case.
The relief that should have come with that didn’t arrive.
Instead, there was only irritation—sharp and petulant and uncomfortably close to disappointment. Which made me hate myself a little. Maybe more than a little.
Because the absence of reports didn’t feel like safety. It meant either they hadn’t found it yet, or there wasn’t anything to be found.
Like the held breath before impact. The quiet stretch of road right before the headlights appeared. A clock ticking down somewhere you couldn’t see, couldn’t hear clearly—only feel in your bones that it was running out.
My thumb hovered over refresh again.
And that’s when the disgust flared—hot, immediate, unmistakable. Because there it was. Me, doing exactly what I accused audiences of doing. Chasing the next beat. The next escalation. Anything to end the unbearable stretch of waiting.
I wanted something to happen.
That realization tasted foul.
I pushed the laptop away a few inches, as if distance could somehow restore my moral high ground or steady my nerves. As if I hadn’t already crossed the line the moment I hoped—just a little—for confirmation.
“This is what he wants,” I said, mostly to myself. A confession more than a conclusion.
Brewster didn’t pretend he hadn’t heard.
“What?”
The last thing I wanted was to unpack that sentence. Especially with him. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Bullshit.”
He didn’t raise his voice. Didn’t even look at me right away.
Just delivered the word like someone lobbing a grenade and already turning away from the blast radius.
He lifted his coffee and took a slow sip, eyes flicking back to the tablet in his hand as if we were enjoying a casual morning conversation about what happened on a previous night’s television binge.
I felt my jaw tighten. “You don’t get to interrogate my internal monologue.”
“I’m not,” he said mildly. “It wasn’t internal.”
That did it. I straightened, irritation snapping into something sharper. “You’re the one who keeps saying waiting is part of the process. That patience matters. That not reacting is strategy.”
“And right now,” he replied, finally looking at me, “you want to move because you’re vibrating out of your skin.”