Chapter 16 #2
I didn’t answer. Which should be answer enough. I took a drink of the coffee. It was too damn hot and scalded my tongue. Perfect.
“You’ll have to continue to be patient, however. There are standing instructions,” he continued, easily, swiping something on his screen. “You don’t go back on air without clearance.”
The words were carefully neutral. Bloodless. Institutional.
That was news to me.
“From who,” I asked, already knowing.
His pause was fractionally too long. “Above my pay grade.”
I exhaled through my nose. Of course. Washington. Or someone who wanted to be mistaken for it. And Flint—because it was always Flint—had gone over both our heads and called in a favor. The bastard knew everyone.
I smiled, but there was no humor in it. “So now I’m grounded.”
He spared me a glance as he shrugged. It was almost a dismissal. “You’re protected.”
“By people who aren’t here,” I shot back. “Who don’t have to sit in this house and watch the clock eat itself.” Who weren’t involved in the case. Or knew anything about making a connection with a story.
Well, Flint knew, but that was why he was a bastard, because he did know.
Brewster didn’t argue that. Which only pissed me off more.
“You think I’m being impulsive,” I said.
“I don’t think anything,” he responded in a tone so mild it aggravated me on a soul level.
I snorted. “Right. So… you’re just the good little agent, punching the clock, following the orders and doing what you’re told.”
That didn’t even net a response. He just swiped the screen, his eyes flicking across it as though he were reading. While he read, he sipped his coffee.
Worrying at the raw spot on my tongue, I was tempted to go kick the wall. At least if I stubbed my toe, or something, it might distract me from this.
“You realize the longer you keep me here and out of the spotlight, he could very well decide it’s not worth it and drop all contact?” I pressed. “Then what? You’ve lost your best lead.”
Brewster didn’t answer immediately.
He finished his sip first. Set the mug down with care. Then he looked at me like I’d just recited a familiar argument he’d heard from others—and buried them anyway.
“Fools rushing in don’t become leads,” he said calmly. “They become the story.”
I was already the damn story. My mouth opened, ready to argue…
“And before you say it,” he continued, tone almost conversational, “no—you’re not his type.”
I froze. “Excuse me?”
“He hasn’t targeted women,” Brewster said. Flat. Clinical. “Not directly. Not yet. His pattern favors male subjects, professional visibility, perceived moral authority. As I believe you described quite well. You don’t fit.”
The word yet sat there, poisonous. Unspoken.
His being right did not make me feel any better. I crossed my arms. “Comforting.”
“It’s not meant to be,” he replied. Then, as if reconsidering something, he paused. Just long enough for the silence to stretch to the part where I wanted to throw things again. “Then again…” He exhaled a long breath. “There’s always a first time for everything.”
I stared at him, pulse ticking up despite myself. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“No,” he said. Short. Simple. Sans any explanation.
I laughed—short, sharp, brittle. “So let me get this straight. I can’t go back on air because I might provoke him. But I also can’t go back on air because I’m female and thus not in enough danger to matter.”
“You are in danger,” he corrected. “Just not expendable at the moment.”
That cut deep. Particularly the at the moment. I was already turning that over in my head. I was expendable, at least to Brewster, but only under the right circumstances.
Of course, that begged what were the right circumstances. As cold and clinical an assessment as that was, I swore it grated that the room got hotter.
When I said nothing more, he went back to reading his tablet and sipping his coffee. I studied him, I couldn’t help it. I searched for the chinks in his armor. Despite the fact, he didn’t look up from that screen, I didn’t doubt for an instant he wasn’t aware of me.
Leaning back in my chair, I narrowed my eyes. “You’re afraid.”
His expression didn’t change. “Of rising gas prices? Yes.”
I almost snorted. Almost. “Of losing control,” I countered.
“That too,” he said without hesitation, swiping the screen again. “The difference between us, Mallory, is I’m honest about it.”
The thin air thickened once more, growing denser and more charged. It clung to every single breath and made it hard to inhale. He hadn’t raised his voice once. Hadn’t needed to.
“You want to force his hand,” Brewster went on.
“Because waiting makes you think that you’re losing or missing out.
” For a moment, I got the sense he was tasting that statement, testing its validity before he nodded.
Satisfied, I guessed, that he got it right.
“I get that. But if you push now, you don’t become bait.
Not really, you just become a statistic.
You’re getting a lot of attention, just not from him. ”
He paused then and he slanted a look at me.
“Or so we think. He may not like all the attention you’re getting from others. Particularly those questioning your morals and your ethics. Maybe he needs to do something to dispute those stories…”
Setting his coffee cup down, he tilted his head to the side and I swore there was a surge between us. A zing that went from his gaze to mine and rippled through my whole body. The connection bounced through me, like I’d licked both the connectors on a battery. The zap and jolt hard to ignore.
“You have a connection with him already,” he continued. “He likes you. We know this. Don’t let him take you for granted.”
The unspoken not yet hung off that statement as loudly as the earlier yet had off that one. I hated that he was making sense.
“And if he doesn’t bite?”
Brewster met my eyes. Held them.
“Then we adjust,” he said. The heat in his eyes scorched me. “But we don’t sacrifice you just to see if the monster’s still hungry.”
I looked away first. Not because he’d won—but because some small, treacherous part of me knew he was right.
That scared me more than being wrong ever had.
For a moment, the room wavered. Then I blinked and slammed the shutters closed on that self-pity. No one had time for that.
“Mallory—”
“Don’t,” I cut in, because I could hear the abrupt shift to sympathy in his voice and I didn’t want it.
I reached for my phone and scrolled again, faster this time. My own name trended in small spikes like a heartbeat monitor. A new video appeared: some commentator in a studio breaking down my body language frame by frame.
She pauses here.
She looks off-camera.
She knows she’s being watched.
My jaw clenched.
They were turning me into a character.
I could feel the story slipping away from my hands, while all these talking heads rewrote it without me. Waiting equaled losing. It always had. And if I didn’t move soon, someone else would move for me—the FBI, Flint, the network, the public, the Auditor.
Or all of them.
I lowered the phone and looked at Brewster. “You said there’s nothing we can see.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re okay with that.”
“No,” he said simply.
More honesty than I’d been expecting. Then again, Brewster had been pretty damn blunt with me from the beginning. I respected that. I could work with that. More, I liked it. Liked him…
My pulse ticked up, annoyingly immediate, and I jerked my gaze back to my phone before it betrayed anything.
“I need to do something,” I said, quieter now. Not a demand. A confession. The room felt too small. My skin felt too tight.
Brewster didn’t move, didn’t shift in his seat, didn’t even seem to soften. He merely said, “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
My skin prickled. It wasn’t his tone—his tone was always controlled. It was the fact he’d stopped reading. The tablet sat ignored in his hand, like whatever was on it had become irrelevant.
Which meant I had captured his full attention.
“I’m thinking I need to do something,” I said again, quieter. “Because waiting is… eating me alive.”
Brewster studied me, unhurried. After a long, almost interminably slow minute, he said. “You want to take control back.”
The accuracy of his statement made my chest tighten.
“And you want me to help you take it,” he added.
I lifted my chin. “Will you?”
A beat. Two. His eyes didn’t blink. Didn’t soften. But the air changed anyway—thick, electric, undeniable.
“Yes,” he said.
With that single word, the ground beneath us moved.