Chapter 4
Bruiser
A heat signature in the residential wing, moving from the guest room toward the kitchen.
She pours water from the pitcher I refilled two hours ago.
Stands at the window with the glass in her hand, face angled toward the gate, and the thermal rendering strips her to an orange silhouette against the cool blue of the glass.
She stands there for ninety seconds. She doesn't try to leave. She goes back to bed.
Ten days. Ten days of watching her and I know her routines.
Notebook on the left side of whatever surface she's working on, recorder on the right, pen behind her ear.
She drinks her coffee black and finishes it before it cools.
She gets up twice in the night—once for water, once to stand at the window and look at nothing.
She eats when she remembers to and forgets when she's deep in a lead.
The surveillance is professional. The part where I refill the water pitcher before she wakes up is not.
Knox catches me in the hallway at 7 a.m.
He doesn't speak. He stands at the junction where the residential wing meets the common area, coffee in one hand, and his head turns from me to the doorframe Ava leaned against an hour ago when she asked Finn where the mugs lived. Then back to me.
I've seen that expression before. He wore it for six straight months while Rex scent-marked Holly and told everyone it meant nothing.
"You're marking her."
"Just doing my job, being friendly."
Knox takes a drink of coffee. No rush. "Every monster in this building can smell you on her. The job didn't include marking her."
I don't answer, because the facts aren't in dispute.
Ten days of walking her through this compound—hand on her lower back through doorways, fingers on her elbow in the halls, my palm catching her arm when she tripped on the garage threshold—and my body has been putting scent on her skin the entire time.
Involuntary and biological. A minotaur's body makes claims before the conscious mind weighs in, and mine started claiming her from the first day.
Knox doesn't push. He nods once and heads toward the kitchen.
Breakfast is loud. Finn at the stove with eggs he'll overcook because admitting he can't handle a skillet would end him.
Rex drops into his chair sideways, boots propped on the seat next to him.
Colt reads from his phone with his glasses pushed down his nose, and Garrett eats standing in the corner near the window, plate balanced on one massive hand.
Steel and Chain argue about the water heater.
And Diesel leans against the wall with his arms crossed, trying to look like a man who belongs at this table.
Ava comes in with her notebook and her recorder and scans the room.
Eight brothers. One open chair at the head, which belongs to Knox. Two in the middle with their backs to the door. One on the far end, angled toward the wall. And one on the outside edge, the seat that gives a clear sightline to both the kitchen exit and the hallway.
She pulls the chair out, sits, and accepts the burned eggs Finn slides across the table with his best grin.
"Chef's special," he says. "Don't tell Jess. She thinks I'm getting better."
Ava picks up a fork and cuts into the eggs without looking at the rubbery edges. "Your secret's safe."
I stand at the counter with my mug. She's watched me take the same position in every room, and this morning she left the exit seat open without making it a thing. In eight years, not one of the brothers has done that without being asked.
Finn asks her about the Founder's Day setup.
She answers, pen moving across the page while she talks, and the table takes her in the way it takes in anyone who shows up and doesn't try too hard.
I grip my mug and watch her laugh at something Rex says, and my chest tightens in a way I don't have a name for.
By afternoon, she stops asking me questions.
Not because she's given up. I've watched enough people go quiet to know when someone's backing off versus figuring out a new angle, and Ava White doesn't back off.
She sits at the kitchen table with her transcription notes spread in a half-circle around her coffee, and I sit at the counter with my scanner running low.
No recorder angled at my face. No probing looks aimed at cracking loose a confession.
She works and so do I. The kitchen settles into a quiet I've only ever found alone in my apartment at 3 a.m., and finding it here—with another person in the room, with her pen scratching against paper and my scanner clicking through empty channels—breaks loose a sound I've spent eleven years keeping buried.
The purr builds under my ribs. Low and involuntary, vibrating outward through muscle and bone until the frequency hits the air between us. I choked this sound at the waterfront when she asked about the carvings. I've been choking it every day since.
This time I don't choke it.
She looks up from the page. Her eyes drop to my chest, where the vibration hums loud enough to carry across the table. Her eyes stay on my chest for a beat, then she goes back to her notes.
She doesn't mention it.
The scanner catches it at 4:17 p.m. A sedan crossing the bridge.
Dark, clean, rental plates from a Portland agency.
Nothing about it fits a tourist or a local.
I run the plate and trace the corporate card back to Ridgeline Strategic, the same Virginia consulting firm I flagged in Church. The one her editor came from.
I pull up the bridge camera. Two occupants. I run the driver through facial recognition.
The facial recognition takes four seconds. James Heckland. My former handler, the man who recruited me at twenty-two out of a Montana ranch and gave the order to infiltrate the Feral Sons. The man I burned when I chose Knox's table over his leash.
Heckland is here. Running an operation through Ridgeline Strategic. The same Ridgeline Strategic that placed David Harlow at a regional magazine six months ago and aimed a journalist at my compound.
The woman sitting on the bed in the guest room with her notes and her silence might not know who sent her here. Or she might. Either way, Heckland is in my town, and that means her assignment and my past just landed on the same page.
I call Knox. He picks up on the first ring.
"Government sedan, two occupants. Crossing the bridge now. It's Heckland."
The pause lasts one breath. "Full lockdown. Nobody in, nobody out."
The guest room door is open. Ava sits cross-legged on the bed, transcribing Finn's interview. Her bags sit half-unpacked beside her.
"You need to move."
She looks up. "Move where?"
"My apartment. There's a reinforced door, better sightlines, more cameras."
"I'm fine in here."
"You're not. They assigned me to this compound. He knows the layout—every wing, every blind spot. The guest room is the first place he'd look, and this room has one window, a lock I could break with my shoulder, and minimal camera coverage. You're moving."
The guest room lock works. I know it works—I installed it.
But the part of me making this call isn't thinking about locks.
It's the part that put scent on her skin for days and is now clawing at me to get her behind my door, in my space, where I can hear her breathe.
Every minotaur knows this pull. I've watched it take Garrett apart, watched him rearrange his whole life around Nina without deciding to.
I never expected it to find me. The word mine hits.
She closes her notes.
"I'm not sharing a room with you, Bruiser."
"You're staying in the safest space in this compound while I handle a threat." I pick up her bag. "I'll explain later."
She grabs her recorder and follows.
She steps inside my apartment and stops.
I watch her stand in the doorway and take it in: three walls of corkboard covered in push-pinned printouts, red string connecting faces to organizations to funding sources.
The frequency scanner scrolling green lines across black.
The facial-recognition database feeding four monitors.
Eight years of threat mapping, every name and face I've tracked since I went rogue, pinned and connected and cross-referenced against the day the agency decides to come collect the operative who stopped answering the phone.
Her wall is on the left. Her byline photograph printed in high resolution. Her publication history in chronological order. Her editor's name circled in red. The timeline I built: October festival, April assignment, the phone call I intercepted on her drive down.
She stares at it. I can't read her face, and that tells me enough.
"How long?"
"Since the festival."
She's quiet. Seven months of surveillance. Every call logged, every movement tracked, her recorder intercepted and her audio played in this room while she slept at the B&B and believed her biggest problem involved a word count.
"So since October." Her voice stays even. "At the cider booth. I thought someone was watching."
"Someone was."
She nods. She crosses to the bed, sits on the edge and pulls her notebook from her bag, opens to a clean page.
She starts writing.
By ten, the compound goes dark. Heckland's sedan sits at the motel on Route 9. I've got the room number, the plate, the second agent's face running through recognition software that'll return a match by morning.
Ava sleeps in my bed. She argued about it for five minutes, then her body overruled her mouth.
She fell asleep mid-sentence, pen in hand, notes open on the pillow.
I moved them to the nightstand and pulled the blanket over her shoulders without touching her skin.
I don't trust what my hands would do if I let them.
I lie on the floor mat I've used for eight years and listen to her breathe.
I listen to her breathe, and the purr builds under my ribs before I can stop it. I don't stop it. It rolls through my chest in the dark, low enough that it won't wake her, steady enough that for the first time in eleven years, it drowns out everything else.
My phone glows on the floor beside me. Four missed calls from a blocked number. Heckland.
I turn the phone face down.