She watched his profile. The set of his shoulders.
“Sara saw it,” she said softly. “Day one. Her notes were solid. She clocked the power shifts before anyone else did.”
“Yeah,” he said. “She did.”
Tessa adjusted the edge of her notebook in her lap.
“Scout — about last night,” she began carefully. “At Catch My Draft?—”
His hands didn’t move on the wheel.
“We should stay with the case,” he said evenly.
She stared out the window. Tension knotting in her neck.
Scout’s gaze stayed on the road. He reached up, adjusted the vent — unnecessary.
Frustration prickled under her skin — not at the case, not at Kyle, but at how fast he’d boxed this up.
“Whatever’s going on between you and Denton,” Scout added quietly, “doesn’t change what we’ve got to do.”
Her head turned toward him. “There is nothing going on between me and Denton,” she said. Not sharp. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
A pulse beat hard at the base of his throat before he nodded, still not looking at her.
“We’ll loop Burke in on Raines’s house when we get back,” he said.
The words landed flat. Final.
The cruiser rolled through a shallow curve. Rain thickened against the glass.
This is insane, she thought.Sara is missing. Her cabin was broken into. And I’m sitting here mad he won’t let me explain.
But it did matter.
Because what had happened between them in that snowbound cabin hadn’t felt like adrenaline or convenience. It had felt steady. Solid. Terrifyingly real.
The rest of the drive passed in strained quiet.
Rain.
Engine.
Wipers.
What aren’t we seeing?
31
Special Agent Tessa Quinn — Evening, Next Day
Tessa hadn’t seen Scout all day.
He’d been out chasing leads—Sinclair, Keller, campus security—while she worked the timelines with Burke and dug through Lauren and Sara’s notes.
None of it touched the silence between her and Scout. Their messages stayed clipped. Case only.
By the time she turned onto Black Bear Ridge, the sun was gone. The road wound higher along the mountain, GPS dropping to nothing, the ridge itself doing the guiding—switchbacks, a stand of hemlock, a mailbox with numbers hand-stenciled in white.
