A sound that isn’t quite a laugh. “At least you’re honest about some things.”
The bear comes up off his haunches to listen. Head tipped toward her voice. If he had his way, we’d be standing closer.
She steps out from behind the trees, straightening her clothes, still talking—the cold, the hour, the state of the path—and I keep my eyes on the ridge but keep the rest of my attention on what she’s actually doing.
Her head isn’t tracking the trees around her. It’s tracking south, toward the gap in the canopy that runs downhill to the lower road. She’s reading the slope through it without turning her head. Quiet. Observant. The complaints are for show. She’s trying to distract me from the fact that she’s looking for escape routes.
“This is not how I saw my week going,” she says. “Yesterday I had a schedule.”
She’s measuring the slope.
I don’t let my shoulders change. But I know this much now: if I turn my back on her out here, she runs.
I give the rope a small tug.
She stumbles a step forward. “Nice,” she mutters. “Why don’t you put a collar on me too? You can teach me to heel. Sit. Stay. Roll over.”
The bear rumbles. He’s enjoying her.
We go back inside. I set the boulder, untie her wrists, put water where she can reach it. She drinks without a word and wraps the blanket around her shoulders.
“You’ve been working with the Syndicate,” I say.
“You’ve already decided that. Why ask?”
“I’m not asking.”
“Then you’ve misread what you think you saw. I was in town on a supply run—”
“You parked the van and walked to the service road behind the hardware store. You stood in an empty lane and waited. You took a call. Then two men came to get you.” I let that sink in. “They called you a loose thread. Loose threads get used first.”
The deflection dies. Not the fight—her chin stays up—but she stops pretending she was there for groceries.
“How long?” I say.
“A few months.”
I turn that over. The leak I’ve been hunting goes back a lot further than a few months. Either she’s lying, and badly, or she’s not the ghost I’ve spent months chasing. Both roads end at the same place: the profile doesn’t fit the woman.
“And before that?”
“Nothing. I didn’t come to Aurora to do this.”
“Nobody volunteers to inform on the people who took them in. So why do it?”
Silence. She looks at the far wall.
I stand.
I know how this part goes. I’ve done it more times than I can count—cross the space slowly, let the size do the talking, stand close enough that the silence gets heavy and the room gets small. Hard men crack under it. It’s ugly, and it works.
I cross to her. Crouch, forearms on my knees, close enough that she has to tip her head back to hold my eyes. I’m in her space.
Her breath changes.
Her pulse jumps at her throat. Fear. That part I expected. But she doesn’t shrink into the wall. Her chin lifts. Color climbs herface, and underneath all of it, her scent shifts. Warms. The bear catches it before I do, and the sound he makes has nothing to do with interrogation.
“Who handles you?” My voice is too low. Not intimidating. Rough.
