Page 69 of Scarred By Sin

She was good. He’d give her that.

The conversation with the older man behind the desk was effortless, the kind of casual exchange that most people wouldn’t think twice about. She shifted her bag from one shoulder to the other. She tapped the counter with her fingertips. She even smiled, and it was in a way that suggested she genuinely cared about the man’s opinion.

She had always cared too much about the wrong people.

Across the table, Colin Vogel sat in a straight-backed chair with his wrists secured behind him and a strip of cloth pulled tight between his teeth. His breathing was shallow and rapid through his nose, and his eyes were fixed on Jacob with the wide, unblinking focus of a man who had spent the last three weeks understanding, in slow and agonizing increments, exactly who he was sharing a room with.

Colin had stopped struggling during the first week.

He’d stopped crying during the second.

What remained was a man who had been reduced to the essential functions of survival and nothing more. Jacob ignored him. He wasn’t interested in Colin. He was merely a geographic convenience, nothing more. A man who happened to live across from Brooklyn’s unit in a building with a security system that had taken Jacob months to compromise. It had been worth the wait.

On the left screen, Brooklyn advanced toward the elevators. She pressed the call button and stepped back, that absurd pregnant belly straining against her blouse. Close to nine months along, if his count was correct. He’d been tracking the progression, and the physical transformation had been remarkable. His sister had always been lean, and the pregnancy had rounded her in ways that made her slower and more deliberate in her movements.

The elevator doors opened. She stepped inside and chose her floor. The doors closed, and Jacob switched to the corridor feed on the right screen. He waited. The elevator indicator on the screen above the doors ticked upward until the doors finally opened, allowing Brooklyn to step out into the hallway.

She turned left without hesitation. She didn’t glance toward Colin’s unit, which gave Jacob pause. He monitored her progress to her own door, paused to examine the ludicrous strip of tape, and then slid the key into the lock.

The door eventually closed behind her.

Jacob leaned back in the chair and laced his fingers behind his head. The corridor feed showed an empty hallway. He checked the other cameras. No movement. No one following her. No tactical team staged in the stairwell, no plainclothes agents pretending to be residents. Just an empty hallway and a pregnant woman behind a closed door.

He continued to monitor the feed for five minutes. Then ten. The hallway remained empty, and Brooklyn hadn’t exited.

She was taking down the board she’d created to hunt him.

He’d expected her to dismantle everything tomorrow morning, before the movers arrived, because Brooklyn was meticulous about protecting sensitive information from civilian eyes.

But she’d come a day early.

That was his sister.

Always a step ahead of the schedule everyone else was following.

He would have preferred tomorrow. The original plan had accounted for the movers’ arrival window, the predictable gap between Brooklyn entering the condo and the crew showing up with their dollies and their packing tape.

Fifteen minutes, maybe twenty.

More than enough.

Today would have to do, though.

Jacob lowered his hands and peered across the table at Colin, who flinched at the sudden attention. The man’s shirt was stained and wrinkled, his hair matted to his forehead, and the skin beneath his eyes had taken on the bruised, hollowed quality of prolonged sleeplessness. He smelled, too. Jacob had allowed him bathroom access twice a day, but the human body under sustained stress produced odors that no amount of hygiene could fully address.

Jacob had also allowed Colin to answer his door when the doorman stopped by. Jacob had stood just out of sight with a blade resting flat against his thigh, close enough for Colin to feel his presence without the doorman witnessing a thing. Colin had smiled. He'd told the man he was feeling better. He'd even managed a joke about going back to work. And then he'd closed the door and turned around and stared at Jacob with the dead, hollowed expression of a man who understood that obedience was the only thing keeping him alive. The thought of asking the doorman for help had never crossed Colin's mind.

“Sit tight,” Jacob said with a smile. “I might be a while.”

Colin’s eyes widened above the gag, and a sound came through the cloth that might have been a word or might have been nothing at all. Jacob didn’t care which. He’d already decided what would happen to Colin Vogel, and the decision had nothing to do with preference. Colin didn’t fit his criteria. He wasn’t the type of individual Jacob found compelling, and under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t have warranted a second glance.

But Colin had spent three weeks in Jacob’s presence, absorbing details that a police interview would extract in under an hour.

Jacob preferred a head start. He always had.

He pushed back from the table and stood. The chair didn’t make a sound against the carpet. He closed the distance to Colin’s front door and paused with his hand on the knob.

He listened.