Page 62 of Only the Hunter

Gabe straightens when he sees my face.

“She was here,” I say. “And then she was moved again for her safety.”

“Alive?” he asks.

“At the time.”

“For her own safety,” he repeats, tone flat with skepticism.

“According to someone who shouldn’t have spoken at all.”

His jaw flexes. “Expedited transfer within two days would likely be driven by threat assessment. Either someone found her, or they anticipated someone would.”

I hadn’t thought of it that way, but he’s right. “They won’t say where. No paper trail. No access. Just confirmation she didn’t stay.”

Gabe pulls out his phone, already typing. “Threat-based witness relocation follows patterns. Limited destinations. High-security facilities or deep cover placements. I’ll run it past the team, see if any networks picked up movement in that window.”

The NGO wasn’t the end. It was a waypoint. And wherever Lina was sent next—someone wanted to keep her hidden. The question is whether it’s for her protection, or for theirs. She’s the only witness who didn’t take a payout or disappear voluntarily. If someone silences her, whatever Safe Passage was building toward dies with her testimony. She trusted me enough to stay. I don’t get to stop believing that mattered. When I first started this job, I would’ve believed all actions were done in the interest of the witness. I believed in our system, that those working on the government payroll did so to ensure a just society. But somewhere along the way, I lost my rose-colored glasses.

We walk for several blocks in silence, crossing two bridges and passing three trams before either of us speaks. My mind is still in that NGO office—the young man’s nervous energy, the receptionist’s perfect stonewalling, the forty-eight-hour window. Expedited transfer is unusual protocol. Unusually fast payment. Everything about this case is unusual.

The rhythm of Geneva settles back in around us—tram bells, low conversations in three languages, the faint rush of the Rhône somewhere to our left. Clean. Orderly. And utterly unhelpful.

It’s Gabe who breaks the silence. “Evie.”

He’s stopped just short of a pedestrian crossing, phone in his hand, attention split between the screen and the street.

“Quinn just pinged me,” he says. “Financial noise.”

“What kind of noise?” I ask, moving closer to see his screen. My muscles tense with anticipation. And hope. This is the break we need. It has to be.

“One transaction that didn’t fully anonymize.” He tilts the phone so I can see. “Small, but specific. Logistics-related. Housing and security services, bundled together.”

“That’s not unusual for NGOs,” I say automatically, thinking through it. “They consolidate expenses.”

“True,” he agrees. “But this one cleared through a regional Swiss provider. Not Geneva. Not Basel. Not Zurich.”

“Where?”

He taps the screen, pulling up additional detail. A canton name appears—one I recognize but wouldn’t have ever expected.

Not urban. Not international-facing. Not where you’d typically relocate a high-value witness.

“When did this clear?”

“Early,” he says. “Shortly after the second transfer. Same time window the NGO admin mentioned—that forty-eight-hour expedited move.”

I stare at the screen, then lift my gaze to the street around us, suddenly seeing Geneva differently. Not as an end. As a distraction.

“They didn’t keep her here,” I say slowly. “They washed her through Geneva, then pushed her somewhere quieter. Smaller. Less oversight.”

“Rural.”

“Or semi-rural,” I say. “It makes sense. Private housing. Discretion baked into the culture.”

My mind starts layering patterns—cases I’ve worked, victims who vanished into places that weren’t meant to be destinations at all.

“Trafficking suppression follows money, not geography,” I add, looking back at his phone, thinking about that address. “You don’t hide people where attention pools. You hide them where no one thinks to look.”