Page 11 of The Guarded Monster’s Truth

"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.

Chapter 5

Ava

My notebook tells a story I didn't assign it. I flip back through two weeks of notes, cross-legged on Bruiser's bed in a t-shirt and socks while his scanner cycles frequencies on the desk. The integration piece, the one my editor paid for, the one that belongs on these pages, died somewhere around page six. Every page after the first six reads like a field study of a single subject.

Sleeps in two-hour rotations. Never more than ninety minutes uninterrupted. Eats standing. Won't turn his back to a door. Left horn: watchtower symbol at the base, carved deep, the oldest mark. Right horn: seventeen marks carved at different depths. Mix of crossed lines and closed circles. The circles read like a tally. Years since the Emergence? Count fits. TBC.

I photographed the horn carvings yesterday while he reviewed camera feeds at the desk. Fourteen images on my phone, angled to catch the raised lines in the lamp light. He didn't turn around. He knew I took them. He let me.

The last entry sits at the bottom of today's page in handwriting messier than the rest.

The scent. Warm, heavy, sharper than musk. Saturates the apartment. Getting stronger. Concentrated in the sheets, the pillow, the hallway outside the door.

And above it, the one I almost scratched out:

His hand on my back through the kitchen door this morning. The warmth stayed an hour. Each contact the warmth holds longer than the last. What does that mean?

I close the notebook. Set it on the pillow and press my palms flat against my thighs.

Ten years profiling people for a living. I can break down a politician's tell in forty-five minutes, read a PR deflection from the second sentence, spot the gap between what someone says and what they mean from across a diner counter. This isn't that. Somewhere in the last two weeks I stopped profiling Bruiser and started tracking what he does to me.

His radio crackles from the desk.

Rex's voice, clipped: "Two at the Anchor. Heckland and a younger one. Showed Sal a photo. Not a brother. Woman, dark hair." A beat of static. "Matches your journalist."

My stomach drops before my brain catches up. Bruiser's on his feet, radio in hand, and for the first time since I walked into this compound he looks at me before he looks at the monitors.

They're not looking for him. They're looking for me. Whoever they are.

He doesn't need to order a lockdown. Knox sealed the compound yesterday. Bruiser adds layers: camera feeds cycling, secondary monitor on the Anchor's street, a radio call to Chain for eyes on the sedan. He doesn't raise his voice. Doesn't repeat himself.

When the radio goes quiet, I ask. "Who's Heckland?"

He sets the radio on the desk. "James Heckland. CIA. Recruited me when I was twenty-two. Gave me an assignment to infiltrate this club." He stops for a moment. "I went rogue eight years ago. Stopped reporting. He's been trying to bring me in ever since." He glances at the monitor showing the Anchor's street. "Showing your photo in a public bar—that's not how he runs things. That's not protocol. Heckland's panicking."