Page 20 of The Guarded Monster’s Truth

"We disappear. For real this time."

The words sound wrong before they finish leaving my mouth. Years behind compound walls with a patched club, a gate and cameras on every angle, the agency put a transmitter on my nightstand. Running won't outpace that. But it's the only play I have.

"You've spent eight years behind a gate with an entire club between you and the agency, and they still got a transmitter here." She slides her hand from under mine. "Where are you going to hide that's better than this?"

"I'm trying to keep you alive."

"You're trying to keep hiding." She picks up her pen from the sheets. "We write the story. Everything. The transmitter, the procurement batch, Harlow, Ridgeline, the Humans First funding trail. We publish the operation and let the exposure do what running never will."

"Publishing it will make us targets."

"We're already targets. The transmitter's been broadcasting for three years. They know where I sleep, where I eat, where I shower. Publishing takes the weapon away. You can't covertly surveil someone after a national magazine prints the surveillance specs."

"You're picking a fight with a federal agency, not a local cop who got caught with his hand in the evidence locker."

"You told me nobody's ever kept you because they wanted you there. I'm here because I want to be. Don't ask me to earn it by killing a story."

"I'm asking you to trust me," I say.

"You're asking me to kill a story that could make a difference." She stands from the bed. "The last person who asked me that was the publisher at the Daily Record. He told me it was for my protection too."

The room goes quiet. The coffee in her mug has gone cold enough to stop steaming, and the ring it leaves on the nightstand looks permanent.

"I can't be the journalist who kills stories, Ben." Her voice drops. "Not even for you. If I do that, I'm the thing they made me."

She picks up her notebook. Grabs her jeans from the chair and her bag from the floor. Leaves the recorder on the bed—dismantled, gutted, the transmitter dead in its clear bag.

She walks out of the apartment and I don't know if she's coming back.

The apartment holds her. Every surface, every molecule of air, the sheets in the bedroom and the bed she sat on two minutes ago. Her scent layered over mine, warm and clean, the compound fragrance my body pressed into her skin mixed with whatever she carries on her own. I can track her through the compound by the trail she leaves behind her. Down the hallway, past the common room. My body mapped her route before my ears lost the sound of her footsteps.

My body claimed her without my permission. The scent my skin put on hers reads as mine to every monster in this building, and the woman carrying it told me she won't hide and walked through the door to prove it.

I sit at the desk. The dismantled recorder lies in pieces on the wood—back panel, battery, circuit board, the four micro-screws lined up beside the frequency analyzer. The transmitter sits in its evidence bag, smaller than a grain of rice and heavier than anything on my boards.

Three walls of evidence. Eleven years of hiding. Red thread connecting photographs and call logs and satellite imagery and a silver recorder that carried a signal I never thought to look for because I swept for the wrong threat. I swept for active hardware and missed the passive piece sitting in plain sight on her nightstand, in her bag, in every room she entered, recording and transmitting everything.

She told me she won't hide. The agency suppressed the truth. The publisher buried it. And I sat across from the woman I want to claim and asked her to keep quiet one more time, for me, like that makes it different.

The worst part isn't that she walked out. The worst part is she's right. She saw what I built on those boards and understood it better than I do: years of watching for threats while the real cage closed around me one sweep at a time. Running keeps us alive. Publishing keeps us free. And the woman who could burn it all down proved she understands which one matters, and I don't. Not yet.

I stare at the boards through the bedroom door. Red thread, photographs, call logs. Years of work that kept this club safe and kept me useful and gave me a chair at a table I earned by watching for threats that never stopped coming because I never stopped looking for them.

Chapter 9

Ava

Rex is on the porch when I come through the front door. I ask him for a ride to the library—I don't trust my hands on a steering wheel right now, and I don't know the roads between the compound and town well enough to drive them in the dark. He looks at my face, doesn't ask a follow-up, and pulls his truck around.

Ellie looks up from the circulation desk when I walk in. She doesn't ask. She points me toward the back reading table and goes back to her work, and the six or seven patrons browsing the evening stacks don't look twice at the woman with the red eyes and the death grip on a notebook.

The Nightfall Cove Public Library closes at six. The main room goes dark except for the emergency exit signs and the after-hours desk lamp. I sit at the reading table with my notebook and a headache that started behind my left eye when I walked out of Bruiser's apartment and hasn't let up.

He didn't lie to me. I keep circling back to that, and it keeps not being the point. Benjamin Walker sat across from me on that bed with a dismantled recorder between us and told me everything—the transmitter, the procurement timeline, the fact that my editor and my assignment and my presence in this town trace back to the agency that recruited him at twenty-two. And then he asked me to kill the story.

The request hit the wound I carry from Portland. The Daily Record. A source who trusted me with his name because I swore I'd protect it. A publisher who folded under pressure and destroyed that man's life. I left the paper, left the city, rebuilt myself around the promise that no one would convince me to bury the truth again.

I close the notebook and open it again. Harlow's name stares back at me in my own handwriting, circled twice, connected by lines to Ridgeline Strategic and the county filings Ellie pulled. The same connections I pinned to Bruiser's corkboard, standing in his apartment, drawing lines on his wall while he watched.