Page 5 of The Guarded Monster’s Truth

Her eyes narrow. "That's convenient timing."

"Perhaps but you can spend tomorrow calling every B&B on the coast, or you can wake up inside the story."

She stares at me. I watch her turn it over—a journalist embedded at an MC compound, interviews on tap, the daily routine of a monster motorcycle club from the inside. The kind of access that doesn't come around twice.

"When do I need to move over?"

"Tonight works."

She tucks the notebook into her bag. "I'll need to grab my things from the B&B."

"I'll drive."

She goes into the B&B and comes back ten minutes later with her bags. I load them into the truck, but she doesn't get in. She nods toward the waterfront. "I haven't seen the harbor yet." The harbor stretches out past the docks, the boats rocking in the evening swell, crab traps stacked in rows along the pier. She pulls the recorder from her bag and holds it low at her side. Full access. That's the deal.

"The carvings on your horns," she says.

I wait.

"I've read about minotaur horn modification. Cultural, individual, sometimes familial. But those aren't family crests." She glances up at my left horn, the one with the watchtower at the base. "Those are personal. Each one different. You carved them yourself, didn't you?"

The sentence lands somewhere I don't expect it to. I've heard versions of the question. Tourists at the Harvest Festival, drunk and brave enough to point at my head and say what are those things on your horns? Betty's regulars, who've known me eight years and still won't look above my forehead. Nobody asks the way she asks. She skipped past the horns and went straight to the marks on them, and I've lived in this town for eight years without a single person doing that.

"The watchtower." I touch the base of my left horn. "First one I carved."

"What does it mean?"

Eleven years ago, a twenty-two-year-old minotaur sat in a CIA field office in Kabul and pressed a carving tool against his own horn for the first time. I see everything. I survived this. Somebody should remember.

"It means I pay attention."

She holds my gaze. Most people can hold it for two, maybe three seconds before the horns and the height and the flat stare send them somewhere else. She holds it for five and then leans closer, studying the raised lines above the watchtower—the crossed marks, the closed circles.

"How many are there?"

"Seventeen."

"Seventeen years?"

"No, seventeen reasons."

My chest tightens before I register the vibration. Low and involuntary, buried so deep in my ribcage the sound doesn't reach the air. The purr. Eleven years of keeping that sound locked behind my chest, and it stirs because a woman with a recorder and a pen looked at the marks on my horns and leaned in instead of away.

She glances at my chest. Her brow pulls down a fraction—not fear, not confusion. She's going to write about this later.

I turn toward the harbor. "The fishing fleet comes in around six. Good color for the article."

The compound hallway smells like Colt's coffee and the wood polish Garrett uses on his projects. I'm heading for my apartment when Colt catches me at the stairwell, reading glasses pushed up onto his forehead, a handwritten list in Ellie's neat print spread across the table behind him.

"The journalist—Ava." He folds his arms. "She's been asking around about the library. Ellie mentioned her."

"I know."

"I know you know." His voice stays even, but his shoulders square. "I'm telling you because Ellie will be polite to her, and politeness makes Ellie vulnerable. She'll open the archive, offer the research room, give her everything she asks for, because that's who Ellie is. And this woman is a reporter."

"She's a journalist."

"Same thing."