Page 3 of Hunted in the Silence

They didn’t know. Most of them never knew. That was both a mercy and the thing that made her angriest, the way this darkness thrived in the shadow of ordinary life, in the spaces between the strip malls and the diners and the neighborhoods where people left their porch lights on.

Brynn knew. She had always known, even when she would have given anything not to.

She picked up the phone and dialed the number she kept in her head, never written down.

“FBI Crimes Against Children Unit,” a crisp voice answered.

“This is Brynn Holt with the Blackridge Victim Advocacy Center. I have a young woman here who escaped from a human trafficking ring tonight. She needs help, and we need to move fast.”

“Understood, Ms. Holt. I’ll alert the team. Someone will be there inside the hour.”

She set the phone down and sat in the dark a moment longer, pressing the heels of her hands against her closed eyes. Her own pulse was too fast. She could feel the memories circling, patient and relentless, like wolves that had learned they couldn’t have her but hadn’t stopped hoping.

You’re okay, she told herself. The mantra was worn smooth from years of use. You’re safe. You survived. And there’s work to do.

She stood, splashed cold water on her face in the small attached bathroom, pulled her braid loose and retied it neater. Then she walked back out to the front of the building and unlocked the door, propping it open to the cold night air.

She didn’t have to wait long.

Fifteen minutes later, headlights swept the parking lot. Two unmarked black sedans—the Bureau’s whole aesthetic in four wheels—pulled up to the curb, and two figures stepped out into the amber light.

Brynn recognized the woman immediately. Special Agent Olivia Delgado. They’d worked together on three cases over the past two years. Sharp mind, genuine compassion, exactly the kind of agent Brynn preferred to deal with. After a brief, unintelligible exchange between the two agents, she gave Olivia a brief nod as they approached, the shorthand of two people who knew each other’s professional measure and didn’t need to establish it.

It was the man beside her that made Brynn pause.

He was tall, broad through the shoulders, the kind of build that suggested physical capability without broadcasting it. Dark hair, close-cut, slightly disordered by the night wind. A jaw set hard against the cold or something else. He wore a dark suit and a loosened tie, like a man who had gotten the call mid-evening and come without taking the time to be perfect about it, which Brynn found herself noting without quite meaning to.

But it was his eyes that stopped her for just a fraction of a second when they met hers.

Gray-green, she registered distantly. Clear and attentive, moving over the scene with the focused precision of someone who’d trained themselves to take in a situation all at once—exits, layout, people, risk. They were the eyes of a man who had seen difficult things and kept showing up anyway. She recognized that quality. Knew it from the inside.

New, she thought. She’d never worked with him before.

“Brynn Holt,” Olivia said by way of introduction, “this is Special Agent Cole Maddox. He’s taking lead on trafficking cases out of the regional office.”

Cole Maddox’s gaze moved to Brynn’s face and stayed there—not in the way of a man assessing a woman, but in the way of a man who was listening before anyone had spoken yet. There was something careful in it. Controlled. She had a feeling he was very good at being whatever a room needed him to be.

“Ms. Holt,” he said. His voice was lower than she’d expected. Even. “Thank you for calling us quickly.”

“There’s a girl inside who took a very hard road to get here tonight,” Brynn said. “That makes every minute matter.”

She stepped back and held the door open.

Cole moved past her into the building. Close enough that she caught the cold air still on his jacket, something underneath it faintly woodsy and clean. His gaze moved down the hallway, already working, already cataloging.

Brynn turned her attention deliberately back to Olivia.

Focus, she told herself. There’s work to do.

But as she led them both down the hall toward where Mia was sleeping, she was aware—in the same way someone might notice that a door in a familiar house had been hung differently—that the air in the building felt slightly changed now.

She filed it away. Ignored it completely.

There was work to do.

Chapter 2

Cole Maddox had been in the car for two hours when the call came in, somewhere on the dark stretch of highway between the field office and the motel he’d been using as a temporary base for the past three weeks. He pulled over onto the gravel shoulder to take the call, engine running, the high beams cutting a clean white corridor into the November dark ahead of him.