Page 10 of Shadow Secrets
“Done. Who’s the witness?”
Sebastian glanced over his shoulder. Sutton was watching him with those too-expressive eyes, her arms wrapped around herself, her face pale and drawn in the half-light from the kitchen.
“Penn Crenshaw’s sister.”
Another beat of silence—longer this time. Garrett was already doing the math: the man Sebastian had killed, his sister, a professional hit on the girl Sebastian had saved. “What the…?”
“My feelings exactly.”
“Bring her here,” Garrett said. “I’ll have the team ready. And I’ll inform Claire—this is a federal case as of now. We can only assist.”
“Copy that. Twenty minutes.”
He hung up and turned to Sutton. “I’m taking you to the SPS compound where I work. It’s a secure facility. You’ll be safe there.”
“Safe.” She said the word as if she were testing its structural integrity and finding it lacking. “A woman was just shot to death outside my workplace, and the killer saw my face. What part of this is safe?”
“The part where you’re with me.”
Not a boast, not reassurance, but a statement of fact delivered with the flat certainty of a man who’d spent a decade standing between threats and the people behind him. She blinked, and both resistance and relief swept over her face.
He grabbed his go-bag from the closet by the front door—always packed, always ready, another habit from a life he’d supposedly left behind. Jacket, spare magazines, a med kit, a burner phone. He held out his jacket to Sutton. “Take this.”
She stared at it for a moment, then took it without a word and pulled it on. It swallowed her—she was much shorter than he was, and the sleeves hung past her fingers. She didn’t roll them up. He pretended the sight of her in his jacket didn’t do something complicated to his chest.
“Let’s go.”
He took back roads rather than the direct route from Miller Road to the highway. That was too predictable, too exposed, too many stretches of open road where a trailing vehicle could maintain visual contact without being spotted.
Instead, he cut through the old mining roads east of town, routes he’d driven a dozen times in daylight when he needed a distraction. Sebastian didn’t live anywhere without knowing how to leave it in a hurry.
Sutton sat in the passenger seat with her hands in her lap and his jacket pulled tight around her. She’d stopped shaking. That wasn’t necessarily a good sign—sometimes the shaking stopped because the body had moved past shock into the flat, gray country on the other side. She was staring through the windshield at the dark road, seeing something that wasn’t there.
He checked the mirrors again. Clear.
“You’re taking a weird route,” she said. The first words she’d spoken since they left the farmhouse.
“Yes.”
“Because you think someone might follow us?”
“Caution dictates it.”
She turned her head and looked at him. In the glow of the dashboard instruments, her face was all angles and shadows—sharp collarbones, the small rose gold stud in her nose, the dark smudges under her eyes that predated tonight by months. She looked exhausted in a way that went deeper than one terrible evening. She looked like someone who’d been tired for years.
“You knew her,” she said. Not a question. “Ginger.”
“Yes.”
“I read a lot about her after the—” Sutton stopped. Recalibrated. “She called you Bastian.”
The name hit him in a place he thought he’d armored. Ginger’s nickname for him—half affection, half provocation, deployed with the confidence of a teenager who knew she could get under his skin and considered it a public service. He hadn’t heard anyone say it in six years.
His hands tightened on the wheel. “She used to call me that to get a reaction,” he said. “Worked every time.”
Silence settled between them—heavy, complicated, full of things neither of them was equipped to say. He’d saved Ginger’s life. Her brother had tried to end it. And now Ginger was dead on a sidewalk in Blackridge because she’d gotten too close to something connected to Penn.
He glanced at Sutton’s reflection in the passenger window. She was watching the dark roll by, her fingers curled inside the too-long sleeves of his jacket, and he realized he’d stopped seeing Penn Crenshaw’s sister. He just saw…Sutton.
