Page 18 of Shadow Secrets
Next, Claire activated a voice recorder and asked Sutton to again walk her through what Ginger had said to her before the shooting and what Sutton had witnessed happening to her outside the parlor. She even asked Sutton why she’d run all the way to the farmhouse to find Sebastian.
Sutton’s face heated with embarrassment. “I spoke to Sebastian early in the day, and I was…scared. I just reacted.”
Sebastian didn’t look at her. No one but Claire and Vivi did. Vivi made notes, her gaze shifting to look at Sebastian.
“I should have called the police,” Sutton said. “I should have…” Her voice trailed off. “I knew that man was coming after me, and I panicked.”
Claire offered a sympathetic smile. “You did exactly the right thing. Sebastian was the safest option.”
Sebastian was the safest option. Sutton felt the words settle in her chest, and also knew the irony. The man who’d killed her brother was now her refuge.
Claire shut off the recorder and referred to the notes on her phone. “There’s something I wanted to tell you. The FBI has had a file open for approximately eighteen months on a possible domestic network with connections to intelligence and political circles. The file is thin—more gaps than facts. It’s classified under the codename Inkwell.”
Claire thumbed through her notes. “The connecting thread in the Inkwell file is a tattoo. Multiple sources have reported that individuals in sensitive positions—law enforcement, political staff, intelligence-adjacent contractors—bear an identical tattoo on the inner left bicep. The design is abstract and not a gang symbol. We’ve never been able to trace the artist or determine the tattoo’s significance.” She paused. “Until now.”
Sebastian sat straighter. “Ginger Galbraith was investigating this network?”
Sutton felt it, too—her spine straightened. “She showed me the picture of it on a man’s inside bicep. You think it’s the same group?”
“I do. Penn had a client list that may have intersected with the individuals in our Inkwell file.”
Sutton’s hands were in her lap, fingers laced together so tight the knuckles blanched. Penn’s name, spoken in this room full of operators and federal agents, had a different weight than it did in her own head. To her, Penn was her complicated, infuriating, talented, secretive brother who’d turned into a monster on national television. In this room, he was something else.
“Sutton.” Claire’s voice was careful now. “Did Penn keep records of his work? Client logs, portfolios, sketchbooks—anything that might document who he tattooed and what designs he produced?”
Sutton stared at the table. The wood grain blurred. Penn’s sketchbooks—she’d saved at least three of them.
They were battered sketchbooks with black covers and elastic closures, the pages thick with ink and pencil and the occasional coffee stain. She’d taken them from his apartment after the shooting, when her mother couldn’t bring herself to go and her father wouldn’t. She’d packed them in a box with a few other things—his favorite mug, a pocket knife, a vintage Bowie concert tee—and carried that box from D.C. to Blackridge like a reliquary. It lived under her bed.
She’d kept them because they were his. Because his hands had held those pencils and his mind had filled those pages. Sometimes, on the worst nights, she’d press her palm flat against the cover and pretend she could feel him in the paper.
Now, it sounded like they were evidence.
Her voice was steady. Her hands were not. “I have three of his sketchbooks at my apartment.”
Claire leaned forward. “We need those sketchbooks.”
“We’ll get them for you,” Garrett said.
Vivi touched Sutton’s shoulder as she stood. “Before you go, there’s one more thing you should both see.”
Sutton’s stomach dropped. She’d had about all the more-things-you-should-see she could absorb in a single afternoon, but she followed Vivi’s gaze to the wall monitor, where Jasper pulled up a split screen.
Cable news dominated on one side. Social media feeds were on the other.
The cable news chyron read: Galbraith Daughter Murdered In Rural Montana—where is Agent Whitaker?
The social feed was worse. A scrolling river of posts, most of them paired with the same small set of photographs—Sebastian on a stretcher, Sebastian at congressional testimony, Sebastian and Ginger at some charity function six years ago, her laughing up at him while he kept his eyes on the crowd. The captions underneath were speculating, theorizing. Grieving a girl most of the posters had never met and eulogizing her alongside the man who’d saved her life once, as if the two of them had been a love story.
Sebastian stood abruptly and walked to the wall. Everyone, including Sutton, watched him cross his arms as if shielding himself. He said nothing, just reading the screen with a shuttered expression.
“The news broke late last night,” Vivi said. “It went international within two hours. The #FindBastian tag has been trending in three countries since this morning. Reporters have already been calling the Galbraith family, Sebastian’s family, and everyone associated with him publicly.”
Sebastian stood still, his face carved from stone. The operational mask was fully in place—none of the softness she’d seen at breakfast, none of the mouth-quirk from the compound tour. Just a man looking at evidence of his own worst recurring nightmare.
“How bad?” he asked, his voice flat.
“Bad,” Vivi said. “They don’t have your location yet. They will, eventually. A town this small, an operation this visible—someone will put it together. We have days, maybe a week, before the national press figures out where you are.”
