Page 114 of Shadow Of Sin

I swallow hard, my heart pounding so hard my vision blurs as I try to read the lines at the bottom of the last page under the heading ‘Risk Assessment.’

Wolfe’s investigation thread connects a shell company to a firm that handles Molloy financial operations. I remember the company name from the work I did for Dmitri. I close my fingers around the edge of the table, my gut wrenching as I connect those final dots.

Pursuing my case would have pulled on a thread leading directly back to his family’s infrastructure. There are notes in his fucking handwriting.

Exposure risk: high.

Probability of federal scrutiny on Molloy operations: significant.

Recommendation: close.

One word at the very bottom of the document.

Closed.

Cold spreads through my insides. Not the metaphorical kind. The actual, physical, blood-leaving-my-extremities kind. My fingers are numb on the table. My feet are numb on the floor. The air in the cabin drops ten degrees and I sit there staring at that word, my eyes unwilling to move away from it.

He knew. Eighteen months ago. He didn’t know my name from a random person on the street back then. I was just a case number that popped up in one of his scans. But he still looked at the evidence, figured out I was innocent, and closed the file anyway.

While I was lying on a prison bunk counting ceiling tiles and trying to remember what freedom felt like, Wolfe Molloy had evidence that could have changed everything. He analyzed it. He understood it. He saw that I was innocent.

And he closed the file because saving me would have cost his family.

I sit there for a long time. I don’t know how long. The clock on the laptop says twenty minutes have passed, but it feels like those minutes have stretched into hours.

Then I open the second folder. The one with Friday’s date.

It contains a document. Clean, structured, and detailed, the way Wolfe builds everything.

Panic claws up my spine when I process the title.

Relocation Protocol — E. Moreno.

My vision tunnels. The cabin shrinks to the size of this screen and the words on it.

A plan. For relocating me to a new city, the timeline starting on Friday. The file contains transportation logistics, identity documents I would need.

And…contact termination protocols. That’s what really makes bile shoot up the back of my throat. Contact fucking termination, as in how to cut someone out of your life cleanly and completely without creating a security risk.

This isn’t a rough draft or a sketch. This is a finished, executable plan for removing me from Boston, from the Molloys, from his life, in seventy-two hours.

Starting Friday.

The day after the operation. The day he said he’d come back to me.

And that is a fact, the harshest one I can imagine.

My stomach heaves. I press a fist against my mouth and breathe through my nose until the nausea passes. My jaw is locked so tight that pain shoots up both sides of my skull.

And now that I’ve uncovered all of this, I keep snooping because if this plan exists, there’s a hell of a lot more behind it.

So I dig deeper until I find a bunch of texts from his communications archive. Texts between Wolfe and Ronan over the past few weeks.

The oldest one is from three weeks ago, right after the warehouse hit. Ronan asked Wolfe what happens to me when my work is finished. And each one of Wolfe’s responses drives a knife deeper and deeper into my heart. Each one is colder than the last. Words I can’t imagine coming from the same man who held my hand on the porch last night.

I’ll manage the situation.

I’ll handle the logistics on her end.