Page 82 of In the Dark of the Past

Finn nodded. “She’s reporting in,” he said. “In person. Which means whoever she’s meeting doesn’t trust anything electronic anymore.”

“Smart,” Atlas said.

“Smart and scared are the same things this morning.” Finn opened the passenger door for me, the gesture unconscious. “Let’s go.”

In daylight, the quarry was just a scar—stripped earth, stagnant water, the skeletal remains of equipment nobody had bothered to haul out when the money dried up. The Maple Ridge teenagers used it for dares, rendezvous, and keg parties, and parents pretended they hadn’t done the same thing twenty years before.

At ten in the morning, under a sky the color of old concrete, it looked like something sinister waiting.

Atlas killed the engine a hundred yards back from the broken gate. We walked in—single file, boots quiet on the gravel, breath close in the cold air. Finn’s hand hovered near his holster. Atlas ranged left, fading into the shadow of a crumbling outbuilding. I stayed on Finn’s six without being told.

We reached the ridge and crouched behind a stack of collapsed concrete blocks, the quarry basin opening below us like an empty palm. Rusted crane arms rose against the sky, dark water filled the old pit, and a gravel lot on the near side, flat and open, contained⁠—

A black SUV.

Much too clean for this place. Its engine was running.

Finn went very still beside me.

The driver’s door of the sedan opened, and Jordyn climbed out. She was in civilian clothes now, her hair still pulled back. Even from here, I could read the tension in the way she stood. Her arms were folded across her chest, and she shifted her weight forward. It was the stance of a person braced for something unpleasant.

Finn’s hand found mine. Squeezed once.

Record.

I already had my phone out.

The passenger door of the SUV swung open.

Lucas Grant stepped down, coat collar turned up against the cold, salt-and-pepper hair neat, wearing that easy smile he used at ribbon cuttings and town halls. He looked like a man arriving at a campaign event. The quarry didn’t touch him.

My stomach turned.

“Grant,” I breathed.

“I see him,” Finn said, his voice flat and carefully empty.

They were already talking. I angled the phone to check the audio. The wind dipped, and their voices carried up the ridge in fragments. The recording app registered the sound. Something was said about timing, about the file. Jordyn’s tone was defensive and thinning at the edges.

Then the back door of the SUV opened.

And Finn stopped breathing.

I felt it before I understood it—the quality of the silence coming off him. It wasn’t the still, tactical silence of a man managing a situation, it was something older. Something that lived below the level of training.

I looked harder.

The man who climbed out of the back seat was tall and broad-shouldered. His tie was loosened and jacket unbuttoned as he moved with the particular ease of someone who had never once in his adult life doubted he belonged wherever he stood.

It took me a moment.

Then it didn’t.

The jaw. The set of the shoulders. The way he turned his head at that exact angle like a habit. It was identical to the man crouched beside me.

Sean Callahan.

Finn’s brother.