Page 29 of Knight

Something I didn’t search her for. If she has one, I should have already secured it. But with everything going on—her, Bishop’s request, the laptop. I’d forgotten all about it. Alarm bells ring in my head.

Fucking sloppy, Knight.

"Where is it?"

“What?” She frowns at me. “Where is what?” Her voice is shaky. She’s still afraid of sudden questions, and there’s still no sign of the practiced responses I’d expect from someone trained to handle interrogation.

"Your phone. The one you keep reaching for."

"I dropped it. When you …” She pauses and licks her lips. “When I dropped my laptop."

I run through my security protocols in my mind. Every sweep, every scan should have detected an unauthorized device. I’ve dealt with enough attempts to breach my systems to know all the standard … and not so standard … approaches. USBdrives disguised as jewelry, cameras hidden in watches, phones loaded with custom malware. But all of those trigger alerts. And I’d focused everything on the laptop, instead of sweeping the apartment for bugs.

Have I been focusing on the wrong piece of tech?

“Stay there.” I don’t even know why I say it. I doubt she’s going to try and move while I’m in the same room as her. Her body language screams flight not fight.

Which is just another fucking piece of proof that points toward her being a pawn in someone else’s game.

“Are you sure you dropped it?”

Her fingers twist in the hem of her shirt. A nervous tell thatnoprofessional would display. “Yes. When you pointed the … everything happened so fast. The laptop fell, and I …”

She shakes her head, probably remembering the gun against her head. It’s hard to track small details when you’re two seconds away from having the back of your skull blown out.

That alone would make her the perfect courier. If someone got to her phone and tampered with it, then sent her here … She’d have been too terrified by my response to her intrusion to notice where it fell.

Which means I have to manually search for the damn thing.

I scan the room. It could be fucking anywhere. Under furniture. Behind equipment. Places a phone might slide during a confrontation.

Something must show in my expression because she presses herself harder against the wall when I stand up. I ignore her while I move furniture around. Her eyes dart between me and the door, her breath speeding up with each piece of furniture I shift.

I don’t think she has any idea what I’m doing. Her behavior isn’t the measured assessment of someone checking wherepotential exits are, it’s the pure animal panic at unpredictable behavior.

“Stand up.” When I spin to face her, she shrinks back.

“Please. I told you everything I know. I don’t know what you’re looking for.”

The utter confusion in her voice makes me pause. No trained operative would maintain this level of frightened ignorance through days of captivity. Even the best crack eventually, and show hints of their training. She just gets more terrified.

A muscle pops in my jaw while I stare at her, then I turn slowly and carefully do another scan … andthat’swhen I see it. It’s under the edge of the bookcase near the door, blending into the shadows.

I stride across and scoop it up, flipping it over in my hand. Ordinary. A civilian device that wouldn’t raise any red flags if anyone saw it. The kind of phone a normal person carries without even thinking about it.

“How old is your phone? When did you buy it?”

“I … a couple of weeks ago. My old one broke.”

“Did you get a new sim card?”

“After you started talking to your imaginary friend?”

She nods.

Fuck.

The perfect delivery system. I bounce it on my palm, then tap the screen. It doesn’t light up.

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