Page 34 of Buried Past

I spoke to the empty room. "I'm not backing down. Not this time."

For years, I'd run toward other people's fires—Farid's convoy and strangers' accidents. I'd spent my life stepping into wreckage, trying to patch the broken. But now, I wasn't the medic. I was the protector, the barricade.

Chapter ten

Dorian

The air in the apartment was wrong without Matthew in it. Confident that I wasn't going to run, he decided to return to work.

I'd counted his footsteps down the hallway forty-seven minutes ago—steady, unhurried, the sound of someone heading toward everyday work instead of running from ghosts. When the door clicked shut, it left me alone with the hum of the refrigerator for company.

I couldn't stop myself from pacing. I'd healed enough that I didn't fight pain with every step, and I'd started to feel like a caged animal.

Stop moving. You're making noise.

I forced myself to pause beside the front window. The street below stretched in both directions—narrow, tree-lined, populated by people who owned cats and worried about recycling schedules. It was civilian territory. Safe territory.

Fred Linkerton, an acquaintance of Matthew's, emerged from the building next door, dragging a wheeled garbage bin behindhim. I'd been told to watch for him. He was an older gentleman, right on schedule—7:43 AM every Friday.

Two buildings down, construction workers had been replacing storm gutters since Wednesday. From a distance, I heard the faint sounds of classic rock booming from their radio: same crew and same van parked at the same angle.

A red Honda Civic parked along the street hadn't moved all week. The same thin layer of Seattle grime coated its windshield. Dead battery, maybe. Or an owner who worked graveyard shifts and slept during daylight hours.

All normal and easily explainable. Added up to what a functioning neighborhood should look like at eight in the morning. That was precisely what made it wrong.

Every instinct I'd learned to trust screamed danger.

I moved the blinds another fraction, widening my field of view. Across the street, a man sat on the bus bench with a newspaper spread across his lap: mid-forties and a gray jacket.

Watching him for thirty seconds, I examined his movements. When he turned the page, his left hand stayed positioned at the paper's edge, maintaining the same sight line while creating the illusion of activity.

There. A lens glinted from the newspaper's edge, no bigger than a pinhead but bright enough to catch the morning sun filtering through the overcast sky. It was professional equipment disguised as casual surveillance.

Adrenaline began to flood my system. Every sense sharpened to diamond clarity. I stepped back from the window, calculating. The surveillance post commanded clear views of both Matthew's front entrance and the alley exit that led to the building's rear fire escape.

How long have they been watching?

If they'd been in position since before Matthew left for work, they'd have photographs of him. Documentation. A face tomatch employment records, family connections, and residential history.

They know.

Hoyle's network had found me again, and this time they'd identified my weakness. They'd found the one thing I couldn't replace or abandon. They'd found Matthew.

Six years. That's how long I'd been in this mess. Hoyle recruited me right out of humanitarian orientation.

When I met Farid after his extraction, following his work with Matthew, I was a hardcore Hoyle veteran. What I didn't know then was Farid filed away what he knew about Matthew as crucial information. Kept tabs on him. Believed something about him mattered.

I needed to move. I grabbed a Seahawks hoodie from the back of Matthew's bedroom chair, tugging the hood up to shadow my face without looking like I was trying to hide.

Sunglasses came next, cheap drugstore wraparounds. I checked myself in the bathroom mirror, adjusting my posture until my sharp angles softened into something resembling a college student nursing a hangover.

The grocery store sat three blocks north. I locked Matthew's door and headed downstairs, slowing my stride. It was the college town shuffle—hands shoved deep in hoodie pockets and shoulders slightly hunched in a walk that said bored instead of hunted.

The newspaper man had vanished from his bench. In his place, a woman waited with a canvas shopping bag, checking her phone with the distracted patience of someone whose bus was genuinely late.

The transition was seamless and professional. They were cycling surveillance posts to avoid detection.

I recognized the methodology because I'd written the handbook. Five years inside Hoyle's network, perfecting the artof making people disappear. Now they were using my protocols against me.

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