Page 1 of Silent as Sin
CHAPTER ONE
SOMEWHERE OUTSIDE CINDERCreek, Arizona
The ranch looked dead.
It should’ve been. After the raid, after the screaming and gunfire, after Emmaline walked out of here with her eyes wide and the world a mile away from her, this place should’ve been nothing but dust in the desert wind.
But my gut wouldn’t let me ride.
“Place is cleared,” Warden said, his voice quiet, careful not to wake ghosts in a house that was entirely too dark for daytime.His flashlight cut across a bare mattress and the length of chain bolted to the floor beside it. The links were black with rust. “Why you’d drag me back here?”
“Humor me,” I said.
He sighed like a man clocking in for overtime and followed anyway. That was Warden, he’d bitch about the hours and keep pace the whole way.
The house breathed heat. The kind that crawled down your throat and made your tongue taste like copper. Dust motes floated in the beams of our lights, drifting like snow in a place that forgot winter. The hall smelled like bleach over old sweat, like somebody had tried to scrub sin out of drywall with a bucket and prayer.
We moved room to room. Bathroom with shattered tile. Bedroom with a dresser tipped on its face, drawers yawning empty. A pantry that had held more empty shelves than food. My boots found a spent zip-tie under a table and the stiff crackle of it snapped something loose in my chest.
Emmaline’s face flickered up, pale, blood at the corner of her mouth, the way her fingers shook while Chaos held her. Venom deserved more than the fast death Chaos gave him. Chaos. That was another fucking thing that pissed me off. What was Emmaline thinking?
I swallowed it down, and kept walking.
The hallway tightened at the end, like the house didn’t want us in the last door. Warden swung his light across busted glass and a slumped bookcase. The closet door beyond it was the same half-rotted wood as the rest, paint crazed into a hundred little fractures. Nothing special. But the noise in my gut got louder, like road grind beneath the tires when you’re going too fast to stop.
“Ashen,” Warden said, reading me. “We’re burning daylight we don’t got.”
I wrapped my hand around the knob. Turned. The door gave easy, hinges whining like they hadn’t been touched in a decade. Shelves. Moldy blankets. A stack of plastic storage bins collapsed under their own weight. Nothing.
Warden huffed, smug as a cat. “Happy now? We—”
“Shut up a second.”
I killed my light and stood still. The house hummed with that deep desert quiet, wind through broken window screens, a fan somewhere clicking as it tried to turn on a dead circuit. Beneath it, a small sound. Not words. Not crying.
Paper. The dry whisper of it bending and creasing.
My light snapped on. The beam crawled over the back wall, and I finally saw it, one strip of trim that didn’t match the others. It was newer. Nails countersunk too clean. I slipped my knife under the edge and pried. The board popped, and the hollow sound behind it told me everything.
There was a seam cut into the drywall. A square where there shouldn’t have been one. And on that square, recessed into a steel plate, sat a heavy hasp and a laminated padlock, the kind you buy when you want to keep a thing shut forever. Someone had painted the metal to match the wall. If you weren’t looking for it, if you didn’t get that itch between your shoulder blades that sayslook closer, you’d walk right past.
“Son of a—” Warden breathed. He crouched beside me, ran his thumb over the lock. Fresh oil glistened in the hinge like a smear of black honey. “They kept this one greased.”
“Yeah,” I said. My voice sounded like gravel. “They did.”
Warden jerked his chin down the hall. “Bolt cutters are still on the bike.”
“Go.”
He went. The house settled around me, all its heat pressing in, waiting to see if I was going to earn the right to open it. I tucked the knife away and pressed my palm flat on the plate.Cold. Colder than the room. Behind it… the paper sound again, steady as breathing.
I leaned close. “Hey,” I said, my voice soft like I was talking to a skittish colt. “We’re here.”
No answer. Just that crisp whisper, fold on fold.
Warden thundered back inside, boots loud to warn me he wasn’t a threat. He shoved the cutters into my hand, jaw tight like he wanted to spit. “If the sweep missed this, they’re gonna catch hell.”
“Later,” I said.
