Page 92 of Deeper

Callen

Rylan is inside the building I’m parked behind.

Tatum called me and said the police brought Rylan in for questioning, but she wasn’t under arrest.

How have they even singled her out to get us here in the first place?

Before they took Rylan away, she told Tatum to contact me. Rylan’s in trouble, and she reached out for me, but I don’t know what she expects me to do. The right thing to do for me battles with doing right by Rylan. I’ve been on my own for a long time. It works for me. The trouble is that I’m not so alone anymore.

The decision is made for me when I see her calmly walking away from the building and straight toward me. She doesn’t appear rattled in the least. I roll down my window and let a whistle blow through my lips. Her head whips around in my direction. Her sight locks on me, and she changes course. The passenger-side door of my truck opens, Rylan slides inside, and I pull away from the curb.

“Are you okay?”

She exhales heavily before she twists to face me and responds, “Yeah, they don’t have anything. They’re reaching by asking me to come in today.” Her eyes plead with me for patience, and her voice begs me for compassion.

“How and what are they reaching for?”

“I guess now is as good a time as any for some answers.”

“Answers would have been nice before you were taken into police custody.” A bit of bitter sarcasm hangs from my words. This is bad, really fucking bad, and something tells me it’s about to get a whole lot worse once she gets honest.

“Take me to my place. There is something I need to show you.”

She doesn’t need to tell me twice, and when we are safely within her walls, I face her and demand, “Start talking, Rylan.”

She ignores my orders and moves through the house. I’m so close behind her that I swear, her heart beats against my ear. She stops in front of a door at the end of a hallway, unlocks it, and then pushes inside. My eyes scan the walls, and I’m speechless. You see this type of shit in movies, not in real life.

It’s black and white—literally.

The room is papered with newspaper clippings.

Not an inch of the painted walls shows through.

Rylan steps to the side, giving me room to venture further inside for a closer look.

Carter Andrews. Cortland Evans. Sebastian Rutherford. Abraham Montgomery. And Laurence Rawlings—Number One. Their lives are all enshrined here on Rylan’s walls—everything from business announcements to little league scores from years ago. There is a decade’s worth of following and stalking of my targets.

We haven’t discussed the identity of my last kill yet, but she obviously already has that information.

“What the hell is going on here?” I can’t hide the rise of panic fusing my words.

“I hired you, Callen. I’m the person you’ve been working for on this job.”

What. The. Fuck?

A beat of time passes, and then everything clicks into place. I met her at the club where Carter’s body was revealed. She was keeping tabs while I tailed Cortland in East Rock Park. She didn’t follow me to Sebastian’s out of curiosity; it was deliberate. She knew what would happen next.

“You were in the woods that night. The night I killed Cortland. You were following me before I caught you at Sebastian’s,” I voice my train of thought.

“I was. I’ve never experienced anything so perfect as when you came alive from taking the life of someone else. You broke him. He was gone under your hands long before he took his last breath.”

“Why? Why did you hire me?”

Rylan turns to the far wall and stares at more newspaper clippings. “Those men weren’t good people. They needed to pay for the people they’d hurt.”

“These men hurt you?”

“These men had no idea how much they’d hurt me, nor did they care about how much they’d altered my life. They thought they’d gotten away with it. Hell, they did get away with it.”

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