Page 178 of Only the Hunter

Not anymore. From here on out, when she wakes, I’ll be by her side.

Bonus Epilogue

Three Years Later

Evie

The verdict came in at 2:47 p.m.

I know this because I was in the hallway when my phone lit up with a text from Delgado: Guilty. All counts. I stood there for a moment with my back against the wall and my hand over my stomach and let it soak in.

Guilty.

Trafficking. Conspiracy. Sexual exploitation of a minor.

All counts.

I am not the prosecuting attorney on this case. I recused myself eighteen months ago when it became clear that my early involvement in Safe Passage made me a more valuable witness than a litigator, and I handed off to a team that has been meticulous and relentless and has done the work better than I could have done it while also being a material witness. Delgado ran point. She was built for this. She never once made me feel the handoff was a loss.

It wasn’t a loss.

I walk down the courthouse steps into November light—cold, flat, the kind of afternoon that can’t decide if it wants to rain—and the scene outside is exactly what Delgado warned me it would be. Reporters on the sidewalk, cameras positioned, the particular organized chaos of a verdict that a publicist somewhere has been trying to get ahead of for six weeks.

They’re not surrounding me.

They’re surrounding his lawyer.

He’s in his sixties now. In the coverage leading up to trial he was photographed at charity galas, at a hospital wing that bears his family’s name, at a podium accepting something from an organization that does work with at-risk youth, which required a kind of audacity I still find difficult to look at directly. His lawyer has been telling anyone who will listen that this is a man who made mistakes in a dark period of his life and has since dedicated himself to restitution and reform.

I know what the concealed footage showed.

I know what the payment records specified.

I know what he paid extra for.

I watch his lawyer field questions on the sidewalk and I do not approach and I do not comment and I do not look for cameras, because none of that is mine to do anymore. The verdict is Delgado’s. The sentencing will be Delgado’s. The appeal, when it comes, will belong to the appellate section—different lawyers, different arguments, a process that will grind on for years without needing anything further from me.

What was mine is in the record.

Lina Morozova is in the record.

Not as a closed file or a transferred asset or a status notation that reads Resolved: No further DOJ action required. As a named victim in a federal trafficking conspiracy that is still, three years later, generating cases. The organizer who gave up client names, payment details, and the location of the concealed footage did so in exchange for a reduction that still carries a sentence I find inadequate, but the information he provided has produced eleven convictions. This is the twelfth. There are four more in various stages of prosecution.

Lina didn’t get to see any of it.

I think about that sometimes—not with the specific, gutting grief of the early months, but with the particular heaviness of something you’ve learned to carry rather than set down. She was twenty-three when we found her. She had a cousin in New York whose address she’d given us in the last interview, the one who was supposed to be waiting. I found the cousin eventually, through channels that had nothing to do with my DOJ credentials. I told her what I could.

She already knew Lina was gone.

She said: She talked about you. She said you were the one who actually listened.

I’ve been doing this job for eight years. I’ve learned that some things you don’t resolve, you just carry differently over time. Lina is one of those things. She always will be.

A familiar hand touches my elbow.

“Hey.”

Gabe is standing just behind me and to the left—where he always positions himself in a crowd, sight lines to the street and the building entrance simultaneously, a habit so ingrained he probably doesn’t register doing it anymore. He’s in a jacket over a dark sweater, no tie, the kind of put-together that means he came from something without coming from an office. He’s been in and out of Langley all week, working the kind of coordination that doesn’t have a clean title and doesn’t appear on any organizational chart that would survive a FOIA request. He looks—the way he always looks now—like a man who has found the work that fits him.