JUDAS (BREAKING THE DEVIL'S HALO)

Stop Hiding

CHAPTER SIX

The man in the gray jacket had been standing outside the diner for eleven minutes. Judas counted, because counting was the only thing keeping his hands still.

He'd meant to be reading the printout Kai had handed him, a list of properties connected to shell entities that might trace back to the investigator they were hunting. But the man in the gray jacket kept not doing anything. He didn't check his phone. He didn't order from the cart at the corner. He stood exactly where a person would stand if they wanted a clean line of sight into a diner window without looking like they wanted one.

"Kai."

"What."

"Don't look up right away. Guy outside in the gray jacket. Eleven minutes now."

Kai kept scrolling, unhurried, and only after a long ten seconds did his eyes flick toward the window and back.

"Yeah," he said quietly. "That's not nothing."

"Could be a coincidence." Judas said it more to convince himself than because he believed it.

"Could be." Kai closed the laptop, slow, casual. "I'd rather not test that theory sitting in a booth with one exit."

They left through the kitchen, which the owner allowed without comment after Kai pressed two folded bills into his hand. The alley behind the diner smelled of old grease and wet cardboard, narrow enough that they had to walk single file past a row of dumpsters.

Judas heard the footsteps before he saw anyone. Fast, controlled, moving with a purpose that had stopped pretending to be casual.

"Move," Kai said, and they ran.

Judas had never run for his life before. The real thing was ugly. His lungs burned faster than made sense. His shoes slid on wet pavement and nearly put him on the ground before he caught himself against a chain-link fence hard enough to feel it in his shoulder for a week.

Behind them, the man in the gray jacket had been joined by a second man, both moving with the same flat, efficient urgency, neither shouting, neither drawing attention. The silence meant professionals, people who understood that noise brought witnesses.

"Left," Kai gasped, and Judas turned without asking why.

The turn dumped them into a narrow service corridor, and for one terrible second Judas thought they'd run themselves into a dead end, before he saw a gate at the far side, half open. They hit it together and came out into a parking structure Judas hadn't known existed.

"Up or down," Kai said, chest heaving.

"Up. Down's a dead end if they cut us off at street level."

They took the stairs two at a time. For exactly one flight, Judas allowed himself to believe they might lose whoever was chasing them. Then a door below banged open, and new footsteps joined their own.

The second level opened onto a glass walkway connecting to an adjacent building, and Judas cut toward the glass instead of continuing up.

"Judas, that's not—"

"Trust me."

Kai followed anyway, and the corridor spat them out into the lobby of an aging office building, a security guard behind a desk looking up at two sprinting men with weary disinterest.

"Fire exit," Judas said, already moving toward it.

They came out into an alley on the opposite side of the block. Judas allowed himself to slow, hands on his knees, dragging air into lungs that felt scraped raw.

"Are they still—"

"I don't know," Kai said, equally winded, glancing back. "I don't hear them. That doesn't mean anything. Keep moving."

They kept moving, walking now, forcing themselves into the unhurried posture of people who belonged exactly where they were, scanning every parked car, every doorway, with a new and exhausting vigilance.

They ended up in a laundromat four blocks away, chosen for no reason beyond it being open and offering a clear view of the street. Judas sat on a plastic chair bolted to the floor, hands shaking in a way he hadn't noticed until he tried to hold still, and watched Kai pace between two rows of washing machines.

"They knew where we'd be," Judas said, once he trusted his voice again. "That diner. We picked it specifically because neither of us had been there before. How did they know."

Kai stopped pacing. "Grace," he said quietly.

"What about her."

"We visited her two days ago. If Apex has been keeping tabs on people connected to investigators who've caused them trouble, and Grace used to run in exactly those circles, they might have already had eyes on her before we ever knocked on her door." He rubbed both hands over his face. "We might have led them straight to the one lead we actually had."

Judas felt something cold settle in his stomach, worse than the fear of the chase itself, thinking of her houseplants, a woman who'd built a quiet life after decades of dangerous work.

"We need to warn her." Judas was already reaching for his phone before Kai's hand closed over his wrist to stop him.

"We need to be very careful how we do it. If they're watching her, a call from either of us confirms exactly what they probably already suspect."

They sat with that for a long moment, the hum of dryers filling a silence neither of them wanted to break first.

"This isn't about a parks contract anymore, and it isn't just about a hack either," Judas said finally. "Somewhere in that building's records is proof they knew a drug was killing people and buried it anyway. That's not a story that gets people fired. That's a story that gets people disappeared, quietly, the way they tried to disappear us tonight."

"I know." Kai's voice had gone flat. "I keep thinking about the families. Whoever's on the other end of those settlements they've been paying out. People who lost someone and got a check and a gag order instead of an answer." He sat down heavily on top of a washing machine. "I used to think about this job as a game. Find the thing nobody wants found. Feel clever about it after. I don't feel clever right now, Judas. I feel like we opened a door we don't fully understand yet, and something on the other side already knows our names."

"We're going to give them the answer."

"We're going to try," Kai said, "which right now mostly looks like two guys hiding in a laundromat because we can't outrun professionals for very much longer without help."

"We're out of time to be careful and slow," he said instead. "Grace was right. He's going to find us before we find him. We need to make sure that when he does, it's because we made ourselves easy enough to find, not because Apex got to us first."

Kai looked at him for a long moment, then, slowly, nodded.

"Then we stop hiding," he said. "And we start being loud enough that somebody who's spent a year staying invisible from this company finally has a reason to notice two idiots doing the opposite."

Judas felt something steady in his chest for the first time since the chase had started, not calm exactly, but something adjacent to it. Fear hadn't left him. It had just stopped being the only thing in the room, crowded out by something that felt, unexpectedly, closer to purpose.

Outside the laundromat window, the street had gone back to being ordinary, cars, a bus hissing to a stop, a woman walking a dog who paid them no attention at all. Somewhere out there, two men in plain jackets were reporting back to someone that a chase had failed, and somewhere above them all, someone was already deciding what came next.

He intended to make sure they didn't like the answer.