Madden’s attention swung to her, the accusation sharp enough to draw blood. “How could you not know?”
Willa didn’t flinch. “Because you left. Because you built a whole life away from here. We thought you’d already made your choices about what you could handle. And we didn’t have any idea what the authorities might have told your family.”
Madden’s throat worked. She swallowed hard, eyes flicking back to the dark TV screen as if she was checking whether Gwen was still there.
Bree’s voice came small. “I’m sorry.”
Madden looked at her, and something in her expression shifted—not softened, exactly, but redirected. Bree hadn’t owed her anything. Bree hadn’t been part of Gwen’s life as a kid. Bree had come into all of this later and still had been the one to watch a fifteen-year-old girl on a grainy screen and carry that horror forward.
Ford’s arm tightened around Bree’s shoulders. “We should’ve asked. We should’ve checked.”
Madden’s gaze returned to me.
There it was again. That direct line between us that felt like a wire pulled taut. She didn’t just want an apology. She wanted the truth of what it meant.
“What am I supposed to do with that?” Her voice finally cracked around the words. “What am I supposed to do with that, Rios?”
I could’ve answered as a man. I could’ve answered as someone who wanted to pull her into my arms and tell her we’d fix it, we’d burn the world down if we had to.
But she didn’t need romance in that moment. She needed competence. So I answered as the thing I was trained to be. “We figure out what it changes. And what it doesn’t.”
Her eyes narrowed again. “It changes everything.”
“It changes what we can say out loud,” I agreed. “It changes the shape of Gwen’s disappearance. It changes what was done to her and why. But it doesn’t give us a location. It doesn’t give us a name. And it doesn’t give us anything we can take to a courtroom without blowing up the person who handed you those files.”
Daniel shifted, voice low. “And it doesn’t tell us where Priya is.”
Madden’s shoulders went rigid. For a second, I thought she might lash out again. Then her face tightened like she’d bitten down on something sharp. “Carson has had this video for a year. Both of them. One spoke to motive and was made a part of public record during my cousin’s trial. The other would have been a procedural nightmare and added nothing from a prosecutorial standpoint, so it seems they buried it. He buried it. Maybe not at first, but at the end of the day, it was just like all the others.”
Willa and Gabi both straightened. “Others?”
Ignoring them, I kept my focus on Madden. “Seems like it. Yeah.”
Madden scrubbed both hands down her face. “Fifteen. She was fucking fifteen years old, and she was part of this.”
Her skin had gone gray with grief and horror, and when they opened, those hazel eyes were shattered.
The dog crossed over and leaned his big bulk against her with a little whine. She folded over his back, wrapping around those beefy shoulders and pressing her face into his neck.
No one said a word. What could we say after what she’d just seen? We’d all had our own emotional responses to seeing the footage. It didn’t improve with repetition. The only real answer we had was that something truly horrible had befallen someone we’d all cared about.
Eventually Madden straightened, shoulders squaring, chin lifting. I recognized the shift. This wasn’t the Madden who’d asked what she was supposed to do with it. This was the Madden who built cases and made arguments and refused to let emotion be the only thing driving the room. “What do we do now?”
It was the only thing that fundamentally mattered, and I didn’t have a good answer.
“We thought—we’d hoped—Carson would be looking into all this,” Willa said.
“Should have known better,” Gabi muttered darkly.
Ford’s voice was a little ragged. “If he’s not gonna act, we take the copy to someone else.”
“Who?” Madden demanded. “The State Bureau of Investigation? The feds?” Her eyes cut to me. “Do you have any sense of what would actually happen if we took this off the island?”
I did. I had too much sense of it. “If you hand over copies of evidence that was part of a case file without going through the department, you risk compromising the chain of custody. You risk whoever currently has the authority using that as an excuse to discredit it. And you risk Grant’s job if anyone traces how you got what you got.”
Madden’s mouth tightened. “So we sit on it.”
“We don’t sit on it.” That word hit too close to what Carson had done for two decades. “We decide what we can do without getting someone else burned.”
