My pulse picked up.
I didn’t like the way Madden’s fingers brushed mine—only once—like she needed the reminder that I was there. For the first time all night, I wished she wasn’t here. Wished I was on my own to follow this guy and satisfy the niggle in my gut. But she was here, and we couldn’t risk losing him on the slim possibility my gut was right.
I gave her a brief squeeze back and angled us into deeper shadow as we followed the man from the bar.
Thirty-Four
MADDEN
I crept beside Rios, nerves wound tight as we followed the man from the bar a couple miles from the marina. The shack squatted at the end of a rough lane that had never been properly paved and had been patched so many times after storms it looked like a scar map. Pines and scrub crowded the edges. The marsh pressed in, thick and alive, and the ground still held the day’s heat in a damp, stubborn way that made sweat cling instead of evaporate.
The building itself looked like it had lost a fight with weather and kept showing up anyway. One side had been repaired with mismatched boards. One corner of the roofline dipped slightly, like it had shrugged off a hurricane and never fully recovered. Old storm debris still littered the periphery—broken pallets, a warped sheet of corrugated metal, a length of rope bleached nearly white. It was the sort of building that could’ve been used for a multitude of purposes over the decades. It was obvious no one came here for routine anything anymore. If anyone used it at all, they used it the way people used old outbuildings: overflow storage. A place you stuck things you didn’t want to throw away but didn’t need right now. A place no one visited unless they had a reason.
What reason would a man have to come here in the middle of the night?
No good one.
Rios and I crouched behind a tangle of stacked fish totes and crab pot frames half swallowed by weeds, our bodies angled toward the side door. He’d guided us here without a word, moving with quiet certainty across short distances that seemed longer in the dark because I couldn’t see what I might trip over. The island didn’t sprawl the way mainlanders thought places sprawled. Everything here sat within reach. That didn’t make it safe. It just made it tighter. Harder to disappear without someone noticing—unless you knew exactly where people didn’t look.
The air wrapped around us like a wet blanket. Mosquitoes whined near my ear. I resisted the urge to swat. Any sudden movement seemed loud, and though Rios hadn’t said a word about what we were doing, I understood the need for silence.
The man from the bar crossed to the door without hesitation and unlocked it, slipping inside and pulling it closed behind him.
I exhaled a slow breath and leaned toward Rios, mouth close to his ear. “Okay, tell me what we’re doing.”
He kept his focus on the shack like an enemy combatant, but he leaned close enough that the warmth of his breath brushed my ear as he murmured, “At the bar, I heard his buddies running their mouths. About Priya. About pool. About her cleaning him out more than once.”
I tried to keep my voice level. “That doesn’t exactly scream motive for kidnapping.”
“Not by itself.”
“What am I missing?” Because we wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t missed something.
He shifted slightly, the smallest movement of his shoulders. “The way he reacted wasn’t normal.”
I glanced at the door again. The shack stayed silent.
“What does ‘not normal’ mean?” My brain didn’t like vagueness. It wanted evidence. Names. Timelines.
Rios finally turned his head a fraction, enough that his mouth brushed the shell of my ear when he spoke. “He didn’t laugh. He didn’t play it off. He shut it down hard. Too hard. And when they teased him, he didn’t get pissed the way guys do when they’re being ribbed. Like he was afraid of saying the wrong thing. Maybe keeping a lid on something.”
A chill threaded through me despite the heat.
I looked at the shack again, and my mind tried to shove the two images together—the broad, terrifying pattern I’d been building for hours, and this intimate, ugly, almost prosaic motive Rios was describing. A guy spurned. Or at the very least embarrassed by a woman.
I wanted to ask if that was enough. But I’d been a prosecutor. For some men, it was.
“You think he took her?”
Rios didn’t answer quickly. That pause did more to spike my pulse than any dramatic declaration might have.
“I don’t know. I don’t think it’s likely. But if I’m wrong and we walk away, I don’t get to take that back.”
There it was. The responsibility that was the bedrock of who he was. The reason he was the hero and not the villain he’d been painted as for years.
My mouth felt dry. “Okay. Then we wait.”
Time stretched until my legs ached from crouching. Sweat dampened the back of my neck and the hollow between my shoulders. The mosquitoes grew bolder. The marsh made its own noises—frogs, insects, the occasional soft splash that might’ve been a fish or something bigger. There was no other habited structure in sight from here, but faint sounds reminded us both that people weren’t all that far away. An engine started and died. A door slammed. A dog barked once and quieted.
