I swallowed hard. “And if she did escape someone inside, that means there’s a good chance of a prior first encounter. Either that night or some other time. He followed her out. Which means this wasn’t impulsive. He was already targeting her.”
Rios’s expression darkened in a way that made my pulse jump—not fear, but recognition. He’d seen predators. He knew how they behaved.
“Whoever it was,” he said, “he didn’t pick that alley by accident. And he didn’t pick her by accident either.”
The logic landed like a stone in my stomach.
If the woman Willie saw was Priya, then she’d been scared enough, pressured enough, threatened enough to flee out a bar’s back exit.
Which meant she’d already been unsafe inside before the attack even happened.
And if it wasn’t Priya… then someone else on this island had been hunted, and nobody had noticed.
The thought nauseated me.
Rios turned back toward the main street. “Come on. There’s nothing else to see here.”
He was right. The alley had shown us all it was going to.
Unfortunately, some of what it showed, I didn’t want to see.
It was too easy—far too easy—to picture Gwen in a place like this. To imagine a moment where she’d stepped away from the bonfire, just for a breath, never imagining someone had followed.
My eyes burned.
We stepped back into the sunlight and walked toward the parking lot. The quiet between us this time was a shared weight instead of a strain.
I tugged open the passenger door of his truck and slid inside. “Okay, the next logical step is verifying whether that email really came from Priya.”
“Yeah,” he said. “We need metadata. IP logs. The works.”
“Which requires a warrant,” I reminded him. “A warrant neither of us can get. I don’t have standing. You’re not law enforcement anymore.”
A beat of silence.
Then, softly: “There are… other ways.”
I looked at him sharply. “Do I want to know?”
He shook his head once. “Probably not. But I can take care of it.”
A twinge of discomfort flickered up my spine. “Carrera?—”
“You want to do this by the book,” he said. “I get that. I respect it. But we don’t have access to the book anymore. If we want to find her before something worse happens, we do what we can with what we have.”
He wasn’t wrong.
And the ends did justify the means. This time.
“Fine,” I said. “Just… be careful.”
One corner of his mouth lifted. “Always am.”
“Good. Because while you’re doing whatever it is you’re not telling me about, I have another angle to work.”
He frowned. “Which is?”
“What if Priya isn’t the first?” I asked. “I don’t mean Gwen. I mean other disappearances. People who went missing and got written off as tourists who wandered off, or left the island, or whatever benign explanation Carson preferred.”
