“I woke up because it was hot,” I continued. “And because I smelled smoke. I tried to get out, but the door wouldn’t open. I thought the latch was malfunctioning.”
My chest tightened as the panic resurfaced. Rios’s fingers brushed my arm, grounding without interrupting.
“It just kept getting hotter,” I said. “And I couldn’t get out.”
“You didn’t hear anything before that?” Grant asked. “Footsteps? Voices?”
I shook my head. “No. I was asleep. I didn’t know… I didn’t know I was locked in.”
Grant stopped writing, his gaze snapping to me. “Locked in?”
“So I was told.” I looked to Rios to pick up the thread of the narrative.
“Carrera, take me through it in order, will you?”
Rios gave his account without embellishment. One cop speaking to another. Fire already established, smell of gasoline, blocked door, chain and padlock, getting me out. Through it all, I felt the tension vibrating in Rios’s frame and watched Grant’s pen move faster as the details stacked up, his jaw tightening as the picture sharpened.
When Rios mentioned the chain, Grant looked up sharply. “Chained?”
“Yes.”
The word echoed in my head again, heavy and awful.
Grant exhaled slowly and resumed note-taking. “What happened next.”
Rios’s tone remained flat and businesslike as he walked through the rescue, but I could too easily imagine the roar of the flames, the heat he’d fought through to get to me. What he’d risked staying long enough to battle the chain, to get me out.
He’d risked his life to save mine.
The bloom of that realization left me breathless even before Grant quietly asked, “Is there anyone you can think of who might want to kill you?”
Twenty-Seven
RIOS
The question hung there like a live wire.
Who might want to kill you?
I’d known it was coming. I’d known it since the second I saw the chain on the door, since the stench of gasoline hit the back of my throat and my body chilled with certainty. But up to now I’d been focused on doing the thing right in front of me. Getting the lock off, door open. Getting Madden out. Getting her to treatment.
But there was no next right thing in this moment. No action to distract from the brutal reality she faced.
Madden didn’t answer right away.
She looked at me instead.
Not for reassurance or permission. For calibration. As if she needed a gauge of how much truth she should reveal for the sake of the case. And that said everything about where her faith in the system stood.
And where her faith in me stood.
That faith absolutely cut me off at the knees. Because it said she believed I was the good guy. That I was worthy of trust above and beyond this man who’d once meant something to her as part of a system she used to trust. She’d decided I was a touchstone. A protector.
Something tight and sharp shifted unmistakably in my chest. This was the part I couldn’t protect her from. Not with my body. Not with speed or force or adrenaline. This was the part where survival turned into consequence.
“I’m sure you’re already aware that we believe Chief Carson prematurely closed the Shah case.” Though her voice rasped, it remained steady in a way that cost her. “As I implied when we spoke at Willie Sanders’s apartment, we’ve continued looking into her disappearance.”
Something flickered over the other man’s face. Discomfort. With the way his department was being run? Hard to tell. I didn’t get the sense that he was Carson’s lackey, but I wasn’t sure where he stood.
