And shewasinvolved.
Like it or not, they were bound by a common goal—unraveling Rosa’s secrets.
“What about the evidence?” she asked once they were seated in the vehicle.
“What about it?”
“Did you get Rosa’s things?”
His nod was curt as he started the engine and rolled into the river of evening traffic. “I got them.”
“Let me see!” She could hardly contain her excitement. He reached inside his leather jacket and withdrew a bulging large brown envelope. She grabbed it out of his hands and broke the seal. “Have you looked inside?”
“Not yet. After I snatched it, I was too busy wondering if I’d have to save a certain Atlantean’s reckless ass.”
Sia smirked. “Fine ass, you mean.”
He nearly choked, swiveling a confused frown on her. “What?”
“Isn’t that what you said last night outside the shelter? I believe you said I had a fine ass.”
He scowled, but words seemed to fail him. Sia shrugged, pretending she wasn’t taking far too much satisfaction in his flustered reaction. She opened the envelope and reached inside.
“There’s not much in here.” She carefully spilled the contents into her lap. Rosa’s wallet, which contained only a handful of euros and her ID. Her phone. A gold locket on a delicate, broken chain. “I never saw Rosa without this necklace on. It must’ve fallen off when that bloodsucking monster strangled her.”
Trygg glanced at her as they approached a red traffic light. “What about the phone? Power it up. Let’s see who she’s been talking to recently.”
Sia tried, then shook her head. “It’s asking for a passcode.”
He didn’t touch the device, but a small vibration buzzed her fingertips. “Try it now.”
“Showing off, vampire?”
He smirked. “You’ll know when I am.”
The phone lit up in her hands, unveiling the home screen and a photo of Rosa holding Angelina in her arms on a bright, sunny day. The baby was wrapped in a pink blanket, and Rosa’s expression was one of pure happiness, captured in the midst of a joyful laugh. Sia traced her finger around the mother and child, her heart squeezing with sadness.
“What do you want me to search for?” she murmured.
“Phone calls, messages. Anyone she communicated with on a regular basis, but also any anomalies. Even a one-off phone number or text could be the lead that will bring us closer to her connection to Santino.”
As Sia scrolled through weeks and months of incoming and outgoing calls in the phone’s history, she thought back to the photo of Rosa and her baby. “You don’t suppose she was involved with him, do you? Santino and Rosa. Could they have been lovers?”
Trygg chuckled as he turned the SUV onto the street where the shelter was located. “Highly doubtful.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because Roberto Santino prefers men in his bed. The younger the better. He’s even paid for boys when it suits him, according to our intel on the sick fuck.”
A brutal edge crept into Trygg’s rough voice as he relayed that last bit of information. He’d made it no secret that he despised the criminal for his proliferation of Red Dragon and other drugs, but this charge against Santino seemed to resonate someplace deeper in Trygg.
Sia wanted to ask him about it. She wanted to know so much where he was concerned.
But Trygg lived behind steep walls. She was seeing that for the first time tonight. Where before, after she had first arrived from the colony, she had dismissed him as a menacing brute. With his forbidding looks and surly attitude, she had been only too happy to avoid his dark glares and off-putting silence.
Now it just made her want to know more.
As an Atlantean elder, one who had spent all of her long life safely cocooned behind the veil that shielded her kind from violence and bloodshed, the idea that she might be intrigued by one of the Breed—and a warrior besides—would have been laughable. That she could actually be attracted to one of them? Well, that would have been beyond horrifying.
