“You don’t think it should have been closed?”
“They said she was a runaway,” she whispers. “That’s what it said. But she wasn’t. Everyone knew she wasn’t.”
I process, glance down at her, a dark anger rising inside of me.
“And then...” She shakes herself. “Another night. A document on the printer. Forgotten, I guess. But it wasn’t official. There was a list of names. Ages. Dates. Like some kind of schedule.”
Watching her spiral makes me want to comfort her. She flinches at first when I glide my hand up her arm, to her shoulder.
Kneading those tight muscles, I ask, “Could you tell anything else?”
“There were words I didn’t understand. Confirmed. And placement.”
Fuck. My mind is already drawing bad conclusions.
“I didn’t know what I was looking at,” she says quickly. “I told myself it was nothing. That I misunderstood. But then I started noticing things. Other cases seemingly written off too fast.”
“Men or women?”
“Both. Always young, under forty. Trevor was always gone a lot during those times, too.”
The picture she’s painting is getting more and more dangerous. This screams human trafficking.
“Did you ask Trevor about those times?”
“Not directly. But he knew.”
Cold fury tightens the muscles along my spine as I think about that monster hitting this small, vulnerable woman.
“Is that when he hit you for the first time?”
“Yes.” She presses her lips together. “But he doesn’t know what I saw at the office.”
“What exactly do you think you saw, Jade?”
When she hesitates, I loop an arm around her, pulling her close. “It’s okay. You can tell me.”
“I think...” Her voice is reedy, hard to catch. “Those people aren’t missing.”
“Fucking hell,” I rumble.
I scan the area, my pulse thumping too hard for someone who is standing still. Especially when she adds, “My guess is someone’s taking them. And I think my father is covering it up.”
CHAPTER 4
The rest of the ride carries a kind of tension I haven’t felt since I got out of the Teams.
The knife-blade of emotion I’ve found stuck in my airway for the last four hours only gets bigger, sharper every time I turn over the details in my head.
When I shift the car into park at the safe house, my hand reaches across the console that holds a small stuffed frog.
A child’s toy. Some good luck charm or soft little companion Jade carried when the rest of the world was too goddamned hard.
But I freeze.Jesus. I almost stroked my hand down her hair again.
I can’t afford to let this craving for her go unchecked.
She’s vulnerable.
