Sienna at a restaurant.
Sienna outside her building.
Sienna walking beside me from some distance.
Then a still from Ava’s pop-up with my hand on Ava’s stomach.
That one made my jaw tighten before I could stop it.
Mallory caught it too.
“Interesting,” she said softly.
I looked back up at her. “What is?”
“You went from one woman to another awfully fast.”
I stared at her.
“Was Sienna in the way?”
That almost made me laugh because I could hear how badly she wanted me to be emotional enough to say something stupid.
Instead, I said, “You seem too interested in my dick.”
That didn’t throw her off, but it did irritate her. “What I’m interested in is whether Sienna found out something that made her a liability for you.”
I shrugged. “She wasn’t a liability for me.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Then where is she?”
I leaned back again and let silence answer for me.
Mallory kept trying different angles after that. She brought up Langford, the attack at the pop-up and asked if violence followed me.
I gave her nothing.
After a while, even she got tired of hearing her own questions hit a wall.
She closed the folder and looked at me with the kind of calm that usually meant this wasn’t over. Just delayed.
“You’re not smarter than grief, Tariq.”
“What the fuck that mean?”
“It means fathers like Langford don’t let go. And the bigger this gets in his head, the messier it’s going to get for everybody around it.”
She stood after that and gave the detectives some signal through the glass.
A few minutes later, they let me walk.
When I stepped back outside into the cold, I stood there for a second with my hands in my pockets and my anger boiling.
The bigger danger wasn’t just law enforcement. Law enforcement still needed proof, a body, and something more concrete than instinct and grief to bring me down.
