“Now’s not the time, you fucker; tell me what you got.”
“I came to the station earlier because I wanted to talk to you and Dad about a call I got from the fire Marshall’s office this morning. They suspect arson at Dustin’s property and want me to bring him in for questioning.”
“There’s no fucking way Dustin would have purposely set the greenhouse on fire; it means too much to him and Ari.”
“That was my first thought too. I highly doubt Dustin would have plugged a space heater into a power strip and faced it toward a bank of grow light switches, causing?—”
“An electrical fire.” I finished his sentence.
“Exactly. He would know power strips aren’t designed to handle that kind of current flow, so whoever did it tried to make it look like an accident. I think there’s a bigger motive at play here.”
“Like what? You think someone is targeting her directly?”
“With her now missing under suspicious circumstances, it’s a possibility we have to explore. What if someone wants Arizona for themselves? The best way to do that is to eliminate those closest to her who could threaten their goal.”
“Jesus, fuck! When I get my hands on?—”
“I’d advise you not to finish that sentence, brother, though I understand emotions are high.”
“The thought of her out there, somewhere, hurt or worse . . .” I rubbed my palm over my chest. “We need to find her, Jaxon.”
“We will, we just have to be diligent and?—”
“Fisher, the black van we got a partial plate on was just spotted by some hikers abandoned up on Number Five,” Boden announced after he rushed into my brother’s office. “They called it in because they were concerned by the blood they saw in the back cargo area.”
I jumped out of my seat, ready to peel out of the police station, until Boden’s following words stopped me dead in my tracks.
“I’ve also got a possible photo of our suspect pulled from highway patrol cameras taken yesterday. I’m not sure if it’s linked to him or was stolen, as the name registered with the plates doesn’t match the age of the man in the photo identification in the system.”
“Let me see.”
“It’s grainy, but it’s something to go on,” he said as he handed me his phone.
My eyes widened with alarm as I zoomed in on the image, and the hairs on the back of my neck and arms stood on end.
I recognized the suspect.
I looked up at my brothers—one by blood, the other in name—as the first tear rolled down my cheek, and my body began to tremble as I was the reason my girl had been taken.
“This is all my fault.” I fell to my knees, the weight of everything crashing down on me, leaving me broken and beside myself with guilt. “It’s all my fault.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Arizona
The throbbing pain in my temple and the taste of blood in my mouth stirred my consciousness awake. I tried to fight through the brain fog, willing myself to move, but my eyelids were too heavy to open, and my limbs were numb.
Nothing made sense.
Darkness descended and took me to a place where my mind was void of understanding.
The next time I stirred awake was when a loud bang startled me from my drug-induced slumber. Faint glimmers of light crept into my sightline as my eyes threatened to roll back in my head. My head slumped to the side, too heavy for my neck to support its weight. Beneath me, dark, weathered floorboards transitioned to a rustic beige rug in an otherwise empty room.
The sound of heavy footsteps echoed through the stillness, spiking my heart rate, and yet the looming threat of danger wasn’t enough to help me remain alert long enough to find out who had taken me and why, as the drug I’d been given won another round and pulled me under.
“Time to wake up, princess,” a man’s voice urged, pulling me from yet another nap.
My thoughts were swirling in a vortex of confusion and uncertainty, while anxiety consumed me to the point I wasn’t sure what was real or a figment of my imagination. The concept of time had entirely escaped me, yet one thing was evident: night had descended since the last time I was conscious.
