Page 76 of Honor ’N’ Duty

Laia looked at the other woman, noting her heaving chest and trembling lips. The man held out his hand. “Can we just go somewhere and talk about this?”

The woman sighed. “Fine.” Then she placed her hand in his. To Laia, she said, “Thank you for rushing over, but we’re fine.”

Laia cast a suspicious sideways glance at the woman’s companion. “Are you sure?”

She nodded. “Yes. Thank you.”

Laia watched the couple walk back in the direction they’d come from. They weren’t holding hands, but neither were they arguing. Just to be sure, she continued watching, not understanding how a couple could be so clearly enthralled with each other one minute then nearly coming to blows the next.

She turned and started walking back to the blanket. No matter how bad things had gotten between her and Josh, they’d never—

The temperature had to be over ninety, but Laia froze like an ice cube.

Rosa was gone. Her partially constructed sandcastle was still there, along with the beach blanket, but her daughter was nowhere in sight.

Laia’s heart raced as she spun to look at the water. Surely, she would have seen Rosa in her peripheral vision if she’d gone into the surf. No. Rosa wouldn’t have done that. Living on the Jersey shore as they had for Rosa’s entire life, they’d established hard and nonnegotiable rules about swimming that her daughter had never once disobeyed. Not once.

She ran to the blanket, her heart pounding, then turned in every direction, sucking in deep breaths, trying to curb the rising panic. “Rosa!” she cried. “Rosa!”

When she sucked in quick breaths through her nose and mouth, she vaguely registered the lingering scent of…pizza.

Footprints in the sand and leading away from the blanket toward the sand dunes caught her eye. Had they been there before? She couldn’t be sure.

She ran to the dunes, scrambling over the top, then searching the empty road. “Rosa!” Her daughter didn’t answer.

Laia climbed back over the dune to the beach and raced to the small boats stored beneath the shack. “Rosa, answer me!”

Again, she ran to the water’s edge, racing up and down the shallows, searching for her daughter’s body and praying she didn’t find her little girl face down in the water, not breathing.

Realizing this was futile, and still not really believing Rosa would have disobeyed the cardinal rule and gone swimming alone, she raced back up the beach.

By the time she reached the stairs to the shack, her body was shaking and she felt as if she was about to throw up. She took the stairs two at a time, then flung open the door to the living room. “Rosa! Answer me, please!”

Footsteps pounded down the stairs, too heavy to be Rosa’s. Jamie appeared at the bottom of the stairs, his hair dripping and a towel tied around his waist.

“Laia, what’s wrong?”

“Rosa!” she screamed, racing past Jamie and up the stairs to her daughter’s bedroom. The room was empty. “Rosa?” she cried again, searching every other room on the second floor, then returning to Rosa’s room. She turned to find Jamie had followed her.

“Laia, talk to me.”

As she stood there in the middle of Rosa’s room, gasping for air, the horrible reality slammed home. “She’s gone. Rosa is gone.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

Kade took the final turn onto Jamie’s street faster than was safe. When he hit the straightaway, he pounded his fist on the wheel.

From what Jamie had related during their brief phone conversation, the police didn’t know with any certainty that Rosa had really been kidnapped, but Kade knew. Every fiber of his being knew Fernando Colon was behind Rosa’s disappearance. Killing Josh was one thing but taking a five-year-old girl…

The man had just signed his own death warrant.

Kade cranked the wheel hard and came to a screeching stop in the driveway. Two Manasquan PD cars were parked on the street outside the shack. He hit the remote on his belt, popping open Smoke’s door and not bothering to leash him. With Smoke leading the way, he raced to the door and flung it open.

In the living room, Laia ran to him, flinging herself into his arms. “Kade, she’s gone,” she said between sobs. “She’s just…gone.”

Every sob was a knife strike to his heart. “We’ll find her. I promise.”

“I don’t know what h-happened,” she muttered against his chest. “One minute she was there and the next…” Her voice drifted off, ending with more gut-wrenching sobs.