Chapter 14
Fourteen
MADDEN
We didn’t speak at first as we walked up the ramp from the Sea Breeze to the main dock.
The old boards creaked under our feet, the sun hitting that bleak hour of midday misery that made you question your life choices.
From here, Home Port sat, a simple slab of weathered gray between the pilings—not menacing, just… ordinary. Which somehow made it worse.
I kept my voice low. “So, on a scale of one to ten, how useful was that?”
Rios huffed a breath that resembled a laugh. “Five. We’ve got confirmation of an assault, a general time frame, and a rough description of both the victim and the attacker.”
“And a reminder that Carson has no idea any of this exists because nobody trusted him enough to make a report.”
“That, too.”
We reached the top of the dock. I stopped, turning to look back toward the Sea Breeze. Willie had returned to the overturned bucket, elbows braced on his knees, his head bowed like he was trying to physically hold himself together. Not exactly an ideal witness under the best of circumstances.
I continued turning the information over in my head. “How likely is it that Priya was attacked and didn’t say anything to her friends or adviser?”
Rios considered the question. “Without knowing her? Hard to say. Some women keep quiet. Or they need time. Or they don’t want to relive it. If she was the victim… yeah. Kidnapping would be a hell of an escalation.”
“Is it an escalation? Or did he simply manage to finish what he started?”
“Fair point. If it wasn’t Priya, then we’ve got at least two women of similar build and physical profile being targeted in the same area in under a week.” A muscle in his jaw ticked. “Either way, somebody’s hunting in that alley.”
I blew out a long breath. “Terrifying how easily that sentence comes out of your mouth.”
“Wish it wasn’t,” he said quietly. “But yeah.”
We started toward the parking lot. He matched my pace without comment.
“Do you think he’ll call tomorrow?” I asked.
“I think he wants to do one thing right,” Rios said. “We’ll see if that’s enough to get him there.”
I nodded. “Tomorrow, then.”
“Tomorrow.”
We walked in silence a few more steps before I said, “You want to go back inside Home Port?”
“Do you?” he countered.
I considered. The staff had been cooperative earlier. No one had hesitated; no one had seemed evasive. And after the chaos of last night’s shift, if anyone had witnessed an assault behind the building—even secondhand—they’d have mentioned it when we showed them Priya’s photo.
“I doubt we’ll get anything new,” I admitted. “If they’d heard about the mugging, they would’ve said so. And from the sound of it, Willie’s story never made it past the dockhands.”
“Agreed,” he said. “But we can take five minutes and look at the alley in daylight.”
Which made sense. Doing nothing didn’t sit well with either of us.
We cut between the buildings into the narrow stretch behind Home Port. The space smelled like sun-warmed asphalt and old beer—not exactly comforting, but not sinister either. A couple of dented dumpsters hunched against the fence, one with a lid propped open. Ordinary. Forgettable.
Except it wasn’t.
I’d looked at thousands of crime scene photos in my career—freeze-framed violence rendered into evidence. They were horrible, but they were… buffered. A degree removed. A thing you studied rather than inhabited. I’d gotten good at being objective about it in order to do my job.
But standing in the place where a woman had actually been attacked?
That felt different. And I couldn’t stop the image that flickered up, unbidden and sharp: Gwen backed against a wall just like this. Gwen fighting. Gwen losing. Not that this was what had happened to her, but it was all too easy to fall into imagining the worst with her face.
My throat tightened. I forced myself to look at the siding, at the dumpsters, at the narrow mouth of the alley. Focus on reality. On the victim still missing, not the one who’d been gone for more than a decade.
Rios dropped into that quiet, observant mode he had—the one that made him seem larger, steadier. “Somewhere here. Willie wasn’t precise, but… this general area.”
“Close quarters,” I murmured. “He wanted her trapped.”
Rios moved toward the wall, glancing back at me. An invitation, not a command. I stepped beside him. The boards were rough under my palm. I imagined a woman’s shoulder slamming against them, the scrape of old wood tearing skin. My stomach clenched.
“He had her pinned,” Rios said. “Arm across the chest.”
He lifted his forearm and braced it against the wall near my shoulder—near, not touching, not blocking. But close enough that his warmth bled into the air between us. My breath hitched.
God. Not now.
“And probably the other hand here.” He hovered it near my opposite shoulder.
The space around me contracted, the wall hard at my back, him solid in front of me.
A simulation. Nothing more.
But my body didn’t care about the logic. A pulse of traitorous awareness curled low in my belly. I hated that.
“She reacted fast,” Rios went on. “Probably instinct rather than training. Nothing about it would’ve been clean.”
He shifted to demonstrate, adjusting his stance, and in the process, his thigh brushed mine for the briefest second. It wasn’t intentional. It wasn’t sexual. It wasn’t anything.
Except my body lit up like I’d been plugged straight into a wall socket.
Absolutely humiliating that she’d decided now, with this man, was the perfect moment to wake back up again.
Thankfully oblivious to my plight, he continued, “She would’ve driven her knee up. Hard. Anywhere she could land it. Then shoved him off, probably wild and unbalanced.”
“Messy.” My voice came out a little too thin. “Desperate.”
“Exactly.”
He stepped back immediately, giving me space. Respectful. Controlled. It should’ve helped.
It didn’t.
Because the second he moved, the ghost of my own imagination filled that space again: a woman pinned, gasping, fighting. Gwen’s face flickering over a stranger’s. A decade of what-ifs pressing in like the heat.
I swallowed. “Being here is a lot different than looking at photos.”
Rios’s eyes softened, just barely. “I expect so.”
I wrapped my arms around myself for a beat, grounding. Trying not to think about Gwen. Trying not to remember the way my body had responded to him like an idiot hormonal teenager. Trying not to obsess about how much I wished any of this made sense.
We walked through the rest of the positions Willie described, but nothing else hit as hard as that first moment—me against the wall, him close enough to steal my breath.
And the worst part?
I couldn’t tell whether the grief or the attraction was more dangerous.
Probably both.
Reaching for logic as if it were the last life raft on the Titanic, I scanned the alley again. “There’s no reason for a woman to be back here alone. This isn’t a shortcut. It doesn’t lead anywhere except the dumpsters. So why was she here?”
Rios followed my line of sight. “Came out the back door to get away from someone inside, maybe.”
“Or something more benign. She stepped out to take a breath, a call, anything—and he followed her.”
“Exits are chokepoints,” Rios murmured. “Anyone watching would’ve waited for her to be alone at one.”
A chill crawled across my arms, despite the heat. “If she was ducking someone inside, you’d think a staff member would’ve remembered that.”
“Not necessarily,” he argued. “Packed bar, loud, drunk tourists. One guy bothering a girl isn’t memorable unless it escalates.”
“Or unless someone reports it,” I said. “Which she might not have done. Especially if she handled it herself.”
We both looked back toward where he’d bracketed me against the wall moments earlier. Hardwood siding, rough and splintered. A place to pin someone and swallow the struggle if no one happened to be walking past the mouth of the alley at exactly the right moment.
I swallowed hard. “And if she did escape someone inside, that means there’s a good chance of a prior first encounter. Either that night or some other time. He followed her out. Which means this wasn’t impulsive. He was already targeting her.”
Rios’s expression darkened in a way that made my pulse jump—not fear, but recognition. He’d seen predators. He knew how they behaved.
“Whoever it was,” he said, “he didn’t pick that alley by accident. And he didn’t pick her by accident either.”
The logic landed like a stone in my stomach.
If the woman Willie saw was Priya, then she’d been scared enough, pressured enough, threatened enough to flee out a bar’s back exit.
Which meant she’d already been unsafe inside before the attack even happened.
And if it wasn’t Priya… then someone else on this island had been hunted, and nobody had noticed.
The thought nauseated me.
Rios turned back toward the main street. “Come on. There’s nothing else to see here.”
He was right. The alley had shown us all it was going to.
Unfortunately, some of what it showed, I didn’t want to see.
It was too easy—far too easy—to picture Gwen in a place like this. To imagine a moment where she’d stepped away from the bonfire, just for a breath, never imagining someone had followed.
My eyes burned.
We stepped back into the sunlight and walked toward the parking lot. The quiet between us this time was a shared weight instead of a strain.
I tugged open the passenger door of his truck and slid inside. “Okay, the next logical step is verifying whether that email really came from Priya.”
“Yeah,” he said. “We need metadata. IP logs. The works.”
“Which requires a warrant,” I reminded him. “A warrant neither of us can get. I don’t have standing. You’re not law enforcement anymore.”
A beat of silence.
Then, softly: “There are… other ways.”
I looked at him sharply. “Do I want to know?”
He shook his head once. “Probably not. But I can take care of it.”
A twinge of discomfort flickered up my spine. “Carrera—”
“You want to do this by the book,” he said. “I get that. I respect it. But we don’t have access to the book anymore. If we want to find her before something worse happens, we do what we can with what we have.”
He wasn’t wrong.
And the ends did justify the means. This time.
“Fine,” I said. “Just… be careful.”
One corner of his mouth lifted. “Always am.”
“Good. Because while you’re doing whatever it is you’re not telling me about, I have another angle to work.”
He frowned. “Which is?”
“What if Priya isn’t the first?” I asked. “I don’t mean Gwen. I mean other disappearances. People who went missing and got written off as tourists who wandered off, or left the island, or whatever benign explanation Carson preferred.”
“You think there are others.” He didn’t pose it as a question.
I didn’t have quite that much confidence in my theory. “I don’t know. Maybe. Can’t hurt to check. I’m submitting a FOIA request for every missing persons report filed on this island for the last fifteen years.”
“That’s a lot of paperwork.”
“And if even one case fits a pattern…” My stomach tightened. “I’m not letting her become another unsolved file.”
He studied me for a long moment. “Carson won’t hand those over.”
“The FOIA exists for a reason,” I said. “If he stalls, that tells me something too.”
He nodded slowly. “All right. You pull on that thread. I’ll follow the digital one.”
“We update each other,” I said.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “No surprises.”
I wasn’t sure I believed that—about him or about this case. Not when every hour I spent with him was decimating everything I’d ever thought about him. Not when he was starting to feel like the one stable thing in the chaos of this island. But it was what we had.
“Tomorrow,” I said.
“Tomorrow,” he echoed.
And for the first time since we started this, it felt like we were actually moving forward.