Chapter 31 #2
Madden’s throat worked. She swallowed hard, eyes flicking back to the dark TV screen as if she was checking whether Gwen was still there.
Bree’s voice came small. “I’m sorry.”
Madden looked at her, and something in her expression shifted—not softened, exactly, but redirected.
Bree hadn’t owed her anything. Bree hadn’t been part of Gwen’s life as a kid.
Bree had come into all of this later and still had been the one to watch a fifteen-year-old girl on a grainy screen and carry that horror forward.
Ford’s arm tightened around Bree’s shoulders. “We should’ve asked. We should’ve checked.”
Madden’s gaze returned to me.
There it was again. That direct line between us that felt like a wire pulled taut. She didn’t just want an apology. She wanted the truth of what it meant.
“What am I supposed to do with that?” Her voice finally cracked around the words. “What am I supposed to do with that, Rios?”
I could’ve answered as a man. I could’ve answered as someone who wanted to pull her into my arms and tell her we’d fix it, we’d burn the world down if we had to.
But she didn’t need romance in that moment. She needed competence. So I answered as the thing I was trained to be. “We figure out what it changes. And what it doesn’t.”
Her eyes narrowed again. “It changes everything.”
“It changes what we can say out loud,” I agreed.
“It changes the shape of Gwen’s disappearance.
It changes what was done to her and why.
But it doesn’t give us a location. It doesn’t give us a name.
And it doesn’t give us anything we can take to a courtroom without blowing up the person who handed you those files. ”
Daniel shifted, voice low. “And it doesn’t tell us where Priya is.”
Madden’s shoulders went rigid. For a second, I thought she might lash out again.
Then her face tightened like she’d bitten down on something sharp.
“Carson has had this video for a year. Both of them. One spoke to motive and was made a part of public record during my cousin’s trial.
The other would have been a procedural nightmare and added nothing from a prosecutorial standpoint, so it seems they buried it.
He buried it. Maybe not at first, but at the end of the day, it was just like all the others. ”
Willa and Gabi both straightened. “Others?”
Ignoring them, I kept my focus on Madden. “Seems like it. Yeah.”
Madden scrubbed both hands down her face. “Fifteen. She was fucking fifteen years old, and she was part of this.”
Her skin had gone gray with grief and horror, and when they opened, those hazel eyes were shattered.
The dog crossed over and leaned his big bulk against her with a little whine. She folded over his back, wrapping around those beefy shoulders and pressing her face into his neck.
No one said a word. What could we say after what she’d just seen? We’d all had our own emotional responses to seeing the footage. It didn’t improve with repetition. The only real answer we had was that something truly horrible had befallen someone we’d all cared about.
Eventually Madden straightened, shoulders squaring, chin lifting.
I recognized the shift. This wasn’t the Madden who’d asked what she was supposed to do with it.
This was the Madden who built cases and made arguments and refused to let emotion be the only thing driving the room. “What do we do now?”
It was the only thing that fundamentally mattered, and I didn’t have a good answer.
“We thought—we’d hoped—Carson would be looking into all this,” Willa said.
“Should have known better,” Gabi muttered darkly.
Ford’s voice was a little ragged. “If he’s not gonna act, we take the copy to someone else.”
“Who?” Madden demanded. “The State Bureau of Investigation? The feds?” Her eyes cut to me. “Do you have any sense of what would actually happen if we took this off the island?”
I did. I had too much sense of it. “If you hand over copies of evidence that was part of a case file without going through the department, you risk compromising the chain of custody. You risk whoever currently has the authority using that as an excuse to discredit it. And you risk Grant’s job if anyone traces how you got what you got. ”
Madden’s mouth tightened. “So we sit on it.”
“We don’t sit on it.” That word hit too close to what Carson had done for two decades. “We decide what we can do without getting someone else burned.”
Sawyer exhaled, frustrated. “We’re back to the same place.”
Willa’s voice stayed steady. “Not exactly. Now Madden knows. That matters.”
Madden’s gaze dropped. For a second, the steel slipped and something raw showed through. “It matters that I didn’t know.”
It was an accusation and a confession all at once.
I shifted closer. “I’m sorry.”
Her eyes lifted to mine. She didn’t soften. She didn’t accept it. Not yet. But she heard it.
Gabi swallowed. “We didn’t do it to hurt you.”
Madden looked at my sister again, and this time the edge in her expression eased a fraction. “I get that.” The words sounded like effort. “I’m not—” She cut herself off, jaw tight. “I don’t know what I am right now.”
Fair.
Gabi leaned back, wiping at her eyes with the heel of her hand like she was angry her body was betraying her. “What it means is Gwen didn’t vanish into the ocean. Someone took her.”
“And they filmed it,” Madden said, voice flat.
“And they sent it,” Daniel added. “At some point.”
Ford’s shoulders tightened. “It was on that flash drive with the other file. The guy who was blackmailing Miles kept it.”
Madden’s eyes turned distant for a beat, brain already moving. “So it survived thirteen years in someone’s possession.”
“Yeah,” I said.
Her gaze sharpened again. “Which means people protected it.”
Or used it. Or traded it. Or kept it as leverage the way they’d kept Miles as leverage. The implications branched out fast enough my head hurt.
Madden looked down at her hands like she couldn’t make sense of them. “And none of this helps Priya.”
It wasn’t a question. It was a verdict.
Willa leaned forward again. “We don’t know that.”
Madden’s laugh was short and humorless. “We don’t even know where Priya’s phone was beyond a last ping at the ferry terminal. We don’t have a location. We don’t have a suspect. We don’t have anything we can legally force.”
Sawyer’s jaw tightened. “We have eyes. We have instincts.”
“Instincts don’t get her back,” Madden said.
I watched her face as she said it. It wasn’t just frustration. It was fear. Fear with teeth.
Because now she’d seen Gwen on that screen, and she could finally name the thing she’d been circling around since the beginning. This island didn’t just lose women. This island fed them into something that moved through the water and out of reach.
Madden’s chest rose and fell fast. She pressed a hand flat to her sternum like she was trying to steady her own breathing.
Though every cell in me wanted to hold her, to offer comfort, I didn’t reach for her. Not in front of everyone. Not with the room already watching her bleed.
A phone began to ring. Madden jolted, pulling hers from her pocket.
We’d picked up a replacement at the general store earlier in the day, but I didn’t think she’d done anything to set it up other than having her number ported over.
One glance at the screen and her already gray face chilled.
She rose to her feet, stroking one hand along the dog’s back. “I… have to take this.”
She was already stepping into the hall when I heard her stiff, “Hello?”
Everything broke up quickly after that. Dark had already fallen, and everyone had work tomorrow. There was nothing more to be done tonight except figuring out a way to get Madden to let me back in.