Chapter 34
Thirty-Four
MADDEN
I crept beside Rios, nerves wound tight as we followed the man from the bar a couple miles from the marina.
The shack squatted at the end of a rough lane that had never been properly paved and had been patched so many times after storms it looked like a scar map.
Pines and scrub crowded the edges. The marsh pressed in, thick and alive, and the ground still held the day’s heat in a damp, stubborn way that made sweat cling instead of evaporate.
The building itself looked like it had lost a fight with weather and kept showing up anyway.
One side had been repaired with mismatched boards.
One corner of the roofline dipped slightly, like it had shrugged off a hurricane and never fully recovered.
Old storm debris still littered the periphery—broken pallets, a warped sheet of corrugated metal, a length of rope bleached nearly white.
It was the sort of building that could’ve been used for a multitude of purposes over the decades.
It was obvious no one came here for routine anything anymore.
If anyone used it at all, they used it the way people used old outbuildings: overflow storage.
A place you stuck things you didn’t want to throw away but didn’t need right now.
A place no one visited unless they had a reason.
What reason would a man have to come here in the middle of the night?
No good one.
Rios and I crouched behind a tangle of stacked fish totes and crab pot frames half swallowed by weeds, our bodies angled toward the side door.
He’d guided us here without a word, moving with quiet certainty across short distances that seemed longer in the dark because I couldn’t see what I might trip over.
The island didn’t sprawl the way mainlanders thought places sprawled.
Everything here sat within reach. That didn’t make it safe.
It just made it tighter. Harder to disappear without someone noticing—unless you knew exactly where people didn’t look.
The air wrapped around us like a wet blanket. Mosquitoes whined near my ear. I resisted the urge to swat. Any sudden movement seemed loud, and though Rios hadn’t said a word about what we were doing, I understood the need for silence.
The man from the bar crossed to the door without hesitation and unlocked it, slipping inside and pulling it closed behind him.
I exhaled a slow breath and leaned toward Rios, mouth close to his ear. “Okay, tell me what we’re doing.”
He kept his focus on the shack like an enemy combatant, but he leaned close enough that the warmth of his breath brushed my ear as he murmured, “At the bar, I heard his buddies running their mouths. About Priya. About pool. About her cleaning him out more than once.”
I tried to keep my voice level. “That doesn’t exactly scream motive for kidnapping.”
“Not by itself.”
“What am I missing?” Because we wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t missed something.
He shifted slightly, the smallest movement of his shoulders. “The way he reacted wasn’t normal.”
I glanced at the door again. The shack stayed silent.
“What does ‘not normal’ mean?” My brain didn’t like vagueness. It wanted evidence. Names. Timelines.
Rios finally turned his head a fraction, enough that his mouth brushed the shell of my ear when he spoke.
“He didn’t laugh. He didn’t play it off.
He shut it down hard. Too hard. And when they teased him, he didn’t get pissed the way guys do when they’re being ribbed.
Like he was afraid of saying the wrong thing. Maybe keeping a lid on something.”
A chill threaded through me despite the heat.
I looked at the shack again, and my mind tried to shove the two images together—the broad, terrifying pattern I’d been building for hours, and this intimate, ugly, almost prosaic motive Rios was describing. A guy spurned. Or at the very least embarrassed by a woman.
I wanted to ask if that was enough. But I’d been a prosecutor. For some men, it was.
“You think he took her?”
Rios didn’t answer quickly. That pause did more to spike my pulse than any dramatic declaration might have.
“I don’t know. I don’t think it’s likely. But if I’m wrong and we walk away, I don’t get to take that back.”
There it was. The responsibility that was the bedrock of who he was. The reason he was the hero and not the villain he’d been painted as for years.
My mouth felt dry. “Okay. Then we wait.”
Time stretched until my legs ached from crouching.
Sweat dampened the back of my neck and the hollow between my shoulders.
The mosquitoes grew bolder. The marsh made its own noises—frogs, insects, the occasional soft splash that might’ve been a fish or something bigger.
There was no other habited structure in sight from here, but faint sounds reminded us both that people weren’t all that far away.
An engine started and died. A door slammed. A dog barked once and quieted.
Island sounds. Normal sounds.
Except nothing was normal.
While we sat there, my brain spun.
Priya leaving the bar. The ferry terminal. The last ping.
And then the other pieces I’d been staring at all day: women who vanished in liminal places. Boats coming and going. Seasonal clustering. The kind of infrastructure you didn’t notice until you knew to look for it.
This—one fisherman and a beat-up old building—didn’t erase that.
But it made room for an alternative: the messy human variables that threaded through bigger crimes and made them possible.
A man who knew her.
A man who’d watched her play pool and laugh and not care that he wanted her attention.
A man who couldn’t stand the idea that she belonged to herself.
I hated that my mind went there. I hated that it made a kind of horrible sense.
The door scraped open, and my body locked.
Rios’s hand lifted slightly, a silent command for stillness, though I’d already frozen. I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to.
The man stepped out alone. He locked the door, glanced around, and headed back toward the marina and the bar without turning on any exterior lights. He moved like he expected no one to be here—which meant he either felt safe…
…or he felt entitled.
I waited for Rios to signal, to move, to do something.
He watched the retreating figure until it became nothing but a smear of darkness against the night.
Then he waited—not just a few seconds, but several long, careful minutes—before finally rising from his crouch.
His movements were deliberate, practiced, the kind of patience born from military training and years of knowing that rushing could get you killed.
I followed, my knees stiff and protesting after being folded beneath me for so long.
My sneakers sank slightly into the damp sand with each step.
The closer we got to the building, the stronger the odor became—and it wasn’t the clean, sharp scent of fresh fish or the pleasant tang of salt brine that you smelled at the docks in the morning.
This was something older, more layered. Ancient salt and rot that had soaked deep into wood and metal over years, maybe decades.
The scent of a place that hadn’t been properly scrubbed or maintained in a long time, not because it was forgotten, but because no one cared enough to bother anymore.
Because it served its purpose as it was.
The door was secured with a thick padlock hanging from a heavy-duty hasp that had been bolted into the weathered boards. The lock itself looked relatively new, the metal still bright enough to catch what little moonlight filtered through the clouds. The rest of the building did not.
Rios crouched, examining the hardware for a moment before he pulled something from his pocket.
One of those multi-tool things men carried with seventy-five uses.
He flipped out one of the larger blades and went to work on the wood around the hasp—because old storm damage meant weak points, and weak points meant leverage.
He worked carefully, controlled, until the board gave with a muffled crack that sounded horrifically loud in the quiet night.
Rios caught the door before it could swing wide and bang against the interior wall. He eased it open just enough for us to slip through sideways, one at a time, bodies pressed close to minimize the gap.
The smell hit like a fist.
I clamped my mouth shut hard enough that my jaw ached as I fought the gag reflex.
Heat inside the building sat trapped and wet, thick with brine and something sourly organic that I couldn’t quite identify and didn’t want to.
I had the distinct sense that fish had rotted here over the course of years, their decay seeping into every porous surface.
Although one hot summer would be enough to bake the odor in forever.
Rios flicked on his phone flashlight. I did the same, beams slicing through the darkness to paint everything in harsh, jumping shadows.
The interior didn’t offer any additional clues to what this place might have been in its former life.
A couple of badly scarred work tables had been shoved carelessly to one side, their surfaces water-stained and warped.
I spotted a busted commercial ice machine with a stained tarp draped over it like a shroud, stacks of plastic storage totes in various states of deterioration, coils of rope in different thicknesses, and fishing nets hanging limp and tangled from rusted wall hooks like tired ghosts of better days.
A large chest freezer sat unplugged in the far corner, its lid cracked open just enough to make my skin crawl with awful possibilities—at least until I angled my light inside and saw that it was blessedly empty except for some dried brown stains I chose not to examine too closely.