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“Suzanne said she left at around three-twenty yesterday. She hasn’t seen her since.”
“I’ll pull all the resources I have,” he says. In the background, I can hear him mumbling commands and giving directions.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t.”
“I-”
“I’m doing this for Catherine,” he says.
I close my eyes against my rising panic. “We’re on our way to Rampart Police Station to see if we can give them any more information, but…We don’t know much since...”I fired her. I can’t give life to the words. But the guilt inside of me is blood-fueled, traveling throughout my body and numbing all my limbs.
“I’ll meet you there.”
“No, th-”
“Fifteen minutes, Toni.” And then he hangs up on me.
Moving my phone away from my ear, I stare at it in my palm, dumbfounded. There’s a flicker of annoyance riding just beneath my skin. He’s sopushy.
And, yet, underneath the annoyance, I am deeply relieved too. Despite our differences, Drakos is the only person I’ve ever met who’s better at managing people than me. And now, when I’ve fucked everything to hell and back, he’s the only person I know who can fix it. And I need him. I need him to fix everything.
He’s resourceful. And, even though he can barely stand to be in the same room as me, I know that he wouldnever let anything happen to Catherine. Heknows. Other than Lizzie and me, he is the only one who knows the truth about what happened.
By the time we get to Rampart Station, Drakos is waiting for us outside. He’s leaning against a matte-grayMcLaren, wearing a three-piece suit in navy blue and brown monk strap shoes. His signature diamond cufflinks wink at me as he uncrosses his arms and walks towards us.
“Good Lord,” Lyla whispers, “I always forget how smoking hot he is.”
I snort. Watching him approach is like eyeing a lion as it stalks towards you. Drakos, with his six-one frame, golden hair, and blue eyes, cuts a lethal image. He’s the type of man that women preen and gush around, humiliating themselves in the hope that he’ll look their way.
“Toni.” He greets me with a small dip of his head and cold blue eyes before turning to Lyla and Jules. “Ladies.”
They smile and mumble greetings, both of them uncharacteristically shy under his smothering aura.
Edging past him, I make for the front doors of the station without replying. The girls follow and, while I can’t see Drakos behind me, I know that he is coming too. I can feel him at my back.
Inside the station, everything is calm. At the front desk, a middle-aged woman clacks on the computer in front of her. Two men and a younger girl sit in the chairs, waiting for who knows what. In the corner, two cops, a male and a female, laugh over some shared joke. And it makes me angry. It seems so wrong that the world should go on when Catherine is missing. There’s a warrior inside of me and she wants to scream, “Why aren’t you all out looking for her!”
When I feel the heavy hand on the middle of my back, I come to. Realizing that I’ve been standing in the middle of the reception like an idiot, my body tense, my eyes boring holes into all of the cops, I force myself to relax and step out of Drakos’s reach.
“Ms. Rupetta.” The pretty detective who is always with Aiden—Sade, I remember—approaches our group from a door to the left. “Aiden said you would be coming.” Changing direction, she indicates for us to follow. “Right this way.”
We trail behind her, back towards the interview rooms that we originally interviewed in after Lizzie’s death. Strange, it wasn’t even a month ago, yet time has passed, making it seem like so much longer. Even my grief has shifted, changing from a raw, ugly pain to a hard, vengeful anger.
“Has he found anything?” I ask Sade.
She opens the door to the room and waits for us to shuffle in before replying. “Her car was impounded last night for being illegally parked on Los Angeles Street.”
“Los Angeles Street?” I shake my head. “She left from Vernon. She would never have tracked back through Downtown. She would have gotten straight on the freeway.”
“Exactly. But whoever took her made a mistake. Downtown has the largest percentage of private and public security cameras in LA. We have boys on the adjacent streets already, knocking on business doors to see if they can find anything.” She waves to the chairs around the table. “Please sit. Aiden will be in-”
Her words are cut off by Aiden himself. He comes into the room like a force to be reckoned with. His eyes are bright and focused. His jaw is firmly set. He looks like a man with everything on the line, a man fighting time.
“Thank you for coming down.” He sits, forcing me to sit too while the others remain standing. He doesn’t wait. He doesn’t try to put us at ease like he did the first time. He just barrels on with, “We’re trying to figure out which direction she went in once she exited the vehicle. Right now, I need you to tell me everything you know about Sascha Sokolov.”
My heart lurches in my chest. “You think he has her?”
