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I wished I could say she was a sight for sore eyes. At this point, she was anything but.
“Detective Moreno.” I’d given up on reminding her that my surname was Jordan, not Miller, and that Xander and I weren’t husband and wife. It hardly seemed important now. “What’s the bad news?”
I’d gotten very good at reading faces in the last forty-eight hours. Hers was an open book.
From the moment Xander told me that Melony Houghton had abducted our sons, it had only been bad news. Especially when it came from the Portersmith police force, who had been liaising with the FBI on the boys’ case.
“We’re pulling the roadblocks tonight,” she confessed. “The checkpoints haven’t turned up anything. No sightings of that motorcycle, either.” She clasped her hands together in front of her and bowed her head like she was giving a eulogy. “I’m sorry. My captain is making me—”
“It’s fine,” I cut her off. “I understand.”
And I did.
I understood that she’d tried. I understood that she’d failed us.
The entire Portersmith Police Department had.
She cleared her throat. “If we thought there was any chance that our current measures would catch Miss Houghton—”
“They were never going to,” I scoffed. “By the time you had those roadblocks set up, she was already gone.”
Moreno’s mouth opened, then closed, then opened again.
“Your husband was prompt about notifying us, Mrs. Miller, and I know every route out of town. I’ve ridden them all myself, on my own bike, twice, just to make sure. I’ve timed every path. Believe me when I say that wherever Miss Houghton took your boys, she didn’t leave this area on two wheels.” She said it with such conviction that I actually believed her.
But Detective Moreno wasn’t the only person from the Portersmith PD we’d spoken to. Her captain, Kain Booker, was a big, nasty man with a face like a sour lemon and an attitude to match. He may have been human like Moreno, but unlike Moreno, he’d been appointed to his position by Samuel Morrow himself.
If I had to guess, old loyalties died hard.
“You think she’s still here in Portersmith, then?”
“I didn’t say that.” Moreno reached across her body and rubbed her arm. “We’ve swept the area thoroughly. Our current suspicion is that she shifted and fled with the boys in her wolf form.”
“You truly believe that a wolf could carry away two one-month-old babies without detection? How do you figure the logistics of that, even? She—what? Swaddled them up with a Boba Wrap and ran off with them riding on her back?”
“That… is one of our current theories, yes,” Moreno admitted. At least she had the decency to look suitably ashamed.
She knew exactly what I thought about her department’s current theories. Half of them had been cooked up by her captain. The ones that weren’t entirely implausible were so offensive, Clinton had banned the captain from the estate.
Frankly, it was for his own safety. Captain Booker was lucky he’d made it off the premises with his face intact.
When we reported the boys as missing, Captain Booker had been the first on the scene. He’d had the audacity to suggest that Xander and I might have kidnapped our own sons, or that we’d simply misplaced them—allowed them to wander off. He’d actually asked if we might have staged Gena and Kingston’s injuries, even as Gena was loaded into an ambulance completely unconscious while the paramedics maneuvered a groaning Kingston onto a stretcher, the bandages around his ravaged leg soaked through with his blood.
Xander had wanted to pulverize the man’s face into a pulp for that. He would have, too, if Malik and Clinton hadn’t held him back. He’d always been quicker with his fists than his words, even when we were teenagers. How many bullies had he sent home crying to their mothers in that same way?
And that was before. Before we’d been threatened, targeted, held hostage, attacked. Before we’d been beaten down over and over again, with only enough time to pick ourselves back up before the next wave of beatings arrived.
Before Melony Houghton had launched herself into our lives and ripped our sons from us.
It had changed him, all of it. When his anger flared that day, I’d felt the power radiate off him, dark and powerful as a crackling storm cloud threatening to rain down wrath and ruin.
And I’d wanted to see it happen. Desperately. So desperately that I knew I should have been afraid of that desire. But in truth, it had scared me far less than it should have.
All of this had changed us both.
Regardless, Xander hadn’t trusted the Portersmith PD ever since, and that distrust extended to Detective Moreno, no matter how earnest and eager she seemed.
“Do you have any theories about how Melony gained access to the estate? Any ideas of where she might be now?” More unanswered questions, none of which the police had been any help in answering so far.
