Page 23 of Marked

All she could do was stare at the image. She’d failed her child. If she could crawl in a hole and die, she gladly would. But she didn’t have that luxury. Not while there was still a chance Bella was alive.

The hands on her biceps shook her, and the chair spun away from the screen, forcing her to stare at Cole’s hardened features.

He knelt in front of her, impatience etching his face, his steely eyes flashing with earnestness. “Christ, Detective. Listen to me, will ya?”

She cringed. Being addressed by her title reminded her of how far she’d strayed from her duties. “Sophia,” she said.

Confusion furrowed his brow.

She cleared away the emotion clogging her throat. “Call me Sophia.”

“Okay... Sophia. I get that you want to break down, but we don’t have that kind of time. I need to ask you some questions, and you have to hold your shit together.”

Nodding, she straightened and then grabbed the edges of the blanket he’d draped over her. He was right. A broken parent never helped matters. Her emotion wouldn’t bring Bella back any sooner and, in fact, could delay the search. “Yes. I got it.”

His fingers loosened, but he didn’t drop his hold on her arms. And for some really freaky reason, she didn’t want him to. His touch grounded her. Kept her mind from denying the harsh events that had become her world.

“Have you been to your apartment since you got the call that Bella was missing?”

“Uh, yeah,” she said, scrunching her face as she replayed the moments that had taken years off her life. “Well, I was just leaving work to head home and pack clothes for our stay in a hotel. Then—”

“Why were you going to a hotel?”

She drew her shoulders up an inch. “Because some creep broke into my apartment last night and threatened us.” She would have laughed if the situation weren’t so dire.

A hint of something glinted in his eyes. Amusement? Appreciation?

“I didn’t threaten—”

She held up her hand. “Don’t lie. You said you’d come back and ‘do something you didn’t want to do.’”

His lips parted in an almost smile, revealing even white teeth. “Yeah, well, you sure know how to push a guy to his breaking point. So you haven’t been to your apartment at all since this morning?”

“I was there with an officer shortly after the search party began. We wanted to look for signs of forced entry, and to make sure she hadn’t somehow made her way home.”

“When was that?”

She lifted a shoulder. “Probably around 5:00 p.m.”

“And nothing was amiss?”

“Exactly how we left it this morning.”

“I think we should go back and check it out,” he said. “Who knows if the perps decided to go there after.”

She nodded. It was worth another look. Not that Bella would be there, but maybe she’d missed clues. “Fine.” She gestured to the screen. “Where was this taken?”

“From the street camera outside the park. Looks like this fucker snatched her and tossed her in the back right on the street.”

Her chin quivered. “She looks so scared.”

Cole’s thumb circled her elbow. “While we’re gone, I’m going to have the system trace the van. We should be able to get a license plate and a lead on where it was headed at the very least.”

She brought her attention to his face and, for the third time since she laid eyes on Cole, something other than disgust touched her. He wasn’t warm or even kind, and his motives were definitely selfish, but his solidarity and unwavering assurance was keeping her steady. For that she was grateful. Not to mention he’d been on the case for only forty minutes or so and had already found a better lead than the police. Working with him might pay off.

She stood and let the blanket fall on the chair. He moved past her, tapped the keyboard a few times, and then straightened and went to the closet again. He returned with a large black metallic gun, which he tucked behind his back in the waistband of his pants. “Let’s go.” He flicked his shirt to cover the weapon.

Her spine prickled. “I’m going to assume you don’t have a permit for that.”

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