Page 74 of The Vigilant

“I can explain—but first, I need to talk to Sutton.”Alone.

“No, you don’t understand?—”

Anger made my side hurt worse. “Whatever it is, Rob?—”

“It’s Mara,” Sutton interrupted, stepping forward and gripping the bottom railing on the gurney.

My eyes locked with hers, and when even Rob remained quiet to give Sutton the floor, I realized I had a new reason to worry.

“Mara was working for Robyn.”

Air hissed through my lips, the valve in my chest opening slowly as I processed the information.

“I didn’t realize you were looking for her,” Rob added. “Not until it was too late.”

My brows banded together. “You tried to call me…”

“To warn you.” She pulled out her phone and swiped to a message in an encrypted messaging app.

Protect Sutton.

“Mara had mentioned Sutton before…but when she sent this two days ago, I realized something bigger was going on. I tried to call you to warn you. I was hoping you could bring Sutton back to the garage so we could talk…”

“But they were already there,” I finished, wincing as Rorik peeled the last of the bandage away, exposing the purple-red mottled flesh, tacked together with black stitching.

“I had no idea you were looking for Mara. I would’ve told you…”

I gritted my teeth, not for the first time hating how Robyn continued to work on her own. Like a lone wolf that still belonged to a protective pack.

She thought we’d done too much. Given too much. And just like Sutton, she believed that her problems were hers alone to solve.

“How long?” I asked through gritted teeth.

“Almost a year,” she answered. “When I met her, she was on a slippery slope to a not great place. She carried a lot of guilt and anger?—”

“A lot of things you could use.”

Rob’s eyes narrowed on me like the fresh cut of a knife. “A lot of things she could better use to help herself and help others. I gave her that choice.”

I let out a breath, knowing my anger was misdirected. Rob cared about all the women she took under her wing, and Mara would’ve been no different. I just wish I would’ve fucking known that this whole time…

“Mara was working with Robyn. That was why she became Kang’s girlfriend. Why she didn’t tell me about him at first, andwhy she wouldn’t listen when I told her to leave him,” Sutton continued, clearly having heard this part of the story before.

“So, Kang was your target.”

Rob’s head tipped, and she grimaced. “Not exactly. Kang was supposed to be a stepping stone into the Wah Ching,” she explained, knotting her arms over her chest. “Over the last eighteen months or so, I’ve been getting reports in my network of girls disappearing. At first, I couldn’t really figure out the connection between them, aside from that they were all young and beautiful. They disappeared from different hotels or apartments throughout the city. They were different races. Different socioeconomic class. Some had families who reported them missing. Others didn’t. Some the police investigated, others they didn’t.”

“There had to be something linking them,” I interrupted. Otherwise she would have picked up on the string of missing women.

“It took a while for us to catch on to the pattern that they all disappeared without taking any of their things,” she replied. “It was a small discrepancy, but my team is trained to pick up on small things.”

“So, you started looking into it.”

“One of my cleaning women was sent to the Hill high-rise to clean up an apartment that had been abandoned by the tenant. When she got there and realized it was another one of these situations, we went in and did a deep clean of all the personal items, and that was when I found it—the business card for Wild Side.”

“You okay?” Rorik asked when I flinched, thinking it was because of something he did.

“Fine,” I clipped and nodded to Robyn. “The cam site. I’m familiar,” I grunted, my jaw pulsing heavy under Sutton’s steady gaze. “Continue.”

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