Page 4 of Carrick
And if Quinn was dragging another woman into our circle, that meant one thing: Bellamy Cross wouldn’t be gone in a day or two. Hell, she might not be gone in a month.
I sighed and leaned against the guest room doorframe, staring at the empty bed like it might give me answers. Still, maybe now that I was home, we could finally get ahead of this thing. Find the leak. Shut down the pipeline that kept these Dom Krovi fucks one step ahead of KCPD. I didn’t care what red tape I had to cut through, or what backdoor favors Quinn had to call in. I’d help. Whatever it took to get these women out of my home.
Fuck what the rest of the department said. They weren’t the ones hauling broken people out of the fire. They weren’t the ones holding the line when it all went to shit.
I didn’t care who Bellamy was. As long as she didn’t scream, didn’t sob, and didn’t try to make this place feel like a group therapy session, we’d be just fine.
One week. Maybe two.
Hopefully.
2
Bellamy
YOU’REON THE HOOK NOW.
Five words. Jagged. Smudged. Ink bleeding through cheap, rain-soaked paper. They’d been burned into my brain the moment I read them, echoing louder than the voice in my head telling me to run, to hide, to get away. Louder than the scream I hadn’t let out. Louder than the sound of my brother’s severed finger thudding against the wood of my kitchen table.
Even now, in this too-bright room, with its humming fluorescent lights and lemon-scented floor cleaner that made my stomach churn, those words rang in my ears, over and over again.
YOU’RE ON THE HOOK NOW.
The air was stale and cold, and I could taste the metallic tang of nerves on the back of my tongue. A clock somewhere ticked too loudly, syncing to the beat of my pulse. My palms stuck to the arms of the plastic chair; the surface was too smooth, too unnatural. Everything about this room was wrong—it was too clean, too quiet, and too detached from the reality I’d entered into only hours before.
I didn’t really even remember driving to the police station. Ibarelyremembered unlocking the front door of my apartmentas I ran to my car. The entire evening had become one big, panicked, hopeless blur after I’d opened that package.
The package. It had been sitting there, right on my kitchen counter. Someone had broken intomy apartment, and left a manila envelope with a piece of paper folded up and taped to it. The blood had drained from my face as I tore the paper open. The smell. That unmistakable copper scent, sharp and sticky, color already leaking through the edges of the envelope. My brain had gone silent. No panic, no scream. Just a single, all-consuming awareness:
Rayden.
I hadn’t screamed. I hadn’t cried. I had shut down.
Now I was floating above myself, watching this hollow version of me sitting at an empty table. My hands were clasped tight enough that my knuckles ached. My heart thundered in my chest like it might rip free, but my breathing was shallow and deliberate. I couldn’t afford to fall apart.
If I unraveled now, there’d be nothing left to pull back together later.
I wanted to run. Not for safety. Not for survival. I wanted to tear through the streets, find the men who did this, and make them pay. Make them give me back my brother. But I didn’t know where he was. If he was alive. Or if he still had nine fingers.
The thought sent another jolt of nausea through me. I pressed my palms into the edge of the table and focused on the sharpness, the pain. Anything to keep me grounded.
The door creaked open.
Detective Mercado stepped inside. His face looked harder than I remembered it looking, even moments ago—tired, lined, but alert. His dark suit was rumpled and worn at the seams, his tie loosened as if it had been strangling him all day. He shut the door with a soft click, but it felt like a gunshot in the silence.
He didn’t speak right away. He just looked at me, taking in the mess I’d become. Finally, he set a manila folder down on the table and sat across from me, hands steepled in front of himself.
“Sorry,” he said. “Took longer than I thought.”
I didn’t answer. The words were stuck in my throat.
“We think he’s alive,” he said, but his voice carried the weight of every case that hadn’t ended well. There was no comfort in the words, only a placeholder for a certainty he couldn’t give.
My head jerked up. “Youthink?” I repeated, the words catching in my throat like shards of glass. Hope was a razor’s edge—sharp enough to cut, but dull enough to fail me when I reached for it. “What good is yourthinking? I’m only interested in what youknow. The Dom Krovi hasmy fucking brother, and they’re removingfucking body parts. What do you know about that?”
“I know there’s been no chatter about a body. That matters,” he added, but the look in his eyes said not to hope too much.
A sick weight dropped into my stomach. Not knowing was worse than knowing. I wanted definitive answers. I wanted to scream and demand he tell me more. That hedomore. But I couldn’t.
