Page 119 of The Last Call Home
Only the car remains, disturbingly intact in the places it shouldn’t be.The doors hang open like they were flung in a hurry, or worse, ripped open without consent.Windows smashed ...why?There are marks on the road, as if something was in the middle but it’s gone.The interior light glows against the dark like an afterthought.
Cassian doesn’t say anything.His focus has narrowed into that dangerous, surgical mode he uses when he’s barely holding the threads together.He moves to the driver’s side first, his gloved hand brushing across the seat, checking for prints, for fibers, for blood.Then he drops low, scanning the floorboards with his flashlight, eyes tracking every angle with the intensity of someone who knows how little time they have left.
I circle to the passenger side, my pulse thrumming so hard I can hear it in my ears.The car smells like her perfume—faint, floral, something stubborn enough to linger even after the violence stripped everything else away.
Cass reaches between the seat and center console, his fingers brushing something wedged deep in the seam.He pulls out her phone.It’s still powered on.
“Shit,” he mutters, reaching again.
From beneath the seat, his hand wraps around something small.He lifts it to the light.
The bracelet.
Thick, silver, unmistakable.The bracelet glints under the dim light.
It’s the heirloom—the same one we talked about earlier.The one that might be linked to Desmond and his family, according to Finnegan.It has coordinates, he said, or ...something.We needed it.And now it’s here.Abandoned.
“Why would she leave it?”I mumble.“Why would she let go of something so damn important to her?”I repeat to myself, to Cassian, because someone has to make sense out of this.
“Unless she meant for us to find it?Unless it was her way of telling us, ‘I was here.I didn’t go willingly,’” he explains, as if he’s in the middle of the scene re-living every moment to make sense of it all and to find whoever took her away.
Cassian turns it over in his hand, his jaw flexing, voice low and tight.
“Like breadcrumbs,” he mutters.
Then he’s moving—already halfway out of the car, barking into his comms.“Get someone to sweep the interior for prints and fibers.Full UV, no shortcuts.We need everything.Start at the doors and work inward.”
As he moves toward the hood, I join him, each step feeling heavier than the last.My throat feels stripped raw, like my voice has been ground down by smoke and salt.
“Tell me we’ve got something,” I rasp, the words escaping from me more like a plea than a command.
Cass nods once, clipped but deliberate.“The phone was still recording.”
He turns the screen toward me.It’s cracked, battery flashing red, but still active.Cass opens the most recent file—an audio recording automatically backed up to the cloud, timestamped only an hour ago.
He hits play.
And we hear her.The screen is dark, but her voice is there.
Delilah’s voice, full of panic, fills the silence like a knife slicing open the dark.
“No—get the fuck off me!Stop!”
There’s scuffling.A grunt.The sounds of flesh knocking flesh.Someone cursing under their breath.
“You fucking bastard—” she screams, and then there’s a harsh thud like her back hitting the car door.
“Hold her down—fuck, she’s stronger than she looks.”A male voice, strained.Not local.No accent I recognize, but there’s something clipped about the cadence—professional, controlled.
“Bostonian accent,” Cassian says.
“She bit me,” another man snaps.
Good,I think.I hope she left teeth marks.I hope she drew blood.
Cassian pauses the recording.“Someone try to get some DNA out of those drops of blood.It might belong to one of the kidnappers,” he orders before pressing play again.
“Don’t bruise her.We need her alive.She’s no good to us if she’s broken.”That’s a female voice.
