gather the nerve to stand.
I’m too tired to move at all, and I contemplate drifting off here and now. Let him wallow in his hate and self-pity. Let him go on a wild goose chase after rumors and a ghost.
And yet, I can’t deny a prickle of curiosity strong enough to make me peel my eyes open again.
“Do you even know?”
“I know,” he says with a certainty that irritates my already frazzled nerves. He’s not lying—and I hate that. It gives him some tiny semblance of a right to hate my family all this time. If my father really did kill Pia, he would deserve far worse than a car crash.
But what about me?
I’m guilty too, I decide, shying from those memories. Anything that happened to her would be squarely my fault.
“If he… She’ll be in Terra Rodea,” I say, voicing my fragile hunch.
“Damn it, that’s all you have?” He scoffs. “If that’s a guess, Ada, I would have expected something with more effort. Do you think if she were still in the city, she wouldn’t have been found by now within the past ten years? I would assume he’d dump her in a swamp, or a lake, or on one of your family’s vacation homes—”
“He’d keep her in Terra,” I insist. With what little strength I can muster, I roll onto my side, groaning at the pain. I’m panting when I finally turn to face him. As I suspected, he’s leaning against the closed door to the balcony, his arms crossed, eyes narrowed.
“So you were bullshitting me all along—”
“He would keep her in Terra,” I say over him, surer of that than ever. I may not have learned much in my life, but I know my father. I’ve gotten a taste of the way he thinks and how he moves. How he likes to gloat and lord himself over the things he believes he owns, be them places, objects, or even people. “Why do you think I stayed there?” I demand when Domino’s expression remains skeptical. “Why do you think he kept me in that house, by him always?”
It wasn’t out of the devotion of a caring father, though I think Domino knows that already. A grudging expression crosses over his face. I have his attention. For now.
And I don’t waste it.
“He would keep her somewhere close, but within plain view. A place he could always have access to but somewhere that couldn’t be directly traced to him. Not a vacation house or one of our properties, either. That would be too obvious.”
And I’m sure that there are no dead bodies buried on our property. My father could be cruel, but he was never sloppy.
“If I had to guess, I would narrow it down to a handful of places,” I add, though I rationalize even telling him this by reminding myself that I don’t believe it. Nothing—short of his own mortal soul—would be worth the risk. Pia wasn’t some political rival or a lawless cartel leader. She was a fifteen-year-old girl with a family, and people who loved her enough to mount a search.
I remember seeing the flyers. I remember hearing word of her mother’s anxious search. I remember that a broken heart was rumored to be the cause of death when Rosa Inglecias collapsed four months into her daughter’s disappearance.
“Where?” Domino demands, letting his hands fall to his sides. His fingers twitch impatiently, and I suspect it’s taking restraint on his part to keep from lunging at me and wringing out an answer. “If the bastard would be stupid enough to bury her in Terra, then where?”
“His office,” I say, naming one of three potential locations.
“Where would he bury her?” Domino counters. “Under the elevator?”
He’s right. I haven’t had time to consider the logistics in full. They’re just guesses of the places I know my father values and frequents.
“One of the parks he had dedicated around the city, then?”
“The earliest one wasn’t erected until two years after Pia went missing,” Domino says, proving that he’s considered these options already. He’s obsessed over them, I realize as he starts to pace, wearing a frown reminiscent of the one he’d sport all those nights when I’d watch him on my family’s property. “Where else? Tell me you have a better guess than that.”
The final one I’ve considered the least. It would be the most unlikely of all, I can admit that. And yet…
It would be the cruelest.
“The old Inglecias house,” I croak.
Domino stops mid-stride, his foot still hovering in the