Lured into Love (Blossom in Winter #2) - Melanie Martins Page 0,140

shows her phone is still here in this house.”

And I’m not really sure what he means by that.

“So what happened here?” Tess asks him. “Do you think she received a message that you couldn’t intercept? I thought the phone was fully traced, including calls.”

What? Petra’s phone is being traced? So they heard my entire convo with her? Wow. They don’t joke around.

“And it is,” the agent insists. “We should’ve received this text too. We receive them all.” He pauses, thinking something through, and then he asks, looking at me, “Did you see if she was carrying an extra phone with her?”

“Um, I didn’t notice. I know she received the text on an iPhone.”

“I’ve got the footage.” With his iPhone in his hands, Pops plays for us the recording from the camera at the gates. We see Petra heading there with her backpack, but there is no car waiting for her on the other side. She then opens the steel door near the main gates and starts running away. Alex must have been waiting a bit farther down the road.

We all go outside to the driveway, trying to see if we can find any street cameras that would have a better angle to record the car and the plate itself.

We walk a bit farther down the street, and all of a sudden, I hear a crack as I step on something. Looking at the ground, I find an iPhone shattered in a thousand pieces.

“Well, that’s why you thought she had never left the house,” I tell the agents, pointing to what is left of her phone.

“It’s him for sure,” Tess snaps as she glares at Roy. Then she rubs her eyes tiredly, blowing out a long sigh. Her eyes landing on me, she asks, “Did she tell you where she would be heading, or anything at all?”

“No, she just said she was tired and was going to go to sleep,” I tell them again. “And by the time I got into the house, she had already left.”

“Roy,” my dad puts a hand on his shoulder in order to appease him, “we will find her. I give you my word. And we will bring her back.” Then he looks at the agents and asks, “Do you have a suspect in mind?”

“Yes, I do,” I reply at the same time as everyone else.

“Alexander Van Dieren,” Tess mutters.

“Okay…” My dad squints his eyes in confusion. "And who is he?”

“He’s her godfather.” Tess is the first to reply again, her face laced with disgust and rage. I can tell she truly hates the guy, even though she tries hard to stay as stoic as possible. “He’s so obsessed with her that we had to keep him away from her for ten years.” What? That is something I wasn’t aware of. Jeez! I always suspected there was something wrong with that dude though. “Once he came back, he started grooming her again, so we asked him to move to Singapore and leave Petra alone, but this time it was too late.” Fuck! The more I hear Tess talking, the more I feel bad that I cooperated with that creep. Damn it! What a dumbass I was. “He’s a predator of the worst kind. And now… now he’s kidnapped her,” she says, trying to contain her rising tears.

I feel so damn guilty and even dirty to have helped him. And yet I knew he was a criminal since the first day I laid eyes on him. Fuck, I should’ve been wiser. That asshole literally used me. He had no intentions of leaving for good. Oh no, it was just for one single month to put a damn plan in place to kidnap Petra. And I, like a dumbass, cooperated with him… I shake my head at my own stupidity. Petra is really sick. And she needs our help, my help, now more than ever. This man is manipulating her, luring her, into a relationship that seems pretty twisted.

“We will find her, Ms. Hagen,” my dad tells her. “I’ll put the best team in place, and they will find her and bring her back.”

“Maybe we should call Emma…” Roy suggests to Tess.

But Tess just chuckles in return. “Emma? She will deny everything. Why even bother? She is a loyalist.”

A loyalist? What does she mean by that? A loyal friend? Intrigued, I’ve got to ask, “Sorry, Ms. Hagen, but, um, what do you mean by ‘loyalist’?”

“You may just call me Tess,” she says, offering me a pleasant smile. “A