Deviant (Boys of Winter #3) - Sheridan Anne Page 0,44
the box of jewelry and mementos that’s been sitting right next to Cruz’s laptop since the day we blew up Sam Delacourt’s house.
This box has been acting as motivation, and it’s doing a damn good job. Every little bracelet, every pin, shoelace, ring, or hair clip is something that Sam took off his victims—trophies of his. There are hundreds of things in this box, and I have every intention of returning each little piece to its original owner once we save them and bring them back home.
Dwelling on the box is only going to send me into an intense depression, so instead, I focus on Cruz. “What’s the matter? Can I help?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know,” he says, pulling his head back up and looking directly at the missing persons notice on his screen. A gorgeous six-year-old girl, Maddison Atwell, went missing from her bedroom in the middle of the night nearly two years ago. He points down at the ledger, showing me the entry for a five-year-old girl who was sold around the same time. “It’s just this girl. The ages don’t match up, but my gut is telling me that this is her. This is Maddison. It’s just … I can’t be wrong, not about this. It’s too important.”
I reach down to the ledger and flip through the pages. “Are you sure? Are there any other entries for kids this young around the same time?”
Cruz shakes his head. “No, this is it. She’s the only one. All the other details match. She was sold within fifty miles of where Maddison went missing, and the sale date was less than a month later. It’s just the age.”
“This girl in here was only five. It’s possible that Sam got her age wrong. He’s a scary guy, and for a little kid, he would have been absolutely terrifying. I doubt that she was going out of her way to tell him how old she was. He could have just guessed. No one was going to question him.”
“I know,” Cruz groans, spinning around to lean against the table. He can’t keep staring at the image of Maddison Atwell on his laptop when he knows that right now, all he can do to help her is match her name to a listing in a fucked-up ledger. “But what if we somehow save this girl and we bring her back only to find it isn’t her? What am I supposed to tell her parents then?”
“That’s not going to happen,” I tell him, letting out a breath and putting myself right in front of Cruz. My fingers catch on his belt as I step in close. “I know it’s hard, and you want to reunite every one of those victims with their families, but you need to remember that we’re not doing this for the parent’s sake, this is for the child who’s spent years living in fear. We focus on saving the victims listed in this ledger, and only once we’ve done that, do we find their parents and reunite them. The last thing I want to do is give a parent hope that we can find their baby and not come through. Everybody has already suffered enough, and we’re not about to add to it.”
Cruz lets out a deep breath and takes my waist, pulling me in tight against his body. “I just hate that I can’t do more. I hate that we have Dynasty’s red tape holding us back, and I hate that I’m not out there right fucking now, kicking down doors and saving these people. We need to do better.”
“We will do better,” I tell him. “We’re going to win this. We’re going to fuck up each of those monsters who bought these children. We’re going to get every little piece of information out of them to find whatever connections we can, and we’re going to save other children suffering through the same thing. Those sick bastards are going to wish they were never born. We’ve got this, Cruz. We’re going to be unstoppable. Dynasty isn’t about corruption and power anymore, and I’m going to see to it. We’re going to use every little resource we’ve got. Dynasty is going to become an organization that’s one hundred percent dedicated to fighting the evil in this world.”
Cruz nods and gently presses his lips to my forehead, desperately needing that closeness. “And the bastards who bought from Sam Delacourt are going to be our first targets.”