Page 160 of Captivated

Joe didn’t even mind being rushed, now.

He got what he came for.

“Let’s go over this again, Miss Marcello.”

“There’s nothing to go over,” Joe heard Lucian’s lawyer snarl.

The speaker on the chair in front of Joe and Lucian crackled with the volume of the lawyer’s irritation. A simple wire tap had been placed in Liliana’s hospital room so that Joe and Lucian could listen in from a nearby room while the detectives made their rounds.

“It’s okay,” Liliana said.

Joe flinched.

Beside him, Lucian stiffened.

Her voice was faint—it had been like that since he pulled her from that room. She didn’t want to talk, and when she did, it was like she wasn’t there at all. It was going to take time for her to absorb what happened, and adjust accordingly.

Or, that’s what people kept telling him.

Joe wanted to tell those people to fuck off.

“You’re saying you have no memory of the home Rich Earl purchased in Vermont—no memory of being there, or how you got away from there?”

Joe had to give the detective credit, really. He kept hounding on this line of questioning like it was going to get him somewhere. And maybe with a woman who wasn’t Liliana—one who hadn’t grown up in the life—he might have tricked her in to saying something of use.

She wasn’t so dumb, though.

She wasn’t falling for it.

“The last thing I remember is looking up and seeing the emergency room sign above my head,” Liliana said, repeating the one line of her story that wouldn’t—because it couldn’t—change. “I’m sorry I don’t have the answers you want.”

All it took was a few documents, and a good look around the mansion in Vermont for the police to suspect someone else had been there with Rich, and his men. They found the women’s clothes, and all the other things he had set up for Liliana. They found his papers linking himself to the place, and then the information he had been gathering on Liliana, too.

It didn’t take geniuses to figure it out.

She showed up at a hospital the same night Rich’s estate was attacked, and partially burned. She arrived battered, and broken.

They put two and two together.

It made four.

It also made a fucking media circus, and a shitshow for the rest of them.

“I think if maybe you tried a little harder,” the detective started to say.

“You’re edging closer to a harassment suit with every word,” the lawyer warned, “and you know it.”

“We are trying to piece together this investigation, sir.”

The lawyer scoffed. “Is that the line you’re going to play with me?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Look at her.”

Joe cleared his throat, and glanced away from the speaker. He didn’t need to be in the room—he couldn’t be anywhere near someone who might see his face, and connect him to what had happened—to know what the lawyer meant.

Liliana was hurt.