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“Thank you.”
“Of course. Here you go, Captain,” she hands him a cup of coffee. “Mint chocolate latte with extra whip.”
He beams at her. “You know me so well.”
“That, I do. Alan was like a second father to me,” Anastasia offers, then leans against him in a half-hug.
“You and Zane made it easy to look out after you,” he replies, fatherly adoration in his gaze.
She laughs. “Me, sure. But Zane? Hardly.” When she turns to me, there’s a seriousness to her expression. A shadow I only briefly noticed the other day in the coffee shop. “When I was eighteen, my best friend and I were in a car accident. She was abducted and murdered.” A tear slips down her cheek. “I’m sorry.” She shakes her head. “Anyway, this entire team rallied around me, and when her killer came back to finish me off two years ago, I had an entire army behind me. That’s what you have now, Sadie. I know you don’t know us, but this town does not leave our own to suffer. We rally like no one else.”
As she talks, it becomes increasingly clear why Maverick called her. Not just so I would have another woman here, and not just because she’s suffered, too. But because she trusts the officer sitting in front of me.
And he wants to show me that I can do the same.
My chest warms, the fear slipping from me like a heavy blanket falling to the floor.
Thank You, Lord, I say again.
With a deep breath, I force myself to sit up straighter. “I was being stalked,” I tell them. “It started with notes here and there. In my mailbox, on my windshield, in my gym bag. After that, things slowly escalated. I started seeing a masked man in random places. Honestly, I thought I was hallucinating, but when I found a rose on my pillow, I knew that it was real. That’s when I went to the police the first time.”
“They couldn’t find anything?”
I shake my head. “I lived in the guest house of the family I worked for, and when I told them what was happening, they stepped in to help.”
“How so?” Captain Leopold asks.
“Bella—the wife—called in a security team to put a system in the guest house. Her husband, Darren, installed extra security cameras all around and in my living room. But the guy always seemed to know how to avoid them. Things went missing. My toothbrush, hairbrush, even some of my clothes.”
“You filed again?” Captain Leopold asks.
I nod. “Every time something happened, I called the Kingswater PD. They said they’d written it down and would investigate it.”
He makes some notes on his notepad, then looks up at me. “What happened next?”
My hands begin to tremble, so I clasp them together and tuck them between my thighs. “About two months after I filed the report, things just stopped. There were no more notes, no more random things being taken or left. I thought that maybe he’d just moved on. I was so relieved that I started running again.” I close my eyes, hating what a fool I was back then. How could I have just believed he’d stopped?
“You were out for a run when it happened?” Leopold asks.
“I was. He came out of nowhere, and before I could even scream, I woke up in a cellar.” I breathe deeply, the feel of the chains binding my wrist still so clear in my mind. “Chained to a pole.”
Anastasia’s expression is broken for me, and she runs her hands over her swollen stomach, tears in her eyes. But she doesn’t say anything, and for that, I’m so grateful.
Lord, grant me strength to continue. Please.
“I know it’s hard, but I need to know what happened while you were there,” the captain says.
“Mav and I can leave if you want,” Anastasia offers.
“No. Please, stay.” I keep my gaze downcast as tears fill my eyes. I did this last night. I can do it again. “He would come in every few days and leave me food. Granola bars and bottled water meant to last until he came again. At first, he didn’t say much. Just sat in the corner and stared at me for hours.”
“Still wearing a mask?” the captain asks.
“Yes. Always.” My bottom lip trembles. “Then he started coming closer. He pushed me into the corner and pointed a gun at me. He ordered me to take off my leggings and sweatshirt.”
Maverick growls, low and deep. A primal sound of pure anger. When I look at him, his jaw is tight, eyes hard. And when my gaze drops to his hands on the bar top, I see that he’s gripping the edge so tight his knuckles are white.
“Were you sexually assaulted?” Captain Leopold asks, pulling my attention back to him.
