Page 27 of Hold Me Before You Go

My head lifted, and I found Hayes with his forearms on the back of his chair, his green eyes on me, pain swirling inside them.

“Don’t apologize for my fucking shit, Mitchell,” I muttered, looking down at the table. “There was nothing you could’ve done.”

“I shouldn’t have left you alone,” he countered, his voice sincere.

I huffed a small laugh of disbelief. “Hayes, I just went into my office—”

“That’s not the fucking point,” he all but clipped back at me. His shoulders were tight. He was on edge. “You asked me to not let you go there, and you did.”

Fuck, he was blaming himself.

“Hayes—”

The door flew open, and our heads snapped to find Dominic, the office phone to his ear.

“What is it?” I asked, rising to my full height.

“Humbly got a hit on a stolen van in Astoria.”

I stiffened, a cold chill shooting down my spine as Dominic held the office phone out to me. “Please tell me you’re running that fucking plate, Humbly,” I said once the phone was against my ear. I moved then, Dominic and Hayes right behind me as I headed straight for Jake’s cave.

“Of course, I have,” Humbly shot back.

I found Jake behind his desk, sliding one of his many laptops into his backpack. He jerked his chin. “We got something?”

“Sheriff Humbly got a hit on a stolen van from Astoria,” Dominic explained as I put the phone on speaker and rounded Jake’s desk.

“Jake, run it,” I ordered to my tech genius before ordering Humbly to repeat the plate number. Jake put in the number, and a second later, a picture of a black van came onto the screen as I ground my teeth, my jaw popping.

“We believe the man who kidnapped Carrie also stole the van,” Humbly explained on the phone as Jake muttered something under his breath and turned to his second screen, his fingers flying over the keyboard. I watched as he input the address registered to the van and pulled up an image of the house—which was down the street from Blue Beauty, Carrie’s house.

“What are you looking for, Jake?” I asked, leaning over him, my eyes on the screen as Ash walked in, joining the rest of the team.

“There’s a traffic camera at the end of Carrie’s street,” he told me, tugging at my memory.

Fuck, there was.

A flicker of hope sparked inside my chest, threatening to grow quickly. Despite how good it felt, I needed to snuff it out. Relying on hope alone was a fool’s errand.

“What’s your guy pulling up?” Humbly asked over the phone.

“Traffic cameras,” Hayes and I answered at the same time, his eyes flicking down to the phone on Jake’s desk.

“You—Grayson, your guy hacked into my fucking traffic cameras?” the sheriff clipped.

“Of course I did,” Jake answered for me as he pulled up a video. My eyes dropped to the time stamp.

Forty-eight hours ago.

“Grayson, I swear to God, if you don’t get your man—”

My head snapped over to find the phone in Hayes’ hand, the call ended. “I can see why you wanted to kill him,” he noted, annoyance lacing his voice.

Ash and Dominic chuckled as I looked back to the video, my eyes on the black van sitting on the side of one of the houses. At the top of the screen, you could see my woman’s pretty blue house on top of the hill, where, at the time, I had my cock buried inside her.

Pulling myself away from those thoughts, knowing they would only piss me off now, I returned my attention to the van. Jake sped up the video, the sun moving across the sky, and just when the sun was about to set, Monica Lark appeared.

My upper lip curled, and the next words out of my mouth were filled with nothing but malice.

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