Page 21 of Riggs (The Maddox BRAVO Team #2)

Riggs

I don’t like the word private . I like doors I can see and curtains that stay open. Brice says “two minutes, designer’s request,” and every muscle between my shoulders goes tight.

“Curtain stays open,” I tell him. “Lina at the doorway. One minute, not two. I’m ten feet away.”

“Copy,” Vanessa says, soft. I hear what she’s really saying: Trust me while I do my job; I’m trusting you to do yours.

They disappear down the short corridor. The boutique’s front is a cathedral to linen and lemon oil—sun through glass, silk on chrome.

The back is a rabbit warren of velvet and mirrors.

I position so I own both—the hallway mouth in my left eye, the front door and street reflection in my right.

The security cam over the corridor is wearing a strip of opaque tape like a bandage.

“Why is that covered?” I ask the manager without looking at him.

“It… gets the wrong angle,” he stammers. “Privacy.”

“Not anymore.” I step on a footstool, peel the tape, and drop it in my pocket. It’s warm from the light. Fresh. My jaw ticks. “Rae,” I murmur into comms, “store cam was blinded. I’m hot on audio only.”

“Copy,” she says, voice a thread. “ I’ve got lobby and street feeds. Back hall is a blind well thanks to Fashion Week here.”

Thirty seconds. Forty. Somewhere a steamer hisses. Somewhere metal clinks. I hear a sound you only learn if you’ve spent time in rooms where people are almost caught—fabric sucked in through the teeth.

Then: tic—tic—tic— like soft rain on tile. A scatter.

Turquoise beads roll out under the velvet curtain and ping the toe of my boot.

Everything in me goes clean and quiet.

“Move,” I tell Lina, already moving. The curtain gives under my hand; Brice is inside the stall, face too blank. “Where is she?”

He startles like a bad actor. “She—uh—the designer wanted?—”

I’m already past him—through the next slit of curtain I hadn’t clocked, into the tight back hall that staff use when they need to be invisible. An EXIT sign hums. The security dome over the back door has a smiley-face Post-it stuck over its lens. Someone’s cute. Someone’s dead.

I shoulder the bar. The alley heat slaps.

To my left: dumpsters, the ghost of a white van’s exhaust hanging low, sliding door seam still shivering from motion, tire scuffs fresh on concrete—short wheelbase, left shock soft.

To my right: the street we came from, a single glance from a barista on smoke break who sees everything and will swear later she saw nothing.

I’m late by twenty seconds.

“Lalo,” I say into comms, already taking photos, already tucking turquoise beads into a bag, already crouching to find a smear of blood at knee level on the rusted lip of the sliding door.

“White van out your two blocks. Short wheelbase. Left rear’s tired.

If you see it, don’t play hero; tail it soft and call Turner.

Rae, I need every external cam between here and the nearest ramp.

Jaxson, give me ALPR on white vans with damaged left shocks within a half-mile in the last four minutes.

Hayes, prints off this smiley and a sniff on the tape glue for brand. ”

“Copy copy copy,” rolls back like a wave.

I stand. Brice is behind me now, hands up like that will keep mine off his collar. “She’s—okay,” he blurts, voice thin. “I mean—he said—Kellan said he just wanted to talk.”

Every card in the deck flips at once. “You knew,” I say, very calm. It’s not a question.

He shakes his head hard enough to spin. “No—no—he DM’d—he said if we gave him two minutes he’d get us a beat—he wasn’t going to—he said he wasn’t going to take her?—”

“You taped the camera,” I say. “You scheduled the ‘private reveal.’ You argued her away from me because a ‘designer’ asked. And you talked to Kellan Stevens like the two of you were plotting stories.”

“He said—” Brice swallows. Sweat beads at his temple, bright under the boutique light.

“He said it would be good for her. Stakes, Riggs. We needed stakes. He promised he’d let her go out the back and we’d pick her up at the corner.

He promised. I swear to God I didn’t know he’d—” His voice breaks on kidnap because the word makes it real.

“Your God’s not in the alley,” I say. I step close enough that he smells the truth.

“Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to hand me your phone, your laptop, your passwords, and the name of every contact who’s ever connected you to Kellan or his friends.

You’re going to tell me exactly what you set up, when, and with whom, and you’re going to do it without lying once.

If you lie, I’ll know. If you stall, I’ll know.

And if you so much as think about ‘metrics’ out loud, I’ll put you on the curb for Turner with a bow. ”

He wavers, then caves. Phones. Laptop. A flood of texts.

Rae starts cloning before I can ask. Brice talks too fast. “He found me after the pop-up,” he says.

“Said the algorithm was plateauing, said we needed an inciting incident. He wanted a ‘conversation.’ He said he could deliver her to the alley so you could ‘save’ her. He’d get clicks, you’d get hero points, we’d get virality. He swore. He swore.”

“You let a man who hurt her set the stakes,” I say, and the way Brice flinches tells me he knows exactly what he did.

“I didn’t think he’d—” He gestures helplessly at the alley’s empty air.

“Stop thinking,” I say. “Start remembering. What did you see?”

“White van,” he says immediately. “Sliding door. A rosary hanging from the mirror? I think. One of those pine tree air fresheners.” He swipes his face. “He gagged her. He—he had zip ties. He—” His breath stutters. “He looked at me like I was a lens and he was playing me.”

“Good. Keep talking while I work.” I follow the tire scuffs to the alley mouth, to a faint arc of rubber where the driver overcorrected heading left. Pine cleaner rides the heat, a ghost of gasoline under it. I log it all. Turquoise bead, blood, pine, rosary—details become a trail.

“Rae,” I say, “flag every traffic cam on the alley’s outbound route. Look for white vans with low left rear. Jaxson, feed me plates off the corridor to the ramp. Hayes, the tape.”

“Tape’s cheap craft brand,” Hayes says, bored. “ Same glue signature as our last notes. Post-it’s generic—office supply chain, store number on the stamp is local. You’re in Austin; half the world shops there. I’ll try to narrow.”

“Lina,” I say, finding her in the doorway, face pale, eyes wet. I soften in the half-second it takes to pivot. “You okay?”

She nods too fast. “She dropped her bracelet,” she whispers. “Like…on purpose.”

“She did,” I say. “That’s a map. We’ll follow it.” It steadies her. It steadies me.

My phone vibrates. Dean. His voice is loud in my ear. “Talk.”

“Kellan pulled her with Brice’s help,” I say, low and clean. “White van. We’re sixty seconds behind. I’ve got beads and blood in the alley and a manager who taped his cameras because the client said privacy. ”

“Media?” he asks.

“Not yet,” I say. “We keep this off the grid. We push decoys—Vanessa stepped out, ‘be right back’—we let Turner run quiet and keep the tabloids hungry but empty.” I look at Brice, who hears all of this and starts to stammer a question about statements.

“We don’t give Kellan the stage he wants. We put him in a room without lights.”

“Do it,” Dean says. “You have point. I’ll sit on the brand and tell them they’ll tank the IPO of their own souls if they leak. Turner’s en route to you. He’s in plainclothes with no marked cars.”

“Lalo?” I call.

“ I’m circling, ” Lalo says into comms. “ White van with a left sag took the frontage road toward the loop. We lost visual when he threaded two trucks, but I’ve got a construction cam that might’ve caught a plate. Sending to Jax. ”

“Rae, ghost the feeds,” I add. “Freeze every account that could turn this into content. Delay our scheduled posts, spin up noise—old footage, out-of-order reels—anything that keeps the wolves running in circles.”

“Already lifting audio from three weeks ago and calling it a sneak peek, she says. Brands think it’s brilliant. God help us.”

Brice makes a sound like he’s drowning. “Is—shouldn’t we—like—make a statement? People saw her go back. People?—”

“Brice.” I put a hand on his shoulder, weight just shy of a push.

“Shut up. If you leak, if you ‘clarify,’ if you even breathe in the direction of a DM, I will assume you’re still working with him and I will freeze you out so hard you’ll be begging a ring light for warmth.

” I soften nothing. “You are done. Right now, you’re only useful as a pipeline. Be one.”

He nods, tears standing. I don’t have time for his redemption arc.

I go back into the stall. The mirror doubles me.

On the floor: more turquoise beads, a single broken heel tip—hers.

She’s writing in the language I taught her.

I bag the heel, pocket two beads for luck, and catch a faint smear on the curtain edge, rust-dark already oxidizing. Shoulder-height. She fought. Good.

Jaxson: Plate off a construction cam: 8KZ-1—no last two.

Van’s got a sticker on the bumper of a local church—Our Lady of Something with a wildcat mascot in the school seal.

There’s a water tower with the same cat on your outbound corridor.

If I were a narcissist with a Catholic hangover, I’d keep the rosary and drive past my favorite picture of myself.

“Give me a grid around that tower,” I say, already moving. “Outbuildings, warehouses, yards full of junk.”

“ On it, ” Rae says.

Lalo swings the SUV around. I slide into the back. Lina scrubs her face and moves to come with me. I catch her shoulder. “No,” I say, not unkind. “You stay with the team and keep them from doing something stupid. You’ll see her again. That’s an order.”

She nods and I see her straighten because orders are a relief when the room tilts.

We roll. Austin splits open. Lalo threads the lanes like a letter opener. I keep my eyes on the edges, the places where men like Kellan think they can be small. We take the frontage road. We hit the ramp seam, and the SUV bumps twice.

“ Riggs, ” Rae says, voice low. “ I’ve got a white van on a warehouse strip near a tire place called DOLLAR TIRE and a Latino grocery with a mural of a longhorn. Van pulls into a yard with a turquoise door. Camera loses it after that, but the grid’s tight. Sending you a pin. ”

“Copy.” I point. Lalo turns. The warehouse strip turns the air from music to tin. Gravel crunches under us. I can smell old oil and summer heat.

“Turner’s two minutes out,” Dean says in my ear. “No lights. He’ll let you play point until he says otherwise. Keep it off the radio. Stevens wants sirens.”

Brice texts me a paragraph of him trying to be useful.

I silence him. Jaxson slides in a shot of a rosary air freshener from a bodega two miles from here—security cam with time stamp.

“He bought the rosary five days ago,” Jax says.

“Cash. Clerk remembers him because he asked her if ‘she believed in signs.’”

“Men like this always do,” I say.

We idle a block from the pin. The turquoise door is two down, paint sunburned to chalk.

A chain-link fence sags like a tired sigh.

The yard holds three cars in various states of regret and a boat that will never see water again.

The van isn’t visible, but a tire track fresh in dust points to the far corner where a roll-up is half-shut like a lazy eyelid.

“Rae,” I say, “go deaf for thirty seconds.”

“Copy. You’re a rumor,” she says.

“Dean,” I add, “when Turner gets here, send him in hot.”

“ Heard,” he says.

I take a breath. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four. Vanessa learned this from me. I’m learning this again because of her. “You’re here,” I tell the empty air, and step out into the heat.

I move along the fence line, boots silent where they can be, loud where I want the noise to go first. Lalo peels to the right for angle.

I pause at the corner and listen. Inside—the faint rattle of an AC vent turned high.

A man’s voice, too close to be talking to someone far away.

A second, lighter voice, the driver maybe, radio turned down.

And a sound I can’t mistake: fabric against concrete, measured breaths forced to be steady.

“She’s here,” I say, too low for anyone but the two men who’ve done this with me in worse places to hear.

Turner pulls up quiet. He’s in a shirt that wants to be a suit and a face that says he likes paperwork and hates men like Kellan. “You got us a ribbon to cut?” he asks.

“I got you a door,” I say, and nod at the roll-up. “Two inside. One with a god complex. One who drives. She’s bound, possibly gagged, no active weapon chatter on my end, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a knife. We go soft and plain. No press. We take him alive if you can stand it.”

“I can stand it,” Turner says. “You want first hands.”

“I want her first,” I say.

We stack. Lalo on door, me on breach, Turner at my shoulder with a voice like a ticket book. The roll-up gives two inches, then four, then enough for a man to slide through. The smell of pine cleaner hits, sharp as a memory. My hands stop shaking that I refuse to admit were shaking.

“Vanessa,” I say, pitching my voice to the exact calm I saved for her. “I’m here.”

There’s a silence that goes shaped, and then a sound like a body remembering how to exhale.

“Mr. Stevens,” Turner calls, stage voice, even and bored. “APD’s with me. Let’s talk before we write up the part where you run your life into a wall.”

Footsteps. A scrape. The driver curses under his breath. The god complex clears his throat like he’s about to deliver a monologue.

“Rae,” I murmur, back online, “keep it dark. No leaks. If a blog so much as breathes our block, drown it in kittens.”

“Copy,” she says. “ And Riggs?”

“Yeah.”

“Bring her home.”

“That’s the plan,” I say, and step into the dim.

I don’t pray. I keep promises. And right now the only one that matters is the one I made in a hotel room full of soup and laughter when I told her to sleep and she did because she felt safe with me.

No cameras. No hero music. No statement. Just me, a door, and the woman I’ve fallen completely in love with.