Page 59 of The Last Call Home (The Timberbridge Brothers #5)

Chapter Fifty-Five

Malerick

This might be the worst day of my life. The absolute worst. I’m not fucking exaggerating. My father has beaten me up. I’ve been shot during assignments and kidnapped by a Russian spy and saw my mother die slowly.

None of those times compare to this moment. The moment when you feel like you might’ve lost one of the people who owns your heart. The uncertainty unfurls inch by inch, dread curling around your spine until it calcifies into fear.

When Simone called to ask for Delilah since she hadn’t arrived at her house, I told myself there was no reason to panic. Maybe she'd changed her mind, stayed in the cabin with Cass because they have this routine of fucking right before he goes to work.

I had it all wrong though. At that exact moment, Cass texted me. He was already on his way to visit Rosalinda since Lilah had finally left.

And just like that, the ground tilted. I knew something was wrong.

We mobilized fast. The thirty agents in town were activated—red alert protocols—triggered. Every road between Simone’s place and the center of town was being combed. The detail assigned to the perimeter of Simone’s property was rerouted to the access road leading up from the highway.

And that’s where they found the car.

Abandoned.

Driver’s side door ajar. Passenger-side window reduced to jagged teeth of safety glass.

Interior torn apart.

No sign of Delilah.

Just silence.

And . . . fuck, blood.

“Cass, there’s blood on the gravel,” I say, crouching near the edge of the shoulder, flashlight beam catching the dull stain soaking into the dirt. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

The sound of my voice barely registers—hoarse, guttural, frayed down to the marrow. I’m barely holding myself together, because it’s not just blood. It’s proof. Proof that she didn’t go quietly.

We should’ve driven her ourselves. Should’ve had eyes on her every goddamn second, not just when she was working or at her mother’s house. We treated her routines like they were safe zones, as if danger waited politely outside designated windows.

Cass moves beside me, his eyes scanning everything with clinical precision, but his shoulders are tight, jaw locked. “It’s not fresh,” he mutters, flashlight in one hand, sweeping over the crushed foliage near the roadside. “Already soaked in. Barely visible unless you’re really looking.”

I am looking.

I’m searching for everything. Every piece of her she might’ve left behind in a panic.

Did she run? The shuffle of gravel beneath desperate feet.

The drag marks of someone fighting like hell not to be taken.

A torn thread from her shirt, a boot print pressed too deep into the mud, the arc of motion that says she ran—or tried to.

Anything that could indicate me how far she advanced before it all went dark.

Because it did go dark.

Somewhere past mile marker eight, right at the edge of the dead zone—where cell signals vanish, cameras blur, and the air itself feels like it’s holding its breath—I felt it.

This of course isn’t a feeling I can rationalize or explain in a report.

It won’t fit neatly between timestamps and field notes or be boiled down into the clean, objective language investigators are supposed to use.

It’s not data. It’s not theory. It’s instinct that bypasses logic entirely and goes straight for your ribs.

This isn’t adrenaline, panic or fear. It’s hollowness gnawing. Scraping you out from the inside until all that’s left is the unbearable awareness that something has shifted—something irreversible because you lost everything.

My hands curl into fists, the skin over my knuckles stretched raw. “We have to find her before we lose track of her.” My voice is a rasp, a mix of half-growled orders and clipped commands.

I don’t know how many times Cassian’s told me to breathe.

I can’t. Not until she’s found.

Cass crouches again, this time near the jagged edge of the glass where something sharp sliced into the earth beside the tire tracks.

His flashlight sweeps across the scene, catching the faint shimmer of metal—maybe from a hairpin, maybe from the bracelet she always wears, the one she never takes off.

He’s quiet. Cassian has detached himself from his feelings. This is a case where he has to solve it and Delilah isn’t a person—for now. Though, I’m sure the moment we find her, he’s going to lose his fucking shit.

Cass’s mind is already piecing the scene together, forming patterns from shattered lines and blood trails, extrapolating timelines from the violence left behind.

And still, even through the calculation, he still looks wrecked.

Something fundamental inside him cracked the moment we realized she’s missing.

Like he’s already picturing every worst-case scenario—and daring the universe to make him live through it.

He hasn’t said it, but I know he thinks this is on him.

Rosalinda wanted to flee today and go to Canada to start a new life.

She knew it was coming. I . . . I told him not to overreact. We thought we had time, but we didn’t.

“I didn’t fucking see it coming,” he mutters, standing slowly. “I should’ve known they’d grab her on the way to Simone’s. I should’ve sent someone with her?—”

“She would’ve said no,” I interrupt, my voice low, fraying. “She’s been trying to pretend things are normal.”

“She shouldn’t have to pretend,” he bites back. “We should’ve kept her safe.”

We both fall silent. We don’t have the right to argue when we’re both wrong.

Delilah’s not here.

Only the car remains, disturbingly intact in the places it shouldn’t be.

The doors hang open like they were flung in a hurry, or worse, ripped open without consent.

Windows smashed . . . why? There are marks on the road, as if something was in the middle but it’s gone.

The interior light glows against the dark like an afterthought.

Cassian doesn’t say anything. His focus has narrowed into that dangerous, surgical mode he uses when he’s barely holding the threads together.

He moves to the driver’s side first, his gloved hand brushing across the seat, checking for prints, for fibers, for blood.

Then he drops low, scanning the floorboards with his flashlight, eyes tracking every angle with the intensity of someone who knows how little time they have left.

I circle to the passenger side, my pulse thrumming so hard I can hear it in my ears. The car smells like her perfume—faint, floral, something stubborn enough to linger even after the violence stripped everything else away.

Cass reaches between the seat and center console, his fingers brushing something wedged deep in the seam. He pulls out her phone. It’s still powered on.

“Shit,” he mutters, reaching again.

From beneath the seat, his hand wraps around something small. He lifts it to the light.

The bracelet.

Thick, silver, unmistakable. The bracelet glints under the dim light.

It’s the heirloom—the same one we talked about earlier. The one that might be linked to Desmond and his family, according to Finnegan. It has coordinates, he said, or . . . something. We needed it. And now it’s here. Abandoned.

“Why would she leave it?” I mumble. “Why would she let go of something so damn important to her?” I repeat to myself, to Cassian, because someone has to make sense out of this.

“Unless she meant for us to find it? Unless it was her way of telling us, ‘I was here. I didn’t go willingly,’” he explains, as if he’s in the middle of the scene re-living every moment to make sense of it all and to find whoever took her away.

Cassian turns it over in his hand, his jaw flexing, voice low and tight.

“Like breadcrumbs,” he mutters.

Then he’s moving—already halfway out of the car, barking into his comms. “Get someone to sweep the interior for prints and fibers. Full UV, no shortcuts. We need everything. Start at the doors and work inward.”

As he moves toward the hood, I join him, each step feeling heavier than the last. My throat feels stripped raw, like my voice has been ground down by smoke and salt.

“Tell me we’ve got something,” I rasp, the words escaping from me more like a plea than a command.

Cass nods once, clipped but deliberate. “The phone was still recording.”

He turns the screen toward me. It’s cracked, battery flashing red, but still active. Cass opens the most recent file—an audio recording automatically backed up to the cloud, timestamped only an hour ago.

He hits play.

And we hear her. The screen is dark, but her voice is there.

Delilah’s voice, full of panic, fills the silence like a knife slicing open the dark.

“No—get the fuck off me! Stop!”

There’s scuffling. A grunt. The sounds of flesh knocking flesh. Someone cursing under their breath.

“You fucking bastard—” she screams, and then there’s a harsh thud like her back hitting the car door.

“Hold her down—fuck, she’s stronger than she looks.” A male voice, strained. Not local. No accent I recognize, but there’s something clipped about the cadence—professional, controlled.

“Bostonian accent,” Cassian says.

“She bit me,” another man snaps.

Good, I think. I hope she left teeth marks. I hope she drew blood.

Cassian pauses the recording. “Someone try to get some DNA out of those drops of blood. It might belong to one of the kidnappers,” he orders before pressing play again.

“Don’t bruise her. We need her alive. She’s no good to us if she’s broken.” That’s a female voice.

Silence follows. That awful, unnatural silence that settles into your chest and presses against your lungs.

The only sound in the recording now is wind rushing past, tires grinding steadily against asphalt, and someone adjusting what sounds like a radio—static, faint voices bleeding through like ghosts caught in the airwaves.

Then—barely audible—a voice breaks through. Female, maybe younger, clipped and cautious. She’s not speaking on the phone. She doesn’t even realize it’s on.

“Boss says bring her straight to Ashport Docks. No delays. He wants her on the ship by midnight.”

Cassian stiffens beside me, and I don’t need to look to know his body just snapped to full attention.

“Ashport Docks,” I whisper, the words catching on my tongue. “The woman said Ashport Docks.”

Cassian’s already pulling out his phone with one hand, fingers swiping fast, opening maps, scrolling past landmarks until he finds it.

“There,” he mutters, more to himself than to me. “Outside Cutler. North of the main route. It’s not on any civilian map.”

He tilts the screen toward me. A satellite image—coastline rugged and uneven, a vast stretch of unpatrolled water brushing up against an old access road and a series of industrial docks half-swallowed by forest.

“There won’t be any traffic cams. No patrol stations. No local oversight. It’s private property, officially abandoned. They’re driving her there now.”

My stomach turns.

“They’re going to move her by water.”

Cass nods grimly, already accessing encrypted satellite feeds and requesting aerial scans.

“She’s not supposed to leave the country,” he says, mostly to himself, is voice like ice. “But if she’s on that boat by midnight, we’ll never see her again.”

And just like that, the urgency to find her tightens, turning vicious.

We’ve got a few hours. Maybe less.

No margin for error.