Page 26 of The Lovely and the Lost

She snuffed once, shook me off, and then barked.

Once. Twice. Three times.

“She found something,” Gabriel stated.

With barely a glance in his direction, I followed Saskia as she led the way deeper and deeper into the cave. I heard the sound of running water—an underground river?—but kept my focus on the here and now, the band of light cast by my flashlight illuminating the steel-gray ground beneath our feet.

The cave hit a dead end, and Saskia barked again, three times.Find. Recall. Re-find.

I knelt to jostle her back and forth, to scratch behind her ears, even as my left hand aimed the flashlight past her. There was a red windbreaker on the floor. I stood, angling the flashlight to get a better look as Gabriel did the same with his.

“Bella!” I called the little girl’s name. If she’d found her way down here, like Saskia, she might not have been able to find her way out. “Bella? Can you hear me?”

Nothing.

The ground shook with a roll of thunder, close enough to set my teeth on edge. I turned back to Gabriel.

“She was here,” I said.

Gabriel let his light roam over the area around us and stopped it on what appeared to be some kind of makeshift fire pit. He knelt next to it, dipping his fingers into the ash and studying the way the brush was scattered.

Then he looked back up at me. “Bella was here,” he echoed. “And she wasn’t alone.”

Itried to radio in what we’d found, but between the weather and the fact that we wereinsidethe mountain, reception was shot.

We found Bella’s windbreaker.I ignored the roiling emotions gnashing inside me and focused on rehearsing what I would say when we finally got through.There are signs of a campsite. Bella isn’t just lost. Someone took her.

“You’re pacing.” Gabriel was leaning against the wall of the cave, standing guard over the evidence. Saskia lay at his feet, surprisingly docile. “Afraid that whoever has Bella might be coming back?”

Fear wasn’t something I felt aboutpossiblethreats. Fear washereandnow,fightorflight. I wasn’t afraid.

I was angry.

“Some crimes make sense.” I didn’t pause to think about how that comment might sound. “Taking what you need, even if it belongs to someone else. Striking hard and fast andfirst.”

But this?I stopped walking and stopped talking, because taking a child, hurting a child in any way?

“This doesn’t make sense.” Gabriel said the words for me.

Restless, I crouched, my weight on the balls of my feet and my fingertips braced against the cave floor. The scene looked no different from this angle. The harder I stared at the physical traces Bella had left behind, the further into my own mind I retreated.

Girl presses herself back into the darkness. Wet. Cold. Her throat burns. Can’t move. Can’t make a sound—

“Kira? Come in. Kira and Gabriel, come in.”

My hand tightened around the radio as I fought my way through the flashback, lashing out against the memories, tearing at them in my mind. The real world came slowly into focus.

I lifted the radio to my mouth. “Bella was here.” I’d practiced. I was ready. But somehow, the rest of what I needed to tell them wouldn’t come.

Gabriel squatted beside me. “We’ll give them directions,” he said quietly.

“We’ll give you directions,” I repeated. My grip on the radio relaxed slightly, and I continued, my eyes on Gabriel. “We found a cave. There are signs of a campsite.…”

* * *

It was another half hour before the rescue crew reached us. In the last few moments of quiet before the chaos descended, I made myself look at Gabriel. “Bales was right. You know this mountain.”

That was the closest I could come tothank you.