Page 41 of The Lovely and the Lost

“Over half a million people are reported missing each year.” The doctor pauses.

“How does that make you feel?” She leans back in her chair. “Kira?”

“Hungry.”

“It makes you feel hungry?”

I shrug.

“Let’s try something different. Let’s talk about the dog.”

I cock my head to the side. “Silver?”

“The new dog. Saskia.” Another pause—longer, leaner somehow. “Someone hurt her.”

There was a roar in my ears, a whisper, and then

nothing.

“The cases might not be connected,” Free was saying. “These missing persons might have nothing to do with Bella.”

And how,I thought,does that make you feel?I had to stifle the urge to physically shake off the question. Feeling was dangerous. Thinking was better.

As long as I was thinking, I wasme.

“Say the cases were connected.” I turned to Free, my focus intense. “Andrés Cortez is the earliest case we have a file for. Do you think he was the first?”

Free balanced precariously on the windowsill, one knee pulled to her chest and the other dangling toward the ground. “The first what?”

I thought of the doctor, asking me about Saskia.Someone hurt her.There was still a part of me that believed that was what humans did. They hurt things—not because they had to, not in self-defense, not to sate their hunger.

Because theycould.

“The first victim.” Free answered her own question—or maybe the expression on my face answered it for her. “You think all these people were kidnapped, like Bella?”

I didn’t know what to think.

It was Free’s suggestion that we talk to Gabriel. It was my idea to go alone. Every instinct I had said that Gabriel wouldn’t do well with being outnumbered. I was the one who’d spent the most time with him. I was the logical choice. Free wasn’t happy about that, but she agreed: I would talk to Gabriel.

I would ask him about his brother.

For the first time since Cady had sent me off the mountain, my body and the restless energy inside it felt aligned. I made it to the shack I’d seen Gabriel disappear into the night before and paused. Up close, the termshackseemed insufficient. It wasn’t big—maybe twenty feet by twenty—but it was solid. It had been made with wood but made well. The color had faded with time, enough so that I doubted Gabriel was the one who’d taken hammer to nail. But someone had built this place, board by board.

I understood, objectively, that knocking was something people did. But announcing my presence—giving away my position and waiting, open and exposed—wasn’t something I’d ever been able to bring myself to do. Jude had joked for years that my version ofknockingwas to stand silently outside a door, glaring intensely.

I might have given up on this particular door—I wasn’t even sure why I’d come—but I heard something. The sound was muted, but I had a way of listening, focusing on one thing and blocking out everything else.

And there it was again—a low-pitched murmur.A moan.

A breath caught in my throat, I pressed the door inward, slowly at first. The hinge creaked, the old wooden boards protesting beneath my feet as I shifted my weight. Allowing the house to announce my entry sent my shoulders hunching upward, but after freezing on the makeshift porch for a moment or two, I made my way inside.

The first thing I noticed was that the cabin consisted of a single room, plumbing on one side, a shelf with non-perishables on the other, and a bed in between.

The second thing I noticed was the body on the floor.

Body.For an instant, I was somewhere else, looking atsomeoneelse. I could see long, dark hair. I could see blood pooling on white tile.

I stumbled backward, my hand grappling for the wall and hitting paper. I didn’t turn to see what I was touching. I couldn’t tear my eyes from the floor. Sunlight streamed in from the door and a nearby window, illuminating the shape of the form sprawled there.