“Affirmative.” Focus. See what’s in front of you. Breathe. “I’ve got your six. Go.”
Reaching down with her left hand while she held the Glock steady in her right, Isabella turned the knob, pushing her way inside the apartment. Her body tensed three steps over the threshold, and holy hell.
The place was ruined.
A hard prickle of warning set in over the back of Kellan’s neck, growing sharper with each passing second. Daylight slanted in past the mostly closed blinds, outlining the wreckage of what looked to have once been her living room. An upholstered love seat sat in the middle of the room, sideways and slashed to ribbons. The coffee table in front of it had been upended, the TV beyond smashed and scattered to the four corners of the hardwood floors. Although the room wasn’t particularly large or overly cluttered, everything Kellan could see—picture frames, a handful of throw pillows, books that had presumably been yanked from the shelf on the wall—was all shattered or shredded beyond repair.
Although her eyes were saucer-wide, Isabella still remained on point, her movements quiet and her muscles spring-loaded and ready to strike. With her left hand, she indicated for him to head to the right side of the apartment, leading with her Glock as she headed down the hallway to the left.
Air so hot it hurt to breathe…sunlight scorching in through the windows…
“If you move, I will kill your friend. You’ll watch him die screaming, and then I’ll kill you just as slowly.”
Old emotions threatened to burn bright and bubble up, but Kellan set his mind on the here and now of Isabella’s apartment. Focus.
He inhaled, marshaling his heartbeat to a steady rhythm and squeezing his shoulders in readiness. The kitchen was as trashed as the living room, pine cabinets gaping wide, dishes scattered in pieces over the terra cotta floor tiles. But both it and the breakfast nook were thankfully free from threats.
Or at least the people who had caused them. For now.
“Clear,” Kellan called out, his voice sounding canon fire-loud in his ears. Relief spun through him as Isabella echoed the sentiment a few seconds later, and he retraced his steps back to the living room.
“The place has been completely tossed,” he said, holstering his weapon and waiting for her to do the same before reaching out to put a hand on her shoulder. “This had to be DuPree.”
Isabella let out a slow exhale, her expression unreadable. “It was.”
Concern mixed with confusion in Kellan’s veins. Both must have shown on his face, because she turned on her heel to lead the way to her bedroom. The quilt had been pulled from her bed along with the powder blue top sheet, and Kellan’s blood turned to ice at the sight of the deep gouges cut into the mattress, all the way down to the fabric-wrapped springs. Every dresser drawer had been yanked open and emptied, her underwear strewn all around the room as if on display. But it was what hung over the full-length mirror in the corner of the once-cozy space that made Kellan’s heart go ballistic.
“Is that…?”
“The dress I wore to the party,” Isabella finished, her eyes moving from the photograph pinned to the thin strap of the dress to the message scribbled on the glass beneath the cherry-red hemline.
See you soon.
“I need to call Sinclair,” she said, and Kellan turned, his legs not quite steady but the rest of him one hundred percent goddamn sure as he replied.
“Yes, you do. And when you get him on the phone, make sure you tell him that either he finds this guy, or I will.”
* * *
Isabella looked around her ruined bedroom and tried with all her might not to kick the crap out of something. Even though nearly an hour had passed since she and Kellan had found her apartment ripped open and ransacked, the damage still sent shockwaves down her spine. The knowledge that DuPree had been in her space, riffling through her panty drawer and carving up the spot where she slept like a Thanksgiving turkey, was enough to tempt her to vomit.
The way the slimy bastard had ripped the photograph of her and Marisol out of the frame by her bedside and pinned it to the top of the dress in a clear-cut effort to rattle her? Now that made Isabella want to head straight for his penthouse to drag him down all forty flights of stairs and into the precinct with her bare freaking hands.
This case had just gotten personal on a whole new level, and there wasn’t a damned thing she could do about it from behind her desk. Just like there hadn’t been a damned thing she could do for her cousin eleven years ago once she’d made the fateful phone call that had led to Marisol’s death.
No. No. Isabella would not—could not—be bullied by Julian DuPree. Now more than ever, she had to stop him from hurting any more women. Which meant she had to prove to Sinclair that she trusted her team so he’d put her back on this case.