The Rise Of The Betrayed Luna (Amorah and Holmes) novel Chapter 198

Chapter 198

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The police station smelled of old coffee and fluorescent light. Lucia sat in a hard plastic chair in the corridor outside the interrogation room with her hands folded in her lap, watching through the narrow window in the door as two detectives sat across a table from Marco Hart.

He looked composed. That was the thing that made her want to put her fist through the glass. He sat there in his shirt with his lawyer beside him and his hands flat on the table, and he looked like a man who had been inconvenienced, not like a man who had orchestrated the kidnapping of two children.

Alexander stood beside her chair, his hand resting on her shoulder. His jaw hadn’t unclenched since they’d arrived.

Inside the room, Marco was talking. She couldn’t hear the words through the glass but she could see his expression. Measured. Controlled. Performing the face of a man with nothing to hide, and doing it well enough that she felt sick watching him.

“He’s lying.” Her voice came out flat. “Whatever he’s telling them in there, he’s lying.”

Alexander’s hand pressed slightly harder on her shoulder. Not disagreement. Just presence.

She’d been awake for nineteen hours. Her eyes felt like they’d been scraped out and put back wrong. Every time she closed them she saw the photograph. Monica’s dried tears. Lena’s white knuckles. The rope.

The door at the far end of the corridor opened and Margaret walked in.

She was dressed carefully. Hair done, coat pressed, the full performance of a woman who had nothing to be ashamed of. She spotted Lucia immediately and something moved across her face that wasn’t quite a smile and wasn’t quite satisfaction but lived somewhere between the two.

She walked toward them and stopped a few feet away.

“How does it feel?” Margaret’s voice came out soft, almost gentle, which made the words worse. “Sitting in a police station waiting to hear about your missing children. Wondering where they are. Whether they’re frightened.” She tilted her head. “You should know how that feels by now. You made Marco feel it for months.”

Lucia stood up.

Alexander’s hand moved to her arm. She didn’t shake it off but she didn’t sit back down either.

“I didn’t take Marco’s children from him.” Lucia’s voice came out very steady. “He abandoned them. He chose you over them and spent years watching you treat them like problems that needed managing. That is not the same ing and you know it.”

“You took his company.” Margaret’s eyes stayed flat and steady. “You took his title, his chair, his dignity. You humiliated him in front of every person he’d ever done business with.”

“Were you involved in this, Margaret?” Lucia’s voice didn’t rise. It got quieter, which was somehow worse.

Something shifted behind Margaret’s eyes. Fast. There and gone.

“You’re delusional.” Margaret’s voice hardened. “Your children are missing and instead of letting the police do their jobs you’re standing here accusing everyone around you. You accused Marco. Now me. Who’s next?”

“I’m going to follow where the evidence points.” Lucia’s voice stayed stripped and certain. “And it keeps pointing in the same direction.”

“You’re losing your mind with grief.” Margaret adjusted the strap of her bag, a practiced, casual gesture. “I understand that. I

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Chapter 198

está baby. I know what pain does to a person’s thinking.”

“Don’t.” Alexander’s voice came from behind Lucia. One word. It landed like something physical.

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Margaret looked at him once, then back at Lucia. “I hope your daughters come home safely.” She turned and walked down the corridor.

Forty minutes later the interrogation room door opened.

Marco’s lawyer came out first, briefcase in hand, already moving with the purposeful stride of a man who had won something. Then Marco, straightening his jacket. Then Detective Morrison, whose expression told Lucia everything before he opened his mouth.

“Mrs. Kane.” Morrison stopped in front of her. “At this time we don’t have sufficient evidence to hold Mr. Hart. His alibi checks out for the afternoon in question. Phone records, office entry logs, and a witness who confirms his whereabouts. We have nothing that directly connects him to the kidnapping.”

The words reached Lucia from a great distance.

Marco was already walking toward the exit.

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“He took them.” Her voice came out before she’d decided to speak. She stood up. “He took my daughters. You’re letting him walk out of here and he took my daughters.”

Marco stopped walking. He turned around slowly and looked at her from across the corridor, and for the first time since he’d arrived he let his expression show something real.

“Monica is my child.” His voice came out cracked and furious. “Mine. I held her when she was born. I taught her to ride a bike. I sat beside her bed when she had fever as a little girl.” His chest was heaving. “You’re standing here telling police that I- kidnapped my own daughter. My own blood. What kind of man do you think I am?”

“I know exactly what kind of man you are.” Lucia’s voice shook.

“Do you?” Marco stepped toward her. Morrison moved slightly but didn’t intervene yet. “Because from where I’m standing, a good mother doesn’t send her thirteen–year–old daughter to a mall with hired strangers while she drives around making accusations. A good mother doesn’t hand her children over to a security team that loses them in sixty seconds.” His voice rose. “A good mother keeps her children safe. And you couldn’t even do that.”

The words hit Lucia in the chest like something physical. She felt them go in.

“My daughters are missing because you sent them out without you.” Marco’s voice came out low and brutal. “You were their mother and you weren’t there. I would have been there. I would never have let them out of my sight. His jaw was shaking. “Whatever happened to them, you handed them over to it. You failed them. You failed Monica. That is on you.”

Lucia’s mouth was open but no sound came out.

“Don’t you dare.” Alexander stepped forward, putting himself between Marco and Lucia.

But the damage was already done. Lucia could feel it moving through her, those words finding every crack she already had and pushing in deeper. She pressed her fist against her sternum, pressing hard against the place where the words had landed, and a sound came out of her throat that she couldn’t control.

“I’m a bad mother.” The words came out in pieces, broken and awful, not a question, just a woman saying out loud the thing she’d been telling herself since the moment she got that phone call. “I’m a bad mother. I sent them without me. I should

have been there.”

“Lucia.” Alexander turned from Marco immediately, his hands on her face. “Look at ine. Look at me right now”

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