The emphasis he placed on the word dangerous triggered something inside me. My adrenaline surged. I tried to tell myself that there was no real threat. Confined space. Stale air. Man wants to hurt Girl. I cut that thought off at the knees. It was all I could do not to lunge at him.

“All I need you to do is tell me what Gabriel has been up to for the past twenty-four hours.” The sheriff smiled, like he’d already won.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Gabriel hadn’t said anything about suspecting his brother. He’d gone back out to the caves, but he’d just been looking for the pathway through the mountain.

Hadn’t he?

Even if he had been looking for his brother, that was because he’d spent years looking for Andrés. Not because he believed Andrés was the one who had taken Bella.

Right? I kept breathing. In and out.

The sheriff lifted his hand. I almost flinched, almost lunged, but he wasn’t reaching for me. He pulled a photograph out of a thick manila envelope.

The stone formation, half-buried in front of the hash-marked tree.

“Why are you showing me this?” I asked.

The sheriff’s teeth flashed—almost, but not quite a smile. “I’m showing you what I need to show you to remind you that I am not the enemy here, Kira.” He paused. “Do you recognize this?” The sheriff tapped the photograph. He waited until he saw a spark of recognition in my eyes before continuing. “Gabriel did.” He pulled out a second picture—smaller stones, buried in a similar formation near some kind of fort. “The Circle for the Lost.”

The sheriff’s voice was soft now. He wants me to lean forward to hear him, I thought. He wants me to let my guard down. Maybe that was paranoia, and maybe I was right. Either way, I didn’t move.

“The Circle is an old Hunter’s Point tradition, dating back to the town’s founding when winters were long and some of the people who went off to explore the surrounding terrain were never seen or heard from again.” The sheriff let his index finger trail the two nearly identical stone circles. “Think of it as halfway between a grave marker and a prayer.”

Think. As long as I was thinking, I was in control. Gabriel knelt next to the stone circle, I thought. He’d said it wasn’t a natural formation, but that was all.

“Gabriel and Andrés built this Circle,” the sheriff said, tapping two fingers against the picture with the fort. “Their mother was a Turner before she married Daniel Cortez, and the Turners are one of five founding families, the very people most likely to remember—and keep—a tradition as archaic as this one.”