We’d found solace in one another. A family. I loved every single one of those assholes. I’d die for them. The shivers racked my spine, and I realized that just might happen if I didn’t turn my ass around and go back to the cabin.
Maybe Que talked to Nickie. Maybe it was all amisunderstanding of some sort. Maybe Prat had driven the van into the lake on purpose. Maybe he’d been followed and needed to ditch it. Maybe he’d gotten injured and hidden that key there for us to find…
Fuck! Nothing was making fucking sense!
“Where the fuck are you, Prat!”
The blaring light of the prison spotters and sniper towers climbed over the tree line, and I sighed. Maybe this was a sign that I should just turn myself in. Make up some lie about everyone else being dead and give them a real chance at freedom.
“I’m sorry, Que,” I said and headed that way.
The closer Igot to the prison, the deeper the chill cut through to my bones. I could already feel the hounds snapping at my heels, smell their foul breath on my face. I was going to die out here before I?—
“Oof!” Something caught on my boot, and I tripped, landing face-first in the snow. I sat up and growled before getting back to my feet and kicking at the lump in anger. “The fuck!”
The lump… moved. I froze before brushing aside my shock and crouching down to see what it was. I dusted off the collection of snow and jumped back again when I found a pair of dead eyes staring at me.
It was a body. Not just a body. But…
“Prat.”
My friend’s face was frozen in the snow,frozen in terror, bits of blood and skin peeling away as I scraped some of the ice off. This didn’t look like the work of any animal I’d ever seen. Animals also didn’t leave their meals behind. And there were no bullet wounds suggesting someone in the tower had spotted him. So what the fuck had happened?
“Oh god. Prat,” I repeated aloud. “What the fuck happened to you?”
He still had Dash’s old scrubs on, but the bottoms were yanked down, exposing him to the dick. People didn’t just yank their dicks out when they were dying. It wasn’t normal…
And neither was someone else. Fucking Nickie. She’d done this. I didn’t know how I knew. I just did. It was a gut feeling, like the ones I used to get when I knew a perp was lying to me. I was never wrong then, and I wasn’t wrong now either.
She would answer for this. She would…
“Fuck! Que!” My throat felt like it was closing up. He was at the cabin. With her. They all were. “Fuck! No, no, no!” I pushed up on shaky legs and took off in a full sprint, trying to follow my boot prints back to him while the snow did its best to cover them up.
I couldn’t lose Que. I couldn’t. He was the one good thing in my fucking life. If Nickie touched any of them I’d kill her, but if she hurthim, I’d become the monster the outside world deemed me to be.
“Que!” I yelled, blinded by frozen tears as I pounded snow. I never cried. Not even for Holly. Because Que wasn’t her. He was different. He was… Fuck, he was everything. “I… I love you, you fucking idiot! You better be okay!”
Love? What the fuck was I saying?
The truth. Because I did love him. It had just taken me this long to figure it out. It made about as much sense as it didn’t. Holly had been the rational choice. A check box. The way my life was supposed to turn out. I’d been a cop and she’d been a teacher. They fit together like peanut butter and jelly.
But I fucking hated peanut butter. I loved things that weren’t good for me. Like marshmallow fluff. And Twinkie cakes and Cool Whip… And Quentin. I loved him.
And now he was in trouble because I didn’t trust my gut the first time I felt something was off with that girl.
I ran faster, and faster still, my legs burning as hot as the pain in my chest until it was replaced by something cold.
THWACK!
“Ow! What the fuck?” I shook my head and tried to regain my bearings. Did something hit me or did I hit it?
“Slow the fuck down!” A familiar voice huffed and heaved. “Not all of us have bionic legs!”
I spun around, terrified that I was imagining shit. Hearing what I wanted to hear. Then my eyes landed on him and I tackled the man like a linebacker, slamming him down onto the snow and rolling on top of him. Forcing him to drop the hand-sized ball of ice he was preparing to chuck at me again.
“Oh my god! Que! You’re okay! You’re really okay! I thought… I thought I lost you. I thought…”
“Well, you kinda did.” He grinned up at me. “You need to learn not to walk so fast. I almost fucked like six different trees thinking they were you.”
