She returns to the boxes and kneels next to me. “The last year has been really hard on him.”
“How come?”
“Well…”
Raven clears her throat. “Should you really be telling her this?”
I raise a brow, looking between the two of them. “If there’s something I need to know, then please tell me. I don’t like surprises, and I’m not sure I could handle a bad one right now.”
They continue to stare each other down until Willow finally throws up her hands. “Oh, come on, Rave! She’s going to find out eventually.”
Raven glares at her. “Maybe she should find out from him.”
“I have every right to tell her. It’s my story just as much as it is his.”
My chest tightens, that dull ache that appears whenever a situation gets a little too real threatening to steal my breath. “What is?”
Willow glances toward the back office, listening to see if Niall’s awake. Only the sound of the music still playing from her phone fills the shop. Once she’s confident he’s solidly sleeping, she takes a deep inhale, like she’s bracing herself for what she has to say. “So, about two years ago, I was kidnapped.”
The hairs on the back of my neck stand up, goosebumps breaking out over my skin as my body reacts to her words the same way my mind does.
Disbelief.
“What?”
Raven’s typing has stopped, but that damn music fills the silence as Willow gathers what she wants to say, averting her gaze to the stacks of jars on the floor beside her.
“A man who lived high up on the far side of the mountain, well away from town, who had some very serious mental problems, had kind of a break from reality. He found me on the road after my car broke down and thought I was his wife who had left him decades ago and took their son with her. He brought me back to his cabin and…” She shudders a little bit, her hand tightening on the box lid, like she needs something to ground her. “And some things happened. I was newly pregnant when he took me, and I gave birth to Niall while I was up there.”
“Oh, my God…”
Acid crawls up my throat, my stomach churning violently.
“Killian had no idea.” She inhales sharply, then releases it slowly. “We had an argument, and he thought I left town. Then he and his brothers found me in the river right after Memorial Day last year. I was almost dead, and I had no memory of where I’d been for the previous year.”
My throat starts to tighten, tears and horror at what must have happened to her threatening to break my ability to keep myself together.
Willow shakes her head. “I didn’t know what had happened to me and didn’t even remember having a baby. It took a while for those memories to come back, and some I wish hadn’t, but once we figured it all out, we went back up the mountain to where I’d been held and found the man who did it.”
I hold my breath, waiting for her to continue the story. “What happened?”
She swallows thickly. “Well, Killian almost killed him.”
That doesn’t surprise me in the least.
The McBride brothers don’t seem like the type to let anyone who hurt the people they love get away with it.
“And”—she glances at Raven before she finishes—”we discovered that the man who took me was Liam’s biological father.”
What the hell?
I stare at her with my mouth open, trying to process what she just told me. “Wh-how? I…I don’t understand.”
Willow locks her gray gaze with mine, sympathy swimming in it. “His birth mother, Bobbie, took him when he was a baby and fled from Earl, who was abusive to her. She left Liam?—”
I complete the sentence for her as everything clicks into place. “On Connie McBride’s doorstep.”
She nods. “And then, eventually, Earl caught up with her. He killed her. Never knowing what happened to the baby.”
