No shit.
I swing again, driving the axe head even deeper into the wood before I turn to face him, wiping sweat from my brow.
My hands, shoulders, and back ache from the exertion, but it’s the good kind. The kind my body craves. The kind that reminds me I’m still alive despite everything that’s been happening.
It brings me back to the basics—Mom showing me how to use an axe. Teaching me how to properly fell a tree. Working with her, Killian, and Connor on the mountain with her employees from the yard. Learning the business and how to protect the mountain while only taking what we absolutely need from it.
Those were simpler times.
I didn’t question who I was or why I was here.
I didn’t worry about anything but my school work and having fun with my brothers.
I didn’t have nightmares about this place.
Connor leans against a tree a few yards away, Killian standing beside him with his arms crossed over his chest, looking every bit the big brother with something to say.
For as stoically quiet he often is, lately, he’s been pushing harder for me to talk about the very things I don’t want to. And that now includes Lucky and what happened this morning.
Killian assesses me, his blue eyes hard and narrowed. “We’ve been looking for you.”
I wondered how long it would take them to realize I had walked away from the site, from the meeting with the foreman who had a laundry list of issues that needed our attention.
They were deep in discussions I thought would keep them distracted longer, but apparently, I was sorely mistaken.
The guilt at shirking my responsibilities to come out here to do this starts to eke its way in, but I just couldn’t be up there anymore, couldn’t stand being in the place where Willow was held and where I saw him for the first—and last—time.
Part of me thinks Killian can only tolerate it because it helps remind him that it’s over for her, for them. Because they have each other. They have their family. They have the confidence of what their future holds to help them work through the pain of the past.
But for me, all I see is my father’s face.
All I feel there are his crimes.
Those nightmares become real up here.
So does my fear.
I give Killian and Connor my back again and return to demolishing the tree.
Killian releases a heavy sigh loud enough for me to hear over my own labored breathing and the slam of metal into the wood. Only a few more shots and this one will come down, and then I’ll start on another, and another, until I work all this out.
“Are we going to talk about this?”
I glare at Connor over my shoulder.
I’ve been avoiding this conversation about Lucky as much as I have been the ones about my father, and I only managed to this long today because I drove up here in my truck and they followed in Killian’s. If we had all been riding together, it would have been hours to get up to this site of them peppering me with questions I don’t have answers for.
There are no answers.
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since I found Lucky standing there with that gun, but I don’t know why she had it or what is going on with her. I’m in the dark about the woman I slept with last night. A woman I really barely know even though everything in me wants to know everything.
She took me into her body and gave me the best night of my life, but she’s still keeping me locked out of what’s most important.
That hurts.
And I don’t want to admit to them that she’s shut down all my attempts to get the truth from her.
But I also can’t ignore them.
