Back in the tasting room, he waited.For what?
“What am I waiting for?” he asked Le Dog.
For her.
For the first time in his life, Luc Stanek felt lonely.
He paced the room, agitated. Paced and paced as Le Dog hunkered by the fire, brows twitching as his eyes followed Luc’s movements. Finally, after a useless ten minutes of this, Luc grabbed the rifle and went outside. He’d just head over to the fence, check out the spot where Abby had come through, maybe cut through and investigate the other side under cover of darkness.
Adrenaline coursed through him, pushing him close to running as he went, his feet crunching loudly on the snow. It wasn’t until he neared the fence that he heard it—another set of footsteps. He stopped cold, feet sinking in, and waited.
Probably close to a minute passed, his heart beating in his ears the only sound in the frozen night. And then it started again: the crunching. Steady, slow steps, from across the fence. He followed the steps with his eyes until he saw a shadow against the snow, and a glint of reflected moonlight. They’d put up a guard to keep him away.
Or to look out for Abby.
Either way, he knew better than to face off against them. Not like this, raw and spitting rage. The chilling reality was that they could do anything they wanted…unless he sought help.
No cops and no going in alone. Those were the promises he’d made.Merde.
Slowly, more carefully and quietly this time, he returned to the barn and locked himself in.
He grabbed the bottle and glass before forcing himself to settle down in front of the huge window, with Le Dog pressed to his side and Blackwood nothing but a sprinkling of fairy lights below. The first pour was big, enough to burn on its way down, enough to shove back this chaos burning inside him. Another pour to follow the first—only as he lifted the glass to his lips, it caught the light from the flames. He froze in place, gaze riveted to the liquid within.
Firelight through Virginia bourbon. The exact color of Abby Merkley’s eyes. He slugged it back and doled out another.
Hours later, something woke him up. The cold, he thought at first, seeing that the fire had burned down to a handful of embers. But when Le Dog leaned into his body and growled, Luc knew that wasn’t it.
Just as he rose from his makeshift bed, a noise came to him, piercing through the usual middle-of-the-night silence. An animal sound, spectral and strange, brought another growl from the dog, whose fur was standing on end.
“What is it, boy?”
With the next noise, he knew exactly what was happening. Something—or someone—had gotten into the henhouse.
With a curse, he struggled to get his boots on, took way too long to throw on his coat and grab his rifle and stride out into the night. There was nothing to see below. When he stopped to listen, breathing hard in the cold night, adrenaline pumping through tight muscles, he thought he might have imagined everything. Until from the direction of the henhouse, he heard it again—that unearthly sound.
He didn’t consider what he might be getting himself into by running right into it. He thought only of the animals, but by the time he got there—not even a flashlight in his hand—it was too late.
Whatever it was had gotten in and done its dirty work. Was it a fox? How could a fox have—
He ran his fingers over the latch. Bent backward, which meant this was no animal attack.
Although it wasn’t something he could prove, was it? That those fuckers had come here and killed his chickens. Gagging from the smell of blood, he stumbled back a step, then a second.
The air stank of death and rage.
“Fuck!” he said under his breath, then louder, “Fuck!” Lifting the rifle, he fired a shot into the air before bellowing again. “Don’t you fuck with me, you hear?” The gunshot’s echo muffled his words. It didn’t matter anyway, because he couldn’t see a goddamned thing, but they were out there. He could feel them watching.
And he understood the message loud and clear: His closest neighbors had just declared war.
23
“Anything to prove it was them?” asked Clay Navarro when Luc called him the next morning.
After a sigh, Luc asked, “The armed guard along the perimeter? The threat?”
“Thought they didn’t threaten you.”
“Right. Of course not.” He let out a dry, unhappy half laugh. “They want her back.”
