“Is this all your land?” Colin asked like Cash hadn’t completely ignored his last question.
“Of course, it is. Don’t you remember the map?” Addy dished the details before I was ready to give them. “He’s got like a million miles. That’s why he didn’t find us for two whole days.”
Cash looked back from over his shoulder, and his eyebrow arched in incredulity.
You’ve been here for two days? And a map? What the hell is going on, Daisy?He didn’t need to say it aloud for me to hear it plain as day.
Both irritation and worry lined every inch of his face.
Nerves scattered, and the terror of what I was attempting prowled up my spine and sent chills scattering across my flesh.
Unsettled, I peeked into the dense forest again. The fear not quite as great as it had been. Not with Cash six feet away.
We continued to trudge through the thicket. Daylight waned with each moment that passed as we climbed and wound and edged deeper into the woods.
Finally, we broke into a clearing.
My heart nearly stopped, and I gaped at a meadowy expanse that held a quaint cabin hedged in a deep copse of trees.
A single-story home made of logs with a pitched roof and a chimney rising toward the heavens. It had a covered porch that ran along the front with three steps leading up to it.
Basic and plain and so beautiful it nearly brought me to my knees.
Because it was a cabin that looked exactly like the one he promised to build me when I was seventeen.
FIVE
CASH
What the helldid I think I was doing? Carrying this little girl who clung to my neck like I was her savior while I led the rest of her family toward my sanctuary?
My cabin meant for me and me alone.
Except I figured Daisy knew that was complete and utter bullshit when she stumbled to a stop behind me after she caught sight of the cabin that I built with my bare hands.
One that had been imagined during teenaged middle of the night giggles and foolish dreams.
Building it had been instinct. Unable to stop what my hand sketched before I physically began to bring it to life.
Swallowing the lump in my throat, I forced myself to keep moving over the gravel drive to the three steps that led up to the porch. My boots thudded against the wooden stairs as I climbed them, and Eva cinched down tighter on my neck as I moved across the porch toward the front door. “You got a bed for me, BigGwumpyGiant? I got asweepingbag if I got tosweepon the floor.”
My chest fucking squeezed. Squeezed in something I absolutely could not feel. A groaning of some long-dead piece of me.
I didn’t respond. I only set her onto her feet before I grabbed my phone from my pocket and punched in the code to disarm the security system, then pulled out my keyring and worked through the locks.
Guts a tangle of nerves as I tried to decipher exactly what was going down with Daisy.
Her words spinning around me like I was surrounded by fiends who were coming in for the kill.
I’m in trouble.
It injected aggression into my veins. The violence that forever simmered in my spirit thrashed and pulsed. Vying for a way to be set free so I could inflict the pain I always thirsted for.
Knowing I would destroy anyone who thought to do her wrong and take the most twisted sort of pleasure while doing it.
I couldn’t stop myself from jumping to that conclusion, enraged by the idea that someone had hurt her. I found myself praying to fuck that maybe she was broke, down on her luck, and she was here for a loan or some basic shit. Praying that the trouble she was in could be easily fixed.
But what swam in those cornflower eyes promised it was far worse than that, and the little I’d allowed myself to glean about her life told me she should be financially secure.
