“Where is he, Rae? He told me he was staying with you.”
“I thought he was, or that we were coming back to London.”
“So what happened? What changed?”
“I don’tknow,” I said desperately. “I was held by the police after the hunt. He was gone when I got back—he told Sprig he was going home.”
“Why would he leave without you?”
“I don’t know. Things haven’t been easy. He gets upset sometimes. I figured he needed some space.”
Lucky shook his head. “Not space from you, Rae. It was never that.”
“Wasn’t it?”
But my words were hollow, even to my own ears, and the doubt lacing them didn’t ring true, not anymore. Cash had been different yesterday, hopeful, happy, as though he’d somehow found the answer—the balance between whatever we were to each other, and sabbing. He’d been the man I remembered from the start.
I reached out and gripped Lucky’s warm hands. “I don’t know where he is.”
Lucky hugged me. One of us was shivering, but I couldn’t tell who, and when he pulled away, new horror greeted me.
Sprig had appeared in the bottom corner of the camp. He walked towards us shaking his head, one of my hoodies clutched in his hand. “I found this at Baker’s Gate,” he called when he was close enough for us to hear him. “Lots of footprints too, tracks leading onto Goon’s land.” He stared directly at me and shook his head again. “Rae, I think they got him.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Cash
Foxes had a unique smell. To most people, it was kind of disgusting, but their musky scent had always comforted me, and tied me down to a world I sometimes didn’t want to be in anymore.
Somewhere along the last few hours, though—or however long it had been—it had stopped working. Lack of food, the cold, and the boot-shaped bruises all over my body was making me hurl, and every scent I absorbed as I gasped for air made my vision blur.
The cold was the worst. Goon had taken on the task of filling me in himself, and he wasn’t much good at it. His kicks and punches had stung, but there’d been no strength behind them, no belief. Ironic for a bloke who was far too thick for his horse.
Whatever. He’d hurt me, but I’d had worse, and I could’ve dealt with it if not for the freezing stone floor he’d dumped me on, and an inability to get up that my hazy mind didn’t quite understand.
Perhaps it was the cheap whisky someone had been nice enough to tip down my throat, forcing me to swallow it like water, mouthful after mouthful, until I’d puked on their shoes as well as my own. Either way, however I looked at it, I was fucked.
The booze in my system pulled me towards sleep, but I fought it and tried to take stock of my situation, piecing together the jumbled timeline in my brain to how I’d ended up here. Pain lanced my chest, but it wasn’t physical. Rae’s face haunted me, but I couldn’t remember why. Rough hands had brought me here, dragging me from the light to the dark, and it was only Goon’s frequent visits that clued me into where I was—the kennel block, trussed up on the concrete floor.
Lucky me.
More nausea ripped through me, but I had nothing left. The metal gate to my kennel crashed and banged, and suddenly, I wasn’t on the floor.
Goon stood me up against the wall and punched me in the face. His knuckles grazed my already swollen cheekbone—the same one that been cut a while back. Perhaps I was destined to come away from this place with half my face missing.
He struck me again, still not hitting home as much as he thought he was, but I groaned anyway. I wasn’t feeling him fetching someone from his squad who could throw a fair punch.
Goon laughed, as though he imagined himself the hardest man in the world. “Don’t like this, do ya? Well tough shit, you little fuck. Time for me to ruin your day for a change.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him my day had been ruined long before his thugs had hauled me out of the woods and dumped me in a dog kennel, so I let him hit me until he ran out of breath, or got bored…whatever. I was out of it enough to not know the difference, and weirdly, getting thumped in the head a few times had cleared the nausea. I no longer felt sick to my stomach, just profoundly tired…more than that, and for the first time, real fear broke through the apathy that had protected me so far.
A violent shiver rocked me, jerking my body from the floor so hard my head smacked back on the damp concrete. Pain. Fuck. Okay, despite my internal bravado regarding Goon’s strength, this shit was starting to hurt. And I was cold, so fucking cold that somewhere beneath the murkiness in my brain, I knew I had to stay awake. Goon wasn’t going to kill me, he didn’t have it in him, but the icy wind blasting into the kennel could. And fast, if Goon didn’t get fed up with me soon.
In an effort to stay conscious, I shifted my head to stare out between the bars of the door. I couldn’t see much, but I heard things. A horse moving past the kennel block, its hooves clacking on the concrete, and then the unmistakable snap of a crop, and the horse’s pained whinny. Sometime later, a dog yelped, a door banged, and the nausea returned. All this time we’d focussed on the foxes, when the other animals here needed us just as much.
Despite my best efforts, I lost time. My surroundings faded in and out, and I had no idea which way was up when someone came into my kennel.
Strong hands—stronger than Goon—gripped me under my shoulders. The cold floor disappeared and for a brief moment, I felt as though I was flying.
