I stared at the picture until it burned into my retinas. My hands were shaking so violently I had to hide them under the table. He won. He found the one nerve he could pull to make me move, and he was pulling it with everything he had.
“What do you want me to do?” I whispered, the fight finally draining out of me.
Colin’s smile was almost tender. He reached across the table, not for my hand, but for my phone. He turned it off and slipped it into his pocket. Then he took my keys and did the same.
“We’re staying the night,” he said, his voice final. “It’s safer. Nobody is looking for you out here yet.”
The word yet hung in the air like a noose.
He stood and walked to the door. He turned the lock with a heavy, metallic clunk. Then, he pocketed the key and looked back at me, the firelight casting long, distorted shadows behind him.
“You can sleep on the cot,” he said, pointing to a narrow, rusted frame in the corner. “I’ll stay up and keep watch.”
The offer was a threat. He was going to watch me sleep. He was going to own my unconsciousness the same way he owned my day.
I didn't move. I stayed in the chair, my spine rigid, watching him. Outside, the wind moved through the dead grass, whispering a warning I couldn't escape. I was alone in the dark with a man who thought possession was a virtue, and the night was only just beginning.
Thirty-Five
Wyatt
Thirty hours of dirt roads that bled into the horizon like bruises. Thirty hours of checking abandoned barns where the only thing waiting was the stench of dry rot and the hollow whistle of the wind through termite-eaten timber. We asked the same questions to the same tired, hollow-eyed faces in three different counties, getting nothing back but shrugs and the kind of quiet fear that settled into a town when people realized a predator was walking among them.
I drove with both hands locked on the wheel, my knuckles white enough to glow in the sickly green light of the dash. Every time the truck jolted over a pothole, my heart spiked against my ribs like a trapped bird. The tension in the cab was thick enough to choke on, tasting of stale coffee and unwashed adrenaline.
“You wanna slow it down,” Holt said, his voice a low, jagged rasp. He didn't look at me. He couldn't afford to take his eyes off the black ribbon of road. “The gravel is turning to silt. Road’s getting rough.”
“I’m not missing anything,” I replied. My voice didn't sound like mine. It was a cold, alien vibration in my throat.
He snorted, a sharp, bitter sound. “You’re not missing her by driving us into a ditch either. If we flip this rig, she dies out there. Is that what you want?”
I eased off the gas, just a fraction. Gravel popped under the tires like small-caliber fire. The road narrowed into little more than twin ruts cutting through scrub and waist-high dead grass that hissed against the undercarriage. Trees crowded closer, their skeletal branches clawing at the dark sky, reaching for the truck as if trying to pull us into the blackness.
The radio crackled to life, the static sounding like teeth grinding together.
“Nothing on the east ridge,” a voice said, sounding small and defeated. “We checked the culvert and the old irrigation shed. No sign. Just some old tire tracks that could be months old. No sign of Tessa.”
“Copy,” Holt said, his jaw muscles jumping. “Head back toward the main road and keep your lights low. If he’s out there, we don't want him seeing you before you see him. Stay sharp.”
Every mile we covered without finding her felt like another shovelful of dirt on a casket. I was failing her. I could feel the weight of it stacking up on my chest, making it harder to draw a full breath.
“She should’ve called,” I muttered.
Holt glanced at me sideways, the dash light hollowing out his features until he looked like a corpse. “She’s stubborn as hell, Wyatt. You know that.”
Earlier, the sun had been a cruel, bright eye in the sky, and we’d been forced to stop at Tessa’s place to regroup and trade the horses for trucks. Dani had been pacing the living room like a caged animal, her pink hair pulled up into a messy,frantic knot. She was wrapping her arms around herself so tight I thought she might splinter apart right there on the rug.
Maddy sat curled on the couch, knees drawn up to her chin. She’d pulled her hoodie sleeves over her hands, disappearing into the fabric. She hadn’t cried. Not once. No hysterics, no sobbing—just a terrifying, thousand-yard stare that made her look sixty years old instead of fourteen. That quiet scared me more than any scream. It was the silence of a child who already accepted that the world was a dark and hungry place.
“She wouldn’t just disappear,” Maddy had said when I’d crouched in front of her. Her voice was flat, devoid of the melody of childhood. “She wouldn’t do that to me.”
I’d swallowed hard, the lump in my throat feeling like a jagged stone. “No, honey. She wouldn’t.”
“She promised she would let me know if she was leaving town,” Dani added sharply, her voice cracking. “She promised. We had a plan. She wouldn't break a plan.”
I hadn’t said what we were all thinking. Those promises didn’t mean shit when someone else decided they had a claim on your life. Those plans were just paper when a man like Colin decided to turn the world into a hunting ground.
Maddy had finally looked up at me then, her eyes too steady, too perceptive. “You’re going to find her.”
