She found the fucking router and broke it.
“I need to go,” I say quietly.
“Ashland—” Da turns to me.
When I look at him, he's watching me with red-rimmed eyes. “Whatever's got you running, son, don't end up like Donovan. We stay loyal. We don't hide things from the McCarthy family, aye?”
The words hit me like a fist to the gut. If he knew I've got the daughter of a traitor locked in a cabin in the woods… If Crowning found out I took her…
The McCarthys won't just lose me. They'll lose everything.
But I can't just hand her over to a man who'll kill her the same way he killed the others.
I fucking won't.
“You don't have anything to worry about,” I tell Da. But I'm swallowing a lie.
Seamus puts his hand on my shoulder. “Go,” he says. “But I want the truth, Ashland. I don't want another problem.”
My truck's parked out in the front, right outside the gate. I'm in it before anyone else leaves. The city blurs past. It's a rainy, gray day, nothing like the quiet of the woods where I've got her hidden.
Where Ihadher hidden.
The cabin's forty minutes out. I make it in twenty-five.
The router's smashed on the kitchen floor. She's not in any of the rooms—not in the bathroom… not in the bedroom.
Fuck.
Where is she?
I look frantically, tearing through the whole fucking cabin until I find the back window, the one I was fucking sure was safe.Apparently,the metal panel inserts came out.
Fuck it.
I'm out the door and into the woods in seconds. She can't have gone far, not on foot, not in this terrain. Not without knowing where she is.
But she's clever. Desperate. Scared of me.
I start running.
Chapter Twelve
Bianca
I thought gettingout was the hardest part. Turns out, I was wrong.
These woods are endless. My palms are still scraped raw from the rough wood siding after I took the metal insert out.
I've been running for what feels like hours, but the trees just keep coming. Dense pines that block out the sky, undergrowth that catches on my clothes and hair. Everything looks the same, and I can't figure out where I am. That's the worst of it. If I had any sense of direction, any idea where I was, at least I'd know which way to go.
But I don't.
I step forward. My toe catches on a gnarled tree root, and I go sprawling, my hands hitting the frozen earth hardenough to sting. I know the second my knees hit the ground that something has happened to my ankle.
Fuck.
I take a look at it in the dim moonlight filtering through the canopy. It's swelling beneath my torn stockings and hurts with every step. Now it's swollen and throbbing, and every time I put weight on it, white-hot pain shoots up my calf.
