“We walk from here,” he said.
He couldn’t seem to look her in the eyes, as if he knew on some level that he was doing wrong. They hiked into a sparsely wooded no-man’s land that was mostly rock and hardpack as the sun blazed down from an ever-higher angle. She wondered how the hell anyone would ever find her. Yanking some hair from her own head when he wasn’t watching, she draped the strands over branches at eye level along the trail. She dug her feet into the ground wherever it was soft, ensuring her shoe left an imprint and stomped or stumbled into branchesby accident,to break their ends off and leave a sign.
She was terrified Earl was going to hurt her or kill her. He was big, which was why it got so scary when he’d become controlling and violent. And she knew of his love for guns. He had hers, now, tucked into the back of his jeans.
He was nothing like Wolf.
God, they’d been so close to finding the answers! The photo in that pile of stones was going to lead them straight to Wolf’s birth family. She’d felt it right to her toes.
And the way he’d been looking at her just then, just before the end…
And now, did it even matter? What if Wolf didn’t survive? What if he was already gone?
She gulped back a sob, tripped on a stone, and landed on her knees, and then she just let her head fall forward and sobbed. It had been so perfect between them, and then all stupid this morning. Then just when it started to get good again—maybereallygood—this idiot had to show up and ruin it all.
“Why would you do this to me?” she moaned. “Why did you have to come back and ruin my life all over again?”
He took her by one arm and dragged her to her feet and onward through the wilderness, still not noticing her unbound hands. Or not caring. They moved into a huge ring of rock formations, and then he pulled her into a narrow opening behind one of them.
“What the hell is this? No, we won’t even fit back there. What are you?—?”
She pulled, but he pulled harder, and instead of bashing into a solid rock wall in the darkness, she was pulled through it into a pitch-dark cave.
“What is this place?” she whispered, but her only answer was the echo of her own voice.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Wolf
Wolf was in a canoe with the woman who said she was his sister. Willow. He was in the middle of the canoe, facing backward, and she was in the rear, facing him and paddling. As he studied Willow’s face against the rising stone walls around them, he realized why she’d seemed familiar before. She looked like him. There was something in her eyebrows, the shape of them, a softer version of his own, and in her nose, too, he thought.
Could it really be true?
“How did you find me?” he asked at length. Of the million questions in his mind, it was the first, and he couldn’t make the canoe move any faster, so he might as well use the time to learn more.
“Our parents never told me about you,” she said. “Our mother had a complete breakdown after you were swept away. She had to go in-patient for a time, and when she got out, everyone just fell into not talking about you.”
“They didn’t even search?”
“Oh, they searched. Our uncle Garrett, that’s our father’s brother, was sheriff. Still is. He hunted for you up and down the river for months. Consulted every police agency along the way, too. Even found your baby blanket, right near that spot where we found you. Which is…” She shook her head slightly, raising her eyes as if looking for spirits in the sky. “Something.”
He nodded and resisted the urge to insert questions for more details on every topic. He’d found her. He would have plenty of time to fill in the missing pieces. He wanted to let her speak, because each sentence was a revelation.
“A few weeks ago, looking for something in the attic, I found a cradle with your name engraved on it. I stormed into a family meeting demanding answers. And that’s when they finally told us—my cousins and me—the truth. There were old albums full of your baby pictures. You were wearing that bracelet in every one of them.”
He twisted his wrist and looked at the bracelet in wonder.
“When Uncle Garrett told me where the blanket was found, I was compelled to find the spot and do a ceremony for you. But really, I wanted to find you or some clue about what had happened to you. And all our cousins came, too. They’re all pretty pissed about the lie.”
He looked around as she spoke to see them all around him.
“The vet who patched you up is Maria-Michelle, and the little blond aspiring PI is Drew.”
“And the big guy with the dark hair is the country singer, Ethan Brand, isn’t he?” Wolf asked.
“Yep. We sometimes call him Bubba. He hates it, so we have no choice. And the other big guy with the glasses is Baxter. Drew’s brother is Orrin.” She pointed at one of the two younger men, the lighter one, then she pointed at his darker counterpart and said, “And that’s Trevor.”
He said, “I saw your ceremony. That was for me?”
