“I’m not wrong. He’ll have taken her to Kolob Arch.” Callen funneled the SUV off the freeway, heading directly into Springdale. Maeve didn’t have a lot of time, but he wouldn’t go in blind. Wouldn’t put her at further risk.
“We’re headed out now. Meet you there as soon as we can.” Simpson ended the call from his end of the line, leaving Callen in a cocoon of silence as he pulled the SUV into his driveway.
His parents’ vehicle was parked at the curb. He hadn’t had the chance to explain anything since leaving the funeral home that first time, not wanting to talk about Lauren over the phone instead of to their faces, but now wasn’t the time. Maeve needed him, and he wasn’t going to fail her this time.
Charging through the front door, he noted his parents spread out on the sectional in front of the TV before rushing down the hallway into the second bedroom. Ugh. Looked as though Cieronhad made himself more than comfortable for his short stay with the slight hint of odor coming off the walls. His brother hadn’t even bothered putting on the fitted sheet or the bedding Callen had pulled from the dryer and laid at the end of the mattress.
“You’re late.” His mother followed on his heels, hair in the same curlers she’d used since he was a kid and her face clean of makeup. Sweeping her hands in front of her face, she tried to clear the obvious smoke smell, but it wouldn’t do a damn bit of good. “I was getting worried something had happened at the hospital. How is Maeve doing?”
Callen’s heart stopped for a beat as he tore into the bedroom closet. After his storage container had been broken into, he couldn’t leave an entire arsenal open for civilians or the curious to take advantage of. He’d managed to not go insane in the days between getting Maeve to the hospital and when she’d woken by moving most of his weapons and gear here. Now he needed it to find her. He thumbed the keypad of the gun safe at the top of the closet and pulled one of his sidearms free before grabbing a box of ammo and tossing them onto the tangled bed. “I don’t know how to answer that.”
“What do you mean?” Helen Russell rounded into his peripheral vision, much shorter but so much more intimidating than most women his age. Or maybe that’d come from a lifetime being raised by one of the strongest women he’d known. Her voice notched higher as she dragged on his arm to slow him down. “Callen Russell, tell me what’s going on. Right now.”
He couldn’t keep it from her. Not if this ended with Maeve… He would need her to hold him together, just as she had for those weeks he’d been sick with pneumonia at twelve years old. Callen opened his mouth to answer, taking in Cieron’s mess, but stepped deeper into the closet at the sight of something he hadn’t seen in over a year.
A bright yellow notebook peeking out from his brother’s unzipped overnight bag. Callen crossed the floor in less than two steps.
“Callen?” His mom’s concern practically radiated off her. “What’s happened?”
He ripped the all-too-familiar notebook free from Cieron’s bag and turned to face her. “What is this?”
“I don’t know. That’s Cieron’s bag. I’ve never seen…” His mother’s eyebrows pinched together, then smoothed over in horror. Stumbling back, she held a hand to her chest as the truth registered between them. “No.”
Callen held on to his sister’s notebook—a notebook Maeve had lost everything over—with a death grip. “Where is he?”
Chapter Twenty-Six
It wasn’t possible.
But the face staring down at her wasn’t an illusion. The mask had hidden his most striking features, but the eyes… She should’ve recognized his eyes, a piercing blue that matched his father’s rather than the dark intensity of Helen Russell’s. “You.”
Cieron cocked his head to one side. “Me.”
Her bones suddenly felt too big for her body, gravity too heavy on her muscles. “You killed Lauren.”
Her almost-brother-in-law—the closest man she’d had to a brother—rounded down the side of the table, setting himself up to her right. “I can tell this is coming as quite a shock for you, so I’ll give you a minute.”
The change in his positioning didn’t do much for the anxiety burning through her. She still couldn’t breathe without aggravating the sutures in her still-leaking gut, couldn’t force her brain to catch up with reality. Tears she’d swallowed back over and over finally broke that internal barrier she’d summoned since seeing Callen for the first time in a year. “You tried to kill Callen.”
“Would have, too, if you weren’t so damn determined to save everyone.” His wide smile flashed with newly whitened teeth, but she’d seen the truth that night she’d found him in the warehouse. What the drugs had done to him inside and out. “That bullet was never meant for you, but you just couldn’t stop yourself from playing hero, Maeve. Never could. I think it’s one of the things I love about you. Why I fell in love with you, but nomatter how many times I tried to tell you, I couldn’t. Because I knew you would never choose me.”
Love. No. That…that didn’t make sense. Cieron wasn’t in love with her. Fisting her hands at her sides, Maeve focused on the sharpness of her nails in her palms rather than the steady drip coming from her stomach. She didn’t know what the hell she’d done to tear the sutures, but she’d obviously done more damage than she thought. “Listen to me, Cieron. You don’t love me. You just think you do because we’ve been through hard things together. It happens, and I don’t blame you for thinking that night I got you to the hospital was more than what really—”
“Don’t patronize me!” Cieron slammed his fist into the wood beside her head, and a ringing started in her ear. Vibrations seemed to tremor through him as he stared down at her with an expression she’d never seen before. Tight and full of rage. This wasn’t the man she’d known. The man who’d driven her and Lauren to the movies or to a party their parents didn’t know about or bought them their first case of beer had always owned a sly smile that could slay any woman’s resistance, a lazy way of moving and sarcasm that ended in laughs. He’d been the perfect brother looking out for them when they got in over their heads as teens, then the fun brother when they’d crossed over the eighteen-year threshold. But this man…she didn’t know this man, and Maeve’s instincts told her she didn’t want to. “I don’t have some kind of savior complex, Maeve. Nothing changed for me the night you took me to the emergency room, though I appreciated your help from letting me die and promising to find my sister. Unnecessary but appreciated. I’d already decided long before that night that you would be mine. And now you are.”
His. No. She wasn’t his, and the longer she remained strapped to this table, the more likely she wasn’t leaving whatever hellhole he’d dragged her to. A gust of wind battered the wall behind him, the wood groaning under the force. The entire room feltas though it would crash down around them given the slightest push. She couldn’t stay here, but running out into the night blind, with a hole in her stomach, wouldn’t be any better for what he had planned. “You don’t want to do this. Callen—”
His growl reverberated off the already shaky walls. Cieron planted both hands on the table, on each side of her, leaning in close enough she caught hints of marijuana on his clothing. “Enough about my brother. He’s not coming for you, Maeve. I saw him leave you at the funeral home without turning back and drive away. Probably running back to Mommy and Daddy like he always does when things don’t go his way. He and Lauren had that in common, as you know. He lost his chance. Now it’s my turn, and as soon as I’m done getting what I want from you, I’ll finish what I started with him. After all, it’s the least he deserves.”
Callen. Her vision wavered again. It was getting harder to keep her eyes open, and she really, truly did not want to pass out in the presence of a man who felt entitled to her. Her training directed her to memorize the layout of the small space. The room itself didn’t have much in the way of furniture, the table she’d been zip-tied to taking up most of the space, though she was sure it’d been moved from one of the other walls into the center of the shack-like design. No windows. No signs of anyone having lived here. Not a house. Another gust of wind rattled the thin wood door with knots drilled straight through it. A fire extinguisher had been installed on a hook near the hinges with a toolbox and thin sleeping cot off to one side. “And what is it you want from me, Cieron? Why go through all this trouble? Why kill Lauren and Iliana and try to drown your brother?”
“You, Maeve. I just want you. I want you to want me as much as I want you, and if you don’t, I want you to hurt as much as I do watching you choose my brother over and over despite how he’streated you.” Shoving away from the table, he backed up until he hit what looked like a plain desk. “So what’s it going to be?”
“You’ve already hurt me.” She didn’t miss the flinch in his shoulders. He didn’t like the fact that she was bleeding out. The gunshot wound most likely ruined whatever plans he’d had in bringing her here, but if she was being honest, it was ruining hers too. She wouldn’t make it far when she ran. Maeve twisted her left wrist—the one most likely out of his line of vision—until the edge of the zip tie cut through the first layer of skin. This would hurt, but it would be quick once she followed through. She just had to keep him distracted enough not to notice. “You see that, don’t you, Cieron? Killing Lauren, abducting Iliana and driving Callen’s truck into the river with him inside, the bullet wound. All those things have already hurt me, are still hurting me. You’re not supposed to hurt the people you love, and you’ve hurt me far more than Callen ever has.”
Her heart threatened to give under the lie. Because the truth was, Callen had hurt her, but the scars and the wounds weren’t visible to the naked eye. They’d cut much deeper. From ending their engagement to the barbs he’d thrown at her over the past few days, she wasn’t sure whether there was anything left for her and Callen to salvage. But she wanted there to be. She wanted to tell him how sorry she was that she’d lied, that she hadn’t gotten to Lauren in time, that she hadn’t seen the threat before now. She wanted him to know she might’ve taken that bullet to save his life but that he’d saved hers more times than she could count in some of the smallest ways. By ordering takeout for them after an especially hard day in the field, for showing her what it felt like to be wanted when no one else had stepped forward to claim her after her father’s death, by hunting down the man who’d destroyed everything she’d known and never shying away from the nightmares that chased her until she woke screaming. Callen had been there to shape her from the moment she’d steppedover the Russells’ threshold. He’d trained her to adapt and crawl out onto the other side when things got too overwhelming, and he’d handed her the weapons and the courage to stand her ground against some of the worst threats she’d ever faced.
Breaking her heart, ending their future—neither of those things held a candle to all the good he’d brought into her life. And she wasn’t ready to let the darkness win. Not then and not now.
