Maeve clenched her jaw against the sharp pain lancing through her as she arched her wrist upward, straining the plastic. All she needed was a little more pressure. What was this place? A shed? No. Nobody installed a fire extinguisher in a storage shed. Well, except for Callen, but his storage container had been different. He’d turned it into an impressive arsenal she could only attribute to him. The man loved his weapons, always wanting to be prepared. But he wouldn’t be prepared for this. Things had changed between them, but she had to believe there was still something worth saving from their relationship.
Cieron closed his eyes, and she took her chance, risking the pain. “You forced my hand. I didn’t want to hurt them, but you made me. By not seeing I was right there in front of you. By choosing him.”
The zip tie snapped, though Maeve didn’t give any hint as to the change in her circumstances. “I didn’t make you do anything. You’re the one who chose to hurt them, Cieron. You’re responsible for your actions. Nobody else.”
“No!” He charged the table again, quickly losing the short sense of calm. “You did this. You got into my head and refused to leave. Every time I saw you, you paraded yourself in front of me until you were all I could think about, all I could dream about. But you’ve haunted me long enough.”
Reaching to the back of his waistband, Cieron withdrew a blade like the ones she’d seen in Callen’s arsenal. Serrated anddeadly enough to kill. “Don’t worry, Maeve. This won’t take long. You’re already halfway there, and once you’re gone, I’ll be sure to pay my brother a visit.”
No. “Cieron—”
He arched the knife down.
Maeve snapped her free hand up, stopping the blade a mere inch from her heart. Her mouth parted just as Cieron’s eyes widened.
His breath huffed against her jawline, prickling her skin. “What the…”
She didn’t give him a chance to recover. Curving the side of her index finger over his knuckles, she made contact with the blade’s rough grip and shoved everything she had into turning the sharp end into his gut. The steel cut deep and quick. Lodging in his stomach. Grief that had no business surfacing flooded through her. “I’m sorry.”
His laugh rumbled from the half-cocked smile she’d come to love. “No, you’re not, but that’s okay. You will be.”
She didn’t understand his meaning but couldn’t risk giving him another opportunity to strike. Tugging the bloody metal from his gut, she ignored Cieron’s stumble into the desk behind him as she cut through the remaining zip ties. Curling off the table was impossible, so instead she rolled off the side. Her knees screamed as she hit uneven floorboards. Another gush of blood slid down into her waistband, warm and sticky and setting an invisible hourglass in motion. She had to get out of here.
“Run, Maeve. Hide if you can.” He pressed his hand into his wound, the blood trickling through his fingers. “Because when I find you, my face will be the last thing you see.”
Gripping the serrated blade, she pried herself off the floor and lunged for the door. She wrenched it hard enough to break one of the hinges and burst into a star-speckled night.
To find herself in the middle of nowhere, facing off with Kolob Arch.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
He’d been wrong from the beginning.
Callen hadn’t gotten more than a few pages into his sister’s notebook—a notebook Maeve had supposedly mishandled as a key piece of evidence in Lauren’s investigation—before he’d known exactly what kind of threat had taken Maeve. His gut clenched at the sight of the all-too-familiar handwriting within the pages now tossed in the back seat. It’d taken a couple of minutes to remember the language Maeve and Lauren had made up to communicate with each other about things they didn’t want his parents to know about, but he was never more grateful to recall it than now. Okay. Now and the time he’d first heard Maeve ask his sister about him. Lauren had written notes from entire conversations with “C,” detailing threats he’d made, ramblings about Maeve that led Callen to believe his brother had been watching her for years and indicators of how intense Cieron’s obsession had become mixed in with city development notes, sketches made during city planning meetings and phone numbers to follow through on.
His sister’s entire life had been detailed in this one notebook. Meetings, contacts, brainstorming.
And the letter to Maeve. One only she would’ve been able to decipher if Callen hadn’t gone out of his way to crack their code. And the secret Lauren may have been killed for.
“We’re going to find her.” Tommy Russell had taken one look at the notebook Callen had pulled from his brother’s overnight bag, grabbed a handgun and a box of ammunition for himself,and headed for the SUV. There was no arguing with his father to stay behind. Cieron had killed Lauren, had tried to kill Callen and was potentially on his way to killing Maeve. This was a family issue, and family stood together. His father reached across the SUV’s center console, squeezing Callen’s aching shoulder.
He hadn’t realized how tense he’d become until then and tried to breathe through all the possibilities they’d come across once they reached Kolob Arch. Callen still hadn’t heard from Simpson or his law enforcement rangers, but he had to believe Maeve would walk out of the park alive. With or without his help. He raced up the one-lane road curling and double-backing through the northwest side of Zion National Park. The mountains demanding attention from each side of the SUV were bigger, the valleys wider, the trees thicker, the drop-offs steeper. Everything tourists loved about the main trails in the park—the red rock cliffs, raging rivers and beautiful, winding views—were more beautiful out here. No longer consolidated to approved hikes and rules within a few square miles, the Kolob Canyons section of the park was solely made of backcountry. With a thousand different places a killer might take a victim. “She has to be there.”
“She will be.” His father’s confidence spread through the interior of the SUV, most of it coming from years of his own military service and no-nonsense parenting. He’d witnessed his three children do the dumbest things of their lives—hurt one another, hurt themselves, take risks that never paid off and more—and yet nothing seemed to faze the man. Tommy held on to the sidearm he’d borrowed from Callen’s arsenal like the pro he was. On alert. Ready for anything. It’d been that born and bred confidence his dad carried that’d given Callen the courage to invest in a private security company and become one of its key operators for years, to ask his sister’s best friend on their firstdate after she turned eighteen and then later ask her to marry him. His father had taught him to adapt and endure through good times and bad, and without that influence, Callen wasn’t sure where he would be. Who he would be. There wasn’t a single gene in Callen’s entire DNA he didn’t attribute to the man sitting in the passenger seat, and Callen couldn’t be more grateful to have his dad here now. “Your instincts are better than you think they are.”
The interstate arrowed straight past the Kolob Canyons visitor center, cutting off more than an hour of having to drive north through the park. They would still have to curve south and ditch the SUV to get on to the Kolob Arch trail, and Callen’s heart refused to let him forget every minute that slipped through his fingers.
“My instincts were wrong about her.” Maeve had never been responsible for compromising Lauren’s missing person investigation. She’d never mishandled the evidence that led police to let the case go cold. Cieron. It was all Cieron. Who’d killed their sister, leaving her skeletal remains on that trail. Who’d abducted a forensic analyst to garner Maeve’s attention. Who’d zip-tied him to a steering wheel and driven his truck into the Virgin River. His brother had pointed a gun at him and pulled the trigger, intending to get Callen out of the way. All this time he’d fought to keep his family together, and Cieron had been pulling it apart piece by piece. “I gave up on her. Even when she refused to give up on us.”
“Yeah. You made a dumb decision, but you’re here now. That’s what matters. You’re fighting for her now, and sooner or later, you’re going to have to forgive yourself for those choices.” The passenger seat groaned as his dad shifted. Setting his head back against the headrest, Tommy Russell closed his eyes, as though sensing the pain to come. Because there would be pain.There would be blood. And it wouldn’t be Maeve’s. “All I ask is that you don’t forget who you are, son.”
Understanding hit, and Callen couldn’t hold on to the shallow breath he’d taken as he ripped the steering wheel to the right and pulled to a stop at the Kolob Arch trailhead. Slamming the vehicle into Park, he grabbed his weapon. “You’re asking me not to take Cieron down. After everything he’s done—not just killing Lauren or Iliana Meyer, but hurting Maeve—you want me to let him walk away?”
“I’m asking you to do your job. You’re a protector. You always have been. Don’t let all that anger you’ve been carrying change that.” His dad shouldered out of the passenger side and rounded the hood of the SUV, weapon drawn. Headlights cast Tommy’s shadow over the trailhead’s sign directing hikers into the dark. “Now, stop living in the past and go claim your future.”
Determination settled into his bones. And Callen could do nothing but follow. He couldn’t make that promise to his dad. If push came to shove, he’d do whatever it took to protect Maeve, including choosing her over his brother. But he had no idea whether it would come to that. Whether he’d even get to her in time.
Directing his flashlight ahead, he picked up the pace, feeling every jolt, every burn in his lungs the closer he drew to the arch. His father kept pace with a few stumbles, but the man had taught his children to keep going, keep pushing. Tommy Russell had never expected anything of his kids without being willing to do what he was asking personally, even well into his sixties, and he wouldn’t start now.
