Nick jumped, swinging his tied hands beneath his feet. He lunged for one of the men at Riley’s side and they went down, tussling.
Riley reached for me but I dodged him, plucking the shovel off the ground and brandishing it like a club. Riley and I danced back and forth and I swung. He ducked.
A gun went off. The other agent stumbled backward, clutching at his side. Sam barely stopped to see if his shot had hit the mark before he aimed for Riley. He pulled the trigger, but the gun didn’t fire; either it was jammed or the magazine was empty. He tossed it aside.
I tightened my grip on the shovel as Trev stood up. It was me and Sam against Trev and Riley, and I wasn’t sure if I could best Trev. My only hope was the shovel. I stayed light on my feet, my anger at Trev’s deception all the fuel I needed. I would slam that shovel in his effing face and have no qualms about it.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Riley pull something from the interior pocket of his suit jacket. I realized too late that it was a gun. He pointed it at Sam and shot.
“No!”
The gun made a light thwoop-thwoop sound, and two darts hit Sam in the chest. He looked down at them, then back up at me.
I dropped the shovel—I had to get to him—as he collapsed to his knees, his eyes glassy and unfocused. Nick cut me off and shoved me in the opposite direction. Trev stole a gun from one of the downed men.
“Sam!” I screeched. Riley shot again, and a dart hit the tree next to me.
Nick took hold of the collar of my jacket and dragged me toward the woods. “We don’t have time!”
I staggered back, saw Sam struggling to send me one last message, his finger pointing at something off to my left.
The notebook and logs—they’d been abandoned by Riley’s man.
I tore away from Nick.
“What the hell are you doing?” he shouted.
“We can’t leave it.” I scooped up the evidence as another dart whizzed past. Riley yelled. A gunshot rang out. Nick tugged me in front of him and away from the bullet. He staggered forward, and blood began to soak through his shirtsleeve at an alarming pace.
“Oh my God,” I said.
“Go.”
We crashed through the woods. The sky opened up with a downpour. I slipped in the mud, regained my balance, and kept on even though I had no idea where I was going, even though I didn’t want to go.
We’d left Sam behind. He couldn’t even fight back. They could do whatever they wanted with him. They could wipe his memories again, and he’d have no idea who I was or who he was or what had happened between us.
Branches pulled at my hair. Ferns whipped my legs. Nick ran next to me, but he was slowing down. “Are you okay?” I asked.
“Yes.” But he didn’t sound good.
We passed a hunting shack, and then an abandoned farm wagon, its big wheels rusted out. We crossed a creek, stomping through the water. Finally, the trees ahead thinned, and we saw a dirt road. An abandoned barn sat in a field across the road, the structure leaning dangerously to the left.
Nick pushed me toward it. “What about you?” I asked.
“I’ll leave a false trail.”
He ran the other way, purposefully dripping blood on the surrounding brush.
Checking to make sure the road was clear, I hurried to the other side, keeping the evidence we’d dug up tight against my chest. Despite the rain, the brown field grass crackled beneath me. When I reached the barn, I poked my head in through an empty window. The interior was dark and smelled of wet earth and rotting wood. I danced on my feet, unsure of what to do with myself, worried about Nick.
He reappeared a minute later, a branch from a pine tree in his hand. He darted across the road, sweeping the branch as he went to clear our footprints. I forced my way through the door and Nick came in behind me.
“Now what?”
He looked around. The barn’s loft had collapsed, and the old wood hung from the rafters, cascading down to the first floor. A few stalls sat empty in the back corner. There was a tack room directly across from us, but the fallen loft blocked the entrance.
“Over here,” Nick said, taking careful steps across the floor to the very middle of the barn. He dropped down on one knee and ripped up the floorboards, revealing the barn’s framework and the earth below it. The boards came away easily, the nails rusted and useless.
“Get in.”
“Are you kidding me? What if the barn collapses and we’re trapped?”
“And what if Riley finds us?”
Voices shouted from the road outside. Someone yelled, “Check the barn!”
Nick lowered his voice. “Get in the goddamn hole.”
I climbed in and he squeezed in next to me, stuffing the pine branch around us. He pulled the floorboards back into place until they settled.
My heart raced. I couldn’t catch my breath. It was dark and dank in our hiding place, and I felt like I’d been buried alive.
I twisted onto my side to make room for Nick, because he was injured and we were practically on top of each other. The voices outside closed in on us. I laid my head in the dirt, trying to stop my body from shaking.
The floor creaked overhead.
“Check over there,” Riley said.
A second set of footsteps thudded across the barn. There was a rustling of debris, the snapping of wood. “Nothing here,” the other man said. Not Trev. Riley had backup already?
A cell phone chirped. Riley answered it, paused, and then said, “We’re on our way back.” To his partner he said, “Trev found a blood trail in the woods.”
Dirt rained down through the cracks above us as they retreated. Next to me, Nick sighed heavily. Something scuttled several feet behind us. I cringed, biting back a scream. It’s just a mouse, I told myself. Nothing to be afraid of.
Ten minutes must have passed before I could breathe evenly again. I waited at least ten more before nudging Nick.
“I think they’re gone,” I said. When he didn’t respond, I rose up onto one elbow. “Nick?” His eyes were closed, and he seemed colder than was normal. “Nick. Wake up.” Frustrated tears bit at my eyes. “Nick!”
I was alone in the middle of nowhere and buried beneath a barn. Nick was unconscious. The Branch had Sam and Cas. Trev had turned on us. Riley was somewhere out there, still searching. I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t very well carry Nick out of there.
Let them find us, I thought. I give up. I can’t do this anymore.
Sam was the one who kept us together, who barked out the orders we followed, because he knew what he was doing and when to do it. Now I was supposed to be the commander? I didn’t deserve the role.
I put my ear to Nick’s chest, praying for the sound of his beating heart. I heard it, faintly, and it was pumping slower than it should be. What was I supposed to do in a situation like this? Was I supposed to keep him warm?
His hands were still tied together, so I started there, working against the zip ties, but with little success. I gave up and wrapped an arm around his torso, dragging him closer to me to lend him my body heat. As I did, my hand rapped against something hard in his pocket.
I dug inside and pulled out the prepaid cell phone. I sighed in relief. I’d thought Trev had the cell. Or maybe Nick had stolen it when Trev wasn’t looking, when he realized Trev was on the Branch’s side.
I flipped the phone open and found enough bars to get out a call. Except I didn’t have anyone to call.
I didn’t have any friends, and even if I had, I was several states away from home. And my dad…
Dad.
I wasn’t his daughter and he had no ties to me, but he’d promised me when I left that he’d find me, and I wanted to believe in him. I wanted him to be the man I’d known all those years.
I didn’t have anything left to lose.
I punched in his cell number and hit send.
32
DAD ANSWERED HIS CELL PHONE ON the third ring.
“Dad?” I said.
He exhaled in a rush. “Stay at this number. I’ll call you right back.”
The line went dead. I stared at the phone, thinking he was going to turn me in, that he hung up so he could call Connor and tell him he’d found me—
The phone beeped. The number registered on the screen as THORTON GAS & GO.
“Hello?” I said.
“My line isn’t secure,” Dad explained. “Don’t ever assume it’s safe to call it.”
I clutched the phone harder.
“Are you using a listed number?” he asked. “Cell phone? Is Sam with you?”
“They have Sam. And Cas. And Nick’s been shot and he’s… I don’t know. He’s not responding to me.”
I rested my head on Nick’s chest, one ear listening to Dad, the other listening to the beating of Nick’s heart.
“And… did you find Sura?”
I caught the faint glimmer of hope in Dad’s voice. My shirt was still stained with Sura’s blood. A flash of her dead eyes came back to me and I didn’t have the heart or the energy to tell Dad what had happened.
Maybe he understood what my hesitation meant anyway, because he surged on before I could fake an answer. “I never wanted you to find out like this.”
“Dad,” I started, then cut myself off. He wasn’t Dad anymore.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
But you did, I wanted to say. You and Trev both.
I summoned a thread of dignity and hardened my voice. “We can talk about that later. Right now, Nick needs your help.”
“Are you in Michigan?”
“Yeah,” I said after a pause. If he turned me in, he turned me in. It was a gamble I was willing to take. “We found the house. My house. We’re in the woods behind it, at the next road over. In a barn.”
“It’ll take me a while to get there. As soon as I was discharged, I went straight to the Pennsylvania address and found the house swarming with police officers.”
I groaned. “Oh, yeah. Sam sorta knocked out an officer by accident.”
Dad sighed. “That sounds like Sam.”
“How long before you make it here?”
“A few hours. Six, maybe.”
Six hours? Nick might not have much time. And I couldn’t stand to sit in that hole any longer. Claustrophobia had set in the moment I’d climbed down there, and the longer I sat, the worse it was going to get.
“Hurry, please.”
“I will. I promise. Don’t move.”
I looked down at Nick. “Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere.”
I watched the clock on the cell phone and waited forty-five minutes after hanging up with Dad. I figured if I wasn’t safe now, I wouldn’t ever be, so I might as well risk it. Plus, I had to go to the bathroom.
It took me a few tries to pry the floorboards up, but once I did, I burst from the hole like I’d been drowning, sucking in fresh air as if my lungs had been starving for it. I checked on Nick once more before climbing out. He hadn’t woken, but he was still breathing all right.
I went to the bathroom behind the barn, then hurried back inside. I sat on the floor near the hole and gave Nick a nudge. He muttered something before going quiet again. I stood watch over him for a while. When the cell phone said it was close to four PM, I went to the broken windows at the front of the barn. The storm had finally passed, leaving the earth soggy. Mentally, I drew my surroundings, like it was important to name all the colors so I could share it with Sam later. But what if I couldn’t? What if I never saw him again?
The thought left me nauseous.
When I heard the slow crawl of tires over gravel, I slunk away from the window and peeked through a gap in the siding. I thought to call Dad’s cell, then remembered his warning and pocketed the phone. Instead I watched. He parked on the shoulder of the road and shut the engine off. I was relieved to see that he was alone, though I still half expected Riley to jump out from behind a tree.
Riley reached for me but I dodged him, plucking the shovel off the ground and brandishing it like a club. Riley and I danced back and forth and I swung. He ducked.
A gun went off. The other agent stumbled backward, clutching at his side. Sam barely stopped to see if his shot had hit the mark before he aimed for Riley. He pulled the trigger, but the gun didn’t fire; either it was jammed or the magazine was empty. He tossed it aside.
I tightened my grip on the shovel as Trev stood up. It was me and Sam against Trev and Riley, and I wasn’t sure if I could best Trev. My only hope was the shovel. I stayed light on my feet, my anger at Trev’s deception all the fuel I needed. I would slam that shovel in his effing face and have no qualms about it.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Riley pull something from the interior pocket of his suit jacket. I realized too late that it was a gun. He pointed it at Sam and shot.
“No!”
The gun made a light thwoop-thwoop sound, and two darts hit Sam in the chest. He looked down at them, then back up at me.
I dropped the shovel—I had to get to him—as he collapsed to his knees, his eyes glassy and unfocused. Nick cut me off and shoved me in the opposite direction. Trev stole a gun from one of the downed men.
“Sam!” I screeched. Riley shot again, and a dart hit the tree next to me.
Nick took hold of the collar of my jacket and dragged me toward the woods. “We don’t have time!”
I staggered back, saw Sam struggling to send me one last message, his finger pointing at something off to my left.
The notebook and logs—they’d been abandoned by Riley’s man.
I tore away from Nick.
“What the hell are you doing?” he shouted.
“We can’t leave it.” I scooped up the evidence as another dart whizzed past. Riley yelled. A gunshot rang out. Nick tugged me in front of him and away from the bullet. He staggered forward, and blood began to soak through his shirtsleeve at an alarming pace.
“Oh my God,” I said.
“Go.”
We crashed through the woods. The sky opened up with a downpour. I slipped in the mud, regained my balance, and kept on even though I had no idea where I was going, even though I didn’t want to go.
We’d left Sam behind. He couldn’t even fight back. They could do whatever they wanted with him. They could wipe his memories again, and he’d have no idea who I was or who he was or what had happened between us.
Branches pulled at my hair. Ferns whipped my legs. Nick ran next to me, but he was slowing down. “Are you okay?” I asked.
“Yes.” But he didn’t sound good.
We passed a hunting shack, and then an abandoned farm wagon, its big wheels rusted out. We crossed a creek, stomping through the water. Finally, the trees ahead thinned, and we saw a dirt road. An abandoned barn sat in a field across the road, the structure leaning dangerously to the left.
Nick pushed me toward it. “What about you?” I asked.
“I’ll leave a false trail.”
He ran the other way, purposefully dripping blood on the surrounding brush.
Checking to make sure the road was clear, I hurried to the other side, keeping the evidence we’d dug up tight against my chest. Despite the rain, the brown field grass crackled beneath me. When I reached the barn, I poked my head in through an empty window. The interior was dark and smelled of wet earth and rotting wood. I danced on my feet, unsure of what to do with myself, worried about Nick.
He reappeared a minute later, a branch from a pine tree in his hand. He darted across the road, sweeping the branch as he went to clear our footprints. I forced my way through the door and Nick came in behind me.
“Now what?”
He looked around. The barn’s loft had collapsed, and the old wood hung from the rafters, cascading down to the first floor. A few stalls sat empty in the back corner. There was a tack room directly across from us, but the fallen loft blocked the entrance.
“Over here,” Nick said, taking careful steps across the floor to the very middle of the barn. He dropped down on one knee and ripped up the floorboards, revealing the barn’s framework and the earth below it. The boards came away easily, the nails rusted and useless.
“Get in.”
“Are you kidding me? What if the barn collapses and we’re trapped?”
“And what if Riley finds us?”
Voices shouted from the road outside. Someone yelled, “Check the barn!”
Nick lowered his voice. “Get in the goddamn hole.”
I climbed in and he squeezed in next to me, stuffing the pine branch around us. He pulled the floorboards back into place until they settled.
My heart raced. I couldn’t catch my breath. It was dark and dank in our hiding place, and I felt like I’d been buried alive.
I twisted onto my side to make room for Nick, because he was injured and we were practically on top of each other. The voices outside closed in on us. I laid my head in the dirt, trying to stop my body from shaking.
The floor creaked overhead.
“Check over there,” Riley said.
A second set of footsteps thudded across the barn. There was a rustling of debris, the snapping of wood. “Nothing here,” the other man said. Not Trev. Riley had backup already?
A cell phone chirped. Riley answered it, paused, and then said, “We’re on our way back.” To his partner he said, “Trev found a blood trail in the woods.”
Dirt rained down through the cracks above us as they retreated. Next to me, Nick sighed heavily. Something scuttled several feet behind us. I cringed, biting back a scream. It’s just a mouse, I told myself. Nothing to be afraid of.
Ten minutes must have passed before I could breathe evenly again. I waited at least ten more before nudging Nick.
“I think they’re gone,” I said. When he didn’t respond, I rose up onto one elbow. “Nick?” His eyes were closed, and he seemed colder than was normal. “Nick. Wake up.” Frustrated tears bit at my eyes. “Nick!”
I was alone in the middle of nowhere and buried beneath a barn. Nick was unconscious. The Branch had Sam and Cas. Trev had turned on us. Riley was somewhere out there, still searching. I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t very well carry Nick out of there.
Let them find us, I thought. I give up. I can’t do this anymore.
Sam was the one who kept us together, who barked out the orders we followed, because he knew what he was doing and when to do it. Now I was supposed to be the commander? I didn’t deserve the role.
I put my ear to Nick’s chest, praying for the sound of his beating heart. I heard it, faintly, and it was pumping slower than it should be. What was I supposed to do in a situation like this? Was I supposed to keep him warm?
His hands were still tied together, so I started there, working against the zip ties, but with little success. I gave up and wrapped an arm around his torso, dragging him closer to me to lend him my body heat. As I did, my hand rapped against something hard in his pocket.
I dug inside and pulled out the prepaid cell phone. I sighed in relief. I’d thought Trev had the cell. Or maybe Nick had stolen it when Trev wasn’t looking, when he realized Trev was on the Branch’s side.
I flipped the phone open and found enough bars to get out a call. Except I didn’t have anyone to call.
I didn’t have any friends, and even if I had, I was several states away from home. And my dad…
Dad.
I wasn’t his daughter and he had no ties to me, but he’d promised me when I left that he’d find me, and I wanted to believe in him. I wanted him to be the man I’d known all those years.
I didn’t have anything left to lose.
I punched in his cell number and hit send.
32
DAD ANSWERED HIS CELL PHONE ON the third ring.
“Dad?” I said.
He exhaled in a rush. “Stay at this number. I’ll call you right back.”
The line went dead. I stared at the phone, thinking he was going to turn me in, that he hung up so he could call Connor and tell him he’d found me—
The phone beeped. The number registered on the screen as THORTON GAS & GO.
“Hello?” I said.
“My line isn’t secure,” Dad explained. “Don’t ever assume it’s safe to call it.”
I clutched the phone harder.
“Are you using a listed number?” he asked. “Cell phone? Is Sam with you?”
“They have Sam. And Cas. And Nick’s been shot and he’s… I don’t know. He’s not responding to me.”
I rested my head on Nick’s chest, one ear listening to Dad, the other listening to the beating of Nick’s heart.
“And… did you find Sura?”
I caught the faint glimmer of hope in Dad’s voice. My shirt was still stained with Sura’s blood. A flash of her dead eyes came back to me and I didn’t have the heart or the energy to tell Dad what had happened.
Maybe he understood what my hesitation meant anyway, because he surged on before I could fake an answer. “I never wanted you to find out like this.”
“Dad,” I started, then cut myself off. He wasn’t Dad anymore.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
But you did, I wanted to say. You and Trev both.
I summoned a thread of dignity and hardened my voice. “We can talk about that later. Right now, Nick needs your help.”
“Are you in Michigan?”
“Yeah,” I said after a pause. If he turned me in, he turned me in. It was a gamble I was willing to take. “We found the house. My house. We’re in the woods behind it, at the next road over. In a barn.”
“It’ll take me a while to get there. As soon as I was discharged, I went straight to the Pennsylvania address and found the house swarming with police officers.”
I groaned. “Oh, yeah. Sam sorta knocked out an officer by accident.”
Dad sighed. “That sounds like Sam.”
“How long before you make it here?”
“A few hours. Six, maybe.”
Six hours? Nick might not have much time. And I couldn’t stand to sit in that hole any longer. Claustrophobia had set in the moment I’d climbed down there, and the longer I sat, the worse it was going to get.
“Hurry, please.”
“I will. I promise. Don’t move.”
I looked down at Nick. “Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere.”
I watched the clock on the cell phone and waited forty-five minutes after hanging up with Dad. I figured if I wasn’t safe now, I wouldn’t ever be, so I might as well risk it. Plus, I had to go to the bathroom.
It took me a few tries to pry the floorboards up, but once I did, I burst from the hole like I’d been drowning, sucking in fresh air as if my lungs had been starving for it. I checked on Nick once more before climbing out. He hadn’t woken, but he was still breathing all right.
I went to the bathroom behind the barn, then hurried back inside. I sat on the floor near the hole and gave Nick a nudge. He muttered something before going quiet again. I stood watch over him for a while. When the cell phone said it was close to four PM, I went to the broken windows at the front of the barn. The storm had finally passed, leaving the earth soggy. Mentally, I drew my surroundings, like it was important to name all the colors so I could share it with Sam later. But what if I couldn’t? What if I never saw him again?
The thought left me nauseous.
When I heard the slow crawl of tires over gravel, I slunk away from the window and peeked through a gap in the siding. I thought to call Dad’s cell, then remembered his warning and pocketed the phone. Instead I watched. He parked on the shoulder of the road and shut the engine off. I was relieved to see that he was alone, though I still half expected Riley to jump out from behind a tree.
