Chapter Twenty-five – On My Way
Ryder
ON MY WAY
Performed by Restless Road
As I waited for the crime scenetechs to finish dusting Addy’s room, I called my dad and explained what had happened, letting him know that Maddox was sending several officers their way for protection.
“How is Addy? We left so suddenly… Was she scared?” I asked.
“She asked what happened, and Eva said there’d been a water break. Said it happens sometimes in the snow and ice. They’re in the kitchen, making jam.”
“I’m sorry she’s stuck distracting Addy when she should be—”
“Should be doing exactly this. It helps keep her mind off Phil. Gives her a purpose.”
“We’ll be as quick as we can, but I want to fix her room after the techs leave. I don’t want her to see it this way. If at all possible, try to keep her from knowingMaddox’s men are there too.”
“You do what you need to there, Ryder. We’ve got Addy. Everything will be fine here.” His words were calm and steady like my father always was. Even when we’d been months away from losing everything, he’d still been cool and composed, positive we’d be okay, even if we had to sell our land. And after Ravyn had stolen from us, and we’d had to pay back the loans without the full income all the cabins would have generated, he’d still been calm while I’d fumed. Sometimes it was reassuring to be surrounded by his serenity, but it could also be frustrating.
“Everything isn’t fine, Dad,” I snapped.
“No one was hurt. Addy’s okay. You’re okay. This too shall pass, Son. It’ll pass, and you’ll have a little piece of you at your side for the rest of your life. That’s a blessing. You focus on that, you hear me? You focus on that little girl.”
My throat bobbed. “I gotta go.”
I hung up and headed toward Addy’s room. In mere days, it had become hers in my mind. No longer a guest room. But my daughter’s… My daughter.
That singular word turned over and over in my mind.
Maddox was in the hallway, leaning up against the windows opposite the door to her room and watching through the opening as his team worked carefully and methodically inside. I joined him, hands going into my pockets as I pressed my back to the cool glass.
“They’re almost done,” Maddox said. He was trying to soothe me, but the flames wouldn’t die. I was angrier than I’d ever been before. Even angrier than I’d been when Ravyn had left.
“They took her backpack,” I seethed. “This is the first time she felt comfortable enough to leave it, and now…”
I wouldn’t fucking cry. Not now. Not over a damn backpack.
Maddox bumped my shoulder with his. “You’ll get her another one.”
“Won’t be the same. Just like the jaguar isn’t the same. She knows the difference. She knows what she lost. Knows the new one will never really replace the old one.”
Maddox’s eyes narrowed. “Are you talking about replaceable things, or are you talking about you? Because as far as I can tell, in a handful of days, you’ve given her a life full of more stability and love than seven years with her mother did. You aren’t some lesser replacement.”
I hadn’t meant that, had I?
The crime scene techs came out of the room with bags and boxes in hand. One of them stopped in front of Maddox. “Not much, Sheriff, but we did get a few hairs and prints. We’ll need samples from the folks in residence to rule them out.”
“We’ll get it to you,” Maddox said. “Give me a couple days to gather everyone’s prints and DNA.”
He was stalling them because we had to keep Addy out of the system as much as possible. But doing so would also limit their ability to find the guy who’d broken into my house and fucked with my daughter’s room. My hands felt tied in ways I was coming to despise.
The techs nodded and headed out. I moved into Addy’s room and started righting things. Maddox joined me. We worked in silence, cleaning off the dust used to collect latent prints and putting things back where Addy had left them.
Gia appeared in the doorway. “We found something.” Her face was excited but cautious, and it made my chest ache. I wasn’t sure how much more I could take today—hell, how much more I could take in the next week or month. Hadn’t I been handed enough? That old saying about life never giving you more than you could handle was a joke. Life had broken me multiple times.
Gia turned, and I immediately followed her down the hall with my brother on my heels.
She’d set up at the island in the kitchen. Enrique had made himself at home in my house, cupping a mug of coffee while reading something on Gia’s laptop screen.
“What is it?” I asked, watching as she slid back onto the stool.
“A bunch of documents and image files. The dates show they started a decade ago. They’re encrypted, so I’ve got Rory working on it, but we think you might be able to help us with the password.”
“Me?” I frowned. “I know shit about computers.”
“But you knew Ravyn.”
I sucked in a breath and felt Maddox go still next to me. I took another deep breath, desperate to calm the pounding in my veins, and stepped closer to Gia and the laptop. Her scent immediately washed over me—fall nights and the comfort of home. There was some strange dichotomy in reading and talking about my ex while standing next to this woman who I ached to make mine. Who’d run after a burglar, gun in hand, ready to defend me and my child.
It was sexy and scary.
It was as enticing as her straddling me while I devoured her body last night.
And just as threatening.
“There’s one document that isn’t encrypted. I think it confirms the suspicions we talked about last night. About Ravyn being more to the Lovatos than just their tech genius. But more than that, I think she wrote it for you. Can you read it and see if you understand what she means?” Gia asked gently, as if she was afraid of hurting me.
I forced myself to turn my attention from Gia to the computer. Unlike the letter, handwritten in a painfully familiar script, this was typed in a simple font. Impersonal. Merely black-and-white words and a flashing cursor that didn’t feel nearly as painful as the letter had. I could remove myself from these generic words that could have been written by anyone. At least, that was what I thought until the story hit me.
Once upon a time, a prince saved a demon’s daughter from being slaughtered by the demon’s son. The prince didn’t know he’d saved her, but he still had. He met her, entranced her, and took her to his home, showering her with love and riches she didn’t deserve and certainly hadn’t earned.
But the demon, being the evil creation that he was, reached out his inky hands and found her, stealing her from the prince and tying her to his evil deeds by using her love for the prince against her. Ensnared by the demon, she knew she had one chance to save the world before the demon crushed her and turned her to dust.
So, she created a sword that, once wielded, could unravel all the demon’s protections and keep the world safe from the demon’s dark threats. She waited for the right time to brandish it, working in a fail-safe in case she didn’t make it. If she died before she could use it, the person she’d loved with all her soul—the prince—might still be able to use it.
To do so, to free the sword from its bindings and finish the demon forever, all the prince had to do was say her name.
My jaw worked overtime as waves of regret and sadness flew through me. Gia had been right in that this letter made it seem like Rayvn was running from family. From a dark demon and his son. Worse, the story she’d written thrust me right back to lying twined with her on a blanket in the hollow with the trees shading us and the creek bubbling next to us.
The story she’d woven was full of those magical times when we’d been tucked away from the world, and I’d told her the stories my siblings and I had created in our youth. Stories of pirates and fairies and discovering gold. Even back then, she’d been good at spinning our coarse childhood adventures into fairy tales I could almost see, creating new versions. But in all of them, Ravyn had played the villain’s daughter, saved by the handsome prince. I’d thought she was trying to speak of the abuse she’d suffered as a kid but wasn’t quite ready to talk about, and I’d loved her more for having survived it. For being there, strong and beautiful, facing the world with me. Now, it just added another wound to my already beat-up soul, knowing she didn’t feel safe enough to tell me the truth.
Gia raised a brow. “This is the only file that isn’t encrypted, Ryder. She wanted you to see this. She left you a clue to unlock it.”
“Except, I have no idea what she means,” I said right as Enrique said, “I don’t think you should get your hopes up. It doesn’t prove she’s part of the Lovatos or that Hatley has the key. Hell, this could just be some damn fairy tale she wrote for her kid.”
“Addy,” I groused. “Her name is Addy.”
Enrique’s eyes met mine across the counter, a standoff that neither of us broke until Gia brought me back to her with a gentle hand on my shoulder.
“No one knew Ravyn as well as you, Ryder. What do you think? Is it a coded message? Or is it a fairy tale?”
Before she’d left, I thought I knew her as well as I knew myself, even with the secrets of her childhood. I’d thought her past didn’t matter because I could see the person she truly was. The Ravyn I’d once believed in would have wanted to help others. She would have wanted to save the world if she could. But when she’d left, taking what was ours with her, I thought I’d been duped.
Knowing now that she’d been scared and on the run, it shifted my vision of her again, blending it into some combined version of my rose-colored-glasses version of her and the reality where she was a woman fearing for her life.
“Say her name,” Gia said softly.
I swallowed, and it was my brother who spoke instead of me. “Maybe it’s just Ravyn, as that wasn’t her real name but the one we knew her as,” Maddox suggested.
Gia scoffed. “I doubt it’s as simple as Ravyn.”
But she still brought up one of the files and typed Ravyn’s name into the password box. When it was rejected, she tried typing in different iterations, with capitals and without them, spelling it in different ways. Nothing worked.
Gia looked at me with that cautious look back in her eyes. “Did you have a nickname for her?”
After she asked the question, I realized her caution was all for me, because she didn’t want to hurt me. Didn’t want memories of Ravyn to hurt me. Gia cared enough to look out for me. What did that say? What did I want it to say? Especially when thinking of Ravyn’s nickname shoved me back in time to where I was tangled with her in bed in the apartment above the barn where I’d lived when we’d first met.
She’d laughed at the nickname I’d tried out before I’d ever tried to make it our child’s name, saying, I could never be Arwen, Ryder. She’s an elf full of light, and I’m full of dark. I’m much more likely to be a soldier, wielding a sword than a spell. If I were anyone from that ridiculous trilogy, I’d be Eowyn, bringing the Witch-King down.
I’d insisted she wasn’t dark, that she was my light. But when she’d found out she was pregnant, she’d brought it up again. She’d told me the Witch-King’s darkness was in her, had infected her, and that she wasn’t sure she could be a good mother because of it. I’d promised her we’d fight the darkness together. As a family. It had been one of the last promises I’d made to her, and it hadn’t been until after she’d left that I’d realized she hadn’t promised me back.
A hand landed on my shoulder, and I turned my head to meet my brother’s concerned gaze. “Ry?”
I scrubbed my face. “Try My Lady Eowyn of Rohan.”
Silence settled over the room. My brother covered his mouth, Enrique coughed into the coffee cup, and Gia’s eyes went wide.
“Fuck you all. You think I wanted to say that out loud? Just try it,” I bit out.
Gia’s lips twisted upward as her fingers flew over the keys.
The screen came back, red letters denying access. “Let me try a few different versions.”
I moved away from her, opened the fridge, and took out a beer. I needed something stronger. Whiskey. A whole bottle of it. I wanted to head over to McFlannigan’s, sit on the corner stool I considered mine, and get so drunk I fell off the damn thing. But those days were now behind me. I couldn’t just drown my memories and regrets in alcohol—not if I wanted to be there for Addy. So, instead of giving in to that yearning, I twisted the cap off the damn beer and took a swig.
“Anyone want one?”
Enrique shook his head. “Not while I’m on duty.”
Maddox muttered, “I’m good.”
Gia didn’t respond at all. Did she not like beer? Was tequila or whiskey her drink of choice? She didn’t seem like a wine snob, but I knew even less about her than I had about Ravyn. And yet, I was drawn to this spitfire by a lure stronger than even the immediate, undeniable one I’d felt toward my ex the moment she’d walked into the ranch office for an interview.
Hadn’t I learned the hard way that when people told you they had darkness following them and they didn’t know how to stay, you needed to listen? Gia definitely had secrets—things she did for her job that she’d never be able to tell anyone. And she didn’t stay anywhere for long. She flitted around the globe for her work. So, any notion that might be lingering at the back of my mind about making her mine was ludicrous.
I’d downed half the beer by the time Gia gave a sigh of frustration and pushed the computer away. “Nothing. But I’m not giving up. I’ll give all of this to Rory and see what she can do with it.”
Enrique shoved himself away from the counter. “I’ll take the first watch.” He glanced at my brother and asked, “Your team has the property perimeter?”
Maddox looked exhausted. “We’re spread pretty thin, but I’ve called over to Sheriff Scully in the next county to see if he can spare us some bodies.”
Enrique and Gia shared a look before the DEA agent said, “If we need outside help, we should bring in more of the task force rather than explain the situation to people we haven’t vetted.”
Something about that man raised my hackles. “Where were you today?”
Enrique raised a brow. “I don’t report to you.”
And without another word, he walked out, leaving a vibe in the air I couldn’t quite place.
Maddox looked over at me. “I’m heading back to make sure everything from Addy’s room gets processed. They want samples of DNA and fingerprints so they can rule out anyone in the family. I’ll need yours, Gia. I’ll get Barry to keep it off the books, but he can use the sample of Addy’s they already have.”
“Excuse me?” Gia hissed out. “No one is supposed to have Addy’s DNA. I didn’t even let the Colorado PD run it in the middle of a murder investigation.”
Maddox tossed me a chagrinned look that was decidedly like Mila’s when she’d ratted me out for feeding her ice cream for breakfast. “I’ll run Mila out to the ranch so she can keep Addy preoccupied until you’re ready for her here. Tell me when, and I’ll drop her off.”
Then, he practically ran out the door, leaving me with one pissed-off NSA analyst.
Her eyes sparked, and it ignited the flame in me that had been simmering all day, waiting for the right time to burst. It washed over me as if it was cleansing me, taking every remaining thought of Ravyn and burning it away. Nothing of my ex existed. Instead, I hungered for another taste of Gia. I wanted to experience again the sounds she’d made while I’d had my tongue inside her mouth. It hadn’t been memories of Ravyn that had tormented me all day. It had been Gia.
I closed the distance between us, and she didn’t back up. Instead, she raised her chin. All challenge. All defiance. All control I wanted to destroy with my hands and lips, by pummeling inside her until she broke apart in ecstasy.