Chapter 28
SAWYER
Istood in the doorway and watched the truck disappear down the gravel road and felt something inside me break so completely that I was not sure it would ever fit back together.
Emma was crying against my chest. Not the loud, dramatic crying of a child who had skinned her knee or lost a toy. The silent, trembling crying of a child who had just watched her mother walk away with strange men and did not understand why but understood enough to be terrified.
I held her. My arm around her, my face pressed against the top of her head, and I held her while the dust from the truck settled on the gravel and the road went empty and the silence rushed in to fill the space where Chloe had been standing ten seconds ago.
“Papa.” Emma’s voice was small. Muffled. Broken. “Where is Mama going?”
“I am going to get her back,” I said. “I promise you, Emma. I am going to bring her home.”
I closed the door. Locked it. Set Emma on the couch and crouched in front of her, holding her face in my good hand, looking into those green eyes that were mine and were full of a fear that no six-year-old should ever have to carry.
“I need you to be brave,” I said. “Can you do that for me?”
She nodded. Her lip trembled but she nodded.
I called Josh. He answered on the first ring.
“They took her,” I said. “Two men came to the house. They took Chloe.”
The silence on the other end lasted one second. Then Josh’s voice came back, flat and controlled and running on the same operational frequency that I was. “I am on my way. Do not move.”
I called Dollie next. She answered laughing about something, and the sound of her laughter hit me like a slap because the world she was in, the one where things were funny and people laughed, was not the world I was standing in.
“They took Chloe,” I said.
The laughter stopped. Dead. Like someone had pulled a plug.
“I am coming,” she said. “I am coming right now.”
Dollie arrived first. She came through the door like a woman who had been expecting this, or dreading it, and the look on her face was not surprise.
It was confirmation. She went straight to Emma, scooped her up, held her close, and looked at me over Emma’s shoulder with eyes that were bright and hard and carrying something that she needed to tell me.
“Good thing I can help,” Dollie said.
“How?”
“The necklace.” She set Emma down on the couch, grabbed a blanket, wrapped it around her, and turned back to me. “I gave Chloe a necklace yesterday. It has a tracker in it.”
I stared at her. The words landed in my brain and rearranged themselves into something that looked a lot like hope, and the relief was so sudden and so sharp that it hurt.
“You put a tracker in a necklace.”
“I know Chloe,” Dollie said, and her voice cracked for the first time.
“I have known her my whole life. I know what she does when the people she loves are in danger. She sacrifices herself. She has done it before. She did it when she married Jonathan to survive. She did it when she ran alone to protect Emma. I knew she would do it again if they pushed hard enough.” She pulled her phone from her pocket.
Opened an app. Turned the screen toward me.
A small blue dot, moving east on the highway. “So I planned for it.”
I looked at the dot. At Dollie. At this woman who had loved Chloe long enough and well enough to predict the worst and prepare for it, and something in my chest that was not quite gratitude and not quite rage settled into a hard, focused point.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Do not thank me. Get her back.”
Josh arrived with two of my crew members from the mill. Big men. Loyal men. The kind of men who showed up when it mattered and did not ask for explanations. He had already called the police. Two county units were en route. The sheriff had been contacted.
“I am going with them,” I said.
Josh looked at my shoulder. The sling. The bandage underneath that was holding together a wound less than forty-eight hours old.
“Sawyer, you are injured.”
“I am going with them.”
“The police can handle this.”
“I am going with them, Josh. She is my family. I need to make sure she is safe. I am not sitting in this house waiting for a phone call.”
Josh studied me. He knew that look. He had known me long enough to recognize when I was past the point of negotiation, when the decision had been made and the only question left was logistics. He nodded.
“Then I am driving,” he said.
Dollie stayed with Emma. She held my daughter on the couch and turned on the TV and pulled out the cookies and created the illusion of normalcy with the skill of a woman who understood that the best thing she could do for Emma right now was make the world feel safe while her father went to war.
I kissed Emma’s forehead.
“Be brave,” I said again.
“Bring Mama back,” she said.
“I will.”
We drove east. Josh behind the wheel. Me in the passenger seat with Dollie’s phone, tracking the blue dot that was Chloe, that was the necklace around her throat, that was the thread connecting me to the woman I refused to lose.
The dot had stopped. An address outside of town, twenty miles east, a property that appeared on the map as a large lot with a structure. A house, maybe. Or a warehouse. The kind of place you went when you did not want to be found.
The police met us a mile out. Two cruisers. Four officers. The sheriff, a man named Davis who had the weathered face and steady hands of someone who had worked mountain towns for three decades, pulled me aside.
“You should not be here, Mr. Cole.”
“I should not be a lot of places. I am here anyway.”
“This is a police operation.”
“And she is my wife.” The word came out without hesitation.
Without correction. Because that was what she was, paperwork or not, ring or not, ceremony or not.
She was my wife. “I am not asking to lead the charge. I am asking to be there when she comes out. I need her to see me. I need her to know I came.”
Davis looked at my sling. At my face. At whatever he saw behind my eyes that told him arguing was a waste of time.
“You stay behind the line,” he said. “You do not engage. You do not enter until we clear the building.”
“Understood.”
We moved in. The property was a farmhouse, old and isolated, set back from the road behind a line of trees that provided cover in both directions.
Two vehicles in the driveway. Lights on inside.
The police approached in formation, quiet and efficient, and I stayed behind the line with Josh and watched and waited and felt every second stretch like a wire pulled too tight.
The door went in. The shout of police identifying themselves was loud enough to carry across the property, and then there was movement.
Chaos. The controlled kind, officers moving through rooms, voices overlapping with commands and responses.
A gunshot, single, from inside the house, and my entire body went cold.
Then more shouting. Someone down. Cuffed. Another one, hands up, face on the ground. And then silence. The terrible, hanging silence that comes between action and information, when you do not know what has happened and every possibility, including the worst one, is equally real.
An officer appeared in the doorway. Waved.
I was past the line before Davis could stop me. My shoulder screamed as I ran, the wound tearing against the stitches, but I did not stop. I went through the door and through the hallway and into a room at the back of the house.
Chloe was on a chair. Hands bound in front of her with zip ties. Her face was pale and there was a bruise forming on her cheek and her hair was tangled and her eyes, her blue eyes, found me the moment I came through the door and they went wide and filled with tears all at once.
I was beside her in two steps. My good hand found a knife on the table and I cut the zip ties and she was free and then she was in my arms and I was holding her with everything I had and the pain in my shoulder did not exist because the only thing that existed was her.
“Why are you here?” she said against my chest. Her voice was wrecked. Raw. “Sawyer, why are you here? They could have killed you. Your shoulder. You should not be…”
I pulled back. Took her face in my good hand. And kissed her.
Hard. Desperate. The kind of kiss that was not about tenderness or romance but about the raw, animal relief of finding someone alive when you had spent the last two hours preparing yourself for the possibility that they might not be.
“Don’t you dare escape from me,” I said against her lips. “Or I will tie you up myself. Do you understand me?”
She laughed. A broken, sobbing laugh that collapsed into crying, and then she was clutching the front of my shirt with both fists and pressing her face into my chest and shaking so hard that I had to brace my feet to keep us both upright.
“They were going to kill you,” she said between sobs. “They were going to kill you and Emma. They pointed a gun at her, Sawyer. At our baby. I could not let them…”
“Don’t you trust me?” I said. I held her tighter. Pressed my face into her hair. “I told you I would protect both of you. I told you I would handle this. You do not get to make that choice alone, Chloe. Not anymore. We are in this together. Do not do this again. Please.”
She nodded against my chest. Crying. Holding on. And I held her in the back room of a farmhouse twenty miles from home while police moved around us and radios crackled and the world continued to turn even though mine had stopped for two hours and was only now starting again.
One of the officers approached. Davis. His face was serious but not grim, and the relief in his posture told me more than his words would.
“We got most of them,” he said. “Five in custody. But her ex-husband was not on the property. One of the men says he left an hour before we arrived. We are coordinating with state police to set up checkpoints.”
“Find him,” I said. My voice was low and flat and carried the kind of weight that made Davis look at me twice. “Immediately.”
“We are working on it, Mr. Cole.”
“Work faster.”
Davis nodded. Looked at Chloe in my arms. Looked back at me.
“Take your wife home,” he said. “We will contact you when we have him.”
I walked Chloe out of the house. Through the hallway.
Through the door. Into the cold night air where Josh was waiting by the truck with his hands in his pockets and his face tight with relief.
He did not say anything. He did not need to.
He opened the back door and I helped Chloe in and climbed in beside her and pulled her against me, and Josh drove us home through the dark.
She fell asleep against my chest halfway back.
Exhausted. Drained. Her hand fisted in my shirt even in sleep, holding on, refusing to let go even when consciousness had left her.
I pressed my lips to the top of her head and watched the dark road unwind through the windshield and felt the weight of her against me and made one more promise.
Jonathan Marshall had escaped tonight. He would not escape again. Because I was not the kind of man who waited for the law to solve his problems. I was the kind of man who stood in front of his family and dared the world to come through him. And the world, when it was smart, chose another path.
Chloe smiled in her sleep. A small, unconscious curve of her lips. And I held her tighter and let Josh drive us home.
She slapped my chest softly without opening her eyes.
“Stop squeezing,” she mumbled. “You are worse than Sir Chomps-a-Lot.”
I almost smiled. Close enough.