Chapter 10 Wren
The blood doesn’t even return to my toes before I’m fidgeting from one foot to the other.
Scraping a fleck of mud from my cheek, I squint up at him.
I’m optimistic to the point of delusion, but even I don’t know why I’m still searching for any trace of kindness or humor in his face.
Because, surprise, there isn’t any. It’s the same hardened irritation, interrupted only by that menacing scar.
“Walk where?”
He gives a curt nod to the treeline.
“But why?”
His reply is filtered through gritted teeth. “Because I said so.”
My stomach sinks. There’s no way Rory and Tayce are in there. They’re probably back at Angelo and Rory’s manor, heels off, defrosting by the fire and trying to figure out how the night ended like this.
It’s dark between the trees. Like, can’t-see-the-tip-of-your-nose kind of dark. And if that’s not where my friends are, there’s only one reason a man known coast wide as the Boogeyman would want to march me into the forest, and it sure as hell isn’t for a teddy bear picnic.
With an odd sense of calmness trickling from my scalp, I stuff my frozen hands into the pockets of my coat and rest my gaze on the bulging vein ticking at Gabriel’s temple.
Tic, tic, tic.
“My name is Wren Harlow,” I whisper. “I’m twenty-one years old, and I work as a bartender at The Rusty Anchor.
” I glance to the haze on the horizon. “Well, I did. I’m not sure it’s still standing.
I live at Number 1, Strawberry Farm, which is owned by my uncle Finn—he’s best friends with your cousin Castiel.
You’ve probably seen him around; he’s the blond man with the glasses who pretends to be a carpenter.
” The vein keeps ticking to an even beat.
“I like fashion and makeup and ABBA. And helping people, of course. I help drunk people get home safely in Devil’s Cove on the weekends, and twice a week, I’m a candy striper at the Devil’s Hollow hospital.
Um …” I scratch my nose, racking my brain for the rest of my redeeming qualities.
“I’m going to school to study pre-law next September.
You know,” I add, stealing a quick look at him, “because of the whole liking to help people thing.”
The vein in his temple has graduated from ticking to throbbing. Somehow, I don’t think my monologue is working.
I heard a similar one when I was younger, from my hiding place under the kitchen table.
A man on his knees, calmly reciting his life story.
Even at nine years old, I realized what he was doing: he was attempting to humanize himself, to appeal to the compassion that lives deep within even the most evil of people, in the hope it would change his fate.
It didn’t.
My gaze is drawn to his acidic expression. He runs his tongue over his teeth, and the light shifts over the sharp planes of his face as he tilts his chin up.
“Walk.”
It’s a decibel above a whisper, but as hard as a full stop: end of conversation.
Okay. So maybe compassion doesn’t live in everyone.
I let out a heavy sigh. So this is how I actually die. Not tongueless on my ABBA-themed doormat, but by being frog marched into the woods by a man whose life I saved.
Turns out, Tayce was right all along: being nice is thankless work. I’m sure she’ll be disappointed that I won’t be alive long enough to hear her say “I told you so.”
Gabriel steps aside, and jelly legs carry me from asphalt to soil. Running is so far off the cards now, it’s not even in the same deck, but I guess dying on my own two feet beats being folded into a trunk like a pretzel.
He falls in line behind me, his presence crackling like static down my back. Each of my steps are slow and tentative, seeking all the gnarled roots and ditches I can’t see in the dark.
If I have the patience of a saint, clearly, Gabriel has the temper of the Devil. He lasts all of ten feet before a cold growl touches my nape and he dips to lift me up again.
He doesn’t carry me like a surfboard this time, but sideways and at arm’s length, like I’m a sack of toxic waste he needs to dispose of as quickly as possible.
Tension tightens where his forearms meet my shoulder blades and the backs of my knees, and I, too, grow rigid as my gaze lifts to his profile.
Even in the dark, I can make out the hard set of his jaw beneath his beard.
And even if I couldn’t, the disdain radiates off his body in a silent shockwave.
Without so much as a sideways glance, he dumps something into my lap.
It’s my clutch—I must have dropped it in the struggle. I’m surprised he bothered to pick it back up—a dead girl doesn’t need her lip gloss or her cellphone.
My cellphone.
The tiniest spark of hope ignites in my chest. I rummage among the discarded tissues to find it.
Gabriel steps over a fallen tree trunk. “No signal.”
A tap on my screen confirms it.
Frustration blows out that tiny ember of hope, and I resign to my fate. I flop against my kidnapper’s arms, my limbs bobbing and my hair swaying to the beat of his quick strides.
He navigates the forest with surprising ease, even while carrying me and my heavy heart.
He dips under low-hanging branches, jumps over stumps, as though he’s committed every inch of terrain to memory.
Like he knows the Reserve better than Rory, so maybe the rumors are true—he does live in a cave somewhere within it.
Gah, Rory. I’ll never see her or Tayce again. Or anyone else, for that matter. I wonder if Rory will ever find out her psycho brother-in-law killed me.
A loud sigh leaves my lips in a curl of frost, and Gabriel’s chest tenses against my elbow.
“Stop,” he grits out.
“Stop what?”
“Breathing.”
Oh.
Having learned his commands hold weight, I hold my next breath at the base of my throat. When it starts to burn, I let it out in a shallow puff.
He mutters something under his breath. “Do you just do anything any man tells you to?”
I blink up at him. He’s still staring straight ahead, a fresh sheet of annoyance cloaking his features.
“Um, when they’re carrying me like a purse, yeah?”
He drags his teeth over his bottom lip but doesn’t reply.
We move through the forest for what seems like miles.
Through clearings, over a stream, twisting and turning until the canopy above us is so dense that not even the moonlight touches the forest floor.
Each step adds another brick of impending doom to my shoulders until the weight is too heavy to bear.
“Are you going to kill me?”
“Don’t have the time,” he grinds out each word, sounding almost regretful, as if he’d love nothing more than to put a bullet in my skull and drop me in a shallow grave. His tone nor reasoning plug the burst of relief flooding through me.
“You won’t?” I try to sit up in his arms, but he fists the back of my jacket with a hot hiss, pulling me flat again. “Do you promise?”
Again, no reply, but I don’t care. There’s hope now, real, tangible hope, and I’ll cling onto it like a life raft until he gives me reason to let go.
We stew in silence. Shivering branches, crunching leaves underfoot, and contrasting heartbeats knit together into a steady soundtrack. In different arms, under different circumstances, and if I actually knew where I was going, I’d be almost comfortable.
After a while, Gabriel lifts the arm under my knee to check his watch, and an icy breeze skitters up my thigh.
The movement slid the hem of my dress up.
I move to adjust it, but when Gabriel’s head tilts down, something stops me.
It’s too dark to see, but I don’t need to, because the strip of exposed skin tingles where his eyes touch.
A slow-moving heat grazes over goosebumps, up the inseam of my thigh, and settles on the pink silk pooling in my lap.
My breath catches at the shiver chasing after it.
It’s warm, weird, and unwarranted, invading my core and tightening my nipples.
Fuck, you’re beautiful.
Suddenly, the night doesn’t feel so bitterly cold anymore.
In the absence of light, my other senses prickle.
I tune into the warm masculine scent of his neck, hear the strong throb of his heart and the slowing of his footsteps.
I can feel the bulge of his muscles propping up my body, and when he curls an arm upward, sliding a rough hand over my bare thigh, I feel what it’s like to be touched by him too.
He yanks down my dress with a quick tug.
It’s a simple, almost reluctant move, as though he didn’t want to touch me at all.
It’s gone as quickly as it arrives, but the heat of it lingers.
A small puff of air leaves my lips, and now I’m wondering about irrelevant things, like if he has a wife or girlfriend.
If he’s this cold around her too, or if she’s as scary as he is.
For some reason, the thought rubs until it chafes.
A calloused drawl reaches out from the dark and pulls me back to the forest. “Do you believe everyone who tells you they won’t kill you?”
His words linger longer than his touch. They trickle into my pores, slow and thick, and twist my stomach. With them, comes the realization that he’s referring to his earlier promise not to kill me.
And like that, I slip off the life raft, his question a brick tied to my ankle. This time, annoyance and a flurry of bitter memories propel me to the surface.
He’s playing mind games with me. Dangling hope, only to snatch it away and give it back again.
I’ve seen it played out before, in another lifetime, orchestrated by a different psychopath. I’ve seen grown men cower, then cry with relief. Rinse, repeat, repeat again until they’re dizzy and weak and desperate. There’re no rules and no chance of winning: the outcome is always the same.
I’m tired of swimming in this man’s threats and drowning in his shadow. I won’t dance for the Devil or beg for my life simply for his own entertainment.
I tilt my chin up and glare at him. “You can stop with the psychological torture, you’re not going to kill me.”
“No?”
“Nope. Too many people saw you with me, including your sister-in-law. Who, by the way, will be wondering where I am.”
As we cross through a slither of moonlight filtering through the forest canopy, I’m sure I see his lips tilt. In amusement or annoyance, I don’t know, but the silence that follows holds me at knife point, leaving me with bated breath and an ever-expanding lump in my throat as I wait for his reply.
It finally comes. A murmur, deep and ominous. “If it happens in the dark, it didn’t happen.”
The words leave his mouth in a tight coil of condensation. I watch it dance and dissipate, and a trickle of cold unease washes the heat of my annoyance away.
What the hell does that mean? It sounds like another cryptic threat, but this one has an unnerving undercurrent. Something softer, more bitter, as though pulled from somewhere deeper.
My brain ticks over for a few more minutes, until my thoughts grow slower and slower and finally stop.
I’ve run out of steam. I’m so tired. My limbs are heavy against Gabriel’s grasp, as if my body is letting gravity take over in preparation for being six feet under soon.
When he finally comes to a stop, I realize my lids have grown heavy too. Awareness wakes me like a knee-jerk reaction, and I bolt upright in his arms.
Through bleary eyes, I scan our surroundings. The sky is lighter now, and for a moment, I think dawn has arrived. But it hasn’t, it’s just streetlamps, their soft glow washing over a large gravel parking lot.
I scrunch my eyes and recalibrate. We’re at the entrance to The Whiskey Under the Rocks, a fancy bar in Devil’s Hollow.
Cars similar to the one Rory and Tayce were whisked away in are parked around the perimeter, and when I glance to the front door, a faint hum of activity drifts out from behind it.
Gabriel’s grip loosens around me, and my feet touch ground.
Confused, I blink up at him. He towers over me, the glow from the streetlamp above us catching the high planes of his cheeks, casting the rest of him and the whole of me, in shadow.
His eyes glint with black disdain when they touch me. “Go.”
My retreat is shaky. I walk backward, not daring to take my eyes off him, in case this is another mind game. I’m weary of everything: the clench of his fists, the hard bob of his Adam’s apple, the stillness of his stance, and the way his eyes track my movements like a laser beam.
I thought increasing the distance between us would bring me relief. It doesn’t. I’m still tethered to him by a thread, woven with the words of his earlier ominous statement: If it happens in the dark, it didn’t happen.
It’s not even close to the craziest thing he’s said tonight, but it stuck. Not just because it’s a creepy thing to say, but because of the way he said it. It held a different weight to his other threats, like it wasn’t even a threat at all.
I don’t know. I’m tired. I should let it go, run inside, hug my friends, and thank the Lord I made it from one side of the woods to the other without being murdered by Gabriel Visconti.
But every step backward only pulls the thread tighter, and when he turns and steps out of the light, disappearing from view, it snaps.
“Wait,” I blurt out. The thud of his heavy steps comes to an abrupt stop, and I take a deep breath. For some reason, I need to say it. Whether it’s to remind him or myself, I don’t know. “Whatever is done in the dark, always comes to light, you know?”
An uncomfortable silence trickles out of the dark and across the parking lot. Just when I think he won’t reply, his words reach out of the dark and fissure through my coat, seeping beneath my skin and disturbing every cell they touch.
“Not if you stick to the shadows.”