17. Callum
17
CALLUM
A few twigs and leaves snap beneath my boots as I turn from the road to continue the loop back to the cabin. The air is clear and bright, almost warm, and I can make out the sound of a few birds chirping—a good sign, as it means nobody has been here recently to scare them off.
It’s morning, after our conversation with Charli last night about bringing down her ex, once and for all. After the few drinks I had last night, I figured it would be a good plan to get up and out there first thing to clear my head—not that I get hungover, but the roughness that Chuck’s booze can leave you with always responds to the fresh air.
And besides, we need to be keeping our wits about us, to make sure nobody else is trying to search out Charli or the cabin. I haven’t heard anything since the attack on Charli and me last week, but that doesn’t mean they’ve given up. No, if anything, it likely just means that they’ve gotten a little more careful about how they’re going about it, and I’m not about to let my guard down long enough for one of us to get hurt.
Or worse.
After what we shared last night, the bond between us is even stronger—and I’m even more determined to make sure that Charli’s psycho ex never gets a chance to get close to her again. She doesn’t deserve that. No, she deserves a chance to get out into the world and live the life she was meant to live—the life she was on track for when I knew her.
And the life that, I can’t help but wonder, she might have been able to stick to if I hadn’t dumped her the way I did.
Not that I believe for a second that I was some lynchpin to her success or ability to do what she wanted, no. Nothing like that. But I did abandon her with no warning. Gave her no chance to get her feet under her before I took off. Anyone would have been thrown for a loop by that—anyone would have looked for someone, in their next relationship, who would give them the kind of stability and certainty that I had so utterly failed to provide for her.
And James gave her that. At least, for long enough that he managed to pull her into his web, and by the time she realized, it was too late. That’s the part that kills me, knowing that I might have laid the groundwork for him to move in and take what he wanted from her.
All the more reason to make fucking sure that he never gets the chance again.
But I can’t make out any trouble around the cabin, even in the area of the woods where we were fired on before. The roads are quiet, despite the fact that the weather has started to improve. I want to tell myself that he might have lost interest, but I’m not stupid enough to believe that a guy like that would give up on what he thought he was owed so quickly.
I can’t believe how close she came to marrying him. That’s another thing that fucks with me—we found her in her wedding dress. Just a few more hours, and she would have been his wife, and I would never have known a thing about it. I would never have had a chance to make things right with her…
And now, the thought of that stings just to think about. I don’t even want to imagine what her life might have looked like if she hadn’t been brave enough to flee with everything she had, and leave that bastard behind for good.
I take the path back to the cabin—there isn’t a single route down there, of course, and we try to vary up the journeys we take to get there whenever we’re able to. Safer that way. Harder for people to find us if we haven’t beaten down the grass and branches to guide whoever’s looking for us straight to our cabin. Before, it was just a precaution, but now it feels damn close to a necessity.
And I’m just about to round the final bend of the river that will bring me in line with the cabin once more, when something catches the corner of my eye. I glance around—it’s a flash of metal and red light, buried among the undergrowth. My eyes slide this way and that, and I try to make out if anyone’s watching me, but I can’t see anything else out of place.
Slowly, I pick my way toward the object. Sure enough, it’s a trap—not one of the old metal traps we use for hunting, but something more modern. It still has the sharp teeth and snap mechanism, but it’s fitted with some kind of alarm, a blinking red light, along with a speaker that’s surely meant to go off the moment someone treads on it. Whoever put this here, they wanted to know when it was activated.
It would have led them right to us.
I pull the small penknife from my pocket and slip it beneath the wire that ties it to a small battery back—as quickly as I can, I saw through it till it pops loose, and lift the trap into my hands. As I examine it, my heart sinks. They’re still looking for us, and chances are, this is far from the only trap they were hoping we’d stumble into.
I carry it back to the cabin, and when I get there, Chuck and Dax are already up, sipping on coffee in the kitchen. Chuck parts his lips to greet me—but when he sees what I’m carrying, his brow furrows.
“What the fuck is that?” he demands, striding over to me, his eyes fixed on the trap.
“I found it out in the woods this morning,” I reply, dropping it down onto the counter with a clatter. “Attached to a battery pack. Looks like it comes with an alarm and some kind of tracker.”
“Shit,” Chuck mutters as he looks it over. “Yeah, I recognize this. It sends out a location when it’s set off, and digs itself into the ground so whoever’s in it can’t go anywhere.”
“So whoever left this for us…”
“They wanted us to get stuck,” I finish up for Dax, grimly. There’s no point trying to deny it. We can all see the truth for what it is. Might not be pretty, but God knows we’ve been faced with hard shit before.
“This is good,” Chuck remarks, placing the trap back on the table.
“Good?” I exclaim. “How the fuck can you?—”
“Because it means they still don’t know where we are,” he points out. “They haven’t come deep enough into the woods yet to find us. And now that we know those traps are out there, all we have to do is find them, move them, and then set them off. Send them on a wild goose chase and give us more time.”
He speaks with a clipped, authoritative tone—the same kind I know he used when he used to work comms. Dax stiffens slightly, and Chuck glances over at him.
“Callum and I can handle this. You don’t have to?—”
“No,” Dax shoots back, cutting him off. “I want to help. I’m not going to stand around doing nothing while she’s in danger.”
He looks toward my bedroom door, where Charli’s still sleeping—she slipped into bed late last night and snuggled against me, her head resting on my arm, her hair spilled out over the pillow. I could tell she was smiling, though I didn’t think to ask her what had put her in such a good mood.
“I meant what I said last night,” Chuck adds. “She has shit on that man that he doesn’t want to get out. All we need to do is find some way to prove it, and we’ll be able to find someone out there who’s desperate to get their hands on that information.”
I look between the two of them. Hearing them speak about her like this, it’s heartening—but I can’t help but feel other questions nagging at my mind, other questions that I know I need the answer to.
“If we’re going to do this,” I begin, “then we need to be honest with each other.”
They both turn to me.
“Honest how?” Dax demands, a hint of defensiveness in his voice.
“Honest about why we’re doing this,” I reply. Taking a deep breath, I realize that this is the first time I’ve had to second-guess my brothers—but God knows, now more than ever, we need to be able to be honest with each other.
“Do you have feelings for Charli?”
The words hang in the air between the three of us. For a moment, I think I’ve overstepped, sure that it’s just my worry about her that has me feeling this way. But, slowly, after a long pause, Chuck nods.
“Yeah,” he admits. “Yeah, I do. I can’t speak for Dax, but we’ve had a few…moments together these last couple of weeks. I really like her. And I don’t want anything to happen to her—I know I couldn’t live with myself.”
I turn to Dax. He stares at me for a second before he replies, as though not certain how I’m going to react to this, and then he nods too.
“Yeah,” he echoes, finally. “We…we slept together last night, for the first time. I was trying to ignore it for so long, but I—I’m attracted to her. Not just her body, I mean. She’s…she gets it. She gets me.”
That’s as close as I’ll get to an admission of love from Dax, and I know it. He’s falling for her. He might not want to say the words out loud, but it’s written all over his face, just how much he likes her, how much he wants her to be safe.
“And you?” Chuck presses. “I know you guys were involved before?—”
“Yeah, I still love her,” I reply without a second thought. I don’t even have to consider my answer to that question. “I’ve loved her since we—since I left. I just didn’t want to bring her down with me. But now…now, I feel like I can actually help her. I don’t want to pass up that chance, you know?”
The three of us stand in silence for a moment, taking in the enormity of the confessions that we’ve just made. Because there’s no taking it back now. We’ve said it. We all care about her, more deeply that we could have ever expected. We’re all falling for her, at one stage of love or another, for this woman who has come crashing into our lives.
I thought I would feel jealous, but I don’t. I’ve shared everything with my brothers my whole life. This? This is just an extension of that. It makes sense that they’d fall for the same woman I did, that they’d see the same things in her I can.
And I know that, whatever we’re up against, there’s nobody I’d rather have by my side than my brothers. They’re skilled, they’re trained, and they’re dedicated—if we’re going to find some way to take this motherfucker down, then it’s going to be together, I’m sure of that.
“Neither do I,” Chuck agrees.
“So, we’re in this together?” I look between the two of them. This is it, the last chance they have to back out before everything changes—the last chance to say no, to tell me they don’t want a thing to do with everything that’s about to unfold.
But they don’t break eye contact for a second. No, instead, they both nod silently. I glance toward the bedroom door, where Charli is still sleeping—I almost wish she was here to listen to this, to hear that we’re all on her side for whatever comes next.
But the most important thing isn’t telling her how we feel. It’s showing her. And the best way we can do that is by bringing her psycho ex down for good.
No matter what it takes.