Chapter 15
Vonn
With a grunt, I set the weight back on the bench and sit up.
Nash is leaning against the wall beside the door. He wasn’t there before I started lifting, so he must have come back from jail halfway through my rep.
“When did you get back? I would have picked you up.”
“No need. Otto gave me a lift.”
I reach for a towel to dry the sweat from my face. “How’d it go?”
He shrugs. “The same as it always goes. A waste of time and yet another fishing expedition.”
“Any chance it’s likely to stop soon?”
Nash shakes his head. “Doubt it. My uncle wasn’t happy when I refused to incriminate myself. He’ll be less happy when the sheriff calls to tell him my attorney threatened to file a harassment charge if he keeps arresting me.”
“Save planting evidence, there’s not much he can do.”
When Nash doesn’t respond, I pull the towel from my face and give him a probing look. “He wouldn’t do that, would he?”
He furrows his brow. “Someone planted my mom’s necklace in Byrdie’s bag.”
“It was whoever came looking for Byrdie. They wanted us to accuse her of theft and throw her out.” I toss my towel onto the weight bench and reach for my bottle of water on the black mat beside my feet. “They were waiting to snatch her up as soon as Makhi did what they wanted us to do.”
We already talked about this in the days after Byrdie went missing.
Those three frustrating, agonizing days where I kept wanting to wring Makhi’s neck.
I also wanted to charge after Byrdie, but with no idea where to even start looking for her, it would have been a waste of time.
And I like Makhi. He pisses me off like no one else ever has or will, but he’d been trying to protect me and Nash from someone he thought was using us.
He doesn’t always think before he acts, but when he has your back, he has your back.
“Yeah,” Nash says, but he doesn’t sound convinced.
Someone had been in the house. We’d found one of the living room doors left open, rain and muddy boots tracked inside.
And the front gate, which should have been locked, wasn’t.
I’d have put money on it being Lydia leaving it that way on her way home after cleaning, but she said she closed it behind her, and I have no reason to think she’s lying.
“How’s Byrdie?” Nash asks.
“Makhi took her out on his bike.”
“He did what?” From his scowl, he’s not thrilled about it.
I wasn’t either when I heard her calling out to Nance to let her know where she was going. Nance had tried to stop her, and I’d been on my way to the door to do the same when I recognized the new note I heard in Byrdie’s voice.
Excitement.
“I wasn’t happy about it either, but she sounded like she was looking forward to it.”
He eyes me for a beat, not hiding his surprise. “I didn’t think she’d want to do that.”
“Part of it is that she was bored out of her mind and probably would have agreed to go bungee jumping if it meant having something to do since Nance has been so firm about not letting her clean.”
“And the other part?”
Nash is the reason Nance told Byrdie not to clean. She stopped being a maid here a long time ago. The only person who doesn’t realize it is Byrdie.
I take another sip from my water bottle before returning it to the floor. “She nearly died in the desert. Maybe getting on Makhi’s bike is something she wouldn’t have agreed to do before, but an experience like that changes you. It might be just what she needs.”
After she broke down on the roof last night, she’s talking again, eating a little, but she’s still quieter than she was before someone abducted her.
We learned more about her than she would have willingly revealed about herself, and I don’t know if she’s shy, embarrassed, or just not ready to talk about her past. But I’m waiting for the day she is. I’ll wait forever for her.
Understanding flashes across his face. “And the reason you decided you needed to work out now was…”
“So I wouldn’t follow.” I know how fast Makhi likes to ride. “Makhi acts as if the speed limit is a suggestion rather than a rule. I hope he’s not being reckless, but I also know Makhi.” I smile sheepishly at him. “Turns out working out isn’t as good a distraction as I needed it to be.”
His eyes sharpen at the note in my voice. “You’re not thinking about—”
“Drinking?” I snort. “Not that I could even if I wanted to with Makhi using it to marinate his liver.”
Also, I’m not eager to drive down into town to buy another bottle of whiskey. I drank to hide. It’s not something I’m proud of, and it’s not a person I want to be ever again.
“I didn’t think he would be the one to reach her,” he says.
“Me too.” For a short time, I’d been a little jealous it wasn’t me who broke through. “She didn’t need kid gloves. She needed someone to shock her awake.”
I’d needed the same when I met Makhi. There are times I think he provokes me on purpose, and there are times I let him because I know why he does it.
“Yeah.” He straightens and uncrosses his arms. “I’m going to wash up from the cell. See you in a bit.”
He leaves, and I continue my workout, but my thoughts keep swinging back to Byrdie. Letting yourself get distracted while lifting isn’t just a bad idea; it’s downright dangerous.
I’m wiping my face with a towel when a small sound pulls my gaze to the open doorway. Just in time. I catch Byrdie peeking in and almost immediately turning away.
“You can come in,” I call after her.
She’d seen me in here earlier, before she went on a ride with Makhi. When I asked if she wanted to come in or talk, she shook her head and said no.
After a two-second pause, she returns, her eyes lingering on my chest for a second too long before sliding to my face. “Nance said that Nash was back.”
I’d been about to put my shirt back on, but after that look, I decide to keep it off.
“He’s gone to wash up. He’ll be down soon enough.”
“Oh.” She turns to leave.
“You can stay.”
She looks at me. “I don’t want to distract you and for you to drop a weight on your head.”
I flash her a grin. “Unlikely, but I appreciate the thought. How was your ride?”
She shrugs. “Okay.”
I watch her closely. If Nash was speeding like a lunatic with Byrdie on his bike, he won’t know what hit him when I get through with him. “Makhi likes to speed.”
“He wasn’t going that fast,” she says, sounding disappointed.
I slide over on my bench and pat the seat beside me. “Come sit.”
She gnaws her bottom lip, and I fight the urge to adjust myself in my pants. “Aren’t you working out?”
“Done now. If you’re bored, I can teach you a few things. I promise it’s a little more fun than cleaning,” I tease, prompting a smile from her.
As she crosses toward me, her wary gaze travels over the weights, and she scrunches her nose. “No thanks. I couldn’t do it.”
I give her shoulder a playful nudge. “The weights only look intimidating if you don’t know how to use them and you’re thinking of starting with the heavy ones.
I was the same when I first walked into a gym.
If you want to learn, I can teach you. We’ll start light, work on technique, and only when you’re comfortable and can use them safely, we can go heavier. ”
She looks at my arms doubtfully. “Weren’t you always this big?”
“I was like a weed before the army.”
Her eyebrows shoot up, and I grin at her.
“Really. Started working out before I joined the army at seventeen, then I bulked up a bit more during basic training and kept it up. It’s more discipline than talent, like most things in life.”
At the mention of the army, her right hand flies up, long tanned fingers fumbling with my dog tags she wears on a chain around her neck. “I still have—”
“No,” I gently cut in. “I don’t need them back just yet.”
She looks down. “You nearly didn’t get them back at all.”
I will never forget how I found her, curled up in a ball in the middle of the desert, where someone had dumped her to die. She had her hand wrapped around my dog tags, the only source of strength she thought she had.
I don’t know if she clung to life long enough for us to find her in time because of those dog tags, but I have never been more grateful that I gave them to her so she had something to cling on to.
I dip my head so we’re eye to eye. “There was no future where I wouldn’t have found you, Byrdie. When I make a promise, I keep it.”
“I was in the middle of the desert,” she whispers.
“And I’d have combed every inch of it looking for you, darlin’. I wasn’t leaving without you.”
Her eyes turn glassy, and she blinks rapidly.
“Hell.” I pull her into my lap, wrapping my arms around her and holding her. “I wasn’t looking to make you cry, sweetheart.”
“It’s okay.” She sniffs. “I was so sure I would die out there, and no one would care, but even though I knew no one was going to come after me, something wouldn’t let me stop walking.”
I kiss the top of her head. “You’re a survivor.”
“But I stayed in the compound when I shouldn’t have,” she bursts out, suddenly angry.
“You were trapped.”
I’ve wanted to know how she got caught up in a cult—we all have—but none of us will ask.
This isn’t a memory any of us wants to pull out of Byrdie.
She has to feel like she can trust us enough to want to tell us about it.
She’s told Nash and me a bit, but she didn’t tell any of us about the baby she lost in the compound, and there are probably so many other painful things she’s not ready to share yet.
Things it might take her years to open up about.
We’ll wait. She has us all forever.
“I stayed for my mom,” she says softly, her eyes distant and sad. “She took me there, and they killed her. I didn’t want to leave her, and I wish I had never followed her. Maybe she’d still have been alive.”
I frown. “What happened to her?”
She tells me about Jeremiah, a man old enough to be her father, who liked to watch her.
About her growing uneasiness, and dropping subtle hints to her mom about wanting to leave.
She’s brushing tears from her cheeks as she tells me about the gardening accident that cut up her mom’s leg so badly, and the untreated infection that turned into gangrene that killed her.
“Tell me about the accident,” I order her.
She looks briefly surprised. “It was in the garden. There are vegetables and fruits that we would pick daily. Mom was picking green beans when an acolyte—that’s one of Jeremiah’s men he trusted the most—was cutting back one of the bushes. He didn’t see her until it was too late.”
“Was this before or after you started dropping subtle hints that you wanted to leave?”
She furrows her brow. “After.”
“They hobbled her.”
She blinks at me. “What?”
I feel terrible that I’m the one who has to tell her this, but she needs to know. “They guessed or overheard that you wanted to leave and knew you wouldn’t go without her. So they hurt her badly enough that she couldn’t run with you. They hobbled her to force you to stay.”
“They wouldn’t…” Her voice trails off, and her face turns white with shock.
When her tears come, I’ve already started pulling her against my chest, ready for them.