CHAPTER 18 ROHAN
ROHAN
River water hits the dock. The boy can hear it, but he can’t see it—not the water and not the dock.
He can’t see anything. Jerking himself out of the dream would have been a sign of weakness, so Rohan instead allowed the nightmare to continue, forced it to continue.
The woman holds him close, hums a quiet, soothing song, and in that song, he hears what she is not saying, words she has said before: Don’t cry, don’t cry.
Whatever you do, my beautiful boy, don’t cry.
The boy knows: This is her punishment as much as his.
Of their own accord, Rohan’s eyes flew open.
He’d slept with his back to the door of the shack, securing the assets inside, even in sleep.
The night before, after extracting that promise from him, Savannah had returned to bed, unaware that little sister had heard every word. Rohan, in contrast, was always aware.
He grounded himself in that awareness now, in the sights and sounds and smells of the bayou just before sunrise, when the world was bathed in a hazy orange glow and the morning air was thick with humidity that kissed the wild grass as dew.
There, Rohan’s instincts whispered. Down below, Knox was barely visible and blanketed in brush, awake, perhaps, but still. And there—Rohan heard the rustle of some sort of creature roughly the size of a mouse. There—three, no four birds.
The water.
A wind through the reeds.
And—there. This time, the word came tinged with adrenaline in Rohan’s mind. There was a person out there—farther out, so silent that Rohan couldn’t have sworn for sure that it was his sense of hearing that tipped him off, that had his eyes scouring for…
You. Rohan didn’t hesitate. The moment he saw the figure, he vaulted the railing on the platform, rolling to absorb the impact when he hit the ground, then flowing straight back to his feet and exploding into a run.
Someone was lurking.
Someone was watching.
A female someone.
And now, the chase was on. The difference between Rohan’s size and his prey’s, between the length of his stride and the length of hers, should have given him a significant advantage in speed, but his target was shockingly agile.
Rohan had never seen anyone move like this girl did.
She wasn’t just fast or light on her feet; she was a blur with a sixth sense for shadow, for the changing terrain.
Tireless. That was the word that snaked its way through Rohan’s mind as he forced his body to forget its limits and began gaining on her. You can run, but you can’t hide, Calla.
Fog rolled in from the water. The vegetation grew ever thicker, branches lashing at Rohan’s skin. He didn’t even feel it.
In the end, it didn’t matter how fast she was. The moment Rohan pulled within a body’s length of her, he launched himself forward, off the ground. She dodged, avoiding a full-body blow, but Rohan managed to latch a hand around her ankle, and down she went.
Hard.
Rohan was on her in an instant. She threw a brutal elbow back, twisting her body, her leg hooking around his torso as she attempted to take him down.
Rohan grabbed her wrists an instant before her thumbs would have gouged his eyes, and as he pinned her arms to the ground, as he pinned her, Rohan realized:
This wasn’t Calla Thorp.
He’d seen photographs of Calla, and this girl bore no resemblance to her whatsoever.
There was something Nordic in his opponent’s features, though the shape of her eyes signaled Asian heritage of some sort as well.
Thick honey-brown hair had been braided back from her face on either side of her head like a laurel.
Her eyes were a darker brown than Rohan’s own.
She must have clocked him taking in her appearance, because suddenly, she stopped fighting like a warrior and shifted to struggling against Rohan’s hold in a way that masked her skill so thoroughly that, had Rohan been any less experienced himself, he might have bought the act.
“Get off me, you freak.” She did an American accent very well, but Rohan was enough of a chameleon himself to recognize that neither her accent nor her choice of words reflected her nature.
“What have we here?” Rohan murmured.
The moment his opponent realized he wasn’t buying it, a mask of chilling neutrality descended over her features. Whoever this girl was, she knew when to cut her losses—and when to rotate her wrists, drive her knee upward, and attempt to sink her teeth into skin.
Rohan pinned her by her neck this time. That should have been the end of it, but the next thing he knew, the girl had a knife in each hand. Unfortunately for the lethal little knife-wielder, this fight was getting ready to be two-on-one.
“How kind of you to join us, Mr. Landry,” Rohan called as Knox approached. “Our new friend here was just getting ready to lower those knives and explain herself.”
The girl assessed the situation, and she must not have liked her chances two-on-one, because she lowered the knives. For now.
“Who the hell are you?” Knox asked.
“I’m just a girl.”
Like hell she was. Rohan put her in a hold no one could break, and then shot a warning look in Knox’s direction. “Check her for any other knives—and watch your private parts, if you’re at all attached to them.”
“She get yours?” Knox asked, and the bastard had the gall to sound amused at the prospect as he patted the girl down, a search that yielded two more knives and a single piece of paper that had been folded twice.
Knox unfolded it, stared at it, then turned the page toward Rohan.
Rohan clocked the image first. It appeared to depict a painting, most likely a medieval one, of a woman wearing an elaborate crown and holding what looked to be a church in her hand.
As fascinating as the iconography there was, Rohan was far more interested in the writing on the page, two words scrawled in feminine script into the margins.
Juliet Grayson.