Chapter 34
34
Sloane
After the most thorough two-person shower I’ve ever had in my life, where I miraculously stay awake despite someone using his fingers to give me one more orgasm, we head toward the house for breakfast.
“Nobody else is up yet,” Chuck tells us.
“Shocking,” Davis says dryly, which cracks both me and Chuck up.
Once we’re inside, Davis slides me a look. “Want to be bad?”
“Yes.” I slap a hand over my mouth while he grins. “I meant how ? I didn’t mean yes . I meant what are you thinking? ”
He whispers something in my ear that I should definitely say no to.
I’ve seen enough treasure hunt movies to know this is a bad idea.
But also—fuck it.
The entire state police force is now looking for Patrick. The mortar ball remnants and the skeleton were removed from the cabin yesterday.
What’s the worst that will happen?
That’s the last rationalization I make to myself before I’m on the back of Davis’s motorcycle, speeding away from Beck’s house without a security detail in the early dawn light.
As much as one can speed when there are switchbacks every few hundred yards anyway.
We reach his trailer in about fifteen minutes. There’s yellow crime scene tape all around the cabin, but no deputies sitting here watching the property. Nothing around the camper either.
He grabs shovels and the metal detector from inside, and we head toward the bushy area that I was looking at from the satellite imagery.
And then we both freeze.
There’s a car approaching.
“Get back in the trailer,” he says.
I look at him.
Just look at him.
And Davis Remington—the man I used to think was completely expressionless—stares back at me with his entire face twitching like he doesn’t know if he wants to smile or scowl at me for refusing to follow his orders.
It’s honestly the most beautiful sight in the entire world.
Like he’s no longer hiding anything from me.
Logically, I know he has to be, but emotionally—there’s something incredibly special about him letting me see him.
He looks past me toward the car, and his shoulders relax, but his cheek twitches.
I glance at it too and instantly understand why.
Giselle has followed us.
She parks, climbs out, and glares at both of us.
“Hi, Giselle.” I finger-wave at her. “Isn’t it a pretty day? I love your coat. It’s very…black.”
“You’re lucky I know he’s a bad influence,” she grumbles. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“Treasure hunting,” Davis answers for us.
She sighs and rubs her eyes. “Get to it then. I’ll keep an eye out.”
“Do you like cookies?” I ask her.
“No.”
Welp, so much for that idea for a Christmas present.
She’d probably appreciate a new stun gun and some body armor more. I’ll have to ask Davis’s opinion on what would be best for her.
And I suspect he has one.
He nudges me, and soon we’re standing in a bunch of stabby, leafless bushes, staring at a mostly obscured wooden cover to what I assumed was an extra outhouse while he passes me a pair of work gloves.
Once we’ve cleared away the grass that’s grown over the edges and dusted off a few years’ worth of fallen leaves, we discover the cover has a lock on it.
And not a modern lock.
This one looks more like the kind of lock a pirate would’ve used.
Very eighteenth- or nineteenth-century.
Also very rusty.
“Stay here,” Davis says on a sigh.
We’re out of sight of the camper—it’s on the other side of the cabin. I can see the falling-down porch of the cabin better from this side.
“Have you looked under the porch for the treasure?” I ask Davis when he joins me again.
He shakes his head. “It’s not supposed to be on this property at all.”
“Unless someone moved it.”
“Or lied about where it was located.”
“Or both. You know what I would’ve done if I were a pirate? I would’ve hidden it and not told my family where so that they could all fight over it because that’s a dick thing to do, and pirates are dicks. And then if my family were dicks too, if one of them found it, they’d hide it somewhere new so that the rest of the family would never know, and they’d use it the same way dear ol’ Thorny or Walter or whoever used it. Huh. I wonder if I’m descended from pirates too because my family is also made of dicks.”
His lips twitch again before he drops into a squat and uses bolt cutters to break the lock. When he lifts the wooden cover, there’s a creak so loud, they can probably hear it all the way down the mountain.
“What was that?” Giselle calls.
“A hundred years of rust rubbing against itself,” Davis calls back.
“Not raccoons?”
“Too bright.”
“Not for those fuckers.”
“She has a point,” I murmur.
Davis grunts and shoves the lid the rest of the way open, then shines a flashlight below.
And we both sigh.
“Root cellar,” he says.
Definitely a root cellar. It’s a square room lined with wood shelves and dust-covered jars, some still on the shelves, some on the ground.
“It’s small enough to have been an outhouse,” I muse.
He smiles at me, then puts a hand on either side of the opening and swings down into it.
I squat wrong and get a stick almost up my ass—freaking bushes—but readjust until I’m able to peer down too.
“Pass me down the metal detector and a shovel, then sit on the edge,” Davis tells me. “I’ll help you down from there.”
It’s not deep—he can barely stand straight—so I do as I’m told, and soon, we’re standing in the root cellar with a shovel and the metal detector leaning against one of the shelves. It’s so tiny in here that we barely both fit, and I wonder if whoever used this last had to bring a ladder over every time, or if it got so old that it just disintegrated.
Roots poke through the dirt walls behind the uneven, free-standing shelves. There’s maybe a foot of dirt overhead, reinforced with a couple beams that look like they’re about to give their last hurrah.
We should definitely not stay down here long.
“Why was it locked?” I ask.
For one brief moment, I see the pirate in Davis as he grins at me. Then he shines a light at the shelf that’s hardest to see from overhead, and when I’m expecting him to say something like because people are weird , he says something else entirely.
Something that makes my heart pound and my muscles tense in excitement.
“Because it’s not just a root cellar.”
Behind the shelves farthest from the trapdoor, there’s another half door, this one built into the wall.
No knob on it, but it does have hinges and a frame.
We trade looks, then move as one to clear the old jars off the shelves blocking the door.
It’s tight in here and smells even more like my grandma’s basement than the cabin basement did.
Dark and creepy too.
Likely full of worms.
No spiders though.
My heart won’t stop pounding.
There’s something behind that door, and soon, Davis is pulling the shelves away.
Unlike the top door, this one isn’t padlocked.
So maybe we’re about to find someone’s secret stash of historical sex toys. I heard that happened on a ranch in Wyoming somewhere, and given what I know of the people who live in Sarcasm and Shipwreck today, it truly wouldn’t be surprising if their ancestors also had secret sex toy rooms.
I mean, I have one myself, if you call a nightstand drawer a room.
But when Davis pries the door open with the shovel, with me staying as far out of the way as I can, I tell myself to be prepared for an empty space.
Probably a wall.
Maybe the door was put there to reinforce the structure.
Like the dirt was caving in or something. See again, there are roots poking through the dirt walls down here.
So I’m prepared when the door opens to a rock.
Seriously.
There’s a rock on the other side of the door. A big, stone-colored, rough-edged, small boulder of a rock taking up the entire width of the door.
But while it’s wide, it’s not tall.
In fact, it’s only half as high as the half-high door.
Davis shines his flashlight in and squats to look.
I huddle close to him, inhaling his familiar scent of pine and campfire, and peer in too.
He stops breathing.
I can feel it.
Or maybe that’s me.
Maybe I’ve stopped breathing.
Probably we’ve both stopped breathing.
The little hidey-hole beyond the rock isn’t empty.
It has something in it.
Something treasure-chest shaped.
“Oh. My. God,” I breathe.
I blink.
Blink again.
Rub my eyes and peer harder at the box illuminated by Davis’s flashlight.
Holy. Fucking. Shit.
That’s a treasure chest.
“You afraid of tight spaces?” he asks.
“Yes. No. No. I mean, sometimes. It depends on the space.”
“Hold this.”
He hands me his flashlight, and then he crawls over the rock into the even smaller little cutout.
Seeing him in the tight space makes sweat break out on my hairline. “Please don’t die,” I whisper.
I get a grin in response. “All good here.”
He’s not just grinning.
He’s smiling like a kid who’s just been told he gets an entire birthday cake for himself.
“Is that it?” I breathe.
He flips the lid, and while I gasp, he sucks in an audible breath too.
Gold coins.
There are freaking gold coins in that chest.
It’s not a huge chest—maybe a foot wide, not nearly as long, and just a couple inches high—but it has gold coins inside.
Davis is still wearing his work gloves as he runs his hands through the coins.
They clink like real coins.
He holds one up, and I gasp again.
I recognize that coin.
It’s old.
Old old. Likely British.
If it’s real—if it’s real, we’ve just found an actual, honest-to-god pirate treasure.
He pauses, and a moment later, he’s pulling a book out from beneath the coins.
It’s leather-bound.
With a sail burned into one corner.
“Thorny Rock’s other journal,” I breathe.
He gingerly opens it. “Handwriting matches the real Thorny Rock.”
“Oh my god. We found it.”
He grins at me again. “We found it. Now let’s get rid of it. Here. Stay there. I’ll hand it to you, then climb out.”
“Wait. We should get a picture.”
He shakes his head. “We weren’t here.”
Is he serious?
We found a pirate treasure chest , and he doesn’t want pictures?
“Just for us?” I say. “On your phone? No cloud?”
He hesitates the briefest moment, and then he’s passing me his phone. “One picture.”
“Don’t worry. I’m very good at getting your best side.”
He dead-eyes me, and then he cracks up.
And that’s what I get.
Davis, laughing over a pirate treasure.
His pirate treasure.
I hand back his phone. He passes the chest out to me, and I urp when I take it.
It’s heavy.
Not too heavy, but probably at least twenty-five or thirty pounds.
More than I was expecting.
He crawls back out into the main area and then hoists himself out of the hole. “Hand it up?”
I’m holding a pirate treasure.
A hidden, buried, lost, previously undiscovered pirate treasure.
History.
Blood.
The reason I have a hometown that I love now.
My throat clogs, and my eyes get hot.
A warm hand touches my hair. “You good?”
I look up at Davis. “This is kinda monumental.”
“You did good.”
“ We did good. I can’t believe it’s real.”
“Are you the kind of person who can take a good I told you so ?”
I laugh. “Yes.”
“I’ll tuck that information away for future reference.”
I look at the rusty metal box, then back up at Davis. “Are you giving it to Pop?”
“Cooper.”
“ Just Cooper?”
“You should probably call Tillie Jean and Grady. Get them out here too. All three of them should know.”
I nod, and then I lift the thing so he can take it.
It feels almost anticlimactic.
We spent almost a week looking, we found it, and now it’s over.
You did the thing. Now go back to doing real life .
It’s Friday.
Once we take it to Cooper, I could go back to work.
Or go pick up my house.
Or—
Giselle makes a noise, and Davis pauses over me.
“Stay here.” His voice is quiet again. Tense. “Be right back.”
Like I’m going anywhere.
I’m in a hole and I don’t exactly have the body strength he does to pull myself out.
Giselle makes another noise.
At least, I think that’s Giselle.
“Davis?” I whisper.
No answer.
Just bushes rustling.
And then— “I’ll take that, you ugly piece of shit.”
Oh my god .
That’s Patrick.
That’s Patrick .
“No,” Davis replies.
It’s the over my dead body kind of no, which is not at all my favorite.
Probably my least favorite, in fact.
I eyeball one of the shelves, decide there’s no way I’m testing my weight on it, and try to jump a little to peer out of the root cellar instead.
Nothing.
“I already took out your bodyguard. You think I can’t take you out too? Give me the fucking box.”
I shiver at the malice in Patrick’s voice.
I shiver again at Davis’s repeated, “No.”
Shit.
Shit shit shit shit shit.
What did he do to Giselle?
What did he do to Giselle ?
I jump a little more, but I still can’t see anything.
“Hand. It. Over.”
“Where’ve you been hiding, Dixon? Half the state’s looking for you.”
I look around the root cellar again.
Shovel.
Metal detector.
That’s it.
That’s all I have, aside from some?—
Some jars .
I grab one, and I pull a raccoon, and I throw it as hard as I can out of the hole.
“They can keep— Jesus fucking Christ, what the hell was that? ”
So I was close.
I throw another one.
Then a third.
A fourth.
“ Stop fucking throwing things ,” Patrick bellows.
“Go to fucking hell,” I yell. “The bad hell. The hell where you’ll be butt-plugged by spiny-tailed lizards every day for the rest of your life until you start to enjoy it, and then they switch to stabbing you in the heart and the liver and the spleen until you can’t fucking stand it.” I keep throwing jars. And yelling. And throwing jars. And yelling. And throwing. Until I realize I’m sobbing and everything is silent overhead.
Eerily silent.
Nothing rustling.
No breathing.
All I can hear is the rush of my own heartbeat in my ears and my sobs.
“I hate you,” I yell at Patrick while I go back to throwing all of the jars. My arm hurts. My face hurts. My chest hurts. My head hurts. My heart hurts. “I hate you, and I hate you for making me hate you, and I hope you die miserable and alone after a long, miserable life of knowing you’re a useless fucking cuntwaffle. The cuntiest, fuckiest of fucknuggets.”
I gasp for breath.
Silence.
There’s still silence outside.
Until—
Until there’s a creak. A long, slow, creaky crreeeeeaaaaaakkkkk .
All falls silent again.
“Davis?” I whisper.
“Right here, love,” he murmurs above me.
Above and behind me.
And then the most massive crash I’ve ever heard in my life erupts somewhere just beyond the opening. Wood splinters. Dust billows in the sky.
I shriek.
Davis blinks at the dust cloud.
“What happened?” I whisper.
“Sloane two, Patrick zero, cabin zero.”
“What does that mean?”
“You put one of those jars through the roof of the cabin, and it’s—well, you’re gonna want to see this for yourself.”
The man pauses, and he pulls out his phone, and he snaps a picture of something.
“I killed the cabin?” I breathe.
He grins. “You got it good.”
“And Patrick?”
“You got him too.”
“I—what?”
“You got him. In the head. With a jar of what might’ve been pickled beets. A long time ago.”
I blink up at the sky and the dust cloud still billowing and bare bush branches and the beanie-headed, bearded man peering down at me between snapping pictures of what I assume is the remnants of his great-great-something-grandfather’s cabin.
“Giselle?” I ask.
“Stunned. She’ll be okay. Mad as hell, I expect, but okay.”
“You?”
“Dodged a jar of what might’ve been okra and will live to see another day.”
“Patrick’s accomplice?”
“He’s fucking dead if I find him,” Giselle growls. Her face pops into view too. “Get the fuck out of there before he shows up and you have to see me do things you don’t want to see me do.”
“Is Patrick—is he dead?”
Davis smiles. “No. He’ll get everything you’ve wished for him and more.”
I sag to the dirt floor. “I really hit him?”
“Three times, actually,” Davis says. “First jar knocked him in the shoulder. Another one got him in the knee. That one tripped him, and he rolled over in time to see the jar of maybe beets land right on his forehead.”
“So fucking mad I didn’t see it.” Giselle’s seething.
Davis holds out another hand. “C’mon, Sloane. Let’s go finish the job.”
Finish the job.
Finish our time together.
Move on with our lives.
Me to put mine back together.
Him to—well, to do whatever the mysterious Davis Remington does.
I don’t ask if we can stay friends.
I know the answer.
He’ll disappear into the night, and that will be that.
An epic tale to tell my—my friends’ grandkids one day.
I reach up and take his hand, knowing this won’t be the last time—we are still getting fake-married tomorrow because I’ve earned it, dammit, but this will be close to the last time.
Unless I’m brave.
And unless he is too.