Chapter 25
Chapter
Twenty-Five
EMERSON
“ C illian! Felix!”
All our heads swing in the direction of Annabelle running down the drive toward us. She’s soaked and barefoot. Cillian and Felix drop the tree they were moving and run to meet her. Declan and Cyrus are further down the fence line repairing some damage, so they don’t hear her.
I exchange a look with Banks, and we both drop what we’re doing to go to her. Felix gets to her first, his hands cup her cheeks in a way that would raise my eyebrows if I wasn’t so worried about Harper. Why isn’t she here? Is she hurt?
“-took Harper.” I hear the end of Annabelle’s sentence, and my stomach drops to my feet.
“Who took her?” I ask, running the rest of the way as I pull my phone out to text Cy.
“Where is she?” Banks asks at the same time.
“I-I can’t remember his name, he’s only vaguely familiar. Maybe someone who Scott brought to the house once or twice a few years ago. He had a boat hidden by the jetty and a gun.” Tears stream down her face. “He has her. She pushed me off the jetty to save me, and he took my baby.” She grabs Cillian’s shirt. “You have to find her. You have to get her before they hurt her.”
He catches her as her legs give out and sweeps her into his arms. “We’ll get her back. I promise.”
The sound of running footsteps pull our attention to Declan and Cy as they join us. Cillian hands Annabelle over to Felix and tells him to get her inside and to call their doctor. The man is always unflappable, but his face is pale as he locks eyes with Declan.
“Harper’s been taken.” He delivers the news like it’s a mundane piece of information, all inflection is gone from his voice. But I see the way his body tenses, like he’s ready to jump and pull Declan back from whatever edge he’s about to leap off of to go find her.
The thing is, he won’t be leaping alone. If he goes, we go. And there’s no fucking way we aren’t going.
“Annabelle said whoever it was took them onto the jetty to get on a boat he had hidden there. Banks, Emerson, go see if you can find anything. It sounds like Harper put up a fight, so maybe something got left behind.”
As soon as the order leaves Cillian’s mouth, we’re both running in that direction. I’m used to running miles a day, but this relatively short distance seems like a marathon. We pass Harper’s sandals where the grass meets the sand and keep going.
At first glance, there’s nothing on the jetty. No boats on the horizon either. Just wave after wave of deep blue water and the salt marshes several miles to the west.
“Here’s her footprints.” Banks points down to the ground. “Wait, what’s that?”
“Be careful,” I say as he scrambles down the slick rocks to pick something up.
“It’s a shell.” He walks back up the side. “With blood on the tip.”
“Let me see,” I hold out my hand, careful not to touch the blood in case it isn’t hers. “They can test it for DNA.”
We spend a little while longer looking for anything else but come up empty handed. The gravity of the situation grows heavier the closer we get back toward the house. Before we had a job, something to focus on and keep the anxiety from building up. Now all I can think about is that she’s out there probably fighting for her life.
Declan and Cy are going to lose their minds. I have to remain calm and level-headed because they won’t. A glance over at Banks is all it takes to see he’s not ready to burn the world down, but he is clearly close to the edge.
I grab his shoulder, halting our progress back toward the house. “Listen to me, I need you to keep it together.” I give him a little shake to hammer in my point. “Declan and Cy are going to be ready to go down in flames for her. I can’t manage them and you on my own. I need your help.”
He gives me a weak nod. My stomach turns at how unconvincing it is. Fuck me, I need more than that.
“Not good enough.” I swing around and grab him by the jaw, forcing him to look slightly down at me. “Lock it the fuck in, Banks. Harper needs you.”
That is what he needed to hear. It makes sense, he wouldn’t feel the need to help us as strongly as he would Harper. She’s his driving force.
“Got it?” I ask.
“Got it.” He says, clear eyed and focused. “I’ll keep it together.”
“Good. Because you’re about to see some crazy shit.”
We jog up the steps and into the house. Everyone is in the living room, Annabelle has changed into dry clothes, but her hair is still stuck together in stringy, wet clumps. A cup of tea sits untouched on the table in front of her. Cillian is pacing in the corner of the room on the phone with Declan listening in.
Cy walks over as soon as he sees us. “Did you find anything?”
“Just this shell.” I open the drawer with all the food storage bags and grab a freezer bag to drop it into. “It has blood on it.”
“I found it on the jetty. It caught my eye because there’s no other shells up there.”
“Let me see it.” Annabelle stands up and walks over to us. She picks up the bag and looks at the shell. “That’s the one she found right before he came up on us. She must have hidden up her sleeve.”
“Good girl,” Cy murmurs beside me.
“She must have tried to use it to fight him off after she pushed me into the water.”
“She pushed you in?” Banks’s eyebrows raise.
“I think she did it to protect me.” She sets the bag down and runs a hand over her stomach. Her face crumples as she bursts into tears. “We have to get her back.”
“We will.” Banks wraps her in a hug. “We will Annabelle. I promise.”
“My cousin is on the way, along with a team of Lake’s mercenaries,” Declan says. “What’s that?”
We fill him in on the contents of the bag until we’re interrupted by the doorbell. Felix draws a gun and walks to the front of the house to answer it. A moment later he walks back with a man in golf clothes who looks like he just walked off the course. He must be the doctor they called.
Cillian and Felix drag Annabelle into the living room, leaving the four of us standing around the kitchen island.
“I’m going out on our boat to look for her,” Declan says.
“Wait.” I hold my hand out. “You don’t even know which direction they went in.”
“Annabelle said he was headed back toward the coast. Plus, she said it was a little dinghy. He couldn’t have gone out to sea in that.”
“Logically, no. But there’s hundreds of thousands of acres of marsh to the west of us. It’s a needle in a haystack until we have more information.”
“So you just want to let her be taken further and further away? Beaten, raped, tortured, or murdered by fuck knows who while we sit around and talk about how to save her?”
“No.” I put my hand on his chest and push him down onto a barstool. “I think we wait for backup and leadership by Lake and Nolan. The people who have a clue about this type of thing.”
“It’ll take hours,” Cy says. “I’m with Declan. Let’s at least start searching while we wait.”
“What if there’s more than one person?”
“I’m not afraid.” Cy clenches his jaw. “I’ve been through and done worse.”
That’s probably not an exaggeration. I scrub a hand over my face and look to Banks for help. But he’s just staring down at the seashell in a bag, lost in thought. I look over to see if I can get any help from Cillian, but do a double take when I see Annabelle’s shirt pushed up over her abdomen and the doctor holding a fetal heart rate doppler to her pelvis.
My shocked expression must catch Declan’s eye because he follows my gaze. The only sound in the room is the rapid swooshing of the fetus. No one says a word until the doctor pulls the doppler away from her stomach with a relieved expression.
“Baby sounds good. You’re both going to be fine.”
“Baby?” Declan asks his dad.
“This isn’t how we wanted you to find out.” Cillian sits down on the coffee table across from where Annabelle lays while Felix walks the doctor out. “Annabelle is pregnant.”
“Is it yours?”
My gaze snaps to Declan. What kind of a question is that?
Cillian’s expression darkens. “She’s my wife.”
“Yeah, but I know you’re all fucking.” Declan pins a stare on Felix as he enters. “Could be his.”
“It could be.” Cillian’s voice is cold and hard. “I know you’re upset about Harper, but watch your fucking tone. You’re living in a glass house.”
Declan presses his lips together. He wants to fight, it’s not actually the pregnancy that’s upsetting him. He and Cy are so similar in that way.
“Congratulations, Annabelle.” Banks says quietly as she sits up.
“Banks.” Her voice trembles as she tries to stand, but Cillian gently stops her.
Instead of having her come to him, he walks over to her and sits down. She wraps her arms around him and starts to cry. “We have to get her back.”
“We will.”