Chapter 33
Cameron
I look from the paper in front of me to my phone and back again, trying to keep my brain from spinning out of control.
I don’t know if anything’s even wrong, I tell myself firmly. I don’t know that there’s any emergency here except the one I’m building in my own head.
“Tell me again,” he says abruptly. “What do you know?”
I sigh, already tired of this cycle, but know that he’s doing the same thing I am: Trying to find facts so we can figure out what’s going on here, and from there, build a plan.
A plan to save our Sammy, probably from an adventure she herself came up with.
Not the first time I’ve had to save her from herself, but this time feels a whole lot scarier. At least when she’s gone to the train tracks, I know where to find her.
Right now, I don’t have a fucking clue where she is, and that feels like I’ve carved out part of my soul and thrown it through the window, then went on trying to live without it.
I’ve never been away from her for more than a couple hours, and I’ve certainly never woken up to a note telling me that she’s left me behind.
Off to have an adventure of her own without telling me where the fuck she was going.
God, I’m going to murder her when we find her.
I look back at the note, though, and start at the beginning. “When I woke up, there was a note on my chest. From Sammy.”
“And what’s it say?”
“That she’s gone to have breakfast with someone who claims he’s her father. That she wants to know what it’s like to have actual family, and that she’s not going anywhere but to the cafe at the bottom of the hill, near the plateau.”
Waking up this morning had been one of the biggest shocks of my life. I’d come awake in a hurry, on a deep gasp, like someone had just punched me. My blood was racing and chills covered my skin like my body already knew something was wrong and was ready to fight whoever was causing the trouble.
Turned out my body was correct, because when I sat up, a note fell from my chest into my lap.
And when I read it, I knew exactly what had happened.
Sammy’d been getting texts for days that she didn’t want to talk about.
She’d read them then frown and put them away, like they were something she didn’t really understand, or didn’t want to deal with.
She refused to tell me what they were, which was strange, but the moment I saw that note, it all started to make sense.
Someone had been contacting her and trying to get her out of town.
Telling her some story about being her father and wanting to reconnect, no doubt.
He’d found the way under her skin and manipulated it, and she’d fallen for it.
The rest of the note was frustratingly vague: just that she was going down the mountain to a certain cafe, that she’d taken my truck, and that she’d be back before lunch.
She’d signed off with her standard ‘love you too much to count, S,’ and that was that.
A note that tells me nothing except that she’s made another stupid decision, and this time hasn’t given me enough information to save her.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
“And nothing else?” Bear’s voice suddenly asks from my left.
I jump, having forgotten that we were in the middle of a conversation, and glance at him.
If Sammy’s note was odd, this situation is even odder.
I’m in a truck with the man I hated up until a few days ago, and the two of us are, for the first time, working as a team, our minds and hearts intent on the same goal.
Find our Sammy. Bring her home. Keep her safe.
The moment I finished the note, I’d jumped out of bed and thrown on the first clothes I could find, knowing that I had to get to a vehicle and follow Sammy before anything happened to her. When I threw open the door to my room, though, I found myself blocked by a man even larger than myself.
Bear.
He’d been standing there half dressed, his hair still messy from sleep and his eyes barely open.
“Sammy’s not in her room,” he observed coldly. “You know anything about that?”
I didn’t ask why he knew that or what he’d been doing looking for her, because in that moment, it didn’t matter. I’d just lifted the note and showed it to him, letting Sammy do the talking for me.
Bear had read quickly, nodded once, and then looked at me.
“I’m not letting anyone take her. My truck.”
I hadn’t had to answer, and he hadn’t expected one.
He’d already known I was his ally in this fight, and that I would have killed him before I let him go after her without me.
Now we’re halfway down the mountain, maybe ten minutes from the cafe in question, and I can hardly sit still.
I can’t believe she did this. I can’t believe she thought any of this was safe, or that she did it without telling me.
Part of my heart wants to scream at the idea that she didn’t let me in on her plan, after a whole lifetime of never leaving each other out, but the larger part–the stronger part–knows that this isn’t the time to cry over hurt feelings.
This is the time to make a fucking plan.
Though that would be a whole lot easier if I had any fucking information.
“That cafe’s been closed for years,” Bear says for the third time since we got into the truck. “Doesn’t make any sense to want to meet her there.”
It didn’t, and that was the problem.
No one asks to meet you at a closed cafe unless they have no intention of staying at said cafe.
And if they got there and took her, we have no way of figuring out where they went.
I’m good at tracking, but tire tracks only work if you’re on a dirt road, and the road that leads down off the mountain is paved.
Without some sort of miracle, we’ll never know where they took her.
Bear hits the gas and the car jumps forward down a straightaway, skidding a bit when he throws it into the corner, and I grasp the handle on my side.
.. but don’t tell him to slow down. If we can get to the cafe before this mystery person does, maybe we’ll find Sammy.
Get her out of there in the nick of time, like we did when the bikers were attacking her at Penny Royal’s. And speaking of the bikers...
“There’ve been a whole lot of strangers in town,” I say. “And now this.”
“And now this,” Bear agrees. “Pictures that don’t make sense. Trouble with the council. A new biker gang. People following Sammy.”
I spend half a second marveling that our brains seem to work in exactly the same way, then launch into the next thought. “Think it’s all connected?”
He jerks the wheel to the right and then left, bringing the truck smoothly out of a turn. “Of course it’s all connected. None of that made any fucking sense until this morning, and now it makes so much sense I hate that I didn’t see it before. Still don’t know who the fuck’s behind it, though.”
At that moment, my phone buzzes, and I nearly jump through the roof in surprise. When I look down, I see it’s a text.
From Sammy fucking Price.
I jerk the phone toward my face, fingers shaking and heart hammering, and read what she wrote.
“Duane Price,” I say. “What the fuck does that mean? The girl’s been out on her own, gone to who knows where, might be fucking kidnapped, and she’s sending me a single fucking name?”
I’m so angry it feels I might spontaneously combust, and since I don’t get angry often, this feels all sorts of wrong.
It feels even weirder when Bear pauses, then hits the wheel with a shout.
“Duane Price?” he shouts. “Fucking Duane Price?”
And that’s it. He doesn’t give me anything more than that, just steps harder on the gas pedal and starts muttering to himself.
Who in the fuck is Duane Price and why does he have Sammy’s last name? Wait.
I glance back at the text and read it ten more times in the space of five seconds. Duane Price. Duane Price.
Sammy’s dad. It has to be. But why did Bear shout his name like he was already somehow expecting it... or like he already knew it?
I’m opening my mouth to ask that when my phone buzzes again, and I look down, expecting to see a text that has more than a fucking name.
But this time, it’s not a text.
It’s a pin.
And I know that location.
“Take the next left,” I said. “The road that leads to the other side of the mountain.” I look up, watching for the road, and start breathing more quickly.
Christ, where is it? It’s a tiny thing, and easy to miss if you’re going the speed limit, which we’re definitely not.
If we miss it, it’ll be miles before we can safely turn around and go back to it, and we don’t have miles.
Because another text came in right after the pin, and this one was even shorter.
It just said ‘hurry.’