Chapter 17 #2
“Did Wolf tell you how we met?” Scar asked quietly, and I shook my head again.
“It was, gods, about ten years ago. He was so serious, so determined that he didn’t need any help from anybody.
He had one goal, finding you, and he wasn’t interested in anythin’ else.
At the time, Lee and I were working with a different group of bounty hunters, but we were hopin’ to leave and start our own group.
We talked him into helping us with one mission, and in return, we’d help him with one mission.
” I could hear the smile in her voice. “Of course, he found the guy we’d been tryin’ to track down for months in just two days.
So we parted ways but told him we’d fulfill our part of the deal when he had a lead. ”
She hit a particularly tangled section of my hair and had to put the brush down to work the knot out carefully with her fingers.
“A couple weeks later, he tracked us down and told us he had a lead in Moab. So we set out.” She moved on to parting my hair with her fingers and deftly beginning to braid.
Moab. Lee had mentioned Moab when he found me in the cemetery.
“The lead he had was a girl who’d been sold to a whorehouse, so he was already on edge at the idea of you bein’ in that situation, which of course, he hid by barely sayin’ a word for the three-day journey.
And then, when we got there, the girl was gone.
The owner said she ran away, but Wolf couldn’t let it go.
He just kept saying it didn’t feel right.
We finally spoke to some of the other girls and found out that a week prior, they’d heard the missing girl screaming and found blood in her room and down the hallway.
“Your brother was like a man possessed with that info. He broke into the records and found who had been with her that night. He tracked that asshole down, beat him bloody, and then told him he had two choices. He could talk, or he could die. Turns out the owner charged him triple and let him kill her. I thought for sure Wolf would end him, but he let him go. We were able to find the body based on the info we got. They’d dumped her in a shallow grave outside of town.
Animals had gotten to her, so she wasn’t exactly recognizable, but she looked enough like you and was the right age and roughly the right size.
Scar’s fingers stilled in my hair, emotion clear in her voice.
“Wolf stood there staring at the body for a long time. When he finally spoke, I knew shit was about to go south. He told us it was you and took off in our truck without us. By the time we got back to town, he’d killed the man he’d let go and the owner of the brothel and told all the girls to run. ”
I barely breathed as I listened, horrified and captivated at once.
“And Wolf didn’t stop there. Next, he got himself drunk off his ass and started a massive brawl at a bar.
” She made a disapproving sound through her teeth.
“Just about got himself killed. Lee and I found him bleeding out in an alley and got him out of there. The whole drive back to New Salt, he kept telling us to let him die, to leave him there, that he’d failed his mission, his family, and you.
He lost a lot of blood, and I thought he was a goner more than once. ”
Emotion was welling up in my throat, and I struggled to swallow it down.
“We got him patched up, but he was a broken man. We technically didn’t owe each other anythin’, but Lee and I couldn’t just leave him like that, no matter how many times he told us to.
Eventually, we started gettin’ through that hard head of his, and he started opening up.
He told us all about you, what happened with your brother, and how he didn’t know what to do now, so we asked him to join us. ”
She huffed a laugh as she began to braid the other side of my hair.
“We had to ask Wolf about a hundred times before he finally said yes, and I still suspect he only agreed to get Lee to shut up. We were on another mission a year later when we ran into one of the girls from that brothel. She recognized us and wanted to say thank you. Wolf asked her about the girl and turns out they’d been friends.
Lee asked if Wolf and you really had the same eyes, and she got real confused before finally tellin’ us her friend had brown eyes.
I thought Wolf was gonna pass out. He barely made it through that conversation before breaking down. ”
She shifted from behind me to sit on the floor by the mattress, apparently finished braiding my hair, and I studied her.
Her light brown skin made me think of honey.
She wore a short-sleeved shirt, and a single glance at her muscled arms would tell me she was a fighter.
Her dark brown hair was pulled back in her usual short ponytail.
I had to work to hold her gaze because her brown eyes had a warmth that reminded me of Trey.
“We thought he was hurt when he collapsed in an alley, but he just cried and kept saying, ‘She’s still alive.’ And I think that’s when I knew I’d stick with him and help him find you, ’cause it was so clear he still loved you so fiercely despite everything.”
My throat felt impossibly thick, and a tear escaped and rolled down my cheek.
“He never stopped lovin’ you, Ember,” she murmured.
“He might not fully realize it yet; he’s still got a fuckin’ hard head, but to the rest of us, it’s always been clear as day.
It’s why we all stuck with him.” She hesitated for a moment, searching my face for something.
“None of us have ever seen you as just another bounty. Even when we thought you were guilty, you were still Wolf’s baby sister. ”
I squeezed my eyes shut. I didn’t know if that meant some of them believed me, and I was too scared to ask.
“Also, I think you broke that poor boy’s heart.”
I opened my eyes. “What boy?”
“Sam. He’s just been moping around the clinic.”
My shoulders slumped, and I wrapped my arms around myself, my mind replaying the angry words I shouted at him.
“We weren’t tryin’ to overhear your argument, but, well, it’s a small building. And I just wanted to let you know from an outsider’s view, it seems obvious your crew loves you as much as we love Wolf.”
Tears welled in my eyes, and I bit my cheek hard.
“I know for a fact he’s sittin’ on the porch right now if you want me to send him up here. Poor boy looks exhausted. I don’t think he’s been sleeping.”
I hesitated for a long moment but then nodded slightly.
“I’ll go tell him,” she smiled. “Thanks for letting me do your hair.”
After she disappeared down the ladder, I carefully reached up and felt the two braids she’d put in my hair. They felt much neater than my regular messy braids. I heard the door open downstairs and tried to figure out what the fuck I was going to say to Sam.
His head popped up over the loft a minute later, and I felt even worse. He looked pale with dark circles under his eyes. His short blond hair was messy, as if he’d been pulling on it.
“I’m so sorry.” His voice shook as he pulled himself up and crossed the loft to crouch beside my mattress. “I’ve never thought of you as a thing, I swear. You’ve always been a person to me, always, but I?—”
I interrupted him by throwing my arms around his neck and burying my face in his bony shoulder. He immediately wrapped his arms around me, squeezing me back tightly.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
“No, I’m sorry.” My voice cracked. “I never should’ve yelled at you like that.”
He pulled away to grip my face in his hands. There were tears in his blue eyes. “You are not a thing,” he said fiercely. “Not to me, not to anybody else on our crew. I’m sorry Trey was the only one of us smart enough to say it out loud.”
“I saw him,” I whispered, my eyes overflowing.
His brow furrowed. “Trey?”
“In my dream that night.”
He looked confused as if thinking about all the times I woke up screaming Trey’s name.
“Not a nightmare.” My voice broke. “It didn’t even feel like a dream. It felt real—so real. He was there . We were together, and then I had to watch him disappear—again.”
He dropped his hands from my face, one fist rubbing at his chest. His eyes grew vacant, and his entire body sagged. It was jarring to see—to realize just how much grief he’d been hiding behind his jokes.
“Fuck,” he muttered.
“I can’t do this, Sam,” I whispered through the tears. “I can’t.”
His throat bobbed as he swallowed hard, and then he wrapped his arms around me again.
“You know, his bunk was the one under mine. And I still find myself hangin’ over the edge to tell him somethin’ I thought of, only to see it empty and remember he’s gone.
” He took a shaky breath. “I think he’ll always be the first person I think of when I want to talk to somebody. ”
“I just want him back,” I sobbed. “I’d do anythin’ to get him back.”
“I know,” he whispered. “Me too.”
We ended up curled up on my mattress together, both of us consumed by grief, but for the first time in a while, I didn’t feel alone.