Chapter Twenty-Six
Jessie wasn’t sure where she was. Her head spun, and her vision was blurry as it adjusted to the room. Butch had thrown her on the dirt floor of a building before leaving her in silence. He’d ripped the bag off of her head before leaving. It must have been to make sure she didn’t know where they were going, since it didn’t serve any other purpose.
Her arms were tied behind her back with rope that cut into her wrists and caused them to burn. She lay face-down on the ground, her stomach pressing into the dirt under her. She could feel her left eye had started to swell shut from where Butch had slapped her, and she could barely open it at all.
Taking a deep breath, she tried to calm her nerves and mind. Remaining calm was the only way to get out of this situation alive. She didn’t know where Butch was, but she needed to escape before he got back.
If he was gone.
She turned onto her side and looked around cautiously, struggling to see through only one eye. She didn’t see Butch, and felt a small twinge of relief that he wasn’t in the room with her.
She was in a cabin that was similar to the one she and Gray had been in a few nights ago. It was falling apart around her, its wooden walls crumbling from being beaten down by the elements. It was most likely abandoned, but there were hints that someone had tidied it up recently.
There was a table in the middle of the room with one flimsy wooden chair. A small bed sat in one corner, and on the opposite wall, a kitchen. That was all. It was a very simple house with a dirt floor, but everything was in its place, like someone had cared enough to keep the area tidy.
She sat up and placed her back to the wall, keeping a close eye on the front door. Carefully, she probed her back with her hands, searching for the knife that she kept in the waistband of her pants. Her fingers brushed across the handle of the blade, and relief rushed through her body. She found it!
He had taken her guns from her, but he clearly hadn’t checked her well enough to make sure she didn’t have any smaller weapons of any sort on her.
The knife was a small one. Not something she would use in a fight if she could help it, but it would come in handy now. She started to work on the rope binding her wrists, careful not to drop the knife. It would be a pain in the ass to pick it up again if she dropped it. She wished it was sharper, or bigger, because it wasn’t easy to cut the rope off with her small one. Her wrists stung from the tightly bound rope.
While she slowly worked on the ropes, the flimsy door at the front of the cottage opened, and her lips parted in surprise as Butch and Casey both walked into the room.
Casey’s eyes landed directly on her. A grin slowly covered his face. Jessie froze, grasping the knife behind her back hard, like a lifeline. His hand went inside his jacket, and he removed a gun from an inside pocket. She held her breath in anticipation. Was he going to kill her?
“Told you I’d get her,” Butch said, his voice holding an ominous tone.
Casey nodded, rubbing his hand over his chin in contemplation. “Now all we need are the other two, and you can have your reward,” he said.
Butch strode toward Jessie, his boots thudding on the floor as he walked.
“Let’s try this again.” He didn’t waste any time with small talk, jumping straight to the point. “I have all day to get the answers I need out of you.” He pulled out his own gun and ran his fingers across the barrel in an almost loving fashion, and his grin widened as he looked at her. “Where are Luke and Gray?”
She wished she had been able to get out of the ties before he’d come back. She wished she’d been able to fight him off at her camp and not dragged to some unknown location.
The reasons he’d kept her alive this long couldn’t be good ones. Whatever was about to come her way wasn’t going to be pleasant.
“I told you already. I escaped and got away from them not far from where you kidnapped me. Just let me go. I don’t know where they are.”
Butch paced around the cabin, attempting to move with controlled energy, but his eyes betrayed his intent. If she gave him an answer he didn’t like, he would kill her. Casey seemed to enjoy watching the interaction and was practically buzzing with excitement.
She worked on her binding again while Butch paced the room. He dragged his fingers along the table as he passed it. He was attempting to look uninterested, but Jessie knew a killer when she saw one. She needed to distract him until she could get free. Maybe she could get him to stop talking about Gray and Luke, and move onto something else for a bit.
“Why do you care so much about finding them?” she asked Casey. “It’s only a matter of time before the bounty hunters do. You’ve sent enough hired men tracking them.” She nodded her head toward Butch as proof.
Casey was next to her then, looming over her like a man standing over a prized animal he’d just killed. Grabbing her hard under her arms, he picked her up and slammed her into the chair by the table.
She let out a cry of surprise at the sudden movement, and his eyes gleamed in excitement. He liked hurting people. These two were a dangerous pair.
She grasped onto the knife with all her strength, willing herself not to drop it. She gritted her teeth so she wouldn’t let out another cry of pain. She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of knowing he hurt her.
He stooped and ran his hand along her cheek in a movement that would have seemed intimate and gentle to anyone who was watching. But it made Jessie want to vomit. His eyes roamed her face as she jerked her head away from his hand, and he chuckled.
“You’re probably right,” Casey said, mere inches from her face. “I have enough people after them, and it won’t be long before they are found. Alive or dead. Preferably dead, so I don’t have to put up with any more of this bullshit.” Spittle sprayed across her face as he spoke. She squeezed her eyes shut against the spray, cringing.
His bitter words made her feel like there was more to the story than what Gray and Luke had originally told her. It seemed personal at this point.
“Why did you fake your death and pin it on Luke?”
He rolled his eyes and snarled. “Sometimes it’s really simple, dear.” His voice was condescending, and the anger in his eyes was sickening. “I’ve been wanted by the law for a while for all the crimes I’ve done. It’s an easy way to start a new life and not have to worry about that anymore. Luke was a good target because he was there, he was annoying, and he was known for being good with a gun.” As he listed the reasons he’d framed Luke, he counted them off on his fingers. “If a gunman killed an outlaw, nobody would second-guess that. It should have been as easy as Luke killing a man in cold blood, and my death would have wiped away my crimes. I didn’t know he had a brother, and that made things more complicated.”
Gray and Luke’s instincts had been right about Casey. They had thought from the beginning that he’d faked his death just to wipe away the crimes he had committed.
“But Gray made things complicated?”
Casey stepped away from her, turning to lean against the wall. She began working on the bindings at her wrists again. He was too angry to pay attention to what she was doing.
“Yes,” he said. “So, I had to take matters into my own hands again because you two kept ruining things. Kept making things more complicated for me instead of just going away.”
She felt the bindings snap behind her back, freeing her hands. She wasn’t sure what to do, but at least she could fight if she needed to.
She took note of the things around the room now, deciding what she could use as a weapon. Butch stood in the kitchen, a few feet away from her, listening to the conversation between her and Casey.
There wasn’t much of anything she could use to defend herself. The chair she sat on, the table, pots and pans in the kitchen. She slipped the knife back into her waistband and grasped the wooden dowels on the chair back, just in case she needed to start with that as her weapon.
It’d be best if she could get them to leave the cabin so she could run. Taking two of them on in a fight would not end in her favor; they were bigger, stronger, and angrier than her. Sometimes, anger was enough to win a fight. They also probably had weapons on them besides their guns, and had no reason to keep her alive other than wanting to get the location of Gray and Luke out of her. After Casey had what he wanted and was happy, they would kill her. She had no doubt.
“I can’t wait around for the bounty hunters to find Gray and Luke, they are taking too long. And Gray has gotten too close to me too many times. Because of you. Why are you helping him instead of trying to get the reward?”
She shrugged nonchalantly. “I figured out that Luke didn’t murder you. I wasn’t going to be responsible for an innocent man’s death.”
“Trust a woman to have a bleeding heart. If I’d have known you were a woman, I never would have asked you to go after Luke.”
She shouldn’t let his comments anger her, but they did. “Yeah, that’s why I pretend to be a boy.” The sarcasm was evident in her voice, even though she knew it wasn’t a good idea.
She thought her father was the angriest man she’d ever seen, but the look of murderous fury that crossed over Casey’s face made her stomach lurch.
He lunged at her, and she barely had time to stand up before he was in her face, screaming curse words at her.
She grabbed the back of the chair with one hand and swung it at him with all her strength. It hit him awkwardly due to her grasp, but Casey stumbled in surprise. Butch laughed maniacally in the background. Her grip on the chair had been clumsy at best, and she didn’t manage to hurt Casey.
She sprinted to the door as fast as she could, taking advantage of Casey’s surprise. She pulled it open with all her strength, but before she could get outside, she felt a tug on her hair and was yanked backward. Casey slammed the door shut again, trapping her inside with him and Butch.
Gritting her teeth, she swung around and punched him in the face as hard as she could. Her fist stung at the contact, but the blow caused him to stumble back and let go of her. His hand was still on the door so she couldn’t escape that way, so she sprinted around the table, putting it between them.
He slowly turned and faced her, the anger in his eyes burning her with its intensity.
“Fuck it,” he spat. “I don’t need you alive anyway, and you are more trouble than you are worth.” He pointed the gun at her. “One more chance, and I’m done. Where are Luke and Gray?”
She was dead whether she told him or not. But at least if she didn’t tell him, Gray would stand a chance of living.
She realized in that moment that she loved Gray. It hurt that she’d understood it too late and she would never get to do anything about it, but she was willing to die to protect him.
She closed her one good eye and waited for death to come.