Chapter 26
Rex
When I first saw thefootage and Cade didn’t respond to the text message I had sent him, I’d never been more thankful for Devolin’s call offering me relief of my watchdog duties. I told her that under no circumstance was she to take her eyes off the screen. With that, I had gotten my ass in gear and headed straight for Aspen’s cottage. I never told Dev what was going on, sure she’d figure things out in due time.
I also tried to dial Aspen’s cell, but her voicemail picked up immediately, telling me that it had either been turned off, or her battery had run dry.
Fucking women and their fool heads!
As I tore up the highway, driving like a bat out of hell to get there in less than the forty minutes it would take the average driver to reach my destination, something wasn’t sitting right. The footage I’d witnessed earlier played in a constant loop in my mind, and even though I knew something was off, I couldn’t pinpoint what it was.
The moment I got to the cottage’s turnoff, I pulled off the road, parked, and decided to go the rest of the way on foot, making sure I had my Beretta tucked in the waistband of my pants.
I passed Aspen’s vehicle, glad to see she’d had the common sense of a true investigator, but that all went to shit when I observed her out of the tree line, making her way toward the porch.
Anyone could have seen her from any direction, which is what happened.
One minute, she was crouched by the front door, the next, I witnessed Aspen hitting Aspen with a two-by-four at the back of the cranium, my own head reeling at the image.
There’s two of them?
The next thing I knew, the unkempt version of Aspen was pulling her doppelg?nger by her underarms into the cottage, and my gaze settled on Renegade, cowering back into the bushes where they’d probably come from.
Yeah, I’d be confused too, buddy.
When the door to the cottage slammed shut, that’s when I made my move.
Cade
I was unsure as to how long it took me to make it to Aspen’s cottage, but I sure felt the sense of relief I wouldn’t have to wait for backup when I spotted Rex’s Suburban off the side of the road.
Pulling in behind him, I headed for the trees, sure of the way I’d planned on sneaking up on whomever it was I’d come up on when I’d reached my destination.
The phone in my back pocket vibrated. Halting my progress, I pulled it out and unlocked the screen to reveal numerous full-length texts.
Dev:
Men on the move.
Rex on scene.
Another ping.
Shane:
On route. Coroner report came in on that vic from the skip you helped Rex with. Talk when this bullshit with this perp is over and Aspen is safe. Hold tight.
Dev:
Rex on his way to you.
Minutes later, I heard the low whistle we’d used as a call sign with one another on previous missions.
Seconds after that, Renegade was at my side with Rex emerging shortly thereafter. My four-legged partner wasn’t the jovial mutt he always was, his ears back and low on his head, his gaze aimed downward as though he felt like a failure.
“There’s two of them,” Rex first said.
“Two perps, got it.” His message nothing new to what I’d gotten from Devolin.
Although frustrated, his eyes held disbelief. “No, man, two Aspens.”
“The fuck?”
“Didn’t you get my text at the ass crack of dawn?” he asked.
I shook my head, pulled my phone back out and went to my message app. That’s when I caught a text I’d missed simply because it had already been read.
Aspen.
Opening it, I saw the message and immediately knew he wasn’t talking out of sleep deprivation or some sort of hallucination. The video footage also went a long way to explain why she’d taken off like she had.
But I knew the difference immediately.
“Fuck me.” I let out a string of additional expletives, shoving my phone back in my pocket and raking my hands through my hair. “Goddamn it, Pen!” I whisper-yelled.
When all of this was over, I was sure to tan her perfectly pert hide.
“Not the time, Cade,” Rex growled. “I just saw your woman get clocked hard with a chunk of wood. At best, she’s got a lump to rival the size of a fucking ostrich egg; at worst, she’s got one hell of a concussion, or she’s?—”
“Don’t even fucking say it,” I growled.
The man’s hands came up in a peacekeeping manner. “You ready to go then?”
With one nod, we set off, me in the lead, Renegade at my side, and Rex manning my six.
Aspen
My ears were ringing.
My head throbbed as if someone had stuck it in a blender.
My pulse raced, and I was struggling to keep my churning stomach from rebelling and me losing what was left of last night’s dinner on the floor I was currently crumpled on.
Taking a few calming breaths, hoping to all hell I wasn’t being obvious of my being conscious, I wanted to get my bearings long enough to assess the extent of my injuries and figure out where my attacker was.
I needed a plan.
I felt eyes on me, so I knew whoever it was that hit me earlier was in the room with me. The pungent smell of disinfectant, that most likely was a fragment from when the Nightshade crew had been in here, mixed with stale air and what I could tell were the remnants of one of my apple-cinnamon candles in the air, let me know I was in what used to be my safest place on Earth.
“Wake up, bitch!” A swift kick to my ribs had me shrinking into a ball on the hardwood surface.
“W—why?” I croaked, trying to take a deep breath in, but unable to do so, due to the pain in my right side, so I straightened myself out a bit to take pressure off my middle. I was pretty sure she’d at least cracked a rib. “What do I have?—”
“You took it away!” the female voice, so similar to my own albeit slightly unused, hollered as she kicked me once more. “You took it all from me, and I can never have it back.”
Any doubts I had about bruising, or a simple fracture, were washed clean out of my mind when I heard the telltale cracking sound. My next breath inward had stars exploding behind my eyelids and fire streaking through my lungs.
Trying to conserve what strength I had left, and keeping myself safe, I no longer cared how hard it was to breathe. For self-preservation purposes, I curled myself in the fetal position, giving her less surface area to make contact with.
“You could have saved him! I wouldn’t be alone if it wasn’t for your choice to pick him over me,” my attacker rambled on. “He gave me everything! From the time I was a little girl, he was my only friend.”
Any doubt of what I’d seen in the short video footage on Cade’s phone vanished.
“W—Willow?” I coughed, and when I tasted blood, I knew I was in trouble.
“Don’t call me that! I haven’t been Willow in twenty-five years.”
It really is her?
Now, it all made sense. The way I felt closer to her by moving into the cottage when I’d thought all along it was because she’d disappeared in these same woods, albeit a much farther distance from here. The hope that had always been there, that I would find her again someday.
But any hope that some sort of sisterly relationship would be able to be rekindled with my sister dissipated the moment our eyes connected for the very first time since the day when the man had taken her away from my parents—from me. Willow was dead. In her place resided some wild and hollow being who had an axe to grind, and for the life of me, I can’t put two and two together to make four.
“Abe is gone and I’m all alone.”
“He took you from us,” I struggled to get out.
“He took me and gave me the best life I could have ever hoped for, and that man you’ve been fornicating with, writing that filth about, took him away,” Willow accused. “Just like it was when we were kids. It was always you over me. That’s why I went with Abe. It’s why I never wanted any of them to find me. But you ruined it, and once I’m done making you pay for taking away the only thing I love, he’ll be next.”
“Wil—That won’t make the pain go away,” I croaked. Closing my eyes, trying to stave off the dam of tears threatening to flow out of sadness and desolation, I remembered the gun tucked in my front left side of my jeans, covered by my shirt. I reached slowly for it but came up empty.
“Looking for this?” My eyes snapped open to find Willow holding Cade’s weapon in her hand. “You seriously didn’t think I wouldn’t look for anything that could be used against me while you were out, did you?”
“Y—you don’t need to do this.” I tried to sound confident, but it came out as a whisper.
Next thing I knew, my world exploded with fear as I saw Cade’s face flash through the window above the kitchen sink at Willow’s back.
I’d been found, but if he came in here, Willow would do to him exactly what she had planned. And I didn’t doubt that she would take the shot to get to him, even before she’d be done with me.
Putting every ounce of strength into my voice, I yelled a pitiful sounding, “No!”
Cade
I about lost my mind the moment I heard Aspen screaming, “No!” through the door. I’d barely felt the crumpling of the wooden barrier when I crashed through it, Rex at my back. Frankly, I had already lost my shit as soon as I spotted the blood under her head, while she lay in the fetal position, her face contorted with pain.
The only thing I hadn’t noticed, because the perp’s back had been to me and the window I’d quickly glanced through, was the fact she had been brandishing a weapon, one that had been trained on my woman up until two seconds ago.
“Oh fuck, no!” Rex shouted about the same time Renegade lunged past me and tackled the crazed woman.
“Get Ren off and I’ll secure her, then you can go to your woman,” Rex ordered loud enough to be heard over the screeching banshee.
“Renegade, release!” I said, as I hurried to check Aspen out, confident my dog would do as he was trained. When I skidded to a stop in front of her, the up-close sight had me wincing. Although she looked as though she slept, I knew she’d passed out from the pain. The fact her face was still contorted in a grimace, and her arms, although limp, were still wrapped around her middle had me wondering if I should even attempt moving, let alone touching her at all.
Seconds later, Renegade came to lay in a whimpering mess at my side, a safe distance from us. Rex had managed to take the power cord from a lamp he’d cut off with the help of his utility knife and had secured the bitch who’d done far more damage to Aspen than I’d ever thought possible.
“This isn’t over!” she shouted. “You’ll lose everything you took from me. I promise you that!”
“It is for you,” Rex spat, as he whipped out his cell and began dialing. The moment he finished barking out our location, he hung up, then hit a button on his phone. “Yeah… We got her… She’s fuckin’ banged up bad… Ten-four.” Pocketing his phone, he explained, “The cavalry just got here. They’re jumping back in their vehicles and coming up the drive. Ambo is right behind them along with the cops.”
I could only nod my response, the lump in my throat impeding the possibility for words.
When I turned to face Aspen’s tormentor, I was floored by her unkempt nature, but also by the fact that she looked almost identical to my woman. It was unsettling how I could love Aspen so much, then face a person, nearly her mirror image, and hate her with the fire of a thousand suns.