Chapter Thirty
MY PHONE LIT up with Sawyer’s name at ten to five in the morning, I grabbed it fast, because after everything I wanted to hear his voice more than I wanted to go on lying there not sleeping.
Rune was gone. Something important had come up a little before midnight.
I didn’t hear what, only Chain’s fist on the door and Rune awake between one breath and the next, pulling his boots on in the dark.
Rune had leaned over, kissed the top of my head and told me to stay put, stay inside, keep the door locked, he’d be back by sunrise.
So I was alone in his cabin when the phone lit up.
“Sawyer?” I was already half smiling. “It’s five in the morning, you absolute — ”
Breathing.
“Sawyer?”
“He can’t come to the phone right now.”
And the bottom fell out of the world.
I knew the voice before he finished the second word.
You don’t forget it. You spend your life trying and you don’t, it lives somewhere under your skin, that low, easy, unhurried voice, the one that used to come down a hallway toward a closed door that didn’t lock.
I hadn’t heard it in three years and my body knew it in less than a second, went to ice, and the phone was suddenly very heavy in my hand.
“Hi, baby girl,” my father said. “Been a long time.”
I couldn’t make a sound.
“Now I know you’re there, I can hear you breathin’, so let’s not do the we don’t talk thing, we’re past that.
” A pause, almost gentle. “You got real hard to get to. All them men, all that fence. Had to find me another door.” I heard movement, a scrape, and then his voice went off the phone, away from it. “Say somethin’ to her. Go on.”
“Amy — ” Sawyer’s voice was in pieces, high and shaking, nothing like him, no happy in it at all. “Amy, don’t, okay, don’t come, he’s — I’m sorry, I don’t know how he — don’t do what he says! — ”
A sound. A grunt, a scuffle, Sawyer’s voice cutting off, I was on my feet in the dark with my hand over my mouth and my heart trying to come up my throat.
“There,” my father said, back on the line, unbothered, like a man who’d stepped away to take a pot off the stove.
“He’s alive. He’s got all his fingers, for now.
Whether he keeps ’em, whether he keeps anything, that’s gonna be up to you and how good you listen.
You always were a good listener when you had to be. ”
“Don’t hurt him.” It came out of me in a whisper. It was all I had. “Please. He’s got nothing to do with — please, he’s just — ”
“I know what he is. I watched the two of you a long while.” Something shifted in his voice, something that made my skin crawl worse than the threats.
“Watched you make a life here like the first one never happened. Like I never happened. New hair. New town. Little boyfriend.” A soft sound, almost a laugh.
“You thought you got away from me, sugar. Nobody gets away from their daddy. I just been waitin’ on the right time to come get what’s mine. ”
What’s mine.
“Here’s how it goes, and I’ll say it once, ’cause you’re smart, you always been smart.
” Calm. Patient. The patience was the worst part, it always had been.
“There’s an address. I’m gonna text it to you off this boy’s phone.
You come to it. You come by yourself, and you come without a sound, and you don’t tell one single soul, not the old woman, not them bikers, and especially not that big one you been sleepin’ out in the woods with. ”
The floor tilted.
He knew. He knew about Rune.
“That’s right,” he said, reading the silence.
“I told you. I been watchin’. And I ain’t the only set of eyes on that compound of yours, either.
I got people on it right now, tonight, watchin’ that gate and watchin’ them fences, so let me be real clear with you, Amy Rose.
You wake anybody up. You leave a note. You so much as whisper to one of ’em on your way out.
You show up with one single person behind you, or one truck follows you, or I catch one biker within a mile of where you’re goin’.
And this boy dies. Right then. Right in front of nobody.
And it’ll have been you that did it.” A beat.
“You come alone and he walks. That’s the deal. That’s the only deal.”
And that, that last part, was the thing that finished me, because it was the exact pattern of my entire childhood, the sick way of it, be good, and quiet or someone gets hurt and it’s your fault, and he knew it, he built it into me.
“How do I know you’ll let him go?”
“You don’t.” Honest. He was always honest about the cruelty, that was the thing, he never once lied about what he was.
“But you know for a fact what happens if you don’t come.
So.” I heard him settle back. “Phone’s gonna buzz with an address in about one minute.
You got till six to be standin’ at it. That’s plenty of time for a girl who knows how to slip out of somewhere without wakin’ the house. And you do know how.”
The line went dead.
* * *
The address came ten seconds later. A number on a county road I half knew, not far from here, and where there wasn’t much of anything else.
I stood in the middle of Rune’s cabin in the half-dark and shook, trying to find the part everybody had missed, some third choice where Sawyer didn’t die and I didn’t have to walk straight back into the thing I’d spent my life running from.
But there wasn’t one. There was staying here and letting them hurt Sawyer because I was too scared to leave, or there was walking out that gate myself.
I hated that those were my choices.
I hated even more that I already knew which one I was going to make.
Because he had people watching. I believed it, God help me I believed every word, because I’d spent weeks feeling watched and being right, my life being right about exactly this, and if I ran to that clubhouse and I was wrong to, if there really was a man out there in the trees with eyes on that gate, then I would be signing Sawyer’s death myself.
I couldn’t gamble the sweetest person I know on a hope that my father was bluffing about the one thing he’d never once bluffed about.
I got dressed in the dark.
And then I did the thing that’s going to live in me forever, if I get a forever. I sat down at the bottom of Rune’s bed with a pen and the back of an old seed catalog, and I started to write him a note.
I got as far as his name.
Rune—
That was it.
I sat there staring at those four letters, trying to figure out what came after them.
I’m sorry wasn’t enough. Don’t come after me would make him come faster.
I love you would be cruel if those were the last words I ever got to give him, and once that thought got into my head, I couldn’t breathe around it.
Then my father’s voice came back to me.
You leave a note...
And I understood why he’d said it. Rune would find it. Rune would know. Rune would come for me, because of course he would, and if anybody saw him coming, if anybody followed him, if I got one thing wrong, Sawyer was the one who paid for it.
So even this was gone.
I looked down at Rune’s name in my handwriting and felt something inside me fold up small, because I’d spent all this time learning how to go to him when I was scared, how to say his name and let him help, and now the one time I needed him more than I ever had, I couldn’t.
I tore the page off the catalog, folded it twice and shoved it deep into my pocket. I couldn’t leave so much as his name behind.
At the door, I stopped.
His bed was still unmade from that morning, the sheet twisted on his side and my pillow crooked against his, and for one stupid second all I wanted was to crawl back into it and wait for him to come home.
He’d find me there. He’d know something was wrong before I said a word, because he always knew, and then I wouldn’t have to be brave anymore.
But Sawyer would still be out there.
So I opened the door and went out.
* * *
I know this compound. That’s the thing none of them ever really understood about me, not even Rune.
I’ve been here a year, and in that year I’ve noticed every gate, every fence, every place a person could get in or out, because I’ve been checking exits since I was old enough to understand I might need one.
I knew the fence dipped behind the old bike shed and that the wire had been pulled loose at one corner by some animal and nobody had gotten around to fixing it.
I knew the camera on the back post hadn’t worked since the storm three weeks ago because I’d heard Gearhead mention it once, and things like that stick with me whether I want them to or not.
So I went out the back of Rune’s cabin and into the trees, keeping far enough from the yard that nobody would see me from the clubhouse.
I knew where to put my feet without snapping branches or kicking through pine straw, and I hated how easily all those old habits came back when I needed them.
I passed the bike shed, found the dip in the ground and dropped onto my stomach, ruining my good jacket as I worked my way beneath the loose wire.
The county road was a half mile through the trees. His address was a few miles past that.
I started walking toward my father.
And the worst thing, the thing I’ll never tell anybody, is that some small broken part of me, the oldest part, the part he made — it wasn’t even afraid.
It knew this walk. It had always known I’d end up taking it.
You get a head start, is all. You run, and you build a life, and you cut your hair and change your name and let yourself think you got out.
And then your phone rings, and you find out you never left that hallway at all.