Chapter 17
Liam
I was in the barn when everything fell apart.
Honey stood in the crossties, steady and patient, while I worked the curry comb through her coat. She’d learned the rhythm. Leaned into the strokes, eyes slipping half-closed, trusting the way she hadn’t trusted anyone months ago.
That should’ve felt good.
It was my day off. Quiet afternoon. The kind that used to make my skin itch—too much space for old memories to wander in. Now it just meant getting ahead, finishing chores before Riley and Mia came home. Before dinner. Homework. The ordinary things I’d stopped taking for granted.
I was halfway down Honey’s flank when my phone buzzed in my back pocket.
I didn’t reach for it right away.
The feeling hit first. Low and sharp. Like a missed step on a staircase that wasn’t there. My hand stilled on the brush. Honey shifted, sensing it.
Riley’s name lit up the screen.
Something in my chest tightened, fast and hard, like my body was already bracing. Like it knew before I did that whatever was on the other end wasn’t routine. Wasn’t small. Wasn’t something I could fix by finishing what I was doing and dealing with it after.
I answered.
“Riley?”
“Todd took Mia.”
Her voice was tight, words coming too fast, the kind of control that meant everything underneath was about to shatter.
“He showed up at school. Told her I was hurt. She went with him.”
The curry comb slipped from my fingers. Hit the barn floor. I didn’t hear it. Didn’t feel it.
“Where are you?”
“Following him. Route 7. Toward the logging roads. He’s got maybe ten minutes on me.”
“I’m coming.”
The words were already out. My body was already moving. I was running for the truck, leaving Honey in the crossties, her soft huff of breath chasing me out of the barn.
“Riley. Don’t do anything until I get there. Wait for backup.”
“I can’t.”
Her voice broke on it, raw and unfiltered.
“I can’t lose her. I can’t—”
The line went dead.
The line went dead.
I was in the truck before my brain caught up. Keys. Ignition. The engine roared like it was angry too. Gravel sprayed as I tore down the driveway.
I didn’t call Cal. Didn’t call 911.
There wasn’t time.
There was only the road. The distance. Riley’s voice lodged in my chest like something sharp.
He has Mia.
The logging road was fifteen minutes from the ranch if you followed the speed limit.
I made it in eight.
Every second stretched like taffy. The road unwound in front of me, each curve taking too long, each straightaway never quite straight enough. My truck devoured the miles, and it still wasn’t fast enough. Nothing would be.
I should have told her.
The thought hit hard and sudden, like a blow I hadn’t seen coming.
This morning, when she kissed me goodbye before her shift.
Yesterday, on the porch, the sun sinking low and everything feeling quiet and safe.
Every time I’d swallowed the words because the moment wasn’t perfect. Because there would be time.
There was never time.
I should have told her what she meant to me. Said it out loud. Let it exist outside my head. Given her something solid to carry with her.
If something happened to her—
The thought splintered before it could finish. I tightened my grip on the wheel until my knuckles burned, until the ache in my hands gave me something real to hold onto instead of the panic clawing up my chest.
Trees blurred past the windshield. Green and brown and gold. Colors I’d loved my whole life, reduced now to distance. To delay. To everything standing between me and the people I couldn’t lose.
I prayed.
I hadn’t done that in years. Not since Gran’s funeral. Not since I’d stood over fresh dirt and asked God why He kept taking the people I loved most.
I prayed anyway. To a God I wasn’t sure was listening.
Please.
Please let them be okay.
Please let me get there in time.
Please don’t take them from me.
I saw Riley’s car first.
Parked at an angle on the logging road, driver’s door hanging open, engine still running. Beyond it, Todd’s blue F-150—empty, abandoned in a clearing where the road dead-ended into trees.
I killed my engine. The silence rushed in, thick and heavy, broken only by the distant wail of sirens. Sheriff Daniels.
I got out of the truck. The door slammed behind me.
Somewhere beyond the tree line, muffled by distance and foliage, I heard their voices. I couldn’t make out words, but I recognized the cadence. Todd’s voice—high and manic. And underneath it, softer, steadier: Riley.
She was still talking. Still alive.
I moved through the brush, each step careful, deliberate. Branches caught at my clothes, scratched at my arms. I barely felt them. Every sense narrowed to a single point: the voices ahead, the scene I was walking into, whatever was waiting for me in that clearing.
I stopped at the edge of the clearing.
Todd stood in the center, maybe thirty feet away. He had his back partly to me, his attention fixed on Riley. The gun in his hand was a dark shape against the golden light, held steady, pointed at her chest.
Riley faced him. Her hands were raised, palms out—the universal gesture of surrender. But her voice was calm. Controlled. The Riley I knew from fire scenes, the one who talked panicked victims down from ledges, who kept her head when everything around her was burning.
“Todd. This doesn’t end the way you want it to. There are cops coming. You can hear the sirens. If you put the gun down now—”
“Shut up.” His voice cracked, high and wild. “You don’t get to tell me what to do. You never got to tell me what to do. You were nothing. You and your junkie mother—you were nothing. And you took her from me—”
Behind Todd, tied to a tree with rope that bit into her wrists, was Mia.
I forgot how to breathe.
She was crying. Silent tears streaming down her face, her whole body shaking, a strip of duct tape across her mouth. Her eyes were wild with terror, darting between Todd and Riley and the gun—the gun, always the gun.
Twelve years old. She was twelve years old, and she was watching a man point a gun at her sister.
“She was never yours.” Riley’s voice stayed level, but I could hear the strain underneath—the fear she was fighting to hide. “Mia was never yours, Todd. She’s my sister. My family. You have no claim to her.”
“I have every claim!” Todd’s arm swung wide, the gun tracking with it, and for one horrible second, it pointed at Mia.
She flinched, pressed herself back against the tree, a muffled sob escaping past the tape.
“I raised that brat. I fed her, I clothed her, I put a roof over her head. And you stole her. Just like you stole everything else.”
The gun swung back to Riley. Todd’s finger tightened on the trigger.
“You were always the problem, Riley. Always. If you’d just stayed gone, if you’d just left well enough alone—”
His knuckle whitened.
Time stopped.
I saw the small details with terrible clarity. The sweat beading on Todd’s temple. The tremble in Riley’s hands she was fighting to control. Mia’s eyes, wide and wet, fixed on her sister. The gun—black and cold—and the finger curling around the trigger.
The space between heartbeats stretched into eternity.
And then I moved.
No thought. No plan. Just motion.
I launched myself from the tree line. My hand closed around his wrist just as his finger squeezed the trigger. The gun fired as I hit him. The crack of it split the air—deafening, a sound that would live in my nightmares for years.
We went down hard. Todd’s back hit the ground, the breath exploding out of him, and I was on top of him before he could recover. The gun was still in his hand. I grabbed his wrist, slammed it against the dirt once, twice, until his fingers loosened and the weapon skittered away into the leaves.
Todd fought back. Of course he did. He’d been hurting people his whole life, and he knew how to do it. His fist connected with my jaw. His knee drove into my ribs. He clawed at my face, my eyes, my throat—fighting dirty because that was the only way he knew how to fight.
I barely felt it.
The adrenaline had taken over, flooding my system, turning pain into something distant and irrelevant. All that mattered was ending this.
My fist connected with his face. Once. Twice. The satisfying crunch of cartilage as his nose broke, blood spraying across my knuckles, across the leaves, across the golden afternoon light.
Todd’s struggles weakened. His hands fell away from my throat. He lay beneath me, dazed, beaten, blood bubbling from his ruined nose.
I reared back for another blow.
He was still breathing. Still conscious. Still capable of getting up, finding the gun, finishing what he’d started.
I could end it here. End him. Make sure he never threatened Riley or Mia again.
My fist hung in the air.
“Murphy! Stand down!”
The voice cut through the red haze. Sheriff Daniels, emerging from the tree line with deputies fanning out behind her, weapons drawn and trained on us.
“Hands where I can see them! Both of you!”
I raised my hands. Stepped back from Todd’s bloodied body. A deputy kicked the gun farther into the brush while two others kept their weapons fixed on Todd, shouting commands—stay down, don’t move, hands behind your back.
I looked up.
And saw Mia, still tied to the tree. Someone had pulled the tape from her mouth. Her face was streaked with tears and dirt. Her eyes were wide, fixed on me with an expression I couldn’t read.
She’d watched me. She’d watched all of it.
Then I saw Riley.
She was on the ground. Not standing. Not moving toward Mia. On the ground, one hand pressed to her shoulder—and even from here I could see the blood seeping through her fingers.
“Riley!”
I lunged toward her, but a deputy caught my arm. “Sir, we need you to stay back—”
“That’s my wife.” I shook him off, dropping to my knees beside her. “Riley. Riley, look at me.”
Her face was pale, her jaw tight with pain, but her eyes were clear. Focused.