Chapter 23
Whatever Whitlaw had drugged her with back at the cabin was still affecting Lakin, slowing her down so that she felt as if she was running in quicksand. The slope was getting more treacherous with rocks and loose leaves making her slip and fall. Her hands were scraped.
But she didn’t notice the pain or the blood seeping from her scratches. She clawed at branches, using them to pull herself up. She couldn’t go back…
He was right behind her. Branches rustled, twigs snapped, and every now and then he coughed or cursed.
She waited for gunfire, like how he’d shot at Troy the other night. But none came. Maybe Whitlaw didn’t want anyone to hear and figure out where they were.
How close to RTA were they?
Why hadn’t she gone on some of the damn adventures herself? She hadn’t wanted to run all over the mountain like she was now. If only she knew the area more, like her siblings and cousins. Hell, even Mitch the lawyer had gone on more adventures than she had.
“You can run, girlie, but you can’t hide,” Whitlaw called out to her. He chuckled, but he sounded out of breath.
She was, too, her lungs burning from the altitude. She was going so slow, struggling so hard to fight the dizziness that kept threatening to overwhelm her.
As out of breath as he sounded, he also sounded close. Much too close.
She pushed her way through branches as the ground leveled out for a moment. And then…nothing was ahead of her or underneath her.
She dropped through the air, falling, falling…
Branches scratched at her hair and her clothes until finally she struck the ground.
Hard.
Pain radiated throughout her body and her head. And like at the cabin, blackness suddenly claimed her, pulling her deep into oblivion.
* * *
Troy continued to follow the sounds of dogs barking and the SAR team members talking back and forth.
He recognized Kansas and Eli’s voices and knew he had to hang back.
If they saw him, they might have someone escort him back to the cabin.
But he wanted to get close enough to clearly hear what they were saying.
The dogs had to be following the scent still, but where?
“Tire tracks…”
“There’s a truck…”
A vehicle was involved then. If a truck was still here, hopefully Lakin was, too. But where?
“And a cave…”
The dogs started barking louder, drowning out the voices. While Troy couldn’t hear everything, he suspected he would have heard something over the barking if they’d found Lakin and her kidnapper. Gunfire or screaming maybe…
But there was just barking. So the cave was empty. Since the truck was still here, they couldn’t have gotten anywhere fast. They had to be running around the woods. Maybe the kidnapper was trying to find a new place to hide Lakin and himself.
Or maybe Lakin, strong and resourceful, had managed to escape. Maybe the kidnapper was trying to find her.
Either Troy or the SAR team would have stumbled across them if they’d been going down the mountain, so they must’ve headed up. So he did, too.
Using the branches for balance, he pushed up the steep rocky incline. In one tree, he noticed a strand of long dark hair caught on a twig. Lakin had gone this way.
He wanted to call out to her, but if the kidnapper was looking for her, Troy didn’t want to alert him to her whereabouts or to his.
The last time Troy had tried to rescue her, he’d gotten shot at.
He needed to be careful. He couldn’t help Lakin if something happened to him.
He was damn lucky that last time he’d only gotten a scratch on his face instead of a bullet in his brain.
So he kept his head down and moved as quietly as he could through the trees, climbing up the rocks.
The dogs were not moving quietly. They barked loudly as they crashed through trees. He heard shouting again, in another direction.
He’d gone the wrong way, apparently.
But then he found another strand of hair on a branch. As he reached for it, his foot slipped. He dropped down hard on his butt, jarring his back as he hit the ground. His foot dangled over a steep drop.
Ignoring the twinge of pain in his back, he scooted closer to the edge and peered down into a deep ravine filled with trees and boulders. He looked at the branch above him, with that long strand of silky dark hair dangling from it.
The pain in his back moved to his heart. Had she fallen in the ravine?
“Lakin!” he yelled. He didn’t care now who else heard him as long as she did. As long as she answered him. “Lakin!”
As long as she could answer him.
He could see where something, or someone, had broken branches in the ravine below. She had to be down there. Unable to answer him.
So he had to figure out how to reach her without falling himself.
Troy ducked under the branches of the trees that grew on the edge of the ravine, obscuring it so much that it was easy for someone to fall into it.
With the edge of the bank eroding under those trees, one had fallen, giving him a gangplank to the bottom.
But with branches sticking up from it, he couldn’t walk down it.
So he climbed down its branches, scratching his hands and his face.
He didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything but finding Lakin.
The tree branches thinned toward the bottom of the ravine, snapping beneath his weight, and he dropped down into weeds and rocks beneath it.
Pain shot up his spine as his knee jammed into a rock.
He flinched but willed the pain away. He had to find the woman he loved.
He’d wasted so much time that they could have been together.
He should have been living with her in the present instead of planning and saving for a future that might never come. If he couldn’t find her…
He had to find her.
His throat raw from yelling, he shouted again, “Lakin!”
Pushing his way through the weeds at the bottom of the ravine, he found her lying in crushed ferns.
Blood dampened her hair from a wound on her head, and her eyes were closed. Was she just unconscious or…?
“Lakin!” he yelled.
But she didn’t move at all. He couldn’t even tell if she was breathing.
“Help!” he shouted, hurling the word toward the mouth of the ravine. “Help me!”
He could hear the dogs and the voices of the SAR team, but they sounded as if they were moving away from him, not toward him.
He stood up and shouted again. “Help! Come help! I found her!”
But had he found her too late?
* * *
Eli heard Troy shouting. But he was staring into the barrel of a gun that the man from Lakin’s photograph pointed at him.
Whitlaw was older now, with several lines in his face. The same jagged scar trailed down one side of it. And his mouth was twisted into the same cruel sneer.
“It’s too late,” Whitlaw said.
“It is too late,” Eli agreed. He held a gun, too, pointed directly at Whitlaw who stood a few yards up the mountain from him.
Behind Eli were a couple of the SAR team members, holding back the dogs that Whitlaw had already threatened to shoot.
Eli heard another gun cocking. Probably Kansas.
His cousin would not let this man take him out.
“Throw down your weapon. There’s no way out of this, Whitlaw. ”
“It’s too late for her,” the older man said.
Eli heard the panic and desperation in Troy’s hoarse voice as he continued shouting. The man was too proud to ask for help for himself. He needed help for Lakin.
“What did you do to her?” Kansas asked, moving closer to Eli.
Whitlaw chuckled. “Not a damn thing. She’s the one who hurt herself. She ran right off the mountain.”
Kansas gasped.
Fear gripped Eli, but he didn’t lower his weapon. He didn’t trust this man for a moment. If they got distracted, Whitlaw was going to shoot one of them. And with his obvious resentment of the Coltons, it was going to be either Eli or Kansas.
He had to take this guy out. Now. Without anyone else getting hurt.
But Eli couldn’t stop thinking about Lakin hurt and needing his help.