Chapter 35
Thirty-Five
Wyatt
Thirty hours of dirt roads that bled into the horizon like bruises.
Thirty hours of checking abandoned barns where the only thing waiting was the stench of dry rot and the hollow whistle of the wind through termite-eaten timber.
We asked the same questions to the same tired, hollow-eyed faces in three different counties, getting nothing back but shrugs and the kind of quiet fear that settled into a town when people realized a predator was walking among them.
I drove with both hands locked on the wheel, my knuckles white enough to glow in the sickly green light of the dash.
Every time the truck jolted over a pothole, my heart spiked against my ribs like a trapped bird.
The tension in the cab was thick enough to choke on, tasting of stale coffee and unwashed adrenaline.
“You wanna slow it down,” Holt said, his voice a low, jagged rasp. He didn't look at me. He couldn't afford to take his eyes off the black ribbon of road. “The gravel is turning to silt. Road’s getting rough.”
“I’m not missing anything,” I replied. My voice didn't sound like mine. It was a cold, alien vibration in my throat.
He snorted, a sharp, bitter sound. “You’re not missing her by driving us into a ditch either. If we flip this rig, she dies out there. Is that what you want?”
I eased off the gas, just a fraction. Gravel popped under the tires like small-caliber fire.
The road narrowed into little more than twin ruts cutting through scrub and waist-high dead grass that hissed against the undercarriage.
Trees crowded closer, their skeletal branches clawing at the dark sky, reaching for the truck as if trying to pull us into the blackness.
The radio crackled to life, the static sounding like teeth grinding together.
“Nothing on the east ridge,” a voice said, sounding small and defeated. “We checked the culvert and the old irrigation shed. No sign. Just some old tire tracks that could be months old. No sign of Tessa.”
“Copy,” Holt said, his jaw muscles jumping. “Head back toward the main road and keep your lights low. If he’s out there, we don't want him seeing you before you see him. Stay sharp.”
Every mile we covered without finding her felt like another shovelful of dirt on a casket. I was failing her. I could feel the weight of it stacking up on my chest, making it harder to draw a full breath.
“She should’ve called,” I muttered.
Holt glanced at me sideways, the dash light hollowing out his features until he looked like a corpse. “She’s stubborn as hell, Wyatt. You know that.”
Earlier, the sun had been a cruel, bright eye in the sky, and we’d been forced to stop at Tessa’s place to regroup and trade the horses for trucks.
Dani had been pacing the living room like a caged animal, her pink hair pulled up into a messy, frantic knot.
She was wrapping her arms around herself so tight I thought she might splinter apart right there on the rug.
Maddy sat curled on the couch, knees drawn up to her chin.
She’d pulled her hoodie sleeves over her hands, disappearing into the fabric.
She hadn’t cried. Not once. No hysterics, no sobbing—just a terrifying, thousand-yard stare that made her look sixty years old instead of fourteen.
That quiet scared me more than any scream.
It was the silence of a child who already accepted that the world was a dark and hungry place.
“She wouldn’t just disappear,” Maddy had said when I’d crouched in front of her. Her voice was flat, devoid of the melody of childhood. “She wouldn’t do that to me.”
I’d swallowed hard, the lump in my throat feeling like a jagged stone. “No, honey. She wouldn’t.”
“She promised she would let me know if she was leaving town,” Dani added sharply, her voice cracking. “She promised. We had a plan. She wouldn't break a plan.”
I hadn’t said what we were all thinking. Those promises didn’t mean shit when someone else decided they had a claim on your life. Those plans were just paper when a man like Colin decided to turn the world into a hunting ground.
Maddy had finally looked up at me then, her eyes too steady, too perceptive. “You’re going to find her.”
It wasn’t a question. It was a command. A debt I was now carrying through the dark.
“I am”
She studied my face for a long second, looking for the lie. She didn't find one, but she didn't find peace either. She just nodded once. “Okay.”
That faith sat heavy in my marrow now as I turned us down another unmarked track, the brush scraping against the doors like fingernails.
“You sure about this one?” Holt asked.
“Yeah,” I said, my pulse beginning to thrum with a sick, instinctive rhythm. “Ray mentioned an old hunting cabin out this way once. It’s off the tax maps, buried in the timber. Nobody uses it anymore.”
“Nobody sane,” Holt muttered.
The headlights swept over broken fence posts and a rusted gate hanging open on one hinge like a broken jaw.
The land dipped into a hollow, then rose again, the road barely visible beneath overgrown, yellowed grass.
The air felt different here. It was colder, thicker, smelling of stagnant water and things that died in the shade.
I felt it before I saw it. That wrongness. That prickle along my spine that told me we were no longer alone in the woods. The trees seemed to lean inward, whispering.
Out of nowhere, I hit the brakes, the truck skidding slightly.
“What is it?” Holt asked. I leaned forward without a word, squinting into the void, and killed the lights.
“You serious? We won't see a foot in front of us.”
“Good.”
The world dropped into a terrifying, absolute darkness, broken only by the faint, ghostly glow of the dash and the cold, uncaring stars overhead. My eyes adjusted slowly. The silhouettes of the trees emerged, jagged and sharp.
“There,” I whispered, pointing through the windshield.
Holt followed my gaze. A faint flicker of light glowed ahead, low and unsteady, half-hidden by a screen of dying pines. It wasn't a fire; it was the sickly, orange light of a fire through a grime-covered window.
“Campfire,” he murmured.
“No. It’s inside,” I said. “It’s trouble.”
I opened the door, and the hinge let out a faint groan that felt like a betrayal.
I grabbed my rifle and stepped out, my boots crunching softly on the gravel.
The night air was biting, smelling of damp earth and something sour, the scent of a place that had seen too much shadow.
I motioned for Holt to stay put, to be my backup in the dark, then I started forward.
Every step felt like walking toward a cliff edge. I kept low, moving with the slow, agonizing precision of a man walking through a minefield. The cabin emerged from the dark like a wound in the land. The boards were warped and grey with age, looking like the skin of a leper.
And there, parked crooked near the tree line, was the vehicle that made my blood turn to ice.
Her truck.
My pulse slammed so hard it felt like it would burst the vessels in my neck. I crouched behind a fallen, moss-covered log, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs. I forced myself to breathe. In. Out. Don't let the rage blind you. Think.
Voices drifted through the thin, rotting walls of the cabin.
A man’s voice. It was calm. Horrifyingly controlled. It was the voice of a man who believed he was doing something righteous.
And then, hers.
God, her voice. It was raw, stripped of its usual warmth, sounding like it had been shredded by hours of screaming or silence.
I closed my eyes for half a second, praying to a God I hadn't spoken to in years. When I opened them, the cabin was still there. The orange light was still flickering. This wasn’t a nightmare I could wake up from. This was the reality I had to survive.
I edged closer through the wet grass, keeping low and slow, through the wet grass, staying in the deep shadows cast by the pines until I was close enough to hear the individual words, their breathing, the creak of a chair.
“You don’t get to decide when I eat,” Tessa said. It was a snarl, but I could hear the exhaustion under it, the way her voice wavered on the edges. “I’m not a child, Colin. I’m not your project.”
“You are when you don’t take care of yourself,” Colin replied. His tone was honeyed, dripping with a poisonous kind of concern. “You’re pale, Tessa. You’re thin. You’ve let yourself go since you left. Sit down. Eat the soup. I made it just the way you liked.”
“I hate you,” she whispered.
“You’re just tired,” he said, and I could hear the scrape of a bowl across the wood. “Sit down, or I’ll have to make you sit. And we both know how much you hate it when I have to be firm.”
I saw red. A hot, blinding wash of fury that nearly sent me over the threshold right then. I didn't care about the plan. I didn't care about the law. I only cared about the fact that his hands were anywhere near her.
I stood up. I didn't sneak anymore. I stepped into the spill of light from the window.
“Tessa.”
Her name left my mouth like a prayer, a promise, and a death threat all at once.
The silence that followed was absolute. Then frantic movement inside. Tessa turned so fast she nearly stumbled, her face appearing in the window for a fleeting second, white as a sheet, eyes sunken and shadowed, before she rushed toward the door.
She burst through the exit, her face flushing, then crumpling into a mask of pure, unadulterated relief. Her eyes locked onto mine as if she were a drowning woman, and I was the only piece of wood in the ocean. She looked like she was afraid I’d vanish into the mist if she dared to blink.
“Wyatt,” she breathed. It wasn't a name; it was a prayer.