“Yeah. I get it.” He was having the same nervous flutters.
Another deep breath, and she was composed, calm. “Okay. You guys found him. That means…”
“Yeah.”
She nodded. “I understand that. You have to do it.” Her voice was wrong, though. “He can’t be allowed to…”
“Sam, baby.” Aidan got to his feet as quickly and deftly as possible. Lainie woke with a little snort and began whimpering. Aidan cradled her close and sat down beside his wife. “We have to finish it with Ellison,” he said gently. “You know that. Probably better than a lot of people.”
“I know.” She reached for Lainie. “Come here, sweetie.” She rested her chin against the top of the baby’s head, pretty face grave with concern. “Idoknow it,” she repeated. “But that doesn’t make it any less disturbing.”
Aidan put his arm around her – around both his girls – and Sam’s blue-green gaze lifted to his, glimmering behind the lenses of her glasses.
“You can’t go out and die on us,” she whispered. “You’re a dad now. You have to come home.”
She was thinking of her own father, he knew with a pang. Of the way he’d been taken from them far too soon.
“I’ll always come home,” he told her. “I promise.” And he prayed like hell fate wouldn’t make a liar of him.
Forty-Six
It was an eerie sound, the baying of the dogs. Somewhere between a human scream and the lonely howl of a timber wolf. They ran with their noses hovering over the ground, leaping like gazelle through the rough tussocks and clumps of jagged rock.
“Doesn’t matter if we can’t keep up,” Michael said. “They’ll put him at bay.” He had his hand wrapped around the leash of his uncle’s giant black stud dog, the Great Dane they called Cassius, after the Roman conspirator. The beast was obedient enough, but Aidan saw the moon strike a wild light in his eyes, heard the excited strain in his panted breath.
The three dogs brought along were the ones who’d tracked and helped to kill Holly’s father and uncle.
They knew how to track the scent of man.
Not so different from a wild boar, after all. Only a pig of a different color.
“Fan out,” Ghost instructed, and they did, a loose line of hunters closing in on their prey.
Aidan stepped in a hole that sent a jolt straight up his spine and clapped his teeth together. He bit the tip of his tongue and tasted blood. Would Cassius smell it, he wondered. Make a dive for his throat with those great drooling jaws?
Best not to think of it. Just press on through the dark, flashlight pinging across the terrain. Rock, loose bits of gravel, hard-packed dirt, tufts of moss and grass. He skidded and braced a hand against the trunk of a pine tree, the bark rough and sticky beneath his palm.
Were there bears up here? Coyotes? Mountain lions?
Something screamed, a high sharp sound, with a tail end like a cough. His pulse thundered in his ears and he caught his breath to listen.
“Bobcat!” he heard Michael call from off to his right.
He exhaled and started moving again, a little tremor rippling down his spine. “Fucking bobcats. Fucking asshole making a break for it,” he muttered.
They’d come up on the cabin just after nightfall. The windows had glowed with cheery warmth and a thin tail of gray smoke had curled up from the chimney. It was April, but it was cold up here in the mountains; his mind had filled with visions of a crackling fire, mugs of coffee. He’d flashed back to his wintertime honeymoon with Sam: the fire-gilded skin, the way her mouth had tasted like chocolate.
Ellison had had romance on his mind too, obviously. They’d looked in the windows to find him in a compromising position on the couch with his assistant.
Mercy and his sledgehammer of doom had taken down the door. In the chaos that ensued, the assistant was killed.
Ellison managed to grab his pants and flee out the back door.
Unarmed.
White skin gleaming in the moonlight when he left the shelter of the trees.
The dogs were giving chase.
