“Can you be any louder?” he snaps in a hushed tone.
Giving him my back, I made a beeline for my car. “Fuck off.”
“There are people around. Even though it’s night, we’re in a very populated part of town.” He kicks up dirt, trudging through the landscape behind me.
“I don’t fucking care,” I bite back, then yank open the car door. “You disabled the cameras in the surrounding homes, anyway,” I point out. “And the house to the left is still under construction. The workers would have gone home by now.”
Sebastian lays a friendly hand on my shoulder. “River.”
“What?” I jerk it off and turn around to face him while circling my temples with my fingertips.
“I’ve never seen you like this.”
I roll up my sleeves, flexing my arms. “I can’t let anything happen to her.”
Sebastian’s face softens and suddenly he understands what’s going on inside my head—something I refuse to admit to myself. “You love her, don’t you?”
“I’m incapable of love,” I state with unwavering conviction. “I failed to protect Lux, Sebastian. She trusted me to protect her, and I let her down.”
The first opportunity to experience being with someone and I fucked it up. Instead of watching over her, I let my impulses get the best of me and endangered the first person I’ve ever cared about this way.
“We will find her,” he reassures me, but his words fall flat.
“I’ll believe it when we do.” I go to pull on the door to shut it when I get a call from Christian.
My heart gets trapped in my throat as I answer the phone. “What’d you find out?”
“There is a property about thirty minutes from your location that Hughes purchased to turn into a small bed-and-breakfast.”
“And?”
“For some reason, construction halted last fall, which means it’s vacant and located in a secluded part of the woods,” Christian continues.
My ribs constrict my lungs, adrenaline pumping through my veins. “That’s got to be it.”
“Put him on speaker,” Sebastian tells me.
I roll my eyes, but oblige.
A few papers wrestle in the background. “It’s the only one that makes sense. It’s within thirty minutes from where he took her, and taking the highway directly over, he wouldn’t have to wait for the ferry downtown.”
“Bingo,” Sebastian blurts out.
“Send us the address,” I cut him off.
“Wow, he really did pick somewhere close to home, didn’t he?” Sebastian quips.
Christian laughs sarcastically. “Maybe he’s dumber than we thought.”
“Or he’s more comfortable hiding in plain sight,” I mutter. Something I’m not proud we have in common. “Thanks, Christian.”
“Oh, and River?” he says.
“Yeah?”
“Lux is one of us now. Do whatever you can to get her back,” Christian says without knowing the extent of what I would do for that woman.
A calm heat moves through me and I’m a predator on the hunt once again. “Andrew will take his last breath today,” I reply, then end the call.
