by Dale Mayer
“Kevin, it’s me,” Shadow whispered.
Kevin’s eyes popped open and he stared at Shadow. Then threw himself into his arms. Unprepared for the onslaught, Shadow had to quickly adjust his grip and position to handle the tiny tornado. But he held him close to his chest. “Where is your sister?” he asked, quietly searching through the tree. She’d been left with Cooper. Cooper was under the truck. He gave Kevin a shake. “Where is your sister?”
“Don’t know.” Kevin lifted a tear stained face to him. “She saw someone on another tree trying to make their way over here. She told me to stay here and she took off.”
Damn, that means Cooper had helped her return to her brother then had gone to check out the truck. But if she’d stayed down below then chances were good that Kevin would have been spirited away without anyone the wiser. Holding Kevin tight to his chest, he searched through the branches.
And saw her crouching on a branch, the back of her clothing blending in with the greenery around her.
On a branch above her stood a soldier.
His heart pounded as he realized the soldier hadn’t seen her. He turned and looked down at something. Shadow followed his gaze and caught sight of Swede moving through the trees. Shadow pulled out his gun and lined it up, but it was hard to get a good shot. As he waited for the right moment, Arianna rose up from her crouched position and with a large branch hit the soldier at the back of the knees. He cried out, toppled over, tried to save himself but she whacked him a second time and he fell.
Nice.
Arianna stared over the edge at her handiwork and then as if realizing she’d taken out one but there could be scores more she needed to watch out for, she spun around, ducking deeper out of sight. As that gaze of hers swung back toward Kevin, it landed on Shadow.
Shadow grinned.
She gave him a slow smile that seemed to light up the darkness around them. Then she glanced past to check for more soldiers before zinging back in his direction. She shifted her attention, finding a path back toward them. Shadow kept an eye on her progress while trying to keep her safe from other shooters. But silence had fallen. Everywhere.
They were all in a state of waiting. For someone to make a mistake.
Arianna managed to make it to the tree next to him. She reached out to step over to another branch.
A single shot fired.
Arianna cried out and stumbled. She grabbed a branch and hung on.
Several more shots were fired and a lone gunmen fell from the tree.
Kevin called, “Arianna?”
Shadow pulled him back out of the way in case anyone else heard him. But there was no corresponding gunfire. His gaze tracked Arianna who was still standing but trembling. “You need to stay here and don’t make a sound,” he said to Kevin and left the boy hugging the tree.
Shadow quickly slipped through the boughs and made it to Arianna’s side. He ran his hands over her body until he came to stickiness on her thigh. Crouching low he bent and checked out the wound. The bullet had gone in and through the top of her thigh. Painful as all hell but could be so much worse. He had to go by touch alone given the endless blackness around them.
Tiny whimpers sounded through her mouth as she tried to hold them back. Shock was the issue now. He pulled out his knife and cut the bottom of her t–shirt from under her sweater and quickly bound up the wound. Then wrapping an arm around her, he half carried her half supported her as they slowly made their way back to her brother.
“I’d really like to go home now,” she whispered against his neck. “I’ll never look at tree climbing the same way again.”
“Too bad as you do it so well.”
She gave a broken gurgle of a laugh. “No, I don’t. Or I wouldn’t have gotten shot.”
“Ah, you see that’s because you weren’t supposed to play cops and robbers at the same time.”
She gave a half snort that for some stupid reason he found wonderful. Back at her brother, he slowly lowered her until she was sitting on the thick branch. It was pitch black outside but the rain had slowed. “Any chance we can move back into the house,” she said, her teeth chattering. “I’m starting to wish I’d never left.”
Kevin wrapped his arms around her as if to keep her warm. “Don’t say that, Ari, you know what they were going to do to you.”
At the boy’s words, Shadow swiveled to look at Arianna’s face. She looked miserable, wet now, but she held Kevin close. Not wanting to ask for an explanation for Kevin’s statement, he looked at Arianna, one eyebrow raised. She shrugged then nodded.
Damn. He hadn’t really considered that. This kidnapping had a political overtone, but she was a beautiful young woman and rape was often meted out as a punishment and to control the victims. He was glad she’d made it out first.
“I’m fine, Kevin. Sorry for whining.”
Whining? That wasn’t close to being a whine but as long as she had Kevin to keep bolstered she’d do her best. And he respected that.
Down below nothing stirred. Off to the side he heard a long drawn out hawk’s cry. He quickly cupped his hand and gave a corresponding cry. He looped the rope back over his arm and studied the pair. “I’m going to carry Kevin down on my back. Then I’m going to come back up for you, Arianna, okay?”
“No, I don’t want to leave her,” Kevin cried.
“Hush, Kevin,” she said, her voice soothing. “This will be fine. I’m safe here.”
Swede came out from the bushes and held up his arms. Shadow tied the rope around Kevin’s waist and dropped him down into Swede’s waiting arms. Then with Arianna clinging to his back, he carefully climbed down the tree. When on solid ground, he helped her stand on her own feet. The color drained out of her face, she barely held back the cry of pain when she tried to put weight on her injured leg.
Before she could collapse, he swung her up into his arms and carried her back to the camp where they’d held the rebels with Swede at his side carrying Kevin. She looped her arms around his neck and snuggled in damn near breaking his heart. She shouldn’t be so trusting. The world was full of assholes.
Cooper, now out from under the truck, raced after them. “I think I’ve got it dismantled. I need help though.”
“I’m here.” Hawk slid out from behind a tree. Evan shifted to guard the direction he came from then disappeared from sight. “Dane is at the camp and Mason is on his way. Evan is heading back. What do you need?”
“I think I can get the senator out from the back of the truck now. But I don’t want the rebels to know that we have them.”
Arianna tilted her head upwards and whispered, “Go help. I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine,” he said shortly but his attention followed the others. “They should have someone to watch out for them.”
She gave him a push on the shoulder. “Put me down,” she said. “Swede, leave Kevin here with me.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Yes. Those are our parents and we don’t even know if they survived that beating. Save them,” she ordered. “Kevin is fine with me. You’ll only be gone a few minutes anyway.” And she gave him a sharp nod as if to underscore the right actions for him to follow.
Swede grinned, glanced at Shadow, and said, “I think we’ve been told.”
“She doesn’t understand,” Shadow said. “We have to get her and her brother to safety.”
“And you have, several times, in fact, so far this night. Now get our parents and maybe we can all get the hell out of here.”
She tilted her chin at him and narrowed her gaze.
He glared.
Swede laughed. “It’s all good. Let’s go.”
He grabbed Shadow’s arm and tugged. Markus, his gaze knowing, led the way. Damn.
Chapter 7
Arianna watched them leave. With Kevin’s arms once again wrapped around her, she leaned against the closest tree for support and took the weight off her leg. She could have kept going, but she was damn glad she didn’t have to. And that
just made her a softie. Her father would roar at her to buck up and take it.
Like he had.
But she didn’t even know if he was still alive. Right now she wanted to be back home safe and sound and preferably in her own bed where her leg could heal and she could forget this nightmare. She was so far from being in that position tears of exhaustion came to her eyes. It had to be the injury making her so weak. She wasn’t normally like this.
“How bad is it, Ari?”
She managed to smile down at him. “Hurts like the dickens,” she said with a smile. “Going to make walking difficult, but as far as being badly injured, don’t worry. I’m not.”
He appeared to be satisfied with that, then again he desperately wanted her to be fine so something in his world was okay. She could only hope they found their parents and they were still alive. For all her and her father hadn’t seen eye to eye, she’d do a lot to hear him rage at her once again. He’d always been gruff and loud but it was who he was. She’d hoped for something closer but after her mother’s death, Arianna had gone inside to deal with her loss and so had her father. They’d rarely met in any meaningful way after that. After Kevin was born she’d made a point of telling her father how he needed to change if he wanted his son to love and respect him and to have a relationship with him. He’d been angry like she couldn’t remember ever seeing, but for a while he’d seemed to be there for Linda and the baby more.
But in the last few years he’d gotten busier, colder, and Kevin had gotten older. The relationship between the two had stretched very thin. That Linda hadn’t much in the way of maternal hormones had further complicated manners. Then she was raising Kevin the way she’d been raised. As a showpiece to be seen and not heard. That might have worked for her decades ago, but Kevin needed so much more than that.
Arianna had started taking him for weekends where they’d done zoo trips and park outings, she’d taught him to swim and snowboard. She sucked at baseball, but they’d spent many a great hour playing catch. She knew her time with him was going to change once he grew into a teenager and needed his friends around more and more. He had friends now, but he still wanted to spend a lot of time with her.
Hard footsteps raced toward them.
Kevin lifted his head, his grip around her waist tightening.
Shit. She tried to lower herself to the ground so she was hidden by the brush a little more until she caught sight of who it was. Shadow. He raced toward her.
“Are they okay?” she asked anxiously.
“They are alive,” Shadow said in a low voice. “But your father is in bad shape.”
She knew that. But he was still alive and that meant he had a chance. Right? Shadow bent down and scooped her up, startling a gasp out of her. She wrapped her arms around him and held on. Glancing behind, she saw Swede walked silently carrying her father while Cooper carried her stepmother. Her father was unconscious, her stepmother had a large bruise on the side of her face and appeared to be in shock. The bruise probably meant she’d fought, hopefully to help her father. And for that she liked her stepmother for the first time in a long time.
Another man, nodded at her and disappeared into the bushes ahead.
“That’s Mason,” Shadow said in a low voice. “Hawk has gone ahead as well. Trying to clear a path for us.”
“Why?” she asked. “There were two vehicles back there. Why couldn’t we grab one of those?”
“Because we don’t know if they have rigged them both,” he answered in low tones, his gaze never stopping as they swiveled from one side to the other. “They also could have remote detonators. They could blow us up just when we thought we were safe.”
“Right.” She should have considered that. A sign of how she was really feeling. In fact, all she wanted to do was close her eyes and let this man carry her to safety. But then Kevin reached up and grabbed her hand. She squeezed his fingers. “I’m fine, Kevin. We’ve got Mom and Dad and we’re heading to safety.”
“Dad looks bad,” he whispered just loud enough for her to hear. She stole a look behind her at her father’s large but scrawny form in Swede’s huge arms.
“I don’t think Dad looks all that bad. It’s just the giant carrying him that makes him look small and injured,” she joked.
Kevin glanced back. “How come he’s so big?”
“’Cause he ate his broccoli,” she said with a laugh, knowing that was a sore point with her brother. He glared at her, then dropped his hand and slowed until he was beside Swede. She watched as he asked the big man something and grinned when Swede threw his head back and laughed. Then he nodded and said, “Absolutely.”
“That was unfair,” Shadow protested. “I don’t like broccoli much either.”
“Well, you’re likely as big as you’re going to get by now,” she quipped. “And it’s not just broccoli he won’t eat, it’s pretty much anything green.”
“Oh. Well, I do like spinach and kale and chard.”
“See, all the good stuff.” Behind her Kevin chattered happily with Swede and Cooper, seemingly happy to run along beside everyone. “Thank you,” she said.
“For what?”
She caught his sideways glance and beamed up at him. “For not treating him any different.”
She was lifted in his arms as he raised and lowered his shoulders in a shrug. “He isn’t any different. He’s a young boy caught up in dealings that had nothing to do with him.”
“True enough. Same for me.”
“You have a special relationship with him.”
The sentence was delivered as a statement and not a question, but she couldn’t help but feel that there was a question in there anyway. “He’s alone a lot. So I try to step in.”
“Your parents travel?
“No,” she said shortly. “They are busy.”
“Right.” And he fell silent.
She hadn’t meant to shut the conversation down but what was she to do when the questions arose about how broken the relationship was between her brother and parents.
She sighed. “Linda is father’s third wife. I’m a product of his second and my mother died of an overdose when I was little. I was raised by governesses until Father remarried. He chose another non–maternal type of woman, and I could see how Kevin was suffering. I’d moved out and he had a really hard time after that. So I stepped in to make his world a little happier when I could.” She grinned as she glanced back to see him chattering nonstop behind her to the two men. “He’s become remarkably normal in the meantime.”
“You’ve done a good job raising him,” Shadow said quietly.
“They raised him, I just helped to balance out the cold emptiness of living in that household. I remember it well.”
“Your mother, was it deliberate?”
She didn’t try to misunderstand. “I don’t know. We’ll never likely know. I was Kevin’s age. And the cold front between my parents was already nasty. If she hadn’t died, a divorce was in the immediate offing.”
“Children are the real victims in a situation like that. It’s not easy for anyone.”
She studied his chiseled profile, detecting something long ago that had hurt him a lot. “Did your parents’ divorce?”
“No.” He gave her a smile completely devoid of any humor. “My father killed my mother instead.”
*
Shit, he hadn’t meant to say that. In fact, he wasn’t sure the last time he told anyone. It wasn’t exactly ice breaker conversation.
And the last thing he needed was sympathy. If she showed him any pity, he’d dump her on the ground so she’d have to walk the rest of the way. Although he couldn’t, it wasn’t in him to do something like that. But…he held his breath and waited for her response.
When it came it blew him away.
“You know, I often wondered if that didn’t cross my father’s mind a time or two. I knew he didn’t kill her as in he didn’t force feed the pills down her throat, but I’m sure he was hoping she’d do it herself soo
ner than later.” By the end of her sentence, she’d lowered her voice to a husky whisper as she glanced behind them to make sure her father couldn’t hear her.
“What happened to his first wife?” he asked curiously. If that woman had died then maybe someone should be taking a look at the senator.
“Nothing so gruesome. They divorced and she has since remarried. I’ve met her at a couple of functions, but she’s so similar to Linda that I’m wondering if he hasn’t been searching for his first wife all over again. According to her, she’s the one that left him.”
Shadow nodded. “It happens.”
“Yeah.” She looked behind at Kevin, who given the circumstances, appeared to be in his element talking to Swede and Cooper. “Your friends are very nice.”
Shadow stiffened.
“Kevin is really enjoying being around them,” she said. “It’s really good for him.”
“What is?”
“Acceptance,” she said simply. “If you saw his relationship to Dad and Linda, you’d see Kevin can’t do anything right for my father who has such high expectations that no one can reach them and his mother who coddles him because she wants to protect him from such a big bad world. All because he’s different.”
“And you, did your father have the same high expectations for you?”
“Sure, but I was a disappointment from the outset so the expectations were lowered immediately.”
He glanced at her. “In what way?”
“He only wanted a son.”
Several hard clicks split the air.
Shadow froze, his arms tightening around her, his throat closing up as six men, assault rifles pointed their way, quickly surrounded them.
“Arianna,” Kevin cried and ran toward her.
And a gun fired.
Chapter 8
Arianna cried out. But she couldn’t see if anyone had been hit. Shadow had shoved her behind a tree and covered her with his big body. A volley of shots fired. Then more shots. Hidden behind the big man and worried about her family, she stayed pinned in place, shuddering. Her injury had changed something for her. Instead of being strong and capable she felt weak, in need of help. And hated that. Sure she did need the help, but she wasn’t a victim. If she didn’t get out of that mentality she’d become a liability. She didn’t know where her brother was, nor the men who’d carried their parents. Surely they’d have been better off going back into the cabin. Especially given her father’s condition.