Wild Hearts (The DiCarlo Brides)

by Heather Tullis

  “How are you doing?” Jeremy asked when she sucked in a breath as she felt a rock cut into her knee.

  “Getting closer. I think. It’s hard to tell. How are you? Cold?”

  “Getting there. It’s going to be a chilly night in here if we can’t get out.”

  “At least it won’t freeze in here.” Silver linings, right? She had to believe things would be okay, that he would be okay—it was the only way she would be able to keep going.

  “I’m sorry for dragging you into this,” Jeremy said after a moment.

  “It’s not your fault. You didn’t plan this.” She was thinking she should have done something different when the men were here, but she didn’t know what she could do.

  She paused for a moment to catch her breath, then kept moving. She knew she should be focusing on what she was doing now, on getting out of this alive, but instead her mind veered to everything she had let undone at the hotel, with her sisters, her parents. Would she ever get another chance to fix her relationships with people?

  Silence filled the cave for a long while before she spoke her thoughts. “I can’t stop thinking about my mom. Things are going so badly for her right now. She felt abandoned because I couldn’t spend more time with her while she as in town. What’s going to happen if we don’t get out of this? What will she do?” She wanted to kick herself for letting her mind wander, for still worrying what her mom thought of her, but she couldn’t help it. Zelda was her mother, even if she was too self-absorbed to be the kind of support Delphi needed.

  “Don’t say that. We’re going to be fine.” But his voice was husky.

  “Your dad, he’ll be alone too.” She just couldn’t push the worries away, though she knew they didn’t do any good.

  “No he won’t. We won’t let that happen. One or all of your sisters are going to freak out when you don’t show for work tomorrow and Gage will get called eventually, and he’ll figure out we might be here. I hope.”

  She could tell from his voice that he was still about five feet away, which would normally be no problem, but in their current circumstances, it might as well have been a million miles. She kept moving toward him, but latched onto his comment, needing to divert her attention from the pain shooting through her knees. “I envy how close you are to Vince and Gage.”

  “They’ve been my family more than anyone. And you can’t beat Etta’s mothering.” There was a smile in his voice.

  She smiled as she thought of Vince’s mother, who stopped in to the girl’s home sometimes to drop off cookies and homemade bread. Etta seemed to think they needed mothering too. “She’s a sweet woman. For me it was Fallon’s parents. At least after we met. They’ve been there for me through so much, but I don’t have any close friends, not like you, Vince and Gage.”

  “How are your knees holding up?”

  She wasn’t going to tell him the full truth—that they felt like they were on fire from the sharp pain. “They’re not very happy, but I’ll live.” She started moving again. “Tell me about your brother.”

  She listened, using his childhood stories to distract her, as much as she reasonably could, from the growing discomfort in her knees as she slowly moved closer to him. A couple of times she nearly fell over when the ground wasn’t even, but eventually she made it to his side.

  “You tired?” he asked.

  “You have no idea.” She wanted to slump down next to him, but wasn’t sure how to do it without hurting herself since she didn’t have a hand to break her fall. From her knees, she shifted onto her bottom when she was near his hips. She stretched out her legs and bit her lip to keep from groaning as the blood rushed back to her feet and she felt the swollen, cut skin of her knees throbbing with each heartbeat.

  “Rest for a minute, get your bearings.”

  “How late do you think it is now?” Delphi asked.

  “I don’t know. Seems like it should be midnight, which means it’s probably only six or seven.”

  She leaned back against his stomach a little, enjoying the reassurance of his body while she tried to make her fingers work, though they were growing a bit numb. Troy had tightened the zip ties a lot.

  “Did your mom never consider having another kid?” he asked. “Or were you perfection enough for her?”

  She chuckled low under her breath. “Not even close. Ralph is sterile and couldn’t get her pregnant, which meant he knew immediately that I wasn’t his kid. I don’t know if she stopped seeing other men or if she was just more careful about her assignations after I was born. He probably threatened to divorce her if she got pregnant again or if anyone found out that I wasn’t his child.”

  “Did you wish for a brother or sister?”

  Delphi had thought about it a lot as a kid. “I always wanted a big brother, actually, and maybe a little sister. Now I have a whole slew of family, when you count the spouses. I don’t know what to do about it.”

  “It’s not the same when they come to you all grown up already.”

  “Not even close.”

  “Are you rested?

  “Better, yeah. Let’s try for that knife.”

  She took a deep breath and lifted her arms, straining to reach his pocket. She patted along the length of it coming across what was probably his keys, and his cell phone but not feeling anything that could be his pocketknife. She twisted to stick her hand in his pocket to feel better, but couldn’t find anything that felt likely. “Are you sure it’s in this pocket and not the other one? I don’t feel it here. I found your phone though.”

  “There’s no way it’ll get a signal in here,” Jeremy said as if reading her mind. “Hold on. I’m going to roll over.”

  She had to shift out of the way so he could roll, but a moment later he stopped moving.

  “Okay, is that better?”

  He rolled over across his hands, which were bound behind him and onto his left side so she could get to the pocket. This put his back to her, making her contort her body more to get to the pocket. Again, she felt along the outside, trying to pinpoint its location before diving in, but she didn’t feel the knife.

  “What? Just go for it, no room to be modest now.”

  “I don’t feel it, Jeremy.” She tried to think back to when they broke out their lunch. “Are you sure you put it back in your pocket after you opened the cookies?”

  There was another moment of silence before he groaned. “I might have left it with the stuff by the water.”

  Perfect. Just great.

  Delphi groaned, thoroughly discouraged. After all of the effort and torn knees to get over to him, he didn’t even have the knife? She slumped to the floor beside him and pressed her back against his.

  There was a lump under his jacket. She ran her hands over it. “Do you have a gun?”

  “Yeah. It’s not going to do us much good though, is it?”

  She wanted to strangle him. “If you had a gun all of this time, why didn’t you use it? Why would you carry it if you weren’t going to use it?”

  “It was two against one and I hoped I would be able to protect you without pulling it. I was ready to at any moment, if he’d only given me a break long enough to reach it, but he was twitchy. I nearly went for it when it was just the second guy and me, but he was right, Dave was at the mouth of the cave, and he wasn’t going to let us out alive. I figured our chances were better if we were tied up and left here. At least Gage will probably figure out where we are.”

  “Where we are is stuck. We can’t get out, we can’t see anything and we don’t know what time it is.” She thought for a moment. “Do you always carry a gun? You didn’t have one on the other night.”

  “Not in my own home, no. But often when I go out, especially when I’m on a hike or something, though I’ve only used it on rattlers and targets so far.”

  She considered his words and shivered a little.

  He must have felt her movement. “At least it’s not going to get much colder in here tonight. The cave temperature will hol
d steady, even if the temps outside plummet.”

  “Small favors.”

  “Tired?”

  “Exhausted,” she admitted. “But I don’t suppose I’ll be able to sleep in here, not when my fingers are numb and I’m thinking about everything that’s going to be crawling over my face if I fall asleep.” She hated bugs.

  “You won’t be able to brush it off if something does crawl on you, so you might as well be asleep so you won’t know about it.”

  “Gee, thanks, that helps a lot.” She considered their options. There weren’t any that she could see. She slumped back against him and straightened her knees again. “What other options do we have?”

  “We need to get loose if we’re going to get out of here. At least our feet,” Jeremy said.

  “Were there sharp enough edges on the rocks here to cut the zip ties?” Delphi asked.

  “Unlikely, but we can try. Or rather, you can try. I feel as useless as a dead fish.”

  She wondered if there was any way to help him sit up, but in the total dark and without use of their hands or feet, she didn’t see how they would manage it. She sucked in a breath and after several movements, managed to get back to her knees again. She slowly made her way to the wall, which she knew was just beyond Jeremy.

  Once she got there, she did another series of contortions to reorient herself with her back to it, then felt along the wall. A rock dug into her knee and she moved slightly to the left, then began patting the wall behind her.

  Discouragement came quickly after. “It’s no use. This wall has never been chiseled. I can’t find any rough edges. At least not in an area where I can reach.”

  “Thanks for trying, anyway.”

  “So we wait.”

  Silence descended between them for a couple of minutes before he broke it with a question. “Want to play I Spy?”

  “What’s the point? All either of us can see is blackness.”

  “I suppose you think that’s a problem?” His stomach growled.

  “You going to make it a whole night without more food, big boy?”

  “I get grouchy when I’m hungry. Just a word of warning.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “Then I guess we can be hungry and grouchy together. Sleeping on rocks probably won’t help much. Take a break and then we can look some more for something to cut through these ties.”

  She slumped against the wall to stretch out her legs again and bumped them up against the top of his head so she could feel at least one part of his body.

  “Tell me about the first time you met your sisters.”

  Deciding talk was better than silent misery, she asked. “Which one?”

  “Didn’t you meet them all at the funeral?”

  “Technically it was at the reading of the will, but as I came in late and left early, I didn’t really meet any of them that day. It wasn’t actually the first time I met any of them, anyway. That happened years earlier.” Then she proceeded to tell him of the various activities her father had used to orchestrate all of the sisters meeting each other in groups of two or three—all of which happened before she met Fallon during her freshman year of college.

  There was summer camp with Lana and Sage, the Close Up trip to Washington DC with Jonquil, and a summer cooking class in Boston with Rosemary. She had been a dismal failure while Rosemary succeeded. Jeremy’s gasps and laughs filled the cave in all the right spots as she recounted the few things she remembered about those events, making her smile in response.

  When she was starting to think that she might be able to move again, she sighed. “All right. Time to try again. Did you notice where your flashlight ended up?”

  “To my right, but I’m so turned around now, I’m not sure exactly where it went.”

  “I’ll check the walls for sharp edges. You, do whatever you can. I know it’s not much right now.”

  “I can roll. Maybe I’ll get lucky.” They set to work as worry about dying here in the cave filled Delphi’s head.

  Jeremy groaned, waking Delphi from the light doze she’d fallen into. “Man, I swear this rock under my hip is already giving me bedsores.” He shifted a little in the dirt—he had to be filthy.

  They had searched on and off for most of the night, him rolling—and occasionally bumping his head on rocks—her feeling around the walls and edges, hoping for a sharp rock. It had netted them nothing but bumps, bruises and wrists and ankles that had started to bleed from rubbing against the plastic ties.

  She stretched from where she’d been slumped against a wall, grateful for her leather jacket that had kept her from freezing that night. The muscles in her shoulders whined at being held in such an unnatural position and she just wanted a hot tub of water, a gallon of something cold and wet to drink and some food. Simultaneously would be good. She didn’t know how much more she could take. Didn’t they say you could only go for a couple of days without water before you died? Would they make it that long?

  There was more sound as Jeremy shifted against the dirt. “I’m changing trajectory. Where are you?”

  “Over here. I wonder if we’re getting deeper into the cave or moving toward the entrance.” Her cell phone beeped that the battery was about to die and she held in a groan. Jeremy’s phone died hours earlier and if—no, when—they finally got out of here, it would have been nice to be able to call for help.

  “It feels like we’re moving in circles, mostly.” The sound of his body rolling across the dirt filled the air and then he stopped. “Hey.”

  “Hey, what?”

  “I think I might have rolled onto my flashlight.” There was more noise and movement and he sighed in relief. “Oh, yeah. You’ll probably want to squint. This is going to be bright.”

  It took a moment for the light to come on, but then it was blindingly bright. Or it seemed that way after the total darkness of the past few hours. It didn’t fix their problem, but it gave her hope anyway. Maybe she would be able to find something now. “That is awesome.” She blinked a little until her eyes adjusted, then started directing him on where she wanted the flashlight to hit. He couldn’t see any of it, since his hands were tied behind his back, but he was good at following directions.

  “There. Hold it still, there’s a pile of rubble. Some of them look like they could be sharp-ish.” The pile was several feet away and she groaned as she shifted back onto her knees, which were coated with blood and dirt. She bit back a gasp when she put her weight on them again, not wanting him to know how hurt she was.

  She made her way over to the pile of rubble and started digging through it, looking over her shoulder to see what she was doing. She felt and tossed aside more than a dozen rocks before her fingers encountered the long shaft. “Hold on. I might have found something.”

  “What?”

  “A tool of some kind, I think.” It was L-shaped and heavy, like iron. At the top of the long side was a point with a couple of teeth. Excitement rose inside her. “It’s some kind of file.”

  “Really?” Jeremy perked up. “Do you think you can cut the ties with it?”

  “Not like it is now, but maybe if I clean it off.” She felt around again and found a rock, then tried rubbing the two of them—not an easy job when her wrists were attached so tightly. “I’ll have to move to a wall so I can scrape it off.” She slowly made her way to the cave wall, swearing that she was never, ever going to go in a cave again.

  It took some maneuvering and a lot of scraping, but eventually she got the dirt and rust to start rubbing off the file.

  “How’s it coming?” he asked.

  “I’m making headway.” But her fingers hurt from applying pressure at an awkward angle and her wrist ties were cutting into her skin more with every movement. She tested the metal and smiled when she realized it was sharp enough they might get through the zip ties with a little work. “Okay.” She looked over her shoulder at the file and tried to see if there was any way for her to cut her own tie, but decided it wasn’t going
to happen. She looked over her shoulder at Jeremy, almost fifteen feet away.

  “Can you roll back over here,” she asked. “I don’t know how much more my knees can take.”

  “You’ve been such a trooper,” he said, even as he began to roll in her direction. The movement was lopsided as he had to roll over his bound arms behind him, which were holding the flashlight, which blinked in and out of her view as he rotated her direction.

  After a moment he stopped beside her and with only a few movements, she was able to get into position with his hands. She started to file.

  He grunted a couple of times and she apologized and tried to work more carefully so she didn’t maim him while she was at it.

  It seemed to take forever to get through the zip tie, but eventually he sighed. “It worked.” He left the flashlight on the floor and shifted around, pushing himself up off the floor.

  A moment later he was working on the tie on her hands.

  “Sorry I’m being so clumsy,” he apologized. “My fingers have pins and needles and everywhere else they’re numb now.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Just get it done.

  When the tie was cut, she felt the blood rush back into her own hands and knew what he meant. She opened and closed her fingers, trying to push the blood through her circulatory system. She slid back onto her bottom and found Jeremy already cutting his feet apart.

  “I can’t believe this.” She fished the phone out of her pocket and looked at the screen. “It’s almost ten in the morning.” There were no bars in the reception indicator, as Jeremy had said, and the battery was on its last leg.

  She grabbed the flashlight and shone it on Jeremy’s feet so he could see what he was doing better, then turned it on her own when he was free.

  Once he was finished, her feet hurt so much she had to sit for a long moment and just endure the pain.