After all, there was no way to know how long he could run these leads alone before his fellow officers surrounded his car and demanded he stand down. Demanded he hand over his weapon and his badge.
As if sensing his thoughts, Chance let out a sudden woof that startled Peter into jerking the wheel. Chance was jolted in the seat and Peter righted the car on the slippery ice. “I know, boy. You’re my backup today.”
Alanna had told him how the St. Bernard had been rescued from a cruel owner as a puppy, how she’d gotten him certified as a therapy dog so she could bring him with her to work. It was as much to help her own anxiety as it was to help the trauma survivors she worked with, she’d said. Chance had known exactly when to comfort him at the police station, even when to support Tate out in the cold by the cabin; it was clear he was a damn good therapy dog. And given the way he’d raced into action during the avalanche, he probably would have made a good police dog, too.
“We’ll find her,” Peter told him, hoping it was true.
Chance whined softly, turning his attention out the front windshield. The dog seemed as desperate to find Alanna as Peter.
And he was desperate. There was no other word for it.
Four days ago, he would have scoffed at the idea that he could come to trust Alanna Morgan, let alone that he would care for her so much. But at his house, they’d connected. It had lifted a weight off him to be able to open up about his past. And he’d come to admire her fortitude after everything she’d experienced. If she lived in Alaska, if she wasn’t part of an ongoing case, he’d already be pursuing her romantically. The idea felt ridiculous and yet it made him yearn for something he hadn’t realized was missing from his life.
Maybe it wasn’t Alanna. Maybe it was just time for him to think about finding someone to settle down with, like all his older siblings. Have some kids, make a real home. Take down those pictures from war zones on his walls and move forward. Except how could he do that if he didn’t even have a job?
He shook off the worries he couldn’t be distracted by right now and slowed as he approached the coordinates he’d mapped out. He’d looked up the location online, zoomed in and seen what might have been a cabin. Perhaps it was a hiding spot for a desperate couple who’d known one day their crimes could catch up to them. Who’d suspected they would eventually be on the run again.
Adrenaline shot through him as he drove slowly past. It was hard to tell now that the sun was down, but up close, he realized there was a cabin. Tiny and tucked away from the street behind more woods, it looked a lot like the place in Luna from this afternoon. It was a well-built log cabin, similar in style to the house where the Altiers had lived in Desparre, the one they’d built by hand. Could Julian have built this place himself, too? Peter could see light through the windows.
This time he didn’t slow down, didn’t pull into the driveway. He drove right past and parked down the road where his vehicle wouldn’t be visible from the cabin.
For one crazy second, he considered calling for backup. But even though he and Tate had developed a strong friendship outside of work, he couldn’t ask his friend to risk his career. Besides, Peter didn’t even know if Tate was out of the hospital yet. And there was no one else he’d trust to protect Alanna no matter what they saw, no matter what happened.
“It’s you and me, boy,” he told Chance, his breath puffing in front of him as he stepped out of the vehicle. His boots broke through a top layer of ice with a noisy crunch, then sank down into more than a foot of snow beneath. He hoped he wasn’t making a mistake letting the dog come, but he couldn’t just leave him in the SUV, hidden out here in the woods. What would happen if Peter was killed and no one knew he was here?
Chance leaped out of the vehicle, sticking close and moving silently. His big body was hunched over, the fur on his back raised, like he was stalking something. Like he knew exactly what they were doing and he, too, was willing to risk everything for Alanna.
“Be careful,” Peter whispered, simultaneously hoping that the dog understood and that Darcy wouldn’t hurt Alanna’s pet.
Chance glanced at him once, then looked back toward the cabin. The dog was focused and slinking forward as if he knew Alanna was in there.
Hoping he was right, Peter unholstered his pistol and crept slowly along beside Chance, toward the home. He moved from the cover of one tree to the next, cursing the wind that whistled past his ears as it limited his hearing even further. The snow was deeper here than it had been in Luna and the damp cold seeping through his jeans above the tops of his boots made him shiver. But at least the icy top layer was more melted here, his boots making a quieter crunch each time they broke through.
A shadow moved behind the curtains in one of the windows and Peter’s pulse jumped. It didn’t mean he’d found them, but someone was home.
He scanned the area and spotted something on the far side of the cabin, a brief reflection of light in the moonlight. Squinting at it, he realized with a start that it was his truck. Alanna was here.
Creeping closer, he reached the edge of the woods, then made a run for the side of the cabin, staying in a crouch. Chance raced along beside him, reaching the cabin first. But he waited for Peter, giving him a look that seemed to ask, What’s the plan?
Flattening himself against the side of the cabin, Peter peered at the window, hoping for a gap in the curtains. There was nothing to see, so he tapped his thigh for Chance to follow and slunk to the back of the dwelling. He wasn’t worried about Chance barking. The dog was well-trained and seemed to sense the need to stay silent.
The windows here were the same, but just like the last cabin, there was a back door. For a building this small, it didn’t really need more than one entrance. Unless someone needed an easy escape route.
Peter tested the handle, expecting it to be locked. But it moved under his hand and he froze, hoping no one inside had seen it. For a moment, indecision gripped him, made all his muscles tense. Then he eased the door slowly open, angling his weapon so he could lead with it.
Though it probably wouldn’t help; doorways were one of the most dangerous places for police officers. You didn’t know what was on the other side, and the only way to find out if someone was standing there waiting with their own weapon drawn was to open the door and go inside.
He’d trained for this, Peter reminded himself. Sure, if he was here officially, he’d have a partner. But someone would still have to go through first. In police academy, you learned a simple series of steps to get you inside and out of a doorway as fast as possible. You learned the exact sequence your gun hand and your attention should move to eliminate any threats before they could eliminate you. Still, none of that changed the fact that dying as you came through a doorway was far too common for police officers.
He weighed calling out “police,” but thought it too risky. If Darcy was holding Alanna and the children, he could put them in jeopardy by alerting her to his presence.
He glanced sideways at Chance, who was waiting in a crouched stance as if he planned to bound in after Peter, and held up a hand, telling the dog to wait. Then he steadied his gun hand, ignored the senses-dimming staccato of his heartbeat and pushed the door wide.
The tiny kitchen he stepped into was empty, but beyond an open doorway, he could hear voices. One of them belonged to Alanna.
“I believed in you,” she was saying, the hurt palpable in her words. “After all this time, I really thought that if I could just talk to you, make you understand, that you’d—”
“What?” Darcy interrupted, the volume of her own anger and hurt dwarfing Alanna’s. “Turn myself in? Go back to jail? Die there, like your father did?”
“That’s the thing,” Alanna said, her tone sad but strong. “As much as you wanted to be, as much as I loved you both, you weren’t my parents. And—”
Darcy made a sound that was half furious screech, half wounded cry.<
br />
This wasn’t going anywhere good. Peter darted around the doorway, handgun raised, hoping to find Darcy distracted and across the room from Alanna.
Before he’d fully entered the room, though, Darcy spun toward him, her own pistol raised.
“You shouldn’t have come here,” Darcy spat.
Peter aimed his gun at her head—instead of her center mass, like he’d been taught. He did a quick visual sweep—Alanna across the room, unarmed, her hands up in the air as if she’d been trying to calm Darcy down. But Alanna wasn’t his problem right now.
It was the little boy on the floor, clutching Darcy’s leg and staring at him wide-eyed. It was the little girl held in the crook of Darcy’s arm, silent tears running down her face as Darcy used her as a human shield.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Please, just put the gun down,” Alanna begged.
“Him again!” Darcy snapped. “What happened to all your promises that it was just the two of us talking? It’s always lies with you, isn’t it?”
Alanna swallowed the desire to snap back, to argue about who was lying to who. She’d never seen Darcy like this. All her life, Darcy had been full of smiles and ideas and plans she couldn’t always see through. She was flighty and occasionally depressed, but she was always patient with the kids she’d called hers.
When Alanna had entered the second cabin in Luna, she’d been amazed. She’d thought it was a sign that things were about to go right. That even though Darcy had escaped from prison, she hadn’t returned to kidnapping. That there was a chance to end it all peacefully.
She’d been so wrong.
Maybe Julian’s death had unhinged Darcy. Or maybe Alanna had only seen what she’d wanted to see all those years she’d lived with her. Maybe Peter had been right and she’d been brainwashed by a pair of kidnappers.
“She didn’t know I was coming,” Peter said, his voice calm and soft as Chance walked slowly into the cabin behind him and came to a stop at his side.
The dog’s gaze moved from Alanna to the kids, then back to Peter, as if awaiting instructions.
Tension knotted tighter in Alanna’s chest. How had Peter found them? Why would he bring Chance into this?
She tried to tell him with her eyes to stay out of it, to let her try to reach Darcy. Her gaze darted to the kids, the small girl in Darcy’s arms with dark, curly hair that reminded Alanna so much of herself as a child. The little boy clutching Darcy’s leg with the deep brown eyes and the short dark hair. Both of them could have easily passed as Altiers.
“Do you know how much I miss you?” Darcy asked, her voice breaking as Alanna’s gaze returned to hers. “Do you know how much I miss all of you? Do you know what it was like to have my kids ripped away from me?”
“I’m—” Alanna started.
“Do you know how badly it hurt to know it was you who set it all in motion? What it feels like to have you tell me I’m not your mom?” She let out a humorless laugh. “I know I’m not your mom. Not legally. I…” She shook her head, staring through Alanna now, her brow furrowed like she was peering into the past.
“I could never have kids,” Darcy admitted softly. She tipped her head against the child in her arms and the little girl hugged her neck.
She obviously felt safe with Darcy, despite everything. It was what Alanna had felt right from the start, too. Irrational, maybe, but she’d instinctively known she was loved.
A surge of hope hit, a gut feeling that she could still reach Darcy, still talk her into ending this peacefully. Because no matter what else might have changed, the Darcy she’d known for fourteen years was still in there. A Darcy who would never hurt kids she’d decided were hers. But Peter… If Darcy thought he was a threat, she’d fire at him the way she’d shot at Kensie all those years ago.
She hadn’t done it when she could have at the cabin in Luna, a tiny voice whispered in the back of her mind. It was a voice Alanna couldn’t trust, a voice that had been born from her past life. Still, it was a past life where Darcy had raised her to be strong, had hugged her every night before bed, had greeted her every morning with love.
“I’m sorry,” Alanna said.
“My family never understood me,” Darcy continued, not seeming to notice Peter as he shifted just slightly to angle his good ear toward her. His weapon, too.
Chance moved too, surprisingly stealthy for such a big dog, sticking to Peter’s side as if they were a team with a shared plan.
Praying that Peter would just wait, that Chance wouldn’t think she was in trouble and try coming to her rescue, Alanna nodded encouragingly at Darcy. She’d never met anyone from Darcy or Julian’s families. When she was younger, it hadn’t occurred to her to wonder why. When she was older, she’d assumed it was because of the kidnappings, because of the Altiers’ constant reminders that it was the seven of them against the world. But maybe they’d been estranged long before that.
“They were all overachievers, every one of them. They couldn’t stand failure,” Darcy said. “Me? I had so much trouble learning. But Julian always accepted me just as I was. When we got married, I wanted our life to be so different from the way I’d grown up. We always talked about having a big family, raising them differently. So when we couldn’t have kids, I was devastated. We tried to adopt. A little boy, the age Johnny would have been then. It was such a long process and we finally got to the end of it. He was supposed to come home with us over the weekend. Then that Friday, the adoption fell through. He went back to his biological family. They were drug addicts, in and out of rehab, in and out of prison, but somehow they convinced a judge they should get one more chance to be parents.”
The sadness and loss on her face shifted to anger. “Four weeks later, he was dead. Killed in a house fire his parents had set while they were high. And we just couldn’t do it. We couldn’t go through it again. We gave up on adoption.”
“So you took Johnny?” Alanna recalled what she’d read about his abduction in the papers years later. “From the park when his mom was distracted, right?”
“She wasn’t even watching him,” Darcy said, a new light in her eyes, the spark of a past joy. “Julian said it had been easy to pick him off the swings and bring him home to me. Johnny didn’t even cry. It was like he wanted to come to us, like it was meant to be. But afterward…” She frowned, shook her head, glanced at Peter.
Her eyes narrowed and Alanna was sure she’d noticed that Peter was just slightly closer, that Chance was edging closer, too. “Afterward?” Alanna pressed.
“It was such a mix of emotions,” Darcy said, happiness back in her eyes. “Probably what it feels like right after you’ve given birth to a child. Elation like you’ve never felt, but fear, too. Almost terror, really. And the guilt…” She leaned into the little girl she held and her gun hand, still aimed at Peter, shook a little.
She’d always known it was wrong. Alanna had wondered for years whether Darcy and Julian had felt any regret for taking her and her “siblings.” If Darcy had felt guilty then, surely the guilt was intensified now, knowing that the kids who’d gone home to their families had missed them for years.
If she had any regret, felt any guilt, then Alanna could still reach her. She took a step forward, her hand out toward Darcy.
“A few years later, when we saw you…”
Alanna froze and her heart seemed to contract. It was a moment she remembered so distinctly and yet she’d never known how they’d picked her, or why.
“The first time I saw you, I just knew. You looked so much like I did as a child, but it was more than that. I just felt it, deep inside, that you were meant to be my daughter.” Her eyes glassed over with unshed tears. “I still feel that, Alanna.”
Alanna took another step closer until she could almost touch Darcy, almost reach out and push the gun down. “In some ways, I’ll always be your daughter.” The words were shaky with emo
tion, because they were true.
The smile Alanna had seen every day of her childhood blossomed on Darcy’s face and the woman’s rigid arm loosened, the gun angling downward, away from Peter.
Alanna slid forward just a tiny bit more. “But the Morgans weren’t drug addicts. They loved me. They spent so many years searching for me. They were even called into more than one morgue for identifications that turned out not to be me.”
The smile slid from Darcy’s face. Alanna could see the guilt there as her “mom” glanced down at the little boy still hugging tightly to her leg.
“My older sister almost died trying to find me. My older brother turned to drugs and alcohol and anything else he could find because losing me tore my family apart. They didn’t deserve that,” Alanna said, sliding forward again. Just one more step…
“I know,” Darcy whispered.
Hope erupted inside Alanna, a happiness that she hadn’t been wrong about Darcy; that even though the woman had kidnapped her, there was still good in her, still reasons why Alanna had grown to love her.
Darcy was still a criminal. Once she returned to jail, Alanna would have to consider whether to see her again. She’d stolen the childhood Alanna had been meant to have. And yet, that fact didn’t erase the fourteen years of love, the happy childhood Darcy and Julian had given her. It didn’t change the fact that even though Alanna had gone home to the Morgans, even though she didn’t regret it, she still loved Darcy, too.
Maybe that was something Alanna needed to stop feeling guilty about.
“You have to let these kids go,” Alanna said.
Darcy’s face immediately shuttered, the hand holding the gun shaking.
Alanna stepped closer, put her hand on the top of the pistol and said, “You know it’s the right thing to do. Please.”
The weapon shook violently underneath Alanna’s hand, the fight happening within Darcy written all over her face. Then her shoulders slumped and Alanna smiled gently, knowing she’d won.
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