The Lovely and the Lost

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  Don’t push her, Mac. My pulse jumped in my neck. Saskia strained against Cady’s hold, but Mac didn’t so much as tense.

  When he spoke, it was with the same tone he’d used with me when I was in shock. “You buried the dead. You gave them peace.”

  For a split second, I was sure that she’d recognize the slight shift of his weight, that she’d react—that I’d pay the price. But instead, Ness pressed her lips together. “I couldn’t bring them back, but I could put their bodies to rest. Honor them. Remember them. Mourn them.”

  “And what about Andrés?” Gabriel said. There was nothing light or airy in his voice, no smile on his face as he stepped toward Ness. “Did you mourn my brother? Remember him? Give him peace?”

  “Gabriel, no.” Ness turned her attention back to him. “I don’t know what happened to your brother.”

  Seconds ticked by, the two of them locked onto each other. Mac lunged forward. Ness turned the gun on him so fast that I wondered if she’d known he’d be the one to make a move the entire time.

  “If I knew what happened to Andrés,” Ness said, her voice taking on an uncomfortable edge, her gaze on Mac’s now, her finger hovering over the trigger, “I wouldn’t have left you to wonder. Not you, Gabriel. You’re family.” Her chin shook. “I wouldn’t do that to family.”

  “We didn’t leave you wondering on purpose,” Cady said, her throat making an attempt at strangling the words. “If we knew what happened to Ash…”

  Ness turned the gun on Cady, stepping back from Mac, back from all of us. “You know something,” she said, as if willing those words to be true. “When you left, you weren’t just running away from your father. You were running away from what happened.” Ness’s voice went up an octave. “Something happened.”

  Ness had raised Cady. She loved her. But as I breathed the stale air inside that tree and watched the way Ness looked at my mother, at Jude, still unconscious on the floor, I suddenly knew that Bales had been wrong.

  Ness might not have come here intending to hurt Cady, but she could do it.

  Mac must have sensed the same thing, because he held his hands up, stepping back and away from Ness, and he started to talk. “We went down to South America to retrieve a client’s daughter. She’d been taken and was being held at a camp farther into the jungle than anyone else was willing to go.”

  Cady shifted to put her body more squarely in front of Jude’s. She had a two-handed hold on Saskia now. “We found the girl.” Cady’s voice cracked. I could see her folding in on herself, see the memories taking hold. “We got her out. We made it to the extraction point. But Ash…”

  Words failed Cady. I’d been there. I wanted, more than anything, to go to her, to block her body with mine the way she was blocking Jude.

  “Ash what?” Ness prompted silkily, her voice so soft that the lack of volume almost masked the intensity underneath.

  “Ash went back.” Mac provided the answer. I could sense him willing Ness to turn the gun his way, but she kept it focused on Cady.

  “Why?” Ness demanded. “Why would he go back?”

  “I don’t know,” Cady said.

  “Why?” Ness took a step forward, her fingers tightening around the rifle. Saskia strained against Cady’s hold, but Cady hauled her back. “Why, Cadence?”

  “I don’t know.” Cady lost it. “The girl we’d saved was in bad shape. Mac had taken enemy fire. We made it back by the skin of our teeth, with minutes to spare, and Ash went back.”

  I knew, beyond any human knowing, that Cady had relived that moment, again and again. This was her forest. Her Girl.

  “You left him,” Ness said, her volume rising.

  “There was an explosion.” Cady shuddered. “Enemy forces were incoming. We were outnumbered and outgunned, and…” Her head bowed with the force of what she was about to say. “We left him.”

  The silence that followed that statement was deafening. I calculated the space between Cady and me, the space between Cady and Ness, the chances that I could get to the gun, the risk that Saskia would break Cady’s hold, the consequences if she did.

  “Ash knew.” Mac took first one step toward Ness, then another. “When he went back in—whatever he was thinking, whatever he was after—he knew that he wouldn’t make it back out.” For the first time, I could hear something that wasn’t calm or steady in Mac’s tone. “Ash knew we’d have to leave him there.”

  Ness turned her head toward Mac, the gun still aimed at Cady’s chest. “Why?”

  As hard as it sometimes was for me to read people, I heard echoes of a thousand more questions in that single word. Why would Ash choose to go back? Why would he take that kind of risk? Why hadn’t he thought, in that moment, of her?

  “Ash was always in it for the adrenaline.” Mac shook his head. “He liked taking chances. He liked winning. But in the weeks leading up to that mission, he was different. The chances he was taking were less calculated.” Mac shook his head, his voice tightening. “I confronted him about it, but he kept pushing, right up to the end.”

  “He knew,” Cady whispered. Then she repeated the words again, louder.

  “Knew what?” Mac asked the question before Ness could.

  When Cady answered, her answer was only for him. “Ash knew that we were together, Mac.” She swallowed, her eyes closing, just for an instant. “He knew that I was pregnant.”

  Silence fell, for one second, two, three. And then Ness spoke. “Loving you,” she told Cady, her voice almost tender, “killed my son.”

  “You never told me.” That was from Mac. “That you were pregnant. You told Ash?”

  Cady stared at the barrel of the gun. “He found the test. He asked me. I couldn’t lie to him. I was going to tell you, Mac, but then we lost Ash. And I didn’t tell you, because I didn’t deserve to.” She lifted her gaze to Mac’s. “I didn’t deserve you.”

  Cady had blamed herself for what had happened with Ash. She’d given up the man she’d loved in penance. It was sick and twisted and wrong, but I’d been to the dark place, too. I knew what it was like to push people away because you couldn’t stand to be comforted. I knew what it was like to hurt the people you loved when the person you really wanted to hurt was yourself.

  “What else?” Ness said suddenly.

  Cady shook her head. “There is nothing else.”

  “What else don’t I know?” Ness asked, like Cady had never spoken. “What else aren’t you telling me?”

  The answer was nothing, and I knew, in the part of my gut that could feel danger like the vibration of a tuning fork struck against metal, that nothing was the wrong answer. Ness didn’t want to hear it. And if we made her hear it…

  My gaze went to Saskia. She wasn’t straining against Cady’s hold anymore. She was still, and there was something wild in her eyes.

  “Bales couldn’t find even a hint of what happened to my son,” Ness said, the pace of her words deliberate and slow. “Not even a rumor. People don’t just disappear, Cady. Not like that. Not him.” Ness let her finger rest on the trigger. “Did he get out?” The question reverberated off the walls. “What happened to him? What did he go back for?”

  “I don’t know,” Cady said softly. Saskia lowered her head slightly.

  Ness’s finger shook. I stopped breathing, stopped thinking, every muscle in my body preparing to fight. On the ground, Jude stirred, and like a veil had been lifted from her eyes, Ness shifted the gun from Cady to Jude.

  I held up my hand. It shook, but I held it up. Stay, Sass. She’ll hurt you. She’ll hurt our family.

  Jude groaned and sat up. “I suppose,” he said, his voice groggy, “that there are worse places to wake up than inside a tree.” Then he registered the rest of his surroundings. “Oh.”

  Oh as in Oh, someone is pointing a gun at me.

  Oh as in even Jude couldn’t see the bright side of this.

  “Tell me my boy got out,” Ness said. The words were for Cady’s ears, but she was looking at Jude.
Cady’s boy. “Or tell me that my son died there. Tell me something.”

  She was going to pull the trigger. If Cady couldn’t tell her what she wanted to hear, she was going to shoot. And if I tried to stop her…

  I can hear the gun going off. I can see the blood.

  “He got out.”

  At first, I thought Cady was the one who’d told Ness what she wanted to hear. It wasn’t until Gabriel turned toward me that I realized that I was the one who’d spoken.

  I couldn’t fight a gun—not with claws and teeth, not with every instinct I had. All I could do was this. I could keep my hand up. I could keep Saskia from attacking. I could keep Ness’s attention on me.

  “Ash got out.” I repeated myself, my voice louder this time, steadier. If Ness Ashby wanted to shoot someone, she could shoot me. She could listen to me telling her what she wanted to hear, realize that I was lying, and shoot me.

  “Kira.” Cady saw what I was doing. More than that, she saw that it might work.

  “Everyone wondered how I survived,” I said, willing Ness to listen, willing her to aim at me and not Jude. Not at Cady, not at Sass—at me. “A little girl, all alone in the woods for weeks.” A few days ago, I might not have sounded so close to it—so sure. I waited until I was sure that I had the whole of Ness’s attention, and then I lied. “I wasn’t alone.”

  I bent down and pulled up the leg of my jeans, revealing the deep, ridged scars around my ankle. “There was a trap.” If I could just keep talking, if I could just keep saying things that were true, maybe I could distract her from the one thing that wasn’t. “I saw a wolf caught in one, early on. Later, it was me.” My mouth tasted metallic. The memory smelled like rust—like blood. “Somebody tipped the police off about my mother’s body. Someone told them about me.” I swallowed. “Someone found me dying in that trap and let me go.”

  “You’re a bad liar,” Ness said, her voice low.

  Survival wasn’t just about being the fastest or the strongest or the one who refused to die. When it came to confrontations, survival was just as much about bluffing, about pretending strength, when you had none.

  “Some people,” I said, my voice humming in a way that didn’t sound small or scared or human at all, “don’t want to be found. Ash chose to go back in. Is it so hard to believe that he might have chosen to disappear? That something might have pulled him to check in on Cady, year after year?”

  One second I was standing there, and the next, Ness had me backed up against the wall, the barrel of the gun digging into my throat.

  Good. Let her shoot me. Let her kill me. I could hear Saskia snarling, hear Cady and Jude trying to keep her under control.

  It won’t last.

  “You expect me to believe,” Ness said icily, “that my son disappeared in the depths of a South American jungle eighteen years ago, but that he just happened to reappear, years later, in the woods on the outskirts of a nowhere little town, to save you?”

  I didn’t expect Ness to believe that. I didn’t expect anyone to believe it. I couldn’t swallow. I couldn’t breathe.

  But I could keep Ness’s attention on me as Gabriel moved in behind her.

  “He had a scar.” I choked out that sentence. Ness stared at me for a moment, then eased back, just enough to allow me the breath to speak.

  “What did you say?” Ness asked, suddenly hoarse.

  “The man who saved me,” I said quietly. “He had a scar.”

  Most people did—especially those with devil-may-care grins, who liked winning and taking risks and lived in a dangerous world.

  “What scar?”

  My heart jarred my rib cage with every beat. Gabriel was nearly behind Ness now. I couldn’t let her turn around. I couldn’t let her take her eyes off of me. So I thought back—to the picture in Cady’s old room, to the one Ness had left in the envelope when she’d taken Jude.

  I pictured John Ashby in my mind. I pictured his face.

  “Here,” I said, raising my hand and sliding it down my jaw and across my chin. “The man I saw in the woods—the man who saved me—he had a scar here.”

  Ness’s body seemed to give out beneath her. The gun dipped, and Gabriel lunged, grabbing the barrel with both hands. An instant before Ness collapsed to the ground, Cady lost her hold on Saskia.

  I heard my girl go for Ness. I saw it in slow motion—and then I saw Bales. Had he been waiting outside? Had he just found us? He threw himself in front of Ness, and Saskia’s teeth sank into his arm.

  “Bales.” Ness choked out his name. Cady called for her father. I threw myself forward, getting a hold on Saskia the way Bales Bennett had held me in the sheriff’s office. I whispered to her.

  “I’m here. I’m okay. Saskia. You’re Saskia. I’m Kira. I’m here.”

  As Saskia turned toward me, her whole body shaking as she attempted to burrow into mine, Bales sank to the ground, where Ness was still saying his name, over and over again.

  “FBI is incoming.” Bales kept his tone gentle enough that I could barely push air in and out of my chest. “Ness,” he said softly. “Nessie.”

  The glassy look in Ness’s eyes disappeared as she turned toward Bales. “I wouldn’t have hurt them.”

  I didn’t believe that. Maybe Bales did. Maybe he didn’t. Either way, he let his arms curve around her. “I know.”

  Ness Ashby turned herself in to the FBI. I expected Cady to have us packed and on the road the moment we’d finished giving our statements, but this time, she didn’t seem in a hurry to leave. Pandora’s box had been opened inside that ancient sequoia, and not even one of the most stubborn women I knew could close it.

  “Which tie says ‘Congratulations, it’s a boy, I have completely accepted the fact that my father is not, in fact, an astronaut’?” Jude held up two nearly identical bow ties for my inspection. He was preparing to spend the day with Mac—clearly a bow tie occasion.

  “The one on the left,” I deadpanned.

  Jude smiled beatifically. For someone who’d been kidnapped less than twenty-four hours earlier, he’d bounced back quickly.

  “So,” I said. “You and Mac.”

  “I clearly inherited his manly physique.”

  “Jude.” I gave him a look.

  “I don’t know what to say, Kira mine. The man is responsible for half my DNA. He seems like a good guy. Broad shoulders, steady in a crisis, likes dogs…”

  “He would have been there,” I said quietly. “If Cady had let him, if she’d told him about you—”

  “Mom loves us.” Jude stopped messing with the tie. “More than anything, Kira. She would have taken a bullet for me yesterday. Given your newfound proclivity for bluffing gun-toting little old women, I can only conclude that she might still end up taking one for you someday.”

  Jude wasn’t the type to get bogged down in ifs. He loved me. He loved Cady. Cady and I loved each other. For Jude, it really was that simple.

  I swallowed. “I’m sorry.” Those weren’t words I’d ever really understood. They weren’t words I’d had much—if any—practice saying. “About yesterday. The things I said to you. The way I said them.”

  “You’re allowed to have feelings, Kira. In fact”—Jude tweaked the end of my ponytail—“I think it’s a good thing. Before you know it, you’ll be holding a boom box over your head, professing your love for—”

  I narrowed my eyes at him.

  “Changing the subject now!” Jude declared. “Is it me, or does surviving a kidnapping really bring out my cheekbones?”

  * * *

  I spent the afternoon with Free, out at the tree where I’d buried Silver. She made me tell her about finding Silver, about wrapping her body in the sheet, about digging the grave. We cried, both of us—ugly-cried, with a side of hating the world and loving the ones still with us even harder.

  “It means something,” I told Free, rubbing NATO’s ears as he laid his head down in my lap, “that you stayed so I could go.”

  “I’ve never been as
good as you are at search and rescue.” Free shrugged that statement off like it didn’t matter. “But I like to think that when push comes to shove, I’m good at taking care of people.”

  NATO seemed to appreciate being included in “people.”

  “Extreme Hide-and-Seek?” Free asked me. She’d mourned. She’d let me thank her. That was about all the sitting around she could take.

  “I don’t know,” I replied slowly. “I was thinking…it’s an awfully lovely day for mischief. Think we could get a little creative in town?”

  “Do I even want to know what that means?” Gabriel appeared to have even fewer qualms about eavesdropping than I did. Saskia walked beside him. He gave no signs of treating her like a danger or a liability, and I would have sworn she wasn’t so much as even entertaining the idea of eating his face.

  “I hear you jumped the gun,” Free commented, shielding her eyes from the sun and giving Gabriel an assessing look. “Literally. As in, you literally jumped on top of an old lady holding a gun.”

  “Not actually what the idiom refers to,” Gabriel countered. “But who am I to quibble?”

  A loud and unmistakable sound—followed by an equally unmistakable smell—permeated the air.

  “You’ll have to excuse Duchess,” Free said primly. “Cocky teenage boys make Her Ladyship gassy.”

  “Her Ladyship?” Gabriel asked, arching an eyebrow.

  “Duchess,” I explained, nodding to the dog. “Also known as Her Ladyship.”

  “I hesitate to point this out,” Gabriel said, “but the proper address for a duchess is Her Grace.”

  Free and I stared at him.

  “What?” Gabriel muttered. “A former juvenile delinquent can’t enjoy the occasional historical romance novel?”

  Free recovered before I did. “Pretty sure that makes it official,” she told me. “He’s definitely Miscreant material.”

  * * *

  An hour later, when Cady joined us at Silver’s grave, Gabriel made his exit. Cady watched him go.

  “I believe Ness was telling the truth about Gabriel’s brother,” Cady told me after a moment. “He wasn’t one of her lost ones.”