I’m close to where I left the ATV now. Only a few more hundred yards?—
Voices float through the forest, and I freeze mid-step before I even make it to the clearing I have to cross to get to where I left the small vehicle.
Shit.
There shouldn’t be anyone up here.
The hair on the back of my neck rises, and I listen intently, slowly reaching back for my axe strapped into my backpack—the only weapon I have since I left the gun with Raven.
My hand closes around it, the wood smoothed by years of use slides over my calloused palm as I pull it free.
Footsteps move through the forest, approaching from the river where I just heard the voices. I tighten my grip, prepared for whatever might appear through the trees.
But a familiar face I haven’t seen in years steps from them, hands raised and a smirk curling his lips.
Barrett fucking Briggs…
His blue gaze sweeps over me, then stops on the axe. “I promise I don’t bite unless you ask nicely.”
“Barrett?”
The youngest of the Briggs brothers walks forward and holds out a hand for me to shake, and I transfer the axe into my left one to accept the gesture. I can’t help but notice the new scar that runs from his left temple down, beside his eye, and almost all the way to his mouth.
In the weeks since I left with Raven, I had pushed my conversation with Liam at the lumberyard to the back of my mind and hadn’t even thought about the return of Barrett and Tripp Briggs. “Liam said you were back…”
He nods slowly, scanning me up and down again, that gaze more intense and deeply assessing than I remember it from back in high school before he left for the military. “And you’ve been missing.”
Shit.
Tony’s warning only a few weeks ago that he was about to send out a search party rings in my ears.
“Not missing, just…”
Hiding?
That word doesn’t feel right, either, yet that’s exactly what I was doing up there with Raven.
I was hiding from the Lorells, from the McBrides, from the world.
I was pretending none of it existed every time I kissed Raven.
Every time I slid my cock inside her.
Every time I looked at her and wasn’t asking myself what would happen the moment we went back down the mountain because I couldn’t consider the possibility that things might return to the way they were.
Barrett watches me. “Well, if you aren’t missing, then I don’t know what me and Tony and your brothers have been doing on the mountain. Playing a long-ass game of hide and seek?”
Fuck.
“Is that why you’re up here? Looking for me?”
He nods. “And Raven Perry, who also vanished. Your brother is at the river.”
“Shit.” I run my free hand over my bearded jaw. “Which one?”
“Killian.”
Double shit.
