Chapter fourteen
It's Not a Warning Anymore
Riley
Idon't remember moving.
One second I'm behind Jace, keeping pace, my eyes locked on the narrow corridor between the stock pens where Piper pointed.
The next I'm just there, closing the distance with my heart hammering so hard it drowns out the noise of the rodeo, the crowd, everything except the sight of my daughter standing in the dark with a stranger crouched down in front of her.
Not a stranger.
Colt Ramirez.
I don't know his name yet. Not in that moment.
I only know the posture of a man who has positioned himself between my child and the people looking for her.
Every instinct I have fires at once. Sharp and absolute in a way that has nothing to do with thought and everything to do with five years of being the only thing standing between Hadley and anything that could hurt her.
Jace reaches her first.
He moves with a kind of controlled urgency that doesn't look like panic from the outside but hits like it from where I'm standing. I wouldn't want to be in Colt's shoes right now by the look on Jace's face.
One hand finds Hadley's shoulder, pulling her gently but firmly back and to the side. Putting his body between her and Colt in a motion so instinctive it doesn't look practiced.
It looks like a father.
I don't let myself feel that right now.
I close the remaining distance and drop to Hadley's level the second Jace has her clear. My hands finding her face, her arms, checking in the way I've done a hundred times after a fall or ascare. Running through it fast and certain even though my hands aren't quite steady. I can hear Jace from behind me asking Colt, in a very firm voice, what he was thinking?
"Hey," I say, keeping my voice even. "Hey, look at me."
She does. Her eyes are wide but dry, more uncertain than frightened, like she doesn't fully understand why everyone around her suddenly got so serious.
"I'm okay, Mom," she says.
Two words that should make me feel better.
They don't.
Because she doesn't know what I know. She doesn't know what was in that trailer or what Jace has been piecing together all night. Or what it means that the man who just crouched down to talk to her is connected to all of it.
She's five years old and she's okay and that has to be enough right now.
I pull her into me, just for a second, just long enough to feel the solid weight of her against my chest and let my nervous system register that she's real and whole and unhurt.
Then I stand up, because falling apart isn't something I'm going to do here.
Not with Colt still standing ten feet away.
Not with Jace's jaw set the way it is, the anger in him pulled tight and controlled in a way that tells me he's one wrong word away from making this a very different kind of scene.
Not with my daughter watching everything.
But underneath the steadiness I'm holding onto with everything I have, something has cracked open.
