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Cash and Wilder were seated at the table. The queen bed was untouched by any signs of sleep and was covered in papers. The guys looked up as I entered, falling silent in my presence. “You’re up,” Wilder said.
Cash got to his feet and came to me, wrapping me up in a tight hug that caught me off-guard and stole my breath. He pushed my hair back from my face with both hands and gave me a hard stare. “Don’t you go being brave anymore, okay?”
I nodded. I didn’t feel particularly brave at the moment.
When he pulled away, there was an uncomfortable tension in the air, and I wondered what the talk had been like between them when Wilder had to explain why I was asleep in his room rather than the one I was meant to be sharing with Cash. I hope he left out the part where I made Wilder stay with me. Or how he took off my pants.
Nothing had happened.
Weirdly hot tense moment aside.
That had been the culmination of a lot of stress. Emotions were running high. And besides, nothing had come of it. It was just a…thing. A thing that happened and was now done. Never to occur again.
Ever.
Right?
“How are you feeling?” Matt asked, I think in an attempt to keep thi
ngs from getting more awkward. “Wilder said you were hurt.”
I lifted my feet and turned so they could see the soles. “Score one for glorious werewolf healing powers, I guess. Though I’m going to need shoes.”
“We’ll take care of that,” Cash said, though his attention was elsewhere now.
“When did you get back?” I took the chair he offered, sitting across from Wilder at the table. Matt had to nudge some papers aside to sit on the bed, and Cash dragged an armchair over, its old springs groaning in protest when he sat down.
“Around midnight. I would have come sooner if I’d known you were hurt.” He shot Wilder a look that said this had already been discussed at length, probably with yelling.
“You were at the police station that whole time?” I couldn’t hide the disbelief in my tone. Wilder had been there and hadn’t seen them.
“No. Matt and I spent a couple hours at the bar after the fact, going over our notes, talking about what we could do to help Hank. When we got back, you weren’t here, but my car looked like someone had thrown a rock through the window.” Another scowl.
“That might be because I did throw a rock through the window,” Wilder told me.
Cash frowned. “You’d think someone who runs a body shop could come up with a better way to get into a locked car.”
“So sorry. I left my slim jim in my other pocket.”
“Good Lord, I’ll pay to get the fucking window replaced,” I snapped. “I think Wilder had other things on his mind at the time.”
They both got quiet, realizing they’d been squabbling like fat hens over the last corn kernel. In the grand scheme of things, a car window was not worth this much fuss.
“Sorry,” they both said.
“Forget it. We’re fine, right? For now, anyway. There are bigger problems we need to deal with. Like the fact that Timothy Deerling is a serial killer, and I think he has a secret family of creepy ginger children in the woods.”
They were all quiet again, and Cash gave me a puzzled look. “Did you hit your head when you were out there?”
Well, it had actually been hit for me, several times, but that didn’t seem altogether relevant right now. “On what planet could I dream up something that specific?”
“A planet where you’d sustained a serious brain injury?”
I let out a disgusted sigh. “My brain is fine. I know what I saw. I know what that insane asshole, Anderson, told me, so don’t try to convince me I imagined any of it. You weren’t the one hung up like a chandelier, okay? When someone ties you up like you’re being led to the slaughter, you can talk to me about what’s real and what’s imagined, but until then, just shut up and listen.”
The guys all gawped at me like live snakes had fallen out of my mouth. Their silence was the only invitation I needed. I laid out, in more detail than they probably wanted, everything that had happened to me while I was being held, and everything Anderson had told me about Deerling’s murderous history. I told them about the house, and the woman with all her kids, and what I’d overheard about how Pastor Tim preferred to kill women.
Women like me.
