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“I rescued them,” Finn spoke quietly with a touch of sadness. He turned to look at me, and it took everything in me not to take a step back at the sight of his blue eyes.
They were vacant. At the same time, they seemed ageless in a way that they were ancient. There was something truly terrifying about his eyes, almost like the vacantness and agelessness meant he was capable of anything because he had no soul.
Yes, that was it exactly. They made the man look as if he were soulless, and I thought a soulless man was capable of just about anything.
I wondered if he’d think me rude if I were to ask him how old he was. A woman would find it rude, at least a woman past a certain age would. Finn was a wild card.
I kept my mouth shut and my questions that really meant nothing to myself.
Tyson had no such problem.
“Rescued them, you say? From whom? And are you sure you rescued them and didn’t kidnap them? They don’t exactly look as if they are happy to be here with you.”
Tyson made good points, I had to give him that. They were all questions I should have focused on instead of being curious about Finn’s age.
I focused on the two boys in the bed and took in every little detail that I had missed the first time I’d looked at them. One of them had dark brown, wavy hair that hung in his eyes and looked rather messy. The other one had gold hair buzzed down tight to his scalp.
I couldn’t tell their heights because they were lying down and curled up, but they both appeared to be rather underfed and malnourished.
Their clothes were practically worn rags that hung off their bodies, and I realized as the scent hit me that they reeked of filth and shit.
I was never going to be able to have sex on that bed again. Hell, maybe we’d have to burn the whole tent down just to be rid of that smell. What a damn shame. Dash was going to be so disappointed.
There were visible bruises on both of them. On their necks. Around their wrists. Along the edge of one’s jaw. One had a swollen, black eye. I wondered how many bruises the rags they wore as clothing were hiding and figured maybe I didn’t really want to know. Sometimes ignorance was bliss, and I really did not need one more person to want to take up for.
I wanted them to get out of there. I wanted Finn to take them back to wherever it was that he’d gotten them from. Didn’t he have his own home to take them back to? They could go there.
It wasn’t like me to be so heartless, and I regretted the thoughts almost immediately after having them. I’d been covered in bruises for a good portion of my life, and I hadn’t deserved to be on the receiving end of a single one of them.
“Finn?” Tyson called out hesitantly.
Why had neither of the boys spoken yet? Why hadn’t they so much as twitched or blinked? I knew they were breathing because I could see the gentle rise and fall of their chests.
Something was very wrong here, and I was finally starting to feel very uneasy about this whole thing.
Something bad was going to happen, I could feel it in my bones. It was like something I couldn’t quite touch or feel had fallen over me, and the air was almost harder to breathe.
Finn’s presence was a bad omen.
I turned on Tyson and snapped my fingers at him, cutting off whatever he was about to say. He could chastise me for my rudeness later when I didn’t feel like maybe we were both standing at death’s door, two seconds away from knocking just to say hello.
“Go back to the house now. Get the others. Tell them something horrible is about to go down. Have someone phone Rain and Romero and get them back here, because I have a heavy feeling we’re going to need all of them here for this.”
He gaped at me, and I fought against the urge to yell at him. “Go,” I urged. “Go now, dammit.”
“Ariel—”
Finn turned his back on the bed. He cocked his head eerily to the side and his eyes became unfocused. “She’s right. Can’t you feel that? So heavy, so foreboding. Best to get help before it’s too late. For all of us.”
I most certainly did not like the way any of that sounded. It came off way worse when someone else said what I was feeling.
By the look on Tyson’s face, he didn’t much like it either. He eyed me up and down before nodding briefly and running out of the tent.
I knew I’d told him to leave, but I couldn’t honestly believe that he’d actually left me here with Finn, two strangers, and a really bad feeling in my gut. There’d been a time where he would have argued with me and never done what he was told.
Boy, were times changing around here or what?
“What’s going on, Finn?” I asked in a rush. I was getting tired of having to ask him a version of that question. I felt like time was not on our side, and I needed to know what was coming our way. I felt like Finn was the reason for it. “Why are you here and what have you brought with you?”
