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"Stop fucking around, and help me move whoever this is off her," Travis commands, and it takes a second for his words to register.
The shadow isn’t Briar. She’s beneath whoever that is.
"Briar! Fuck!" I curse as I scramble to the body.
The two of them stand and we each grab a part of the man lying on top of her, grunting as we lift the dead weight. We flip him onto his back as he drops back in the mud and I run my flashlight over his face.
Shit.
"Who is it?" Cole asks, and I put the light on his face again.
Noah fucking Crawford.
"Fuck!" Sawyer shouts, but I don’t waste any more time on the very obviously dead professor and move to my girl.
"Shit, Briar," I hiss as I reach down and touch her face. "She’s fucking frozen."
"Sawyer, Cole, go get another car," Travis barks, and Sawyer objects but does as he’s asked when Cole drags him away.
I move to look down at her, reaching down to check her vitals. Her pulse is slow and her skin is icy. If we don’t get her out of this cold, she’s at risk of way too many things. But I’m scared to move her because I have no idea what other injuries she has and I can’t access her properly here. "Can you move, Beautiful?"
I wait, very fucking impatiently, as Travis paces beside her, but despite the recognition in her eyes, she doesn’t move or say a thing.
"Fuck this," he shouts before he lifts her into his arms and huddles her against his chest. "She needs to get out of this cold. Wait here for the others, and deal with that."
"She needs to get warm, Travis," I argue. "She needs medical attention and I can look after her." I might only be pre-med, but I know what the fuck I’m doing.
"So can I," Travis argues as I hear another car pull up. I know there’s no point in arguing with him, not when he gets like this. "You three deal with that," he says, nodding toward Crawford's body. "Then come back to the house. I’ll look after her."
"Travis—" I start to argue, but he cuts me off.
"Do not push me right now, Asher," he snaps, and I pause, the tremors in his hands apparent, even as he holds her.
"Get her out of this rain, get her warm. We’ll be there soon," I tell him, and without another word he strides to his Range, taking our girl and the puppies home. Sawyer and Cole reach me just as the lights of the Range come on, and I wait for the car to pull away before I turn to face them.
"What’s the plan?" Sawyer asks. "The rain is going to get rid of most of the evidence of anything happening here, but we have him to deal with. Is he actually dead?"
I move over to Crawford’s body and crouch down, pressing my fingers against his neck.
Nothing.
I check his wrist, just in case, because the carotid artery is a bastard when a body is cold, but still nothing. "Yeah, he’s dead."
I grimace at the thought.
If only this were our first dead body.
"Cole, do you want to call your dad and have his people deal with it?" I ask, knowing that that is exactly how we handled it last time we ended up in this fucking situation. Albeit, a little different circumstances, but still.
He shakes his head and wipes the rain from his face. "No, he’ll hold it against her. I don’t want to give them anything else to hang over her head. We need to deal with this ourselves."
"You guys know we’re not gangsters, mobsters, or anything else like that, right?" Sawyer shouts. "We’re just fucking rich assholes who’ve seen some bad shit. How the fuck are we supposed to get rid of a body and make sure it doesn’t come back to haunt us?"
"You might just be a rich asshole, but I’ve got this covered," Cole retorts. "Help me get him in the trunk. The rain should do most of the work here, but make sure to grab that rock too," he says, pointing at what I assume is the weapon Briar used, considering the hole in the back of Crawford's head.
We slip and slide in the mud as we carry the body, and while this storm makes it an absolute dick of a job, it also helps keep us hidden from sight. I already know I’m going to have to go over the campus surveillance with a fine-tooth comb if we’re going to protect her ourselves rather than outsourcing.
I can’t afford to fuck it up.
