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“He will be now.”
The clipped response slammed into her like a two by four, knocking her into silence again.
Did Jax know?
When Vanessa caught sight of them, she popped up from behind a cluster of honeysuckle vines. “Ouch!” Her eyes squinted, and she gingerly touched the back of her head. “Are you both okay?” Her hand dropped, along with her jaw, when Seyla approached her. “Seyla? What happened?”
As her cousin rushed at her, Seyla glanced at her arms, legs, hands. Nothing raised any alarms apart from minor scratches and scrapes. The blood on her hand from Vanessa’s wound had long since worn off from crawling in the dirt. What was she talking about?
Vanessa grabbed hold of her chin and tilted her head, staring hard at her right cheek. “Does it hurt?”
“Hurt?” Seyla raised a hand to her cheek, panic rising in her chest. Awareness brought a throbbing, stinging pain to the forefront of her mind. When she pulled the hand away, she saw blood smeared on her fingers. “How bad is it?”
“It’s superficial,” Jax said, coming alongside Vanessa to examine the wound. “A piece of wood from the tree must have clipped you. There’s still a fragment of bark on your cheek.”
He swiped his thumb along her cheekbone with surprising gentleness.
“There. Got it.” His voice softened a few notches. “It’s actually a pretty small cut. It looks a lot worse than that because it bled a lot. Head wounds tend to bleed more, especially if your blood pressure spikes. It’ll bruise, but I doubt it’ll scar.”
So that’s why he’d reached for her cheek earlier.
Seyla’s eyes fluttered shut on a sigh. How many times would she make a fool of herself in front of this guy? She must resemble a victim from one of those slasher movies her friends had convinced her to watch in college.
She opened her eyes and forced her hands to her sides, refusing the impulse to touch her hair to determine how messy it looked. Thanks to Matt, she knew Jax’s type. Perfect, sophisticated women. In other words, not her.
And why did she care?
“Uh…guys?” Vanessa prompted.
Seyla blinked, then realized she’d been staring at Jax. How long had she been staring at him?
Way to go. He can label you “creepy” on top of everything else.
Vanessa waved a small white piece of paper in front of them.
The folded paper that had fallen on the ground.
“It tumbled out of your pocket when Jax picked you up,” Seyla explained, scrubbing at some dirt stuck to the edge of her shorts.
“You mean yourpocket,” Jax said. “What does it say?”
Vanessa remained quiet for several long seconds before she read it aloud. ‘“You don’t belong here. Leave now, while you can still walk.’”
Seyla’s fingers froze, her gaze locked on the dark splotch marking the hem of the shorts material. The dirt-stained spotonly worsened the more she’d worked to wipe it away. Now it stared at her, unabashed, refusing to be ignored.
Like the threats.
She sank onto an old tree stump, the weight of the others’ stares pressing down on her.
Seyla closed her eyes, wrapped her fingers around her necklace, and inhaled for five seconds before exhaling again, refusing to give in to the panic threatening to spin out of control. Rock’s warm, wet nose snuffled at her ear, helping to calm her thoughts.
“Do you know who wrote this?” Vanessa asked.
Seyla gave her cousin a fleeting glance. “No, but it’s not the first.”
CHAPTER TWO
So Matt had been right.
