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“You do, don’t you?” Quinn murmured.
“How did you—”
“By the strange way you acted about him coming up here,” she said, ignoring me. “His men tore my apartment apart, Cole. They searched every cabinet, opened every drawer.”
My heart began pounding wildly. I knew she could feel it beneath her cheek.
“Ferrera’s up here looking for something,” Quinn said softly. “And I’m pretty sure you know what it is.”
God, she was so sharp. So intelligent. So… so everything.
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” she said, after a time. “In fact—”
It took every ounce of willpower to extract her soft, womanly body from mine. I stood up, pulled on my shorts, and tossed hers down. She held them for a moment, looking confused.
Shhhhh!I motioned, holding a finger against my lips as I motioned toward the others who were still slumbering away. Quinn nodded in understanding. She threw back the blankets and reached for her shirt, too.
“Come with me.”
She dressed quickly and followed me through the door, out onto the deck. I led her down the steps, and into the soft sand of pine forest that surrounded the house.
It took a moment for our eyes to adjust to the moonlight. When they did, I picked my way carefully through the trees. Wordlessly, she followed. Her footsteps were light, and made almost no sound. Only the touch of her hand indicated she was still with me.
“Cole…” she said eventually.
I said nothing. I kept walking, kept looking, kept picking out markers.
“Where are wegoing?”
I saw the rock first, then the cluster of broken stumps. It took me a while to find the hill. It had been years since I’d come this way.
Finally, I saw the twisted old cedar.
“Cole?”
I led her straight to the tree — the tree no other living soul knew about but me — then stopped and turned around. Quinn was standing there, her face unblemished ivory in the silver moonlight. She was shivering slightly from the cold. I wanted to crush her against me, and make her warm.
“Ferrera wants us dead,” I said plainly. “That’s always been true. But he’s here for something other than revenge, as you figured out. Something that’s far more important to him.”
And then I showed her.
Forty-Two
QUINN
His arm disappeared into the tree — or rather, a hole in the tree. One that was on such an odd visual angle, most people wouldn’t even see it.
When it came out, Cole was holding something wrinkled and brown in his hand.
I took a half-step forward, still shivering against the cool night breeze. A few minutes ago I’d been in our makeshift bed, toasty warm. My arms and legs wrapped satisfyingly around his big, strong body.
“Hold out your hands.”
I looked at him questioningly, but did as I was told. The whole time, Cole kept unwrapping the thing from the tree.
“Put your palms together, now. And keep them tight.”
Cole discarded the brown wrinkled thing, which had given way to a light-colored bag with a braided drawstring. He opened that as well, before carefully upending the contents into my palm…
