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Dad’s face pales. “Fuck… He found us.”
“Yes, he found us,” I repeat, wiping my sweaty palms against my apron. I’d forgotten to take it off at the restaurant. Looks like it’s coming with us wherever we go next.Sorry, Mabel.“My question is,howdid he find us?”
“Relentlessness usually tends to bear fruit.”
I stop short and close my eyes. “Okay. Okay. We have to think of a plan. We have to—”
“Taylor.”
“We have to pack our bags and disappear. You’ll need to call some of your contacts, get some help. We’ll need to lie low for a few weeks, maybe a few months, until our trail goes cold. And he—”
Dad walks up to me and puts his hands on my shoulders. “Taylor, take a breath.”
I twist away from his touch. “I hate when people say that. It doesn’t help. Did you not just hear what I said? Ilarion has found us, Dad. He’s here. I thought he just wanted to see Adam, but it’s so much worse. He wants to take Adam back with him.”
“Does Celine know?”
“If she doesn’t already, she will soon enough. And when that happens, all hell will break loose. When Ilarion shows up at their house with a four-year-old who looks exactly like him, she’s going to have plenty of questions. She’ll know. Then all this will be for nothing. Every last fucking bit of it.”
“Sweetheart, you need to calm—”
“Don’t tell me to calm down!” I don’t full-body scream it, but I so desperately want to.
Dad holds his hands up in surrender. “Listen. I’ve been expecting this day for years now. I guess I always knew that Ilarion finding us would be inevitable.”
“And you have a plan, right?” I plead. “Tell me you have a plan. You always have a plan.”
“Taylor.” He slowly shakes his head. “I’m not sure a plan is going to help us now. We won’t be able to make a move without him knowing.”
My legs suddenly feel too weak to support my weight. I lower myself onto the bed, trembling everywhere. “We’ve been running for five years. And for what?”
“I ask myself that all the time, to be honest.”
Frowning deeper, I look up at my father. He’s shrunk in the time we’ve spent in exile. I never noticed quite how much until right now. Probably because he always seems so larger than life when he’s with Adam, and I tend to see things through Adam’s eyes.
It’s easier than using my own.
“There must be something we can do. Someone we can call.”
“I wouldn’t trust anyone we’ve used before, Taylor. Something went wrong there; otherwise, Ilarion wouldn’t be at our doorstep.”
I take a deep breath, but it doesn’t help. The walls are closing in, and I need to make sure they don’t crush us. “It sounds like you’re telling me there’s no way out of this.”
“There may not be, Little Bird.” He hasn’t used that nickname for me in a long time. Not since I was a little girl.
“I don’t remember why you started calling me that,” I murmur. “But I remember I loved it when you did.”
Dad moves to my side and sits down next to me. “The bronchitis years were hard on you,” he says gently. “All the other kids were out running and swimming and playing, and you were stuck indoors, wheezing and coughing.”
I snort bitterly. “That part, I don’t need any help remembering.”
He pats my knee. “I used to tell you to imagine that you were a little bird, and you could fly anywhere you wanted.”
The way he says it makes me realize the feeling I’d carried around as a child, that feeling of being trapped in my room, unable to participate in the outside world… I’ve been carrying the same feeling around with me for the past several years.
Deeper down, something in me whispers that Ilarion saw it long before I did. I just didn’t want to listen to him.
“If we run, Taylor, you won’t be free. Ever.”
