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I nodded I could.
Yes, I could use one if the need arose.
He chased upstairs and through the thin floors, we heard him throwing open drawers, cupboards, crashing and smashing about.
She kept watching TV like nothing was amiss, those dead eyes never losing that glassiness, though every time the house shook as he thrashed around up there, I noticed her flinch slightly. If she wasn’t licking the corner of her mouth, she was furiously biting her bottom lip. She never once glanced my way, never acknowledged the baby.
So he’d been raised by monsters, then.
Telling.
I rocked the car seat with my foot and the baby dropped to sleep again. He wasn’t due a feed, he’d just been disturbed by the change in temperature from the car to indoors. Her house was dank and dark; light only hit the front of the property in the late-afternoon sun, not the back where she sat. Whereas the car had been warm during the drive over… and perpetually in motion.
Eric arrived back downstairs with a large case, holdall and a cardboard box full of computer equipment and other paraphernalia.
“I’ve gotta go, Ma. Don’t know when I’ll be back.”
“Sooner you piss off, the better,” she said.
I lifted the car seat off the ground and followed him out as he made 40kg of stuff look like a couple of bags of feathers.
As he filled the boot and I buckled the baby back in, he said, “Your place isn’t safe.”
“Were they Sherry’s cronies?”
“I think so.”
“I’ve got stuff at the place in Scotland for Logan.”
He gave a sharp nod. “Then we’ll go there.”
I knew it might all still be a trap of some sort, but I also knew those men weren’t friends of Eric’s—or anyone else I knew, for that matter. Those sorts of men could only be associated with my evil stepmother, no doubt controlling things even as she languished in prison.
He started driving and eventually once we were on the M25, speeding along, I said, “How did you know to follow us?”
“He really doesn’t tell you anything, does he?” he snorted.
I couldn’t find it in me to say anything. Clearly, the danger Sherry posed by still existing in the world had been kept from me. A lot had been kept from me.
Prison or no, I would never be safe so long as she lived.
“It’ll be fine,” he said, as we chased for the M1 North. “We’ll get there… it’ll be fine. You’ve got me. He taught me everything he knows.”
That was what worried me most.
Chapter Eleven
The night was well on its way to dawn by the time we made it to the cabin. A few pitstops to feed the baby and ourselves, use the toilet, refuel, etc, and it was around 3am before we got there.
So I was surprised while feeding at 6am to discover Eric was out there already, scouring the land. Out of the windows which were the width of our bedroom, I could see him checking the traps Caelan had laid. Testing them. Checking them again.
He went all around the perimeter doing this as I fed the boy, winded the boy, changed the boy, then put him down again.
I was using the toilet and about to head back to bed when I heard a kerfuffle downstairs. I arrived, knotting my robe, just in time to catch Harold pointing a shotgun at Eric’s face.
“Harold, stand down,” I ordered.
The old man grimaced, chewed his lip, and grimaced again. He could barely contain his rage.
