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“Ready to hunt, brother?” Noah said, ignoring my strange behavior.
“Hunt?”
“Little Bird, you and Ayden will go to the panic room. She knows how to close you both in. This is our land, and Noah and I have no intentions of sharing it with anyone else. We will be back as soon as everything is over.”
“No, I’m not going to just let you go out there on your own. What if something happens to you?”
“Nothing will happen to me. Noah and I know our way around this mountain better than anyone else. We’ll bring all the shit that is surrounding us to an end.”
“What happens when you find them?”
“We kill them,” Noah answered before Leo could.
I felt Ayden’s presence behind me. “It will be okay, Talia. This is all new to me too, but I trust Noah to keep us safe.”
A beeping noise came from Leo’s pocket and he pulled out a phone I hadn’t seen before. “They just tripped my alarms.”
“That makes them what, 500 yards out from the cabin?”
“Yeah.”
“Come on, we’ll go on foot.”
I watched the exchange between the two brothers. Ayden had a look of concern on her face, but she did much better than me at hiding it. She turned one last time and kissed Noah before walking towards a bookshelf and pulling on a book titledPanic.
“Fitting,” I said as I looked up to Leo. “Promise me you will come back.”
“You have nothing to worry about. Now, go. We’ll be in touch as soon as we can.”
He leaned down and kissed me before pushing me off in Ayden’s direction. I had a terrible feeling about everything. Each step I took away from Leo felt as if my heart were breaking along the way. I had trusted him before, and I needed to trust him again. My mind knew that, but my heart felt as if someone were stabbing me from the inside out. Ayden pushed a button that closed the door behind us. I heard a series of locks click into place before we began the descent into the basement.
“Is this your first time, too?” she asked as we neared the bottom of the stairs.
“In a panic room or leaving Leo behind to kill people?”
She let out a nervous laugh and surged. “Both?”
I watched as she placed her palm on a security reader and a large steel door opened. Inside was a cozy-looking space that, if I didn’t know any better, could have been mistaken for a small apartment in the city. There was a bed in the corner and a comfy-looking couch in the middle of the room. I took in the kitchenette and bookshelves full of games and books I hadn’t read in years.
“Well, they sure are prepared for the end of the world.”
“Knowing Noah, that doesn’t surprise me very much.”
“I guess it shouldn’t surprise me about Leo, either.”
Ayden took a step toward the couch. “Have a seat. I’ll get us some snacks while we wait.”
“How are you so calm?”
“I’m not. Honestly, I’m a nervous wreck, but I’ve learned I have no control over what Noah chooses to do and not do. It’s hard to deal with, but I’m getting better at it. This is one job that I more than understand. Protecting family is the most important thing to him and from what he’s told me, you and Leo are pretty serious, so that makes you his family too.”
“He’s kind of terrifying.”
She smiled as she put a bowl of chips and a soda in front of me. “Yeah, he is, but he doesn’t scare me any more.”
“Did he at first?”
“I met Noah when he was undercover at a prison I worked in. I’m a doctor and ran the infirmary. He would come up with all sorts of excuses to come and see me, and after a while, he grew on me. So no, at first he didn’t scare me.”
