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I just hoped Hawk found her.
Please, Jared, do this one last thing for me.
Keep our baby girl safe.
Please keep her safe.
HAWK
“Are we done here?” I demanded, tapping my foot impatiently. “I have shit to do, and it’s pretty fucking urgent.” I had sat on the concrete steps for over an hour while the cops asked us stupid questions that were definitely not going to help them figure out who took Kadey or who the hell had killed Jared.
“We just need to get the facts so we can find this little girl as fast as possib—”
“The facts are that none of us were fucking here,” I snapped, leaping to my feet and beginning to pace up and down the back porch, jabbing my finger at the neighbor’s house. “He told you that. They heard yelling and screaming at least an hour before we got here.”
“Hawk!”
I froze, wondering for a second if I was hearing things.
My gaze met Blue’s, his eyes wild as he searched the darkness. “Was that—”
“Shhh!” I hissed, jogging down the concrete stairs and out onto the grass, blinking hard and fast to force my eyes to adjust to the dark, shadowed backyard. “Kadey?”
“Hawk! Help!” Her soft voice was hard to hear, but I knew I wasn’t going crazy.
“Kadey, keep talking to me, baby,” I called loudly, waving my brothers toward me. Bishop, Blue and Cain all hurried down to the grass.
The cop pulled his radio from his shoulder and spoke into it quietly.
“Kadey! Call out!”
“Help,” she called back, a little louder this time. “I don’t like it here. It’s scary.”
“There,” Cain exclaimed, already running toward something sticking out from the side of the house. “It’s an old wood box. You put wood for a fire in them from outside and can access it inside the house. It looks like it hasn’t been used for a long time. It’s nailed shut.”
“Blue, go inside, see if you can find where the hell the inside opening to this thing is and how she got in there.”
“Hawk?”
“We’re coming,” I reassured her, running my hands over the top of the old wooden box, tracing the edges, and searching for weaknesses. The cops took the crowbar, so we needed to improvise. “Here, grab this edge.”
Cain stepped up beside me, and the two of us gripped the tiny lip on the bottom of one of the boards, our large fingers barely able to hook under the edge. I hoped that with the two of us, it might get enough leverage to rip it off.
“Kadey, cover your head,” Bishop said loudly. “Keep your arms over your head, okay?”
“Okay,” she answered, the quiet sniffles that followed filling me with what felt like enough strength to rip more than just the board off.
“One. Two. Three!” The wood cracked and groaned under the pressure before finally popping, and the timber went flying. I crouched down, barely able to make out the outline of Kadey curled up inside the cramped space. “Hey, pretty girl, we’ll have you out of there in a second.”
She slowly turned her head, peeking through her fingers, and nodded.
“Keep your face covered.” She hid again as we grabbed another board, this one a lot easier to grip, and Cain and I ripped it off in seconds and tossed it to the side.
The space we’d created was small, but Kadey was already squeezing through it, panic on her face. I caught her tiny body as she popped out, dirt and cobwebs and who knows what fucking else completely covering her.
I didn’t give a fuck though.
She was safe.
