Because Camden Daniels had sworn the only way he’d ever come back to Alba was to be buried here. But he felt so real. So solid. Smelled exactly like I remembered. And if I were really dead, wouldn’t it be Sullivan’s arms around me? Not Cam’s. It could never be Cam. Not for me.
I followed Cam’s almost-imperceptible lead as he backed us away from his father.
Cam couldn’t be here. He hadn’t been here in years. And he definitely couldn’t stop a bullet. But a feeling of safety drenched me anyway. It never mattered if the rest of the world saw him as a menace—Cam had always been my unlikely refuge, even when he earned every last bit of his reputation. He’d protected me for the simple reason that I’d been theirs all my life.
The girl who tagged along with the Daniels boys.
The naive teenager who stayed behind when three brothers went to war.
The woman who shattered when only two came home.
Cam might be here now, but one misstep, and we’d both be buried next to Sullivan.
“Stop moving or I’ll shoot!” Mr. Daniels shouted, and Cam obeyed. “Empty your pockets! You’d better not be stealing from me!”
“I’m going to let you go, and I want you to slowly back into the woods and then get the hell away from here,” Cam ordered me softly.
I vaguely heard Mr. Daniels’s agitated muttering in the distance.
“I can’t leave you here,” I protested.
“For once in your life, listen to me, Pika. I’m trying to save your neck. Alexander is coming up behind Dad, and help is on the way, but you have to go.”
The nickname tightened my throat with a lump so big, I couldn’t swallow it down. “He doesn’t recognize you, Cam. He’ll shoot. It’s been six years since he’s seen you. He doesn’t even recognize me, and I see him almost every day.”
“He’ll remember me.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought, too, until he pointed a shotgun at me, you stubborn idiot.”
“What was that?” he whispered. “I thought I heard a squeak, but my coat must have muffled it.”
I would have pinched him in retribution under any other circumstance.
“He’s not going to remember you,” I argued, “and you’ll just agitate him even more when you try to remind him who you are.”
Mr. Daniels’s muttering grew louder until he was shouting again. “You trespassers, trying to steal what’s mine! You can’t have it! Can’t have it…”
Cam’s heartbeat stayed calmingly rhythmic, his breathing deep and even. If I hadn’t seen Arthur Daniels myself, I’d never think there was a gun pointed at us.
“You can’t have it!”
A shot rang out, and birds scattered from the woods at my back. I froze, my grip tightening on Cam’s coat.
His hand splayed wide over the small of my back.
“Cam!” I whispered as loudly as I dared. If he was hurt—if he’d come back only to be buried… I wouldn’t survive burying another Daniels boy. I leaned to see around him, but Cam’s grip tightened, trapping me firmly behind him.
“I’m okay,” he replied just as quietly. “He aimed at the sky.”
“I guess at least we know it’s loaded.” My heart slammed against my ribs, fear coating my tongue with a bitter, metallic taste.
“Way to find the silver lining.”
A corner of my lips lifted slightly.
“There’s one more in the barrel. Remember what I said. Back toward the woods slowly.”
“No,” I argued.
“Yes,” he countered, and his hand disappeared from my back. “Now, Willow.”
Ice rippled through my veins.
He stepped forward, and I let the fabric of his coat slide through my grasp, leaving me precious inches away from Cam.
“Dad,” Cam called out. “I could have sworn you told me never to point a gun at a pretty girl.”
I stood paralyzed, watching Cam walk forward like his dad didn’t have a gun pointed at his chest.
“What?” Mr. Daniels called out. “I’m not your… Who are you? What do you want?”
There it was—a softening in his tone. If Cam could get through to him, they both might live through this. But the odds of that happening were so small, they almost weren’t worth mentioning.
“It’s me, Dad. Camden. And you looked about ready to shoot Willow, so I figured I should step in. You don’t want to hurt Willow, do you? Little Willow? Our neighbor?”
“Willow? Who’s…”
The farther Camden walked, the more his dad came into sight. I needed to move, needed to get back into the woods so this all wouldn’t have been in vain, but the idea of leaving him here to face his dad alone was simply unfathomable.
Sullivan had been alone. I couldn’t reach him. Couldn’t hold him. Couldn’t brush his hair out of his eyes one last time.
I wasn’t leaving Cam.
“Come on, Dad. Put the gun down. We’ll go back to the house, and I’ll cook you up some chicken exactly how Mom made it, okay?” Cam kept his arms outstretched, his palms facing his dad.
“Get off my land! You can’t have it!”
Another shot fired, and I screamed as Cam’s body flew backward, landing in the field with a sickening thud.
“No!” The denial ripped from my throat as I sprinted across the uneven ground to where Cam lay on a patch of winter-brown grass.
“Willow!” Xander shouted from behind his father, already gripping the shotgun.
“Call 911!” I didn’t spare more than a cursory glance as my knees slammed into the unforgiving ground next to Cam. How the hell were we going to get him down the mountain? Could a helicopter land up here?
His jacket was shredded, tiny feathers spilling free all over his chest and blowing away in the wind.
But they weren’t red. Yet. Neither was the grass beside him, right? But it was already so dark.
I reached for his coat, but his back arched, and I scanned up to his pained face—God, I’d missed this face—then took the scruff-softened angles between my palms without thinking. Motion in my peripherals told me that the other searchers had arrived. Too late. Too late. Always too late.
“I’m here,” I told him, looking into eyes so dark, they swallowed me whole. “We’ve got this,” I promised when I had no right to, forcing optimism into my tone with an exaggerated nod and a shaky smile. “Help is coming.”