by Nicole Helm
Brady shook his head, taking her hand off his arm. He quietly got to his feet and quickly shook off his pack. Gently and as silently as possible, he knelt and set it next to her. He looked her in the eye. “I can’t. I’m sorry. I just can’t do it.” He pressed a quick kiss to her mouth. “If it were you like we planned, I wouldn’t have been able to do it either. I’m sorry.”
Then he left her. She had weapons and a cell phone and the chance to escape. Tucker didn’t, and Brady couldn’t let him go down alone.
* * *
CECILIA WAS SHOCKED into stillness for probably more than a minute. All their talk and debating about plans, and it had just gone up in smoke. Brady walked away, all grim determination.
I wouldn’t have been able to do it either.
That echoed inside of her. He’d planned to let her get caught, but he would have never been able to go through with that plan. She wanted to be angry, furious. She wanted to march after him and drag him back behind this rock and their little bubble of pretend safety.
But she understood too well what he’d meant. She was half-convinced Tucker was on the wrong side of things, even now, and it was still hard to listen to someone she’d grown up with and cared about get beaten up.
If it was one of her sisters? She wouldn’t have lasted even as long as Brady. Still, this was...suicide. Surely. Maybe Brady and Tucker could fight three men off, but Elijah’s men had to have weapons. Maybe Brady and Tucker were somewhat protected by their Wyatt name, but if they fought back hard enough, would Elijah really care to keep them around to use them as examples to the other Sons.
And what could she do? There was no cell service out here. She could shoot, but that made her a target too, and if she was a target, how would they get out of this mess? Someone needed to be safe to find the option to get help.
She heard the sounds of fighting and closed her eyes, taking a steadying breath. She had to think clearly, without emotion clouding her judgment. Emotion would get all three of them killed. And probably only after Elijah tortured them.
Torture. Would Brady give under torture? Tell Elijah exactly where Mak was? She didn’t think so. She thought he’d die first.
But Tucker? Once she would have put her utter faith into him, but not today. Not with his weirdness.
She couldn’t let them get captured, or at least not for very long. But in order to figure out what she was going to do, she had to look. She had to know what was going on to make an informed decision.
Maybe it’d be easy to get a shot off, to pick all three men off and end this here and now. It was possible, but she wouldn’t know it unless she risked being seen.
She unholstered her weapon, and took another slow breath, calming her heart rate, trying to keep her limbs from shaking. Slowly, she peeked over the rock.
Tucker and Brady were holding their own in the fight. Brady was a little worse for the wear, probably since he’d already been beaten up the day before. But he and Tucker worked together like a team to take on the other two men, who fought like individuals. Elijah’s men landed blows on Brady and Tucker, but they didn’t make any headway on actually taking Brady or Tucker down.
Both of Elijah’s men had guns strapped to their legs, but they didn’t use them. Why not even use them as a threat? Brady was living proof you could shoot a man and have him survive. Why wouldn’t they use the strongest weapons they had at their disposal?
“Why does none of this make sense?” Cecilia muttered to herself. She lifted her gun, trying to test if she could make two successive shots and take down both men before they returned fire.
There was too much struggle, though. She’d be just as likely to hit Brady or Tucker with the way they were all moving and stumbling and swinging at each other. And she wasn’t guaranteed to make a glancing blow either. What if she missed altogether?
Wait. Two against two. Why were there only two men? Where was Elijah?
She looked toward the car Elijah and his men had left in the middle of the path to camp. It was still running, but she didn’t see anyone. Had Elijah walked on to camp, leaving his lackeys to handle the Wyatt brothers? No. He wouldn’t have done that.
There was a crack of sound behind her, like a gun being cocked, then the cold press of metal against the back of her head. She froze.
“Well hello, Cecilia,” Elijah’s voice said softly in her ear. “Didn’t see this coming, did you?”
He peeled the gun out of her hand, and she had to let him. Because she had no doubt Elijah would pull that trigger if she provoked him.
“Now. On your feet. We have so much to talk about.”
Chapter Nineteen
Brady took another ham-fisted punch to the kidney and nearly lost his balance, but Tucker was there, backing him up, blocking the next blow and landing one of his own.
All of them were breathing heavily, not doing much more than landing punches that hurt but didn’t take anyone out or down. Brady’s gun had been knocked out of his hand before he’d been able to get a clear shot, and Tucker had lost his long before Brady had come to help.
It felt...pointless, Brady realized, ducking another punch with enough ease dread skittered up his spine. “Something isn’t right,” he muttered to his brother.
Tucker dodged a blow, landed a decent fist to one of the men attacking them.
One of the two guys. There were only two.
“Where’d Elijah go?”
Tucker swore, and not half a second later landed an elbow to one guy’s temple that had him crumpling. In a fluid, easy move and with absolutely no help from Brady, he managed to get the other in a choke hold.
Had Tucker been...holding back?
No time to think about that. He let Tucker deal with handcuffing the two debilitated aggressors and searched the area around them for Elijah. Nothing.
He looked over to the rocks where Cecilia should be out of sight. Instead, past the rocks, he saw two figures. They were far away so he couldn’t make them out well enough to be certain it was Elijah and Cecilia, but who else would it be?
“Go ahead,” Tucker said. “Follow. I’ll be right behind you. We can’t have these guys coming behind us, and we have to see where he takes her. Go.”
“No, Tuck. You don’t follow me. You go get help. We can’t do this alone. We need backup. You have to go get backup.” His brother hadn’t been acting normal. His actions didn’t make sense, but Brady had to be able to trust Tucker. “Promise me.”
Tucker was kneeling, tying the men’s feet together with rope Brady had no idea how he’d gotten. “You could both get killed in the time it’ll take me to get help. You don’t even have a gun,” he returned, not meeting Brady’s gaze.
“We’ll take our chances.” Brady was already walking away from Tucker, toward Cecilia. He didn’t have time to search for the one that had been knocked out of his hand or he’d lose sight of Cecilia. “We don’t have any if we both go in there. But we do if you get help. We can arrest him. He’s taken Cecilia against her will. We have arrestable grounds. All we need is enough law enforcement to make it happen.”
He was running by the time he was done talking. Cecilia and Elijah had disappeared behind a large rock formation. Brady headed for the rock first, thinking to grab the pack quickly on his way.
But there was a fire. Small and it wouldn’t spread thanks to the rocky landscape, but both his and Cecilia’s packs were in the middle of the blaze. There was no chance of saving anything or finding a weapon.
Brady didn’t stop to think about the implications, and while he considered the fact that Elijah could just shoot him dead in the middle of the Badlands, it didn’t really matter.
If he’d wanted him dead, Brady could have been dead multiple times. He had to bank on the fact that either Ace’s shadow, or potential family loyalty, or something was keeping Elijah from taking him out.
Maybe th
at wouldn’t extend past an attack, or an attempt to get Cecilia back, but it was a risk Brady was willing to take.
And if Tucker doesn’t get help?
Brady slowed his pace. It was an irrational fear. His brother had taken down those two men, fought beside him. Tucker would go get help.
He could have ended that fight a lot quicker.
Whatever it meant, whatever weird thing was going on with Tuck, it didn’t mean he was helping Elijah or the Sons. Brady had to stop letting stupid doubts plague him.
Even with Cecilia’s life at stake?
It was too difficult a choice. Trust his brother over all else? Risk Cecilia over it? There was too much at stake to make an error.
He could only focus on himself. On what he could do.
He’d laid out a plan where Cecilia was captured, and even though he wouldn’t have been able to let it happen, it was currently happening. And he was following, just like he’d planned. With or without backup, he could arrest Elijah. He had grounds.
All he had to do was catch up, somehow get Elijah away from Cecilia without her getting hurt and arrest him...with no weapon, no handcuffs and no help whatsoever.
He’d eased into a brisk walk instead of an all-out run. With the dust and rocky debris, there was a decent enough trail to follow as long as the wind didn’t pick up and Elijah didn’t realize Cecilia was digging her heels in and making enough of a track for him to follow.
Occasionally, he paused to listen to try and figure out how close he was, but he never got close enough to hear actual footsteps or the struggle Cecilia must be putting up.
She wouldn’t go easily. Even if Elijah had a weapon. She wouldn’t just docilely be marched along. Which meant, surely, Elijah had no plans to kill her either.
Brady wasn’t sure how long he’d walked, following a trail, and not getting close enough to hear a scuffle before the landscape started to feel...more familiar. Too familiar. Bad familiar.
Brady stopped short. He knew this area too well. Old memories tried to surface, but he couldn’t give them space. Couldn’t give them power.
Couldn’t allow himself to picture Ace on that rock above, throwing knives. Leaving him out here, seven years old and all alone.
Brady looked at the towering rock around him, preparing his body for that searing pain out of nowhere, as if he expected Ace to jump out and do what he’d always done. Brady wouldn’t put it past Ace to share with Elijah how he’d tortured his children.
Ace had tortured them each in different ways, and they’d each kept that a secret from each other, thinking it was an individual personal shame. After Gage’s ordeal, he’d told Brady about the ways Ace had tortured him.
Gage’s admission had prompted them all to share their secrets. Which Ace wouldn’t know. He’d think those secrets were ammunition, and wouldn’t it make sense for Elijah to have been given all the ammunition to hurt Brady and his brothers?
Maybe Ace was in jail, but that didn’t mean Elijah couldn’t put men up there, armed with knives and Brady’s nightmares.
The trail led right through the narrow chasm of rocks where Ace had often left Brady, only to torture him later. Where Brady had been forced away from his brothers to survive. On his own. As a child.
When he had nightmares, they all took place here, no matter how incomprehensible his dreams might be. Following that trail would be walking into his own personal hell.
I’ll never go back there. Not for any reason. That’s a promise I’m making to myself and I won’t ever break it. No matter what.
He could hear his own words, spoken to his brothers, to his grandmother, to anyone who’d listen during that first year they’d all been out and with Grandma and living a real life.
Brady could stop here. He could go back. He could wait for help. He didn’t have to brave his own personal hell.
Except Cecilia was at the end of this trail, and no matter what that twelve-year-old had told himself, there were reasons you broke promises to yourself. Reasons you did the things that scared you the most.
And that reason boiled down to one thing, always. A thing Ace didn’t understand, and Elijah probably didn’t either.
Love.
* * *
EVERYTHING IN CECILIA’S body hurt. Which wasn’t new, it was just worse when there was a gun to her head and she knew Brady would come after her and they could both end up dead.
She tried not to let herself think like that. Fatalism could be fatal in her current situation. She needed to believe in Brady, and Tucker and even herself, that they could find a way to survive this.
No matter what hurt, no matter how impossible it seemed, she had to believe or she’d never find a way to survive this.
“Ah, here we are,” Elijah said as if he were a waiter showing someone to their reserved table. Instead it was a tower of rock interrupted by a small crevice.
Without warning, he shoved her into that opening hard enough she stumbled and fell to her hands and knees. Which would have been his mistake if her body was cooperating. She would have immediately jumped up and disarmed him.
But her arms gave out on her so she fell onto her side, unfortunately her bad one, which hurt so badly she had to fight back tears and an encroaching blackness that wanted to take her away.
But she fought both away, breathing through the pain and the frustration. At first she’d thought he’d pushed her into a cave, but above her was bright blue sky. The air was hotter here, like the rocks were trapping it between them or radiating heat. She desperately wished she had her pack and could drink some water.
Though if she were wishing things, she supposed she should be wishing she wasn’t here at all. Or that she’d shot Elijah before he’d snuck up on her.
“On your feet now.”
Cecilia grimaced, but did as she was told. If it came down to it, she’d fight and run, but for now it seemed in her best interest to listen to him.
“You’re bleeding,” Elijah offered, with a slight frown. He almost sounded concerned, but that tone was belied by the fact he was aiming a gun point-blank at her forehead as he moved closer to her, studying the red stain that had seeped through her gray T-shirt.
He stepped closer, reaching out. Cecilia braced herself for pain, for something. But all Elijah did was carefully lift her shirt and look at the stab wound.
Cecilia tried to control her breathing, tried to keep a handle on her revulsion. She failed. Miserably. No matter that it was preferable to say, being shot, it was creepy. It made her skin crawl as he kept her shirt lifted and studied the wound.
“You really should have gotten some medical attention for that. No stitches?” He tsked, lifting his gaze to meet hers. “What were you thinking.”
She didn’t answer him. Why would she? Still, she kept his gaze rather than stare at the gun that was so close to her forehead she could hardly think about anything else.
“You know, Layla quite liked being hurt,” he said mildly. “Maybe you two have that in common.”
“And maybe I puke all over your shoes.”
Elijah lifted a shoulder as if it were of no concern of his. “I don’t mind a little force, a little hurt, but you would invariably do something stupid, and as much as you fancy yourself the center of this, I’m not here for you.”
She tried not to show her confusion, but Elijah’s smile told her she’d failed.
“Don’t worry. Brady will appear soon enough, ready to swoop in and save the day.” He tapped his wrist. “I’m surprised it’s taken two Wyatts this long, though. I wonder why it did take so long. Seems odd. Two strong, perfectly able-bodied men working together. Almost as if they, or one of them, wasn’t trying to take the men out.”
Cecilia’s blood went cold. She refused to take anything Elijah said at face value, but could that mean Tucker was working for Elijah?
Please God, n
o.
She didn’t speak until she knew she could do it and sound steady. Strong. “Brady will come with backup, and then where will you be?”
“He won’t come with backup.” Elijah let out a snort. “He’ll run after you immediately. Especially since you’re hurt. Wyatts and their noble pride are endlessly predictable.”
“And yet alive. All six of them. And not incarcerated, unlike a certain Wyatt.” Still, Elijah’s words created some doubt. Surely Brady wouldn’t come after her without backup... Except, wasn’t that what he’d done with Tucker? Taken off to help without thinking about how he’d get himself out of it.
No. He’d expected her to get them out of it. So, she had to. Somehow.
“You know, Cecilia, you’re making a grave mistake if you think I’m like Ace or your average thug. Killing leads to jail time. You don’t always need to kill someone to get what you want.”
She eyed the gun. If he wasn’t going to kill her...
His smile was slow and self-satisfied. “Now, don’t get too excited. Killing is often an excellent plan when it certainly can’t be traced back to you. Which is why we’ll wait for Brady’s grand entrance.”
“We know you’re Ace’s son.” It was a gamble. Maybe it would make him more inclined to kill her. But maybe it would set him off-balance enough to give her a chance to best him.
Instead, Elijah laughed. If they were in a different situation, she would have believed it an honest, cheerful, good-humored laugh. “You know I’m Ace’s son. You know that, huh?”
“Yes, I do.”
He leaned in close, so their noses almost touched and the steel of the gun touched her forehead.
“You know nothing, Cecilia. And you’re smart enough to know that, deep down. You’re in over your head. Completely lost and completely expendable. You think I care about a baby when I’m building an empire?”
Cecilia didn’t know how to parse that. He wasn’t after Mak? Then what was the point of the fire? Of threatening her at the rez? Why on Earth were they here if not for Mak?
