Page 35 of Mason

I expect whoever it is to walk to the water’s edge to check for me, but they don’t. I listen to them crunch back and forth and mutter curses under their breath, too far away to distinguish which of my kidnappers drew the short straw to check on me today.

I hold perfectly still and try to stop the chattering of my teeth, an impossible feat now that I’m halfway toward becoming a television dinner for a lucky bear.

“Emily!” The voice echoes through the barren forest, projecting across the open swamp ahead.

Whoever it is has to see the lovely smattering of blood down the hill. I know I’m leaving a puddle around myself, the coat pulled down over my legs, shielding my eyes from the damage. I don’t want to die looking at that.

If there’s a God, he’ll let the idiot up there think I drowned and send him home. At least then I’ll die in peace by my own doing, not assisted toward the light via a raging kidnapper.

But like everything else in my life, this situation isn’t as open and shut. The ground crunches and tree branches crack, every new sound bringing fate closer and closer until suddenly, he’s almost on top of me, standing on the other side of the log.

My scalp tingles, expecting a bullet at any moment.

But it doesn’t come.

“You can come with me, or you can stay here,” my pursuer says. It’s the man who pinged me in the head with a Snickers bar. He doesn’t sound as angry as I imagined, and his words shock me. He’s giving me a choice.

Chewing over his offer, I adjust my grip on my legs, my fingers starting to go numb in their current position.

“You’ll die if you stay here, Emily,” he warns. “This is a swamp. It’s impossible to cross in this weather. And even if I call your father and he brings in a goddamn helicopter, you’ll be dead by nightfall. Not by my hand, but by another. There’s a bounty on your head.”

He’s lying. Papa owns the city. If he can’t keep me safe, no one can. Especially not these two morons. They can’t even keep me in a damn cabin.

“I haven’t lied to you once,” he continues, seeming to read my damn mind. “Freezing to death isn’t fun, and neither is being shot or stabbed. The latter two hurt like hell. I have blankets back at the cabin. I’ll make a fire, and we can pretend this didn’t happen.”

Curling up in a blanket in front of a fire sounds amazing right about now. Fuck, sitting back in that grimy bathroom would be heaven.

“You don’t need to die, kid.” He says it with pity that I don’t want.

But I also don’t want to die.

The falling rain is only getting heavier. The drops fatter. Colder. Unforgiving. This isn’t peaceful. This is torture. The movies are full of shit.

“I’m not a kid,” I protest, eager for this all to be over, to be back in the damn cabin in front of a fire and out of these soaked clothes. I won’t even mind the handcuffs at this point.

“Then stop acting like one,” he chastises.

What little heat I have left rushes to my cheeks. “I’m not.”

“Kids run away.” He sighs, his hands jutting over my head to offer assistance. “Stand so I can lift you out of there.”

I ignore his help, trying to stand on my own. “I fell into the water.” I don’t want to admit it, but there’s no sense lying to this man. He’s seeing me at my absolute worst. I have nothing left to hide.

My legs are rubber, the limbs struggling to right themselves. It’s like being drugged all over again, only this time it’s cold-induced. A mixture of searing heat and cold battle across the skin, the drenched coat and dress already stiffening around me.

After watching me topple over twice, the man tires of waiting and steps over the log with relative ease despite its size. I’m pretty sure he’s wearing a suit under his dress coat, and his black slacks bear a few scratches from the thorns. His cheeks glow red from the cold, his hair a tousle of dark golden and crystal rain drops. “Can you stand?”

I grip at the log’s grooved trunk and try to pull myself to my feet again before shaking my head in a wordless answer. My legs aren’t cooperating and alarm bells sound. Something is terribly wrong, but I try not to show it. If I fractured something in the fall, I’m royally fucked. He won’t take me to a hospital.

His long fingers sweep the icy fabric of the coat cloaking me—his coat. “Take this off.”

“It’s raining!” I hiss, pulling it close. He’s out of his mind to ask for it back now.

“It’s only making you colder. I’ll give you this.” He shrugs out of his dress coat and rests it on the log. A white button-down lies underneath with a loose tie dangling from his neck. What the hell? Who wanders around in a suit? Who is this guy?

I don’t want to accept the help from him, but I can’t handle another second of the cold or the wet. I know the coat will be warm from his body, and I’ll do anything for warmth. Even trust him.

My fingers fumble over my coat’s buttons, rolling the round clasps endlessly rather than unfastening them. It feels like my hands belong to someone else and I’m giving commands through a smokescreen.

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