Page 156 of Distress Signal
“Glad you’re not dead, by the way,” I said to Lainey absently.
Lainey crawled toward me until she reached the end of herown restraint, then dropped onto her stomach and stretched out to her full length, a hand extended toward me. I mirrored her, and when we reached for each other, our fingertips barely brushed.
The simple touch was a balm to my soul.
Despite our circumstances, Lainey grinned.
“I fucking knew you’d find me.”
I gestured to my restraint. “Not the rescue I imagined.”
Lainey asked, “How long have you been in town?”
I returned with a question of my own. “How long have I beenhere?”
“Maybe six hours? Hard to be exact when I don’t have a watch, so that’s my best guess.”
Okay, not as long as I expected.
Squeezing my eyes shut, the ache in my brain penetrating the adrenaline coursing through me at seeing my sister alive, I tried to focus.
“So it’s early on Sunday, the…”
“Twenty-seventh,” Lainey confirmed. “Now, when did you get to town?”
“June seventh.”
“I fuckingknew it,” she crowed happily, then shifted closer to the wall behind her, where I could make out a series of hash marks scoured into the wood paneling.
One of the marks was circled.
“How did you make those?”
Holding up her hands, I took in the state of her nails. Several of them were broken and cracked, but a surprising number of her acrylics had managed to hang on through four months of growth. “If I ever make it back to Tennessee, I’ll have to tip my nail girl more next time. These fuckers willnotcome off. But that’s not the point.
“I swear to Aphrodite,” she continued, invoking her favorite goddess and tapping the gouged oval, “Ifeltwhen you got here.”
Exactly how I’d always known she wasn’t dead.
She tapped another, maybe five days later, and stated, “And this night, I?—”
“I had a dream,” I cut her off. “Of this place.”
Clapping excitedly, she said, “Oh my goddesses, it fucking worked?!”
I nodded. “It felt so real, I immediately told Finn about it.”
Lainey smirked. “So you did reconnect with your sexy soldier after all.”
“I did,” I whispered, my heart aching at the thought of him. He had to be going out of his mind, wondering what happened to me.
“You love him.”
My sister knew me better than anyone. Even after four months apart, I wasn’t surprised she’d immediately figured it out.
“I do. And he loves me,” I said, my grin growing to match my sister’s. “Which means he’ll come for us. Goddesses, it’s good to see you. We’ve been looking foryoufor months.”
“Glad to see that worked out well for you.”
