Page 10 of Shadows Relived
The kids had quieted to soft sniffles now that the panic had dulled to exhaustion. Meaghan glanced over again to check on them, reaching over to adjust Sophie’s seatbelt.
Lucas leaned against the window, watching the world blur past, his thumb in his mouth. She smoothed his hair.
Callen cleared his throat. “I know somewhere we can go. Small town, off the grid. There’s a cabin I hang out at when I want to get away from the world. It’ll be safe.
“I don’t care where we go,” she said tightly. “But these children stay with me until we can get them back to their parents. And don’t you dare try to sideline me again.”
He didn’t respond right away. Then, an exasperated whisper reached her ears. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
But he was lying. She could feel it.
And worse? It still hurt that he cared enough to lie to her.
CHAPTER 6
THE WOODS THICKENEDAROUND them the deeper they drove. Gnarled oak and slash pine crowded both sides of the narrow, uneven dirt road, their shadows long and jagged beneath the fading gold of afternoon sun. Overhead, Spanish moss hung like ancient lace, swaying faintly with every breeze. Callen’s car rattled over rocks and roots, the shocks doing a poor job of absorbing the bumps. Somewhere behind them, danger still stalked the world, but here, for the moment, only the hush of the forest kept them company.
Callen gripped the steering wheel tighter than necessary, jaw clenched as he took another turn off the already obscure back road. This wasn’t a trail listed on any tourist map. It had been a game trail once, and then later widened by off-grid campers and a few park rangers who didn’t mind forging their own path.
Blaze had offered to find a fallback location, but Callen already knew exactly where they were going. The moment the school had gone up in chaos, his gut told himto head here, to the cabin his father had built by hand before Callen ever knew what war smelled like or how grief could harden a man’s heart.
Nestled deep inside a forgotten fold of the state park, the cabin had once been their shared escape. Just him and his old man, chopping wood and skipping stones and pretending, if only for a weekend, that the world didn’t demand so damn much from them. The porch still bore the scrape marks from where young Callen had dragged his boots every summer, and he could still hear the echo of his father’s laugh carried on the wind.
He hadn’t been back since the funeral, but if he were honest with himself, it was the only place he had ever felt safe, so it was the one place he knew to go.
It wasn’t listed on any of the GSI fallback plans, which is also what made it perfect. It wasn’t just hidden; it was sacred.
“This is almost as much fun as a rollercoaster,” Lucas exclaimed, bouncing in his seat as he clapped his hands. At least one seemed over the scare from all the gunfire.
“Are we there yet?” Willie asked, his voice a whisper through the thick tension still crackling in the car.
“Almost,” Callen said, scanning the narrowing trail ahead as the tires crunched over gravel and roots. “Just hold on a little longer, bud.”
The words felt foreign in his mouth, like he was borrowing them from someone better suited for this, someone who knew how to talk to kids without sounding like he was mad at the entire world. And Sophie—God, she looked like a single word would shatter her she was so scared.
Callen’s gut twisted.
He wasn’t built for this. Kicking down doors, dragging corrupt diplomats out of third-world bunkers, intercepting threats before they landed on American soil, those he could handle. But scared kindergarteners? That was a battlefield he’d never trained for. There were no blueprints for what to say when a little girl asked if she was going to die.
He adjusted his grip on the steering wheel, knuckles gone white.
He should’ve insisted they hand the kids off before they jumped in the car. Found a trusted civilian team or another teacher or anyone. They would have been out of danger the minute they were away from Meaghan. But no. Meaghan had made sure that wasn’t an option. She had trusted no one else, not with these kids.
And damn it, a part of him had trusted no one else with her.
Still, he didn’t belong in this moment. He could still smell the gunpowder from the attack, feel the little boy shaking in his arms, the wild tangle of Meaghan’s hair when she turned to scream over the gunfire. Now here they were, bouncing through a forest, kids in the backseat like fragile cargo, and him feeling like a ticking bomb behind the wheel.
The road curved again, the trees thickening as the cabin finally came into view: familiar, quiet, and for the first time in hours, something that didn’t make his pulse spike.
A breath he hadn’t realized he was holding slipped out.
“Almost there,” he muttered again, though thistime he wasn’t sure who he was trying to reassure, the kids or himself.
From the passenger seat where she had moved on one of their stops, Meaghan said nothing. She held her arms folded tight over her chest, eyes locked on the dense woods like they might reach through the glass and swallow them whole. The tension radiating off her was practically tangible: sharp-edged, silent, and simmering with a fury only Meaghan Harrington could carry with that much control. He almost wished he had left her in the backseat with the kids.
He remembered that look. Had seen it before, years ago, when they were kids and her father had laid down some rule that made little sense to her. She didn’t yell. Didn’t stomp or flail. She went cold, weaponizing her silence.
But he wasn’t twelve anymore, and this wasn’t about sneaking into the neighbor’s pool or ditching a piano recital. Not that he’d ever tell anyone he took piano lessons.
