Page 75 of Rune’s Solace

CHAPTER THIRTY

MY PHONE LIT up with Sawyer’s name at ten to five in the morning, I grabbed it fast, because after everything I wanted to hear his voice more than I wanted to go on lying there not sleeping.

Rune was gone. Something important had come up a little before midnight. I didn’t hear what, only Chain’s fist on the door and Rune awake between one breath and the next, pulling his boots on in the dark. Rune had leaned over, kissed the top of my head and told me to stay put, stay inside, keep the door locked, he’d be back by sunrise. So I was alone in his cabin when the phone lit up.

“Sawyer?” I was already half smiling. “It’s five in the morning, you absolute — ”

Breathing.

“Sawyer?”

“He can’t come to the phone right now.”

And the bottom fell out of the world.

I knew the voice before he finished the second word. You don’t forget it. You spend your life trying and you don’t, it lives somewhere under your skin, that low, easy, unhurried voice, the one that used to come down a hallway toward a closed door that didn’t lock. I hadn’t heard it in three years and my body knew it in less than a second, went to ice, and the phone was suddenly very heavy in my hand.

“Hi, baby girl,” my father said. “Been a long time.”

I couldn’t make a sound.

“Now I know you’re there, I can hear you breathin’, so let’s not do the we don’t talk thing, we’re past that.” A pause, almost gentle. “You got real hard to get to. All them men, all that fence. Had to find me another door.” I heard movement, a scrape, and then his voice went off the phone, away from it. “Say somethin’ to her. Go on.”

“Amy — ” Sawyer’s voice was in pieces, high and shaking, nothing like him, no happy in it at all. “Amy, don’t, okay, don’t come, he’s — I’m sorry, I don’t know how he — don’t do what he says! — ”

A sound. A grunt, a scuffle, Sawyer’s voice cutting off, I was on my feet in the dark with my hand over my mouth and my heart trying to come up my throat.

“There,” my father said, back on the line, unbothered, like a man who’d stepped away to take a pot off the stove. “He’s alive. He’s got all his fingers, for now. Whether he keeps ’em, whether he keeps anything, that’s gonna be up to you and how good you listen. You always were a good listener when you had to be.”

“Don’t hurt him.” It came out of me in a whisper. It was all I had. “Please. He’s got nothing to do with — please, he’s just — ”

“I know what he is. I watched the two of you a long while.” Something shifted in his voice, something that made my skin crawl worse than the threats. “Watched you make a life here like the first one never happened. Like I never happened. New hair. New town. Little boyfriend.” A soft sound, almost a laugh. “You thought you got away from me, sugar. Nobody gets away from their daddy. I just been waitin’ on the right time to come get what’s mine.”

What’s mine.

“Here’s how it goes, and I’ll say it once, ’cause you’re smart, you always been smart.” Calm. Patient. The patience was the worst part, it always had been. “There’s an address. I’m gonna text it to you off this boy’s phone. You come to it. You come by yourself, and you come without a sound, and you don’t tell one single soul, not the old woman, not them bikers, and especially not that big one you been sleepin’ out in the woods with.”

The floor tilted.

He knew. He knew about Rune.

“That’s right,” he said, reading the silence. “I told you. I been watchin’. And I ain’t the only set of eyes on that compound of yours, either. I got people on it right now, tonight, watchin’ that gate and watchin’ them fences, so let me be real clear with you, Amy Rose. You wake anybody up. You leave a note. You so much as whisper to one of ’em on your way out. You show up with one single person behind you, or one truck follows you, or I catch one biker within a mile of where you’re goin’. And this boy dies. Right then. Right in front of nobody. And it’ll have been you that did it.” A beat. “You come alone and he walks. That’s the deal. That’s the only deal.”

And that, that last part, was the thing that finished me, because it was the exact pattern of my entire childhood, the sick way of it, be good, and quiet or someone gets hurt and it’s your fault, and he knew it, he built it into me.

“How do I know you’ll let him go?”

“You don’t.” Honest. He was always honest about the cruelty, that was the thing, he never once lied about what he was. “But you know for a fact what happens if you don’t come. So.” I heard him settle back. “Phone’s gonna buzz with an address in about one minute. You got till six to be standin’ at it. That’s plenty of time for a girl who knows how to slip out of somewhere without wakin’ the house. And you do know how.”

The line went dead.

* * *

The address came ten seconds later. A number on a county road I half knew, not far from here, and where there wasn’t much of anything else.

I stood in the middle of Rune’s cabin in the half-dark and shook, trying to find the part everybody had missed, some third choice where Sawyer didn’t die and I didn’t have to walk straight back into the thing I’d spent my life running from. But there wasn’t one. There was staying here and letting them hurt Sawyer because I was too scared to leave, or there was walking out that gate myself.

I hated that those were my choices.