Page 50 of The Cabin-A Reverse Harem Romance
When I got around the car, Trevor was standing there, staring at the open door. I couldn’t see into the car from my position, so I didn’t know what he was seeing. Swallowing hard, I forced myself to cover the final distance until I was standing next to him.
When I saw that the car was empty, my heart swelled. She was alive. I had no idea how she could have walked away from a wreck that looked that bad, but she obviously had. Unfortunately, the empty car meant that Brad had too. It was that last thought that let loose that avalanche of grief and fear inside of me again.
“Where is she?” I asked.
Trevor shook his head. “I don’t know, man.”
I waved to Chase and Sean to get their asses down there. It took a few minutes for them to find safe passage down, but then we were all standing there, staring at the empty vehicle, none of sure what to do next.
“We need to find her,” Chase said.
“How?” I asked. “They could be anywhere.”
Sean turned and was walking around, searching the ground around us. Tracks. Of course. Just like we’d used to follow the car, we could hopefully find footprints in the snow leading away from the scene of the accident. I didn’t know if we’d find anything though, not with the wind from this storm whipping through and obliterating everything.
The others noticed what Sean was doing too, and we all spread out, searching for any sign of their passing. I was losing hope quickly though. The wind from the storm was blowing powder everywhere, high drifts were forming, and there wasn’t much to see.
“Over here!”
The voice was faint thanks to the wind, but when I heard it, I spun on my heel and saw Chase standing at the edge of the forest, waving frantically to us. The three of us rushed over to where he was standing. Chase was excitedly pointing to the path that let into the trees.
There was a thick dusting of snow on the ground, but the trees around us were thick, as was the canopy overhead. Though the wind still blew through, it had a harder time wiping everything out, thanks to the foliage. On the ground in front of us were two sets of prints. I stared at them, feeling a bloom of hope burst inside of me, though I was careful to temper it.
“Is that blood?” Trevor asked.
We knelt down, and sure enough, bright crimson against the pristine white of the snow, were drops of blood. The sight of it sent a chill through me colder than the air that enveloped us. It wasn’t a whole lot, thankfully, and we didn’t know if the blood came from Elle or Brad, so I did my best to quash the fears that were rising up within me. I couldn’t afford to lose my head right now.
“She’s hurt,” Sean said.
“We don’t know that,” I replied. “It could be his.”
“Frankly, I’m surprised there isn’t more on the ground,” we all looked at Chase, and he shrugged. “That accident was pretty bad. That we’re seeing drops instead of pools is a good thing, guys.”
As he spoke, I felt the knots in my shoulders loosen, but only slightly. He was right. The fact that there weren’t pools of blood either in the car, or in the snow, was a good thing. It meant that she couldn’t be that badly hurt. More than likely, if she was, it would be superficial. “Thank God for the safety designers at BMW,” Sean cracked.
We all nodded. I looked down the path further into the forest, curious where they could have gone.
“They’ll need to go to ground somewhere,” I said. “They wouldn’t have been able to stay out in this shit. Not without risking frostbite and exposure.”
“Agreed,” Sean said. “But where would they have gone to ground to, is the question.”
“Only one way to find out,” Trevor said.
“We can’t afford to go busting in there half-cocked,” Sean warned.
“Dude, he kidnapped Elle,” Trevor said, his face flushed, but not from the cold. “If he hadn’t wrecked his fucking car, he could be halfway to anywhere by now, and we’d never see her again.”
“I get that,” I said. “But, we need to keep our cool. We need to keep our heads. If we find where they’re at, and go busting in with guns blazing, we could get Elle hurt. Do you really want that on your head, man?”
“I only wish we had guns,” Sean groused. “It’d be over in heartbeat.”
“C’mon now,” Chase said in his best drill sergeant voice. “We’ve got something better than guns – we’ve got training by the goddamn U.S. Army Rangers, which makes us the deadliest motherfuckers on this planet, with a gun or without.”
We all chuckled a bit, but I knew deep down, we all believed it. We were very well trained, and were deadly with a weapon, or without. My hope though, was that we wouldn’t get to a point where we’d need a gun, or to employ our training at all. My hope was that we could track them down and get Elle back with us without a fight.
