Cade
My body temperaturewas well above normal. The hot blood cut through my veins as Brantley sped past the school and continued on to where the GPS was taking us. There was no time to call anyone. There was no other thought in any of our minds other than following the little red dot on Isaiah’s phone that was leading us right to Journey and Gemma.
“What were they thinking?” Brantley asked, smacking his hand onto the wheel. My teeth had left marks on my fist from digging them into my flesh, which was the only thing keeping me from completely raging out in the backseat. All I felt was fear—unbending, panicky fear. The same fucking fear I felt that night Isaiah was holding Journey’s bloody, lifeless body in his arms.
“I don’t know,” Isaiah confessed. “If they were leaving, for any reason at all, why wouldn’t they fucking take someone?”
“And who the fuck locked Shiner in his room?”
We all knew the answer, and we were all so fucking sick of saying it.
Bain.
Like a beacon in the dark, there was Headmaster Ellison’s car parked crookedly on the side of the abandoned road. This part of town housed the homeless. Most of the buildings were vacant and without power or windows. Piss and trash laid near the plowed road, and not a single fucking streetlamp worked.
“Wait, is that Gemma?”
Isaiah was out of the car before Brantley put it in park. His door was left open, and he jogged across the road with his black hoodie pulled up over his head. Gemma dove into his arms, and my heart sunk lower and lower as I searched the area around her.
Where is Journey?
“Stay calm, Cade. Getting overworked means you lose your ability to think clearly. Let’s go see what’s going on before you fucking lose it.”
I didn’t tell Brantley, but it was too late for that. My heart hammered, my pulse thrummed, my blood rushed, and my mind spun in directions I didn’t want to head toward.
“Cade.” Gemma pulled out of Isaiah’s arms, and I paused when I saw the tears rushing down her cheeks. She was holding Journey’s knife, and my insides burned. No. “They took her.”
“Who?” The edge in my tone sounded like my father’s, but I couldn’t focus on that.
“I don’t know. But Bain came shortly after we got here. It was a man who wasn’t happy to see him. I think it was his father.” She grabbed onto my shirt, and her frantic eyes were just as fearful as mine. “Check the tracking on my phone. I slipped it into Bain’s hand before he went with them. She had no choice, Cade. The address in the email was just a meeting spot. Sister Mary isn’t here.”
“Sister Mary?” I asked, backing away and heading for the car.
“What email?” Brantley asked.
“She got an email from Sister Mary’s email address that said if she wanted to keep Sister Mary alive, then she had to come here without you guys. I told her I was coming with her because it wasn’t safe.”
Fucking shit. My determined, kind-hearted, selfless girl going straight into fucking danger to save someone else.
“Cade?”
I turned back as I continued to jog toward the car.
“Bain was with her, so try not to worry. I don’t think he is who he says he is.”
Oh, I already fucking know that.
The winding roadsblurred as my hands tightened on the wheel, and my stomach turned and flipped with every curve of asphalt. Journey’s location had stopped, and I was both thankful and fearful. If it had stopped, what were they doing to her? What did they plan? Was Slave there?
The questions continued to pound through my head, and a breath was lodged in the very pit of my chest. For some reason, my mother’s face popped up as I sped the car up to ninety, praying to God there wasn’t a patrolman hiding somewhere with his finicky speed radar.
My mother thought I was a replica of my father. She feared that my heart would harden and I’d become just as corrupt as he was. But she was wrong, and I didn’t quite understand how she couldn’t see it. Would my father race toward her if she were taken? Would my father run through every fucked-up scenario in his head that he was sure to face, trying to figure out how to save everyone involved except for the ones responsible? My father preached, day after day, that becoming selfless to another person was the moral of life—it just had to be for the right person.
But he chose wrong.
I was choosing right, and even if my mother thought the worst of me, I wasn’t going to let that poisonous betrayal make me hate her. After all, she was the only one in my life that tried to redeem the shit my father would whisper to me in the bleak night, standing over a dead body. I couldn’t hate her, even if she hated me.
Pulling up to another abandoned building, way on the outskirts of town, I parked the car and jumped out a second later. I knew what this place was. I’d been here with my father. It was a meeting spot for a gun exchange. The county line was only a few blocks ahead, and the closer I got to the caution-taped door with the yellow tape flying through the wintry wind like a loose ribbon, I cracked my knuckles and felt for my knife.