Chapter Thirty-One
Shelby pulled Eliza away from Kyle and used her shirt to wipe Chase’s blood off her baby’s arm.
Eliza sat in Shelby’s lap, her face buried in her chest, crying softly. “Daddy owie.”
Shelby glared over at Kyle. “You didn’t have to hurt him.”
“He was keeping you from me. You’re my child. No one can keep me from you.”
She snarled at him. “Yet you just took his child from him. You would have taken her from me.”
“I gave you a choice. But I knew you’d come with us. You want us to be a family, the one you never had. The one I missed out on with Rebecca.”
“She didn’t belong to you. You took her from her family. You held her against her will.”
“No!” He slammed the knife against the steering wheel, then pointed it at her, Chase’s blood still smeared on it and his hand. “Shewanted to be with me.Sheloved me. I showed her how good we were together. I promised her a life where we would be happy away from everyone who wanted to keep us apart.”
“Did she even know you before you took her? Or didyou just not hear her when she told you she didn’t want anything to do with you?”
Everything about him, his shoulders, his eyes, the grin on his face, went soft. “Rebecca smiled at me from across the room. She wanted to go away with me. Every time I looked at her, she’d feel me watching, and she’d turn to me and smile.” Delusional asshole. He saw what he wanted to see in Rebecca. He’d created a story in his mind that Rebecca’s smiles meant something more than a polite gesture. He actually believed she secretly desired him. All from a look and a smile.
“And you believe that after losing my mother because of you that I would want anything to do with you?”
“They poisoned her against me. It made her crazy to be away from me. She felt like the only way out of the pain of losing me was to take her own life.”
“She tried to kill me as well.”
“That’s how distraught she was to lose me.” He really couldn’t see reality.
Kyle took a turn too fast and sent Shelby into the passenger door.
“Slow down before you kill us,” she snapped.
“We’re almost there.”
“Where?”
“Where we can be a family.”
She would never be able to get Kyle to understand or believe that she wanted nothing to do with him. So she saved her breath, held her baby in her arms, glanced at the watch on her wrist with the tracking device, and prayed someone got to them in time.
Chase let the paramedics look at his shoulder and side. He bit back a yelp the second they pressed thick gauzepads to his wounds. He’d been here, done this before, but you were never quite ready for the searing pain.
Hunt showed up five minutes after the paramedics, took one look at him, and swore. “He’s armed.”
“Hunting knife. Stings a little.”
Hunt swore again and lifted his chin to indicate the phone in Chase’s hands. “You tracking them?”
“We were wrong about him planning to take her to the cabin in the woods where he hid Rebecca.”
Hunt squatted next to him and looked at the map on Chase’s phone. “Where are they going?”
“Looks like he’s headed to his parents’ old house where he grew up. The one they lived in here before they moved their business down south.”
“That makes no sense. You’d think he’d want to hide them.”
“Why? He thinks they’re going to be a family. So why not go home.”