I looked over the terrain on the map. It was pretty fucking boring—nothing but rock and ice. I could see the ridges Landon spoke about, running up and down the sides of the mountain.
“They’ll offer some protection,” I agreed, “but also the possibility of getting myself trapped. If someone’s above me, they’ll have a definite advantage.”
“Maybe,” Landon said. “When it comes to pure strength—either that in your hands or the strength of exceptional firepower—taking the high ground will give you the advantage. When it comes to strategy, that’s what everyone is going to assume.”
I sat back a bit and looked at him, realizing almost immediately what he meant. We’d had this conversation many times over the years I had trained with him.
“I should do the opposite.”
“It will be the unexpected,” Landon said with a nod. “You can pull that off where others can’t. Remaining hidden is what will bring you victory.”
“I got ya.”
“I’ve got one other thing to help you out.”
Landon stood and headed over to his Jeep. He opened up the back and pulled out a large duffel bag, which he dropped at my feet before leaning over to open it.
“Kevlar,” he stated simply.
I looked over the rough-feeling black vest.
“Arden is definitely a one-shot-one-kill man,” Landon said, “but this could still help you out.”
“He goes for the head shot every time. He doesn’t miss often.”
“If he does, this could save you.”
“It’ll work against Dytalov’s knives, too,” I noted.
“It will,” Landon agreed. “It will also give you a little extra warmth in the torso, which you’re going to need.”
I slipped off my parka and put the vest on underneath it. It was a little snug, but I could move well enough. If it managed to keep me from getting cut or shot, it would definitely be worth it.
“Let’s call it a day,” Landon said as I slipped the vest back off. He packed it in the duffel and handed the bag over to me.
I looked up at the sun, which didn’t seem to make any perceivable difference in the temperature. It was still high in the sky.
“Kinda early, isn’t it?” I wasn’t going to argue with him or anything. I was already gathering up my stuff to make sure he didn’t change his mind. We’d been hard at it for days upon days, and my head was overloaded. I wasn’t even sure what the date was anymore.
“Well, it’s a long trip into town.”
“We’re going into Leaf Rapids?”
“No,” Landon said, “Thompson. Franks wants to chat, and I thought you deserved a little reward for your efforts.”
Twenty minutes later, we were in Landon’s Range Rover and heading down the snowy back roads to highway 391. The trek to Thompson was long and uneventful, which made it seem even longer. Knowing Raine was going to be on the other side of the journey didn’t help with the perceived passage of time at all.
I’m going to see her—really see her, talk to her, touch her.
We hadn’t spent more than a few hours apart since the night I pulled her onto the raft and away from my sinking ship. Being without her was physically painful.
We drove past the airport, into the city from the north side, and then headed south all the way through town. Landon maneuvered the vehicle off the main road and headed towards a cluster of buildings near a quarry.
I rubbed my hands on my pants nervously. I wasn’t sure why I was feeling so jittery except out of a desire to see Raine. Maybe it was because I’d only spoken to her once since Landon had hauled her out of our condo. I didn’t really know how I was going to be received or what she had been through since I last saw her.
My skin prickled at the thought. If there was a scratch on her, someone would end up paying for it in blood.
Landon drove around the main building and parked in the back near a cluster of smaller sheds. I jumped out of the car and followed him across the gravel to one of the doors. It appeared unguarded, but when I looked around, I could see several people around the area with weapons. They were watching us as we approached the door.
Landon knocked, and I shuffled the gravel around with the toe of my boot until someone opened the door and let us in.
“Mister Stark,” the man behind the door said.
I looked up but realized he was talking to Landon.
“Hello, Roger,” Landon said politely. “Where’s Franks?”
“In the back,” the man indicated with a pointed thumb over his shoulder. “He’s expecting you.”
“Do me a favor,” Landon said, “and take Sebastian here over to the other building. He’s going to visit with Miss Gayle.”
“Sure thing.” Roger held out his hand, shook mine, and then took me over to the slightly smaller building behind the one Landon had entered. My heart started beating faster as we approached.
She’s in there.
Despite the cold, my palms were beginning to sweat. I watched as Roger took out a key and unlocked the padlock on the outside of the door. I wondered if the lock was more to keep her in or others out.
He opened the door.
The inside of the building was set up like a small apartment. There was a couch, loveseat, coffee table, and television on one side and an eat-in kitchen off to the left. A short hallway led directly away from the door, and I could see four openings into other rooms, presumably bedrooms and a bathroom.
Raine was sitting on the couch, dressed in jeans and wrapped up in a long, blue sweater. She looked up as the door opened, and her eyes went wide.
“Bastian!”
“I’ll leave you to it,” Roger said quietly as he took a backwards step to remove himself from the shed and shut the door behind me.
Raine nearly tackled me as she wrapped her arms underneath mine and grabbed me in a death-grip. I tightened my arms around her and tucked my face into her hair. I’d almost forgotten what she smelled like, and the scent of her hair and skin was overpowering. I squeezed my eyes shut and held her to my chest as her arms came up around my shoulders, anchoring me to her.
“I’m here, baby,” I told her. “I’ve got you.”
Just the words coming out of my mouth drove red-hot anger through my body. My teeth clenched as my hands gripped her back. Like the sacred promise I had vowed to her in the life raft when there was no fucking hope for survival, I’d held her to me and said, “I’ve got you.” But I hadn’t been there for her. When she really needed me, I wasn’t there.
“I’m so fucking sorry for all of this,” I said.
She shook her head against my chest.
“Not your fault,” she claimed.
“I’m hardly blameless,” I countered. “I never should have told you anything about my life. If I hadn’t, maybe they would have left you alone.”
“You don’t know that,” she said. “They very well could have come after me anyway. You know they could have.”
She was right. Even if she knew nothing about my connections to organized crime or the death-match tournaments I’d completed to entertain the far-too-rich-for-their-own-good sycophants of the underworld, Franks and his group still could have decided it was best to get her out of the way.
“I missed you so much,” Raine said quietly.
“I missed you, too.”
“We’ve never been apart before,” Raine said. “I don’t like it.”
“I know. I hate it.”
I breathed in her scent again, trying to force the memory to lodge in my brain somewhere so I could keep it with me. I felt both better and worse being in her presence—better because I could touch her and be with her, but worse because she was being held prisoner in a fucking shed in the middle of Nowhere, Manitoba.
I pulled back a little and looked her over.
“Are you okay?” I asked. My chest tightened as I waited for her answer.
“Yes,” she said. “A little annoyed by all of this, but I’m all right.”
>
“No one hurt you?” I braced myself for her answer. If anyone had laid a hand on her, I’d be ripping out throats before the tournament began.
“No,” she said. “Scared me a bit, but no one hurt me.”
I breathed a sigh of relief and held her closer.
“Do you have everything you need? Are they getting you plenty of food and whatever else you want?”
“Mostly.” Raine scowled.
“What is it?” I demanded. If Franks’ cohorts were holding back something she needed, they were going to have to answer to me.
“They won’t let me have internet access,” she said with a sigh. “I didn’t have my phone on me when Landon showed up at the condo, so I can’t call anyone. I can’t reach my professors, and exams are next week. I’m going to fail the whole semester.”
Raine’s schooling had been the farthest thing from my mind. If I was totally honest, I couldn’t have cared less about it. She could fucking drop out, and it wouldn’t make any difference to me. There was nothing in the foreseeable future that was going to require her to have a degree in ecology.
It was important to her though, and it was obviously stressing her out. She’d worked hard and nearly had straight A’s in her classes. Though I didn’t ultimately care, I could understand why she wouldn’t want all that work to be wasted.
Kind of like building a kick-ass shelter out of nothing and then having a helicopter haul you away from it all.
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said.
“If I could just get a hold of them and tell them I was…indisposed, maybe they would let me make up the work in the summer or something.”
There was no way in hell Landon was going to let her talk to anyone, but I didn’t want to bring that up just yet. I had a couple of ideas I thought might work.
“I’ll take care of it,” I told her. “I don’t know exactly how just yet, but I’ll figure something out.”
She nodded, and I was glad she took me at my word. Considering what I had gotten her into, she had every right not to believe a fucking thing that came out of my mouth. I wouldn’t have blamed her. Even if she had come to understand that all of this was for her own protection, it was still a shitty way to live, even temporarily.
Raine reached up and ran her fingers over my jaw.
“How about you?” she asked. “How have you been sleeping?”
I shrugged one shoulder.
“I’ve been so exhausted,” I told her, “I’ve pretty much dropped off as soon as training was done for the day.”
It wasn’t completely true, but I didn’t want her thinking I wasn’t sleeping at all. The last thing she needed was to worry about me. It didn’t work, though, and as Raine eyed me, it became clear that she wasn’t buying it.
“I wake up cold at night,” I admitted. “I reach out for you, but you’re not there. I usually can’t get to sleep again after that. I guess the plus side is there isn’t enough time for nightmares.”
I gave her a half smile, hoping she’d see the joke in it, but she didn’t return the gesture.
“I can’t sleep, either,” Raine said with a nod. “I keep thinking of all the times I woke up with you practically on top of me, and how annoyed I would get because you were sweaty. Now I wouldn’t mind that at all.”
“I like making you sweaty,” I said with a raised eyebrow.
Raine leaned her body against mine and wrapped her arms around my neck. I held her around the waist as she placed her cheek on my chest and just stood there for a minute.
I looked over her head and around the room. It wasn’t too bad, really. It was spacious enough, but I had to wonder if the television actually got any reception out here in the middle of nowhere. I couldn’t imagine anyone had gone through the trouble of connecting cable for her.
Next to the couch, there was a small pile of Legos.
“Bastian,” Raine said softly as she looked up at my face, “there’s someone you need to meet.”
“Alex?” I swallowed hard as I kept looking at the plastic bricks.
“He’s in the other room,” she said, indicating one of the doors down the hallway.
I nodded and relaxed my grip on her. I took a deep breath and started to step away, but Raine grasped my arm.
“Bastian?”
“Yeah?”
“He’s amazing.” The way her eyes lit up told me everything. She loved him already, and loved him deeply.
I didn’t ask for any more information but took a few steps to the bedroom door. Inside were a twin-sized bed and a small dresser in dark wood. There was a mismatched nightstand with a small light in the shape of a turtle. A bookshelf lined with Doctor Seuss and Captain Underpants books stood in the corner near the closet. There were a dozen or so books on the floor in front of the bookshelf with a few Star Wars action figures poised on top of them.
In the center of the chaotic room, a tow-headed boy sat at a small plastic table. The table was cluttered with crayons, markers, and colored pencils, and the boy was bent over a piece of paper scribbling madly. He didn’t look up. He was completely focused on his task.
For a few minutes, I just watched him as he worked, observing everything I could about him. He was right handed, and even with the way he was bent over, I could tell that his eyes matched mine exactly. There was something about how he leaned into his work and the intense expression on his face that was also very familiar.
I didn’t have any pictures of myself from when I was a child. Apparently none of my foster parents ever took any, or if they did, they didn’t give them to me. I never really considered what I had looked like back then, but now I knew. I could see myself as a six-year-old, sitting there at that table in a room just like this one.
I couldn’t quite see the drawing Alex was making, and when I took a little step forward to get a better angle, he looked up at me. For a moment, we stared at each other without speaking. He tilted his head to one side to study me, and I realized I was making the same motion as I watched him. He dropped his gaze down to my feet and then raised it back up to my face.
“You’re tall,” he said.
I grinned. I started to open my mouth, but I realized the sentence that had formed in my head included an F-bomb, which probably wouldn’t be a good idea. I quickly thought of something else.
“Maybe you’re short,” I suggested.
Alex looked up at me and let out a long, exaggerated sigh as he tossed his hands in the air.
“I’m only six,” he replied. “Someday I’ll be bigger.”
“I bet you’ll be as big as me when you’re older.”
He tilted his head to one side and looked at me intently.
“Maybe,” he said. He turned back to his drawing.
“What are you making?” I asked as I took a second step into the room.
“A picture.”
“Of what?”
“You.”
My heart skipped and my diaphragm constricted. For a moment, I couldn’t breathe.
“Me?” I finally choked out.
He nodded and went back to coloring.
I stepped the rest of the way into the room to get a better look. The drawing was definitely of a person, but I wasn’t too sure anyone would think it was me. The figure’s head was just as big as his body, and Alex had colored in red shorts over stick legs. The arms were large balloon shapes, and the hands were little round balls with five tiny sticks coming out of them.
I couldn’t help but smile.
“How do you know it’s me?” I asked.
“Right here,” Alex said as he pointed to the blue dots on the oversized head. “Your eyes are the same color as mine. Raine said so.”
“She did, huh?”
“Uh huh.”
I wondered what else she had told him.
I pulled out the extra chair from the other side of the table and dragged it around to sit next to Alex. My ass barely fit in the seat, and I was a little worried it was going to break under my weigh
t. I shifted a little, deciding the chair would at least hold me for a while, and looked down at the simple piece of printer paper covered in crayon marks.
“What are these?” I asked, pointing to a couple of objects near the feet of the figure.
“Dumbbells,” he said. He looked up, and his eyes traveled over my arms. “You work out a lot. That’s why your muscles are so big.”
He pointed at the balloon arms.
“Well, that makes sense,” I said.
We sat in silence as Alex continued to draw. I knew I ought to say something else, but I didn’t know what it should be. I hadn’t spent any time around kids since I was one myself, and I had no idea how to interact with them. He obviously knew something about me, but how far that knowledge reached was a mystery. Did he only know about me through Raine, or had Jillian divulged information as well? If she had, what would she have said?
I was totally lost, so I decided sticking to something simple would be best.
“It’s a good drawing,” I finally said.
He stopped drawing and looked at me with a creased forehead and slightly narrowed eyes.
“Are you going to be my dad now?” he asked bluntly.
Whatever he had been told, it was enough for him to understand some of what was happening. I wanted to ask him what he knew about me and the death of his mother, but I couldn’t bring myself to change the tone of the setting quite so much. It was the first time we had ever laid eyes on each other, and I wasn’t going to fuck it up.
“I’d like to be,” I said.
“Okay.” He turned back to the drawing and started to make a second figure in the picture. This person was smaller than the image of me, with no balloon arms but the same blue dots for eyes.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“Me,” Alex said as he shrugged his shoulder. “If you’re going to be my dad, I have to be in the picture, too.”
Apparently, that was all there was to it.
“I guess that makes sense,” I replied with a nod. “Will anyone else be in the picture?”
He placed the end of the crayon up against his lip, creating a little depression there. He stared down at the picture in contemplation.