Page 31 of Bird on a Blade (Hunter’s Heart #1)

CHAPTER THIRTY

EDIE

S awyer takes me for a walk after a dinner I make for him, the least I could do since he bleached the entire church spotless: an autumn salad with beets and rutabagas he picked up at my request in Altarida a few days ago, goat cheese I keep in a plastic baggie in the ice chest with his beer, a healthy sprinkling of mystery nuts he gathered from somewhere in the woods. Plus bread and butter. I ate two slices without even thinking about it.

It’s dark out by the time we finish eating, but Sawyer lights our path with a hurricane lamp, the little gas flame casting a wide circle of yellow light. It shines through the pale, wispy fog curling through the mountains, making all the shadows long and crawling. With the constant rustle of dead leaves, it feels like Halloween’s tonight, not a week away.

“I like walking at night,” Sawyer tells me. “And today was, ah, a long day.”

“That’s one way of putting it.” I bump up against him as we pick our way through the dark, and he reacts immediately, snaking his arm down to grab my hand and braid our fingers together. I glance over at him, touched by his sweetness, but he’s just looking straight ahead, brow heavy.

“I want to show you something,” he says.

My chest tightens up. “I really don’t need to see?—”

He barks out a laugh. “Jesus Christ, Edie, I ain’t gonna show the body.” He squeezes my hand. “I wanted to show you the old pier. It’s my favorite place out here.”

“A pier?” I frown. There’s a swimming hole near Camp Head Start, a pinched-off alcove of cold water from some nameless creek. But it never had a pier.

“Yeah, it’s ancient. Nobody uses it anymore.” He glances down at me, his real face carved up like his killer’s mask by the light from the hurricane lamp. “Except me.”

He tugs me forward, out of the clearing and into the woods. I press up close to him, and he shifts his arm accordingly, wrapping it around my waist so he can guide me along the path with a firm, protective air. “City girl,” he mutters, his breath blowing across my hair.

“Never denied it.”

He laughs. “It’s what I like about you.” He pauses. “One of the things.”

I smile at that, small and happy in a way I know I shouldn’t feel. And yet I do. It’s becoming so much easier to just give myself over to it.

He ducks us through the tangle of tree branches, his movements quick and agile, like he can see in the dark. Maybe he can. Maybe the hurricane lamp is for my benefit. All I know is that I never once trip on a wayward branch or step into a puddle of mud. It’s too cold for snakes and insects. Maybe it’s too cold for wolves, too.

“We’re almost there,” he says softly. “Can you hear the water?”

I stop and listen. All I hear is wind and dead leaves. “No. Just the forest.”

“Well, it’s there. C’mon. ”

He pushes aside a low-hanging tree branch and holds out the lamp. I duck through, stepping into darkness?—

And then take a deep gasping breath at what I see.

Stars. Thousands and thousands of stars, so many that they bleed together into a puddle of light. They hang above a vast spread of darkness that catches their glow in fits and starts. The New River, I realize.

“It’s beautiful,” I breathe.

“We’re near the top of the mountain.” Sawyer comes up behind me, his hand pressing into my upper back. I’m distantly aware that he’s extinguished the hurricane lamp so all we have is the light of the stars. “And tonight’s a dark moon, so we’d have a good view of the Milky Way.”

“The Milky Way?” I squeak, turning to look at him in the dark. He has his head tilted back, his eyes on the stars.

“Yeah, figured you hadn’t seen it, city girl.” He points at a bright band of light arching across the sky. “That’s it right there. Mama used to always point it out to me. She said we were safest in places where you can see it.”

Isolated places, he means. Places where no one lives, where two killers can go into hiding. I shiver a little. But I also draw closer to him. And he accepts, pulling his arm around my shoulders.

“The pier’s down there.” He gestures toward the water. I can’t really see anything in the dark. Only the light, and the absence of it. “I’ve got a boat tied up. You know.” His body shrugs against mine. “Just in case.”

I don’t say anything. It would ruin it, anything I could say right now. So I lean into him, breathing in the cedary forest scent of his skin. He nuzzles the top of my head, rubs his hand along my arm.

“I thought it might be easier,” he says in a low voice. “To be someplace beautiful when we talk about your ex-husband. ”

I stiffen against him, even though I understand where he’s coming from. I do. “About killing him, you mean.”

Sawyer keeps running his hand over my arm, over and over. “Killing him before he kills you.”

I take a deep breath. Another. Another. Another. Sawyer doesn’t say anything about it, and I’m grateful for that.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” he says. “I got an idea. Thought I’d see what you think of it, though.”

He’s talking about premeditated murder. But I’m not sure what else I expected.

“An idea?” I say softly, letting my gaze fall on the stars’ reflection in the river.

“Yeah. You think you can get him out here?”

“To Virginia?” I realize I half-expected Sawyer to suggest some kind of murder road trip. I look up at him in the darkness. He’s watching me, his eyes guarded.

“Yeah,” he says. “To the camp.”

I consider it. “Maybe,” I say. “He’d rather send someone else, I think, but—but maybe if I pretend to apologize and tell him he’s right and I’m going to lose weight?—”

Sawyer scoffs.

“That’s what started this all,” I say. “But if I tell him I’m going to go back to being his perfect little wife—maybe. He might come himself.”

Sawyer nods. “You’ve still got access to that cabin, right?”

“Yeah. It’s booked through the middle of November. But—” I turn toward him, peeling out of his arms. “But why? Won’t that just link me to the—” My throat’s still dry when I say the word, although not nearly as much as it used to be. “The killing?”

A smile flickers across Sawyer’s face. But there’s something uncertain about it. Something… nervous.

“Yes.” Sawyer takes a deep breath of his own, and his hand creeps up to touch the back of my neck in that dark, possessive gesture that unravels me so much. He tugs me in front of him, his other hand wrapping tightly around my waist so he can pull me up to him, my back pressing against his firm chest. He presses his face against my temple. “Baby, all I want is to protect you. To make sure you’re happy. Do you understand that?”

I look out at the river. At the stars. “Yes,” I breathe, and I know it’s true, even if Sawyer’s methods are a little… unusual.

“And one thing I can do is make all this go away.” His voice is rough against my hair, and his hand keeps massaging the back of my neck, fingers grazing along my quickening pulse. “But you won’t—you won’t be able to go back to your old life in California. You’d have to stay with me.”

“Have to,” I whisper, the blood pounding in my ears. “Or get to?”

Sawyer’s hand stills against my neck. Against my throat. “Is that what you’d want?” he asks. “To stay with me?”

I’m breathless. He was the worst thing that ever happened to me. Now, he’s the best.

“What are you getting at, Sawyer?”

He doesn’t answer right away. He just holds me, his breath slow and steady. The wind picks up, blowing cold air across the river’s surface. I breathe it in and shiver.

“Sawyer?” I say nervously.

“The mountains are dangerous.” He speaks so softly his words feel like kisses. “People disappear all the time. Especially pretty women from the city who like to go for long hikes in the woods.”

Every muscle in my body freezes in place.

“Especially when there’s a copycat killer hanging around,” he continues. “Killing people with a hunting knife like that boy who attacked that camp fifteen years ago?—”

“Killing people?” I whisper, barely daring to breathe. “Like her husband?”

Sawyer brushes my hair away from my neck so he can tease my sensitive skin with his words. “Like her husband,” he growls. “The Altarida sheriff won’t think much of it, will he, if he finds her husband in pieces on the cabin lawn? If her car’s still there, too, and all her clothes folded up in the chest of drawers?”

I stare at the river, shivering in Sawyer’s arms.

“They’ll do a missing person’s search, no doubt. They’ll find that pretty city girl’s cell phone cracked in the woods. Maybe some strands of her hair.” His hand drops down to trail along the cuts he made on my breasts this afternoon. “Some blood.”

I exhale, and my breath is white in the cold.

“But they won’t find her body,” he says. “They’ll never find her fucking body.”

I whip around to face him, the wind blowing my hair into my eyes. He brushes it away and fixes me with his black, killer’s gaze.

“This is the best gift I can give you,” he says roughly. “But if you don’t want it?—”

“I want it.” Each word is a puff of steam. Each word is a magic spell. “I want you.”

For a moment, Sawyer looks faintly stunned.

Then he takes my face in both hands and kisses me like I’m the only thing in this world that matters.

And I don’t ever want him to stop.