Page 46 of The Lovely and the Lost

Rumbling. Shaking.At first, I thought the jolt to my bones was nothing more than the power of the falls taking hold, but as my balance gave way, I realized that something was wrong.

The mountain was moving.

The tremor only lasted for a moment, but this close to the waterfall’s edge, I had to scramble for purchase. I backed away from the roar of the water, from the drop. A hand closed over my bicep.

Gabriel.I sensed him—smelled him—before I turned to face him head-on. His hold steadied me. A fraction of a second later, he dropped my arm, pulling his hand back like the act of touching me had burned him.

I wondered if he was thinking about the way I’d reacted the last time he’d grabbed me.

“Earthquake,” Gabriel commented casually. “You know, that thing where the ground shakes for a brief period of time, during which it is typically considerednot goodto be inside a mountain.”

I tried to get a read on his posture, his expression. My fight-or-flight instincts hadn’t kicked in when he’d touched me. Because he’d reached out to steady me?

“Far be it from me to state the obvious, but you took my flashlight.” Gabriel gave me an indecipherable look.

“I did.”

Gabriel arched an eyebrow. “Is this the part where I ask why you followed me here and committed petty larceny against my person?”

I got the distinct feeling that he wasn’t amused, even though he smiled like he was. I should have been on guard. When he asked me why I’d followed him, I shouldn’t have wanted to reply.

“Your brother disappeared four years ago,” I said. Facts were easier than answers. “You’ve been mapping out this mountain ever since. Yesterday, you told me that you’d spent a summer looking for these caves. You said you’d never found them.” My heart gave no signs of thundering in my chest. My breath didn’t come quickly. “You lied. Why?”

I braced myself for him to lash out, to go on the defensive, to demand to know how I knew about his brother.

Instead, he reached forward—and plucked the flashlight from my fingertips.

“I told you I wasn’t the trustworthy type.” He stared at me for a moment longer, then turned. “Come on.”

As we approached the entrance, I became acutely aware of the fact that the only light in the cave came from the flashlight in Gabriel’s hand. It wasn’t until we came face-to-face with a wall of rock that I processed the implication of that darkness.

“Rockslide.” I beat Gabriel to the observation. He placed his hand flat on the rocks blocking our exit, testing their stability. I assumed he was trying to calculate the odds that we could dig our way out.

“You know those movies where two people get caught in an elevator together at the worst possible time?” he asked.

It took me a moment to understand what he was saying: We were trapped. The earthquake must have triggered the slide. The opening hadn’t been that big to begin with.

I could feel an old, familiar sense of dread rising up inside me, like a whisper of smoke slithering its way up my spine.Trapped. Dark. Let me out. I’ll be good—

“If it’s any consolation, I have it on good authority that being trapped in a confined space with me is a fate at least marginally better than death.”

“I don’t need you to distract me,” I gritted out. I’d seen Jude and Free doing it often enough to recognize the technique.

“Of course you don’t. But for the record, if you find yourself needing to hit something, hit me.” He smiled. Or smirked. Or both. “After all, I lied to you, and if it weren’t for my sheer animal magnetism, you probably wouldn’t have followed me into the depths.”

“Shut up,” I said, but now I wanted to throw something at him, which was significantly more comfortable than allowing in the lurking memories.

“Shut up,” Gabriel countered, “or get you out of here?”

I didn’t waste any time with my reply. “Both.”

* * *

I couldn’t stop expecting my eyes to adjust to the darkness, but even with the flashlight, we couldn’t see more than three or four feet ahead. The air down here was damp, and my heart beat a little harder and a little faster with every turn. The longer the two of us trekked toward what Gabriel insisted was an alternate way out of the mountain, the harder it was to stop from going over everything I knew—about Bella’s disappearance, about Gabriel’s brother and the other missing persons reports, about the research I’d seen on Gabriel’s wall.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Gabriel said, pausing to remove a canteen from his pack. “This would be an excellent place to ax-murder someone.” He took a swig of water before passing the canteen to me. “It occurs to me,” he continued, “that it’s also ahorribleplace to talk about ax-murdering.”

Given the circumstances, I suspected Gabriel was employing what Jude would have referred to asdark humor. I took a drink of the water. “Why would you need an ax?”