Page 81 of The Lovely and the Lost

My gaze went to Saskia. She wasn’t straining against Cady’s hold anymore. She was still, and there was something wild in her eyes.

“Bales couldn’t find even a hint of what happened to my son,” Ness said, the pace of her words deliberate and slow. “Not even a rumor. People don’t just disappear, Cady. Not like that. Not him.” Ness let her finger rest on the trigger. “Did he get out?” The question reverberated off the walls. “What happened to him? What did he go back for?”

“I don’t know,” Cady said softly. Saskia lowered her head slightly.

Ness’s finger shook. I stopped breathing, stopped thinking, every muscle in my body preparing to fight. On the ground, Jude stirred, and like a veil had been lifted from her eyes, Ness shifted the gun from Cady to Jude.

I held up my hand. It shook, but I held it up.Stay, Sass. She’ll hurt you. She’ll hurt our family.

Jude groaned and sat up. “I suppose,” he said, his voice groggy, “that there are worse places to wake up than inside a tree.” Then he registered the rest of his surroundings. “Oh.”

Ohas inOh, someone is pointing a gun at me.

Ohas in even Jude couldn’t see the bright side of this.

“Tell me my boy got out,” Ness said. The words were for Cady’s ears, but she was looking at Jude.Cady’sboy. “Or tell me that my son died there. Tell me something.”

She was going to pull the trigger. If Cady couldn’t tell her what she wanted to hear, she was going to shoot. And if I tried to stop her…

I can hear the gun going off. I can see the blood.

“He got out.”

At first, I thought Cady was the one who’d told Ness what she wanted to hear. It wasn’t until Gabriel turned toward me that I realized that I was the one who’d spoken.

I couldn’t fight a gun—not with claws and teeth, not with every instinct I had. All I could do wasthis. I could keep my hand up. I could keep Saskia from attacking. I could keep Ness’s attention onme.

“Ash got out.” I repeated myself, my voice louder this time, steadier. If Ness Ashby wanted to shoot someone, she could shoot me. She could listen to me telling her what she wanted to hear, realize that I was lying, and shootme.

“Kira.” Cady saw what I was doing. More than that, she saw that it might work.

“Everyone wondered how I survived,” I said, willing Ness to listen, willing her to aim at me and not Jude. Not at Cady, not at Sass—at me.“A little girl, all alone in the woods for weeks.” A few days ago, I might not have sounded so close to it—so sure. I waited until I was sure that I had the whole of Ness’s attention, and then I lied. “I wasn’t alone.”

I bent down and pulled up the leg of my jeans, revealing the deep, ridged scars around my ankle. “There was a trap.” If I could just keep talking, if I could just keep saying things thatweretrue, maybe I could distract her from the one thing that wasn’t. “I saw a wolf caught in one, early on. Later, it was me.” My mouth tasted metallic. The memory smelled like rust—like blood. “Somebody tipped the police off about my mother’s body. Someone told them about me.” I swallowed. “Someone found me dying in that trap and let me go.”

“You’re a bad liar,” Ness said, her voice low.

Survival wasn’t just about being the fastest or the strongest or the one who refused to die. When it came to confrontations, survival was just as much about bluffing, about pretending strength, when you had none.

“Some people,” I said, my voice humming in a way that didn’t sound small or scared or human at all, “don’t want to be found. Ash chose to go back in. Is it so hard to believe that he might have chosen to disappear? That something might have pulled him to check in on Cady, year after year?”

One second I was standing there, and the next, Ness had me backed up against the wall, the barrel of the gun digging into my throat.

Good.Let her shoot me. Let her killme. I could hear Saskia snarling, hear Cady and Jude trying to keep her under control.

It won’t last.

“You expect me to believe,” Ness said icily, “that my son disappeared in the depths of a South American jungle eighteen years ago, but that he just happened to reappear, years later, in the woods on the outskirts of a nowhere little town, to saveyou?”

I didn’t expect Ness to believe that. I didn’t expect anyone to believe it. I couldn’t swallow. I couldn’t breathe.

But I could keep Ness’s attention on me as Gabriel moved in behind her.

“He had a scar.” I choked out that sentence. Ness stared at me for a moment, then eased back, just enough to allow me the breath to speak.

“What did you say?” Ness asked, suddenly hoarse.

“The man who saved me,” I said quietly. “He had a scar.”