Page 7 of Twisted Trust

“Help her how? Come on, kid, use your words.”

Chip scoffs. “He’s a baby, he barely knows words.”

“She’s f–f–fighting a bad man!” he wails, trembling in my arms as if he’s about to break apart. “I ran. She t–told me to run and I ran.”

“Where?” I feel Chip tensing behind me. “Where was your mom fighting?—”

A single gunshot cuts through the air like a lash of a whip, slicing right through the noise of traffic and music blaring from nearby buildings.

All three of our heads snap toward an alley leading to a parking lot.

Chip moves first. With his gun raised against his chest, he jogs to the mouth of the alley. Donald follows with his own weapon unsheathed, and I take up the rear with the crying child.

His screams have dulled since the gunshot, and now he just whimpers and sobs in my arms.

“Is your mum down here?” I ask quietly, unsure if we’re about to walk in on something completely unrelated.

As we step out from the other side of the alley into a parking lot, a body lies slumped on the ground a few feet away.

Chip briefly scans the surroundings and then sprints toward the slumped form with Donald hot on his heels. I follow, but at aslower pace, and as soon as I see long brown hair spread out on the ground, I immediately hide the child's face against my chest.

“Holy shit,” Chip breathes and he stumbles slightly, then looks up at me with a strange look on his face.

“Is she alive?” Donald pushes him out of the way and in doing so, I glimpse the face of a woman.

The bruises and split skin do nothing to mask the familiar features that have haunted me every day for five years.

My chest tightens and for a moment, I can’t breathe.

There’s no way.

This isn’t possible.

“She’s alive!” Donald exclaims and he fumbles through his pockets for a phone. “I’ll call an ambulance.”

Chip’s hand shoots out to stop him and Donald grunts in alarm.

Keeping the kid’s face against me, I take a single step closer and then I meet Chip’s eyes.

Suddenly, the strange look on his face makes sense. He recognizes her as well.

After all, he was the one keeping watch while I spent every sane moment buried in her arms.

Until she betrayed me.

For five years, I’ve fantasized about all the ways I’d want to kill her if I ever saw her again and suddenly, she’s unconscious at my feet like a perfect opportunity wrapped up in a bow.

I’m so distracted by the rush of memories about Maeve Jackson that my grip on the child relaxes a fraction.

His head turns and then a desperate, heartbreaking wail escapes him.

“Mommy!”

In an instant, the kid becomes almost impossible to maintain a grip on without hurting him, but I do my best as I turn away from her beaten unconscious form.

“Levi?” Chip’s voice cuts through my haze.

I cradle the child as he resumes screaming. “Call the ambulance.”