Page 152 of Untouchable

Then they were even deeper, and she couldn’t breathe again.

She finally had to stop because her ears were roaring with fear and her feet were so cold she could no longer feel them. “Please don’t make me go any farther,” she gasped, collapsing against his chest.

He felt strong and stable and confident, and she was none of those things. She was a blubbering mess who could barely even stand up.

He kept his arms around her to support her, and he let her hide her face in his shirt for a minute. But then he pulled back and made her stand on her own. “What do you remember?” he asked.

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There wassomething strange about Caleb’s face. Almost unnatural. She didn’t understand it, but her mind was such a tangle of desperation that she was probably projecting onto him.

She knew what he was asking. He was still trying to help her. Trying to get her to face things she just couldn’t face.

“I can’t,” she gasped, hugging her arms to her belly since he wouldn’t let her cling to him anymore. There were tears streaming down her face, but she had no idea where they’d come from.

“Yes, you can. Tell me what you remember.”

“I was…” She closed her eyes and squeezed herself with her arms. “I was with my… my uncle. I’d run ahead. He was telling me to wait.”

“And you wouldn’t wait?”

“No. I didn’t listen to him. He finally had to yell at me.” She was practically sobbing now, bent over from the weight of the emotion, the memory, the debilitating fear.

“Then what?” Caleb’s voice sounded almost merciless, but that would have been a projection too.

“Then I heard… I heard…”

“What?”

“A shot. A loud noise. I didn’t know what it was.”

“What did you do?”

“I waited for a long time. Then I went to find him.” She rubbed her ears and her nose with her sleeve, but there was nothing she could do to stop herself from crying.

“What did you find?”

“He was shot. His head was blown off. He was…” She choked. Literally choked. The force of the air strangled in her windpipe pushed her to the ground, and she kept gagging on her hands and knees in the dirt.

“Take a breath, Kelly. Take a real breath.”

She tried. She really tried. But she couldn’t. She just kept choking. She wanted Caleb to help her, to take her in his arms, to carry her out of the woods. But he didn’t.

He just stood beside her, not making a move to touch her, and he said again, “Do it now, Kelly. Take a full breath.”

Something in the stern authority of his voice triggered an innate instinct to breathe. Her throat relaxed enough for the next breath she attempted to work. Her lungs filled with air again, and the strangling eased in the aftermath.

She stayed on her hands and knees on the dirt trail, as broken as she’d ever been in her life. But she could breathe again, so she did.

“Tell me what happened to him,” Caleb said after giving her a minute to recover.

“He was… he was shot. He was… he was killed.” With one last, desperate effort, she managed to stop herself from blurting out the whole truth, giving away her last hidden secret, the one she could never tell Caleb. She kept herself from saying he was murdered.

“Why was he killed, Kelly?”

She was sobbing helplessly, and she huddled down into the fetal position. If she didn’t get out of here soon, she was genuinely afraid she might die. She managed to remember the story she’d told Caleb before. “Hunting… accident.”

She was too overwhelmed to sense anything from Caleb. He was just an unmoving presence nearby. But he felt strong in a way that contrasted sharply with how she was feeling herself, so she finally lifted her head and looked at him blindly. “Please, Caleb. Help me.”