"Do you think he'll let us go when we get out of here?"
I didn't answer right away. I didn't want to lie to her.
"I don't know," I finally said. "But I won't let him hurt you. I promise you that."
Doug muttered to himself across the cave, and yet, I was confident he hadn't heard us. Maybe he was delusional or having a nightmare.
Charlie pressed closer, her head resting against my shoulder. "I'm scared."
"I know."
"Are you?"
"Don't worry, he's not going to touch you," I answered, dodging her question.
She turned her face away, and her shivering increased. As I hugged her tighter, I couldn't decide if she was cold or scared. Probably both.
It was a long time before she stopped shivering, longer still until her breathing settled enough to convince me she was asleep.
I kept my hold on her, waiting for a dawn that couldn't come soon enough.
I didn't sleep. Couldn't.
My thoughts drifted to that skeleton. Who the hell was he? Someone must have searched for him once. A wife, maybe. Children. Parents. People who’d spent years wondering what had happened to him. I needed to find out who he was, at the very least, so his family would know what had happened and have some closure, even if it came decades too late.
The jewels were probably the reason the poor bastard had been whacked over the head. Though it made no bloody sense that they’d been left behind. If you killed a man for treasure, you took the treasure.
Unless the killer had never made it out of these caves either.
Koolaroo Ranch had its share of bodies in the dirt. Most were in the family plot between the new homestead and the old one. But there were others. Men who'd died in the old diamond mine when a detonation hadn't gone as planned back in the 1960s. Their eleven bodies were forever entombed somewhere in the collapsed tunnels. Then there was that plane wreck I'd discovered on Opal Ridge over a decade ago. They’d never found the pilot, never found his mysterious female passenger either, though she'd left her suitcase behind when she’d vanished into thin air.
This land had secrets. And I'd bet my Harley that my old man had been the trigger behind a few of them.
Maybe he'd killed the man with the jewels.
No. Those gems wouldn't be here if he had. Dad would do anything for a quick buck. He'd have pried those jewels out of a dead man's hand and sold them before the body had gone cold. My younger brother, Kayden, had inherited that dangerous trait of putting profit above common bloody sense. He'd taken his fair share of beatings from Dad over it, too. Yet he never seemed to learn. Then again, maybe he'd changed in the last decade.
I certainly had. Though I couldn't decide if I was better or worse.
Charlie shifted and mumbled about dinosaurs, and I smiled. Even unconscious, her mind was on her work.
I wondered what she'd been like before all this. Probably driven. Focused. The kind of woman who didn't take no for an answer when she wanted something.
I respected the hell out of that.
My siblings and I had that same stubborn streak. Cassidy, especially. She'd sooner punch you in the face than admit defeat. Declan was quieter about it, but just as unmovable when he'd made up his mind. Kayden, despite his chaos, had that Branson refusal to quit.
We’d all watched our old man barge his way through every obstacle. But he hadn't just bulldozed, he’d punished, or worse, broken anyone who got in his way.
I'd spent ten years trying to unlearn his lessons. Trying to be better than the bastard who’d raised me.
Some days I succeeded. Others...? Not so much.
I raised my arm to look at my watch, and my jaw tightened. Bloody hell. I must’ve lost my watch in that damn flood. The watch was a gift from Cassidy. The last thing I'd gotten from my family before I’d pissed off and left this place. Cass would be furious when she found out. That watch had probably cost her a week's pay, maybe more.
Every sound Doug made, I cataloged. Every shift, every breath, every scrape of that gun on the stone floor … his weird muttering.
I hope he's having a nightmare.