Novak Raven (Harper's Mountains #4)(53)

Weston looked behind him to see where her gaze landed, but the two-way mirror had disappeared and nothing remained but a white wall. He wasn’t chained to the table anymore, but was standing. His palms were up, outstretched. They looked so solid in this vision.

Avery was panting too hard now, her words coming out jerkily. The hopelessness in her eyes tore at his chest. He couldn’t save her from her past. It was done. Over. He couldn’t even comfort her, but that knowledge didn’t stop his instinct to try.

Weston strode over to her, his boots loud against the dingy white tiles. Louder than in any of his other visions.

He could hear her now. “Me and Ryder bought a whole box of spy stuff and put the cameras all around Willa’s Wormshack. She’s a Gray Back like me, and really funny. You would like her. If she caught us, she would just laugh, so that’s why we picked her to spy on first, but all we got is three straight hours of video footage of her working with her worms. She sells them to bait shops and for people who make fancy gardens. She makes a stupid amount of money at it, but that’s not why she does it. She loves worms. Like…she LOVES worms. We did catch funny audio of her talking to them, though. She called them her babies, and named one of them Dingleberry. And I swear she thought of kissing one when he wiggled extra cute in her hand. Ryder and me were laughing so hard.” Avery’s voice hitched, and another tear streamed down her face. “The spy cameras are so small we’ll never get caught. Never get caught. Never. Never. So small we’ll never get caught.”

Avery clenched her fists to her chest behind her knees, and her shoulders shook hard. It wasn’t until she ducked her chin to her chest and fell apart that Weston noticed her clothes. Jeans, instead of the nightgown from his last vision. And two thin straps of a tank top curved over her shoulders. He knew what the logo on her shirt would say if he could pry her knees away from her torso. Horror dropped him to his knees right in front of her. On the tip of her shoulder was the circular scar he’d given her the night he’d claimed her.

This wasn’t a vision from the past.

This was her future.

“So small we’ll never get caught,” she repeated in an empty tone.

It wasn’t fair. Something bad must’ve happened to him if she was here in The Box because he would never let her come back here if he was still breathing. “Darlin’,” he whispered, his eyes burning from a fate he couldn’t save her from.

“I knew you would come,” she said so softly he almost missed it.

“What?”

Avery lifted her gaze and locked onto his, as if she could see him. Her eyes were rimmed with tears, and her bottom lip trembled hard.

“You said you would be here with me, and you are.” Slowly, she opened the palm of her hand, and in it sat one of the old cameras he and Ryder had bought all those years ago. It was the size of a quarter. “I’m stronger now.” But she didn’t look strong. Her whole body was shaking, and she looked scared.

Weston reached out and touched her hand—touched her. Shocked, he wrapped his fingers around her wrist. “Avery, I can save you. I can get you out of here. Look, I can touch you. Come on.” He pulled, but she shook her head hard and stayed where she was, her wrist slipping from his grip. When he looked down at his hand, the tile floors showed through his palm.

“Weston,” she whispered. “This is the way it’s supposed to be. I can do this.” Two tears dislodged and streamed down her cheeks, but Avery looked different now. Her eyes were harder, more determined, and her breathing had steadied out. “You make me stronger. Wait for me.”

There was echoing power in those last three words, and Weston was catapulted backward so fast, his hands and feet flew out in front of him. He held onto the sight of Avery as long as he could.

“I love you, Ave,” he rushed out, because she should know. Whatever was happening, or if he was dead, she should hear it from him one last time.

As he slammed back into the chair in the questioning room, her whispered words echoed around the room, filling his head. “I love you, too. Wait for me. Wait, wait, Weston. Wait for me.”

Adrenaline and shock did something awful to his body, or maybe it was the power of that vision, but he was drenched in sweat and shaking uncontrollably. Weston dry heaved and closed his eyes tight against the blinding light from the fluorescent bulbs above.

The door to the interrogation room swung open, and in walked one of the cops who had taken Avery away from him. His nametag read Hammond, and after him filed a shorter man in a gray suit.

“This is Detective Sutton,” Hammond said as he took a seat next to the man in the suit. “He’s been the one working on the missing persons case for Avery Foley and her family.”

Weston clenched his hands together in an effort to slow the shaking in his body. He was still reeling from the vision. “Missing person’s report…” Weston shook his head hard, trying to rattle free some clear thoughts. “Avery isn’t missing. She’s where she wants to be. Or was, until you took her away in a f*cking cop car like some criminal.”

“Avery isn’t under any suspicion,” Detective Sutton said blandly, slapping a thick, beige folder onto the metal table. “You are.” His hard, green eyes sliced right through Weston. “You were read your rights, yes?”

Weston nodded. What he needed to do was lawyer up and demand they bring in Harper before he said more, but then he would run the risk of them going tight-lipped about why he was here, and he needed to know what he was really doing strapped to a table in the Bryson City police station. “I’m being charged with kidnapping, but that’s not what happened.” Voice steady, he told them how Avery came to interview for him and work for him. Told them how he fell for her, and she fell for him. He kept his emotions to a minimum, kept the story simple, just stuck to the facts, and the more he spoke, the more Detective Sutton lost his air of pompousness. A little frown crept into his poker face, and his eyes narrowed.