Breathe (Colorado Mountain #4)(102)

Chace was already preparing himself for what he’d see.

Now he knew it was worse.

Fuck.

Deck wasn’t done.

“Lined up two hundred women, told me to choose the one for you, I’d choose the one back there. Settin’ myself up for what I’m gonna see again, gonna hold onto the knowledge that a year ago, my boy had one serious, f**kin’ bitch sleepin’ in his bed and he was sleepin’ in his guest room. Now, when he’s done with this shit, tonight, tomorrow, until he does the smart thing and makes it legal and then until he dies, he’s got that sweet in his bed. Don’t flip out, I know it’s new between you two. I also know you are no dumb f**k. You got that kinda sweet, you’re gonna make it legal. Since I don’t have sweet to go home to, I’ll hang onto the fact that my brother, who’s always deserved it, finally does.”

Deck and Chace had shared vows of brotherly love over Deck’s Dad’s stolen beer they consumed in Deck’s basement when they were freshmen in high school the first time they got drunk off their asses.

Since then, through a lot of good times and bad, that love grew.

These kinds of words from Deck were rare but they were as real as the feeling behind them. Deck detested Misty, f**king hated Chace’s father and not just recently and he knew the whole story. So they were also not surprising.

They also gave fair warning of what he was going to see.

They walked in silence for a few more minutes before men’s voices could be heard and the beams of high powered flashlights like the ones Deck and Chace were using to light the way could be seen.

“Keaton and Decker,” Chace called to inform them of who was approaching.

They got a “Yo,” and a “Hey,” back from two of the four uniforms on duty, Dave and Terry. Both were new recruits. Dave, a three-year veteran who moved to Carnal from Idaho to be closer to his nearly new wife’s family in Gnaw Bone seeing as she was pregnant and had three sisters and thus they had four built-in babysitters, including her Mom. And Terry, a fresh recruit out of the Academy, hailing from Fort Collins.

Deck and Chace met them in the snow outside a dilapidated shed about the size of a big bathroom. The men huddled, kept their lights low in their hands, aimed up but away from faces, lighting the conversation.

“Didn’t pull in lights, Chace, ‘cause it’d be a pain in the ass to haul ‘em up here but also because we might wreck tracks if we did,” Dave informed him and Chace nodded.

“Got in a good look around, though,” Terry added. “Did the best we could not to disturb anything. Not that there was much to disturb.”

This was not good.

Chace nodded anyway.

Avoiding the shed for now, he asked, “What’d you find?”

“Not hard to find the trap,” Dave told him and went on to explain, “seein’ as the blood trail led from it to him.” He dipped his head toward the shed.

“Two hundred yards, I figure,” Terry shared quietly, careful with this knowledge because of what it said and Chace braced so his body wouldn’t jerk.

Two hundred yards. Two f**king football fields. A long way to go with a broken arm, two mangled hands and a f**ked up leg.

A long way to go.

Jesus Christ.

“Able to walk the first fifty.” Dave’s voice was also quiet. It got quieter when he continued, “Had to drag himself the rest of the way.”

Chace closed his eyes and dropped his head.

He shouldn’t have let it go the way it did. He should have tracked him or set Deck on him sooner. He shouldn’t have given in and gone slow. He should have pushed it.

He didn’t.

Jesus Christ.

“Trap’s old,” Terry carried on, Chace opened his eyes and looked at him. “Probably set years ago and forgotten. Rusted. Snowed over. The kid couldn’t have seen it even if he was movin’ in daylight. Pure bad luck he happened on it.”

Malachi seemed to have a lot of bad luck.

But this bit of it was on Chace.

“He’s big on invisibility, Chace,” Dave put in. “Couldn’t find a lot of tracks and, we get lights or come back in daylight, we’ll know more but seems like he covered them. We went a fair ways, large perimeter, got some animal tracks, only thing we got is a few leadin’ toward the trap he probably hadn’t yet covered and was in no state to mess with and the tracks leadin’ from the trap to the shed. Lots of disturbed snow around the trap.”

“Found some drops look like blood,” Terry stated. “Leadin’ to the trap comin’ from the hill, northeast.”

“He was beaten before he hit that trap,” Deck muttered.

“Yeah?” Dave asked.

“Leg was f**ked up by the trap but his arm was broken and his face was a mess. Trap didn’t do that,” Deck told them.

This got nods.

But Chace was thinking of a kid who had been beaten, his arm broken but still had the presence of mind to cover his tracks in the snow.

Who the f**k was beating him, who was he hiding from and why?

These questions were strangely exclusive at the same time inclusive. Somehow, whoever got hold of him got the chance to do it.

But they didn’t know about this place. He kept this a secret.

So how did he keep getting beaten?

Terry looked to Chace. “You want lights brought up?”