Hold (Gentry Boys, #5)(65)

“CORD!” my brothers cried and there they were, standing in the doorway in wide-eyed shock as my hand steadily pointed the gun where it needed to go.

I couldn’t drop it. I wouldn’t drop it.





CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE


CREED



Chase drove as fast as he dared while I gritted my teeth and grabbed the door handle. Not out of fear over the way the truck careened through the night but because if I didn’t have something solid to hold onto I might bust right out of my skin.

We hadn’t said a word since we closed ourselves in Carson’s tow truck and burned rubber getting out of the parking lot. There was no way to be sure where Cord had gone until we got there but somehow I knew we were headed to the right place. Carson had briefed Chase on his tense conversation with Cord but even before that I had the nagging sense that something wasn’t right with my usually level-headed brother. Of course today had been a tough one for us but it seemed Chase and I were alone in our relief over Maggie’s death. It was over. Tragic and awful anyway, yet still closure.

But somehow I couldn’t get a read on Cord and I’d always been able to read Cord like a large print book. I could tell when he was hurt, when he was angry. Years ago I caught on right away when he fell hard for a hometown girl who should have hated him forever. I could tell when he was calm and when he was at ease. And I could tell when fury simmered in his heart, threatening to erupt.

“Hurry,” I urged Chase, breaking the silence. He threw me a look that said he understood and didn’t need any prompting.

I loosened my grip on the door handle. What did I expect to find when we got there? I shut my mind off to the possibilities as soon as they started invading. Benton Gentry was not only vicious but he was manipulative as f*ck. If he started taunting Cord with thinly veiled threats to his family then there were no guarantees that Cord’s common sense would win out in a battle between logic and protective instinct.

There weren’t any streetlights this far from the center of town and Chase nearly missed the sharp turn down the narrow road that led to our childhood home. If I hadn’t been so focused on getting to Cord I would have been a lot more keyed up about being in this neck of the woods.

“We’ll find him,” Chase said, then he swallowed hard. “Right?”

I nodded. “We have to.”

“And we’ll fight if it comes down to it.”

“Of course.” I looked down at my bare hands. “Unless something’s changed though Benton has a few guns to choose from if he feels backed into a corner. We don’t have anything.”

One of the truck’s front tires bounced in and then out of a small ditch. The vehicle swayed and Chase cut the wheel, slowing down and righting it.

“Yes we do,” he answered with cryptic confidence.

As if in response to the tumult of the night the wind suddenly kicked up, raking the desert floor, sending gritty clouds of sand into the air. Lighting flashed in the distance but there was no rain, not yet, nothing so cleansing. Just dust and wind.

A single pinpoint of light showed in the distance and I knew what it was even before Chase turned on the high beams. Benton had always kept at least a single bulb burning over the door because he liked to wander in the dark and his eyesight was shit. I tensed as I looked around and then calmed down slightly when I saw my truck parked about twenty yards off from the front door.

“He’s here,” I told Chase but I didn’t need to. Chase had seen. And he apparently wasn’t going to stop. He kept gunning toward the house and we were close enough now for me to see the derelict mess that I’ve been trying to push out of my head for years. Memories don’t work like that though. You can refuse to wave to them whenever they popped up but they were still crouched around the corner, waiting.

“Chase,” I shouted and grabbed onto the dashboard just as he slammed on the brakes. Papers, old soda cups and a pornographic dashboard ornament all came flying out of their hidden corners but I had the door thrown open and my feet on the ground before the debris had finished settling. Chase was almost as quick.

I could see Cord standing in the doorway, on the other side of a half ruined screen. The glare of the lights and noise of the truck must have startled him but he didn’t turn around for some reason. Instead time achieved a slow motion quality as I took a step.

There was Cord’s back, there was Benton’s face. There was a gun.

Step.

Cord lurched, kicked a leg out and threw a table over.

Step.

My body was moving as fast as it could while my brain screamed that it wasn’t fast enough. Chase was beside me. We reached the door together, we flung it open together, we spilled into the room together, and we shouted our brother’s name together.

“CORD!”

Benton was sprawled on the floor, scrabbling around with his hairy potbelly hanging out and clumps of greasy hair falling in his face as he grunted his way to a sitting position. When he got there he stared at the scene before him and blinked.

Three sons. Three sons who had been abused, neglected boys and were now strong men, each one far stronger than him.

But it was not our faces that caught his bloodshot eye. It the gun that was leveled at his head.

Cord was so intently focused on the weapon in his hand and the target not ten feet away I wasn’t sure he even realized we were there. One jerk of that trigger and he’d send Benton Gentry into oblivion even as he sentenced himself to a different kind of hell.