“Is there a hospital around here?” Nate grins, but I’m not finding his remark funny.
“About a half hour north of here, yes. It’s not that far.”
“Except we’re stuck in an outhouse in the middle of snowstorm. Even if we made it back to your place, which I’m not going to risk, there is no way your car is going to do anything on these roads but slide right into a ditch.”
“At least let me look at it!” I have no idea what I’m going to do once I see it, but I’m worried and need to do something.
Nate sighs, pulls down the sleeve of his coat to expose his left shoulder, and I see that it is indeed just a scratch on the top. I guess I was expecting a hole in his flesh, but there isn’t one. It’s barely bleeding anymore. Though he tells me I’m being ridiculous, I insist on covering up the scratch with some little finger bandages I find in the bottom of my purse.
“Feel better now?” Nate asks, still grinning.
“No.” Tears well up in my eyes.
“Hey, now,” Nate says softly as he pulls his coat back up. He reaches out and gathers me into his arms, sitting down on the old boards covering the outhouse hole. “It’s okay. I’m fine.”
“It could have been a lot worse.”
“Yeah, but it wasn’t.”
“You knew who those men were.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“But when they came in, you were watching them.”
“I didn’t know those men specifically,” Nate says, “but clearly they were the Ramsays’ people.”
“How did you know?”
“I had a feeling. I saw a car with Ohio plates parked near the post office. It had tinted windows, and I thought it looked a bit out of place. I hoped I was only being paranoid but obviously not.”
“You think the Ramsays followed us here?”
“Do you have some murderous ex-boyfriend you haven’t told me about,” Nate asks, “or high school rival that might want to shoot at you?”
“No.”
“Then, yeah, it looks like they followed us here.” He holds me a little closer. “They were watching you, not me. I think they were supposed to grab you and take you back to Cascade Falls.”
“Why?”
“They know we’re here, so they probably know we’re figuring things out. They don’t want us to know everything—that much is clear.”
“But if they already know I’m a Ramsay, why would they try to kidnap me?”
“To get you on their side.”
“Humph!” I press my lips together. “I can’t imagine that would endear them to me.”
“Once they have you, they can be very…persuasive.”
I don’t think I want to know what he means by that, so I don’t press the issue. I lean my head against his uninjured shoulder and look around the inside of the small wooden structure. Aside from the bench seat with a boarded-up hole in the center, there isn’t a lot to be seen. A small shelf juts out from the wall, and stones line the floor by our feet. A slight amount of light shines in from the crescent moon carved into the top of the door.
The air is certainly warmer out of the wind and snow, but it’s still cold inside the shack. I watch my breath escape in a puff and shiver. Nate hugs me to his chest, offering a little more warmth.
I stifle a laugh.
“What so funny?”