Broken Hearts (Hearts 2)

“No,” I whispered. “Kitty!” I made a kissing noise the cat didn’t care about. All I needed was this cat to wake him up and accidentally get killed.

In one of the cupboards, there’d been some kibble and cans of wet food. At the sound of me opening one of those cans as quietly as I could, the cat forgot her interest in Ronan and came to curl around my legs as I emptied the food into the bowl.

There, kitty, try not to wake up the killer in the chair. I know he smells good.

The cat fed, I left the kitchen and stepped wide around Ronan to the front door. Plugging my feet into an old pair of muddy, green, rubber boots, I opened the front door as quiet as a mouse. Looking for a way out, I slipped into the cold unknown.

The cottage was small and white walled with dark beams and a roof made from thatch. Actual thatch. If I hadn’t been kidnapped and held against my will by a man I—against all better judgment—still wanted to fuck, I might marvel at such a thing. But I was a little bit busy.

A big tall church made of red brick with a thin spire sat on top of the rocky outcrop behind the cottage about a hundred yards away. Around the two buildings was nothing but wilderness. No trees. Only grass and rocks. Low scrub. Stone fences. A landscape alive and green and real and still somehow as desolate as the moon. The sky loomed and towered. There was so much of it and so little of me.

I turned in a circle. The dirt driveway ended at a gravel road that stretched into nothing in either direction. The rolling green hill to my left dropped off to what looked and sounded like an ocean. Past the hill was nothing but black water.

To the right were . . . sheep?

My chest cracked wide, pried open by the howling wind and the salt air. I was terrified in a way. And something else. Something I hadn’t ever felt before. Something I didn’t know how to name. But I felt very alive in this moment. Almost painfully so. Tears burned my eyes.

There was a car in the driveway I didn’t recognize, but I quickly opened the driver’s-side door. It smelled of cigarette smoke, and there were no keys. Not in the middle console or under the mat or tucked in the visor or any of the other places where people in the movies hid keys in cars.

Theo the spy/hit man never got around to teaching me how to hot-wire a car and so, quiet as I could, I shut the car door.

A dead end.

Which left me with the gravel road. Or the church behind the cottage.

I followed the dirt trail around the house and across the green field, up the stone steps set into the rocky outcropping. This was a well-worn path, the stones smooth in the middle. I imagined a hundred years of feet making use of these stairs and liked the thought.

The fresh air crackled in my lungs and woke me up, but I was easily winded. I stopped, leaning against one of the stone fences to catch my breath, wondering if maybe I’d bitten off more than I could chew for one day. I didn’t even have a coat.

But getting to Zilla was the goal.

God, I should have a plan for this first. Like, was I going up to that church and telling people I was kidnapped? By a killer who’d saved me from another killer? The cops would get called. Or worse. If I asked to use a phone, there would only be more questions.

Perhaps I should just head back, get my bearings. But Ronan had made a mess of my bearings. I couldn’t trust him, and I couldn’t trust myself around him.

A man came out one of the side doors of the church. He lifted an arm in my direction and I lifted my good arm back at him.

It was funny what Ronan did to me.

I’d been a naive fool all this time, pushing the truth away when it was staring me right in the face. Keeping my head in the sand and believing the best about people when they’d given me no evidence of their best.

Ronan came along and changed that.

Suspicion and bravery were not traits that came naturally to me, but I got to my feet anyway, suspicious of a man coming out of a church, and bravely went to meet him. And that was new.

Maybe I was new.

God, please let me be new.

“Are you all right, lass?” The man asked once he got close enough down the stone steps. He wore a priest’s collar and black shirt with a brown cardigan thrown over it. He was on the young side of middle age and tall. Broad and upright through the shoulders. Close-cropped brown hair. All around a handsome man.