Felicity didn’t speak for a while after that. She let Gage drive her back to the Badlands, just as he’d driven her home from them yesterday.
Today he took the long, winding backroad to the southern portion of the park. It was far less trafficked and technically on reservation land. There would be no actual way to get into the park the way Gage was driving without doing some serious off-roading.
She looked at the grim line of his mouth and knew that was exactly his plan.
Because someone had planted evidence that she was a murderer.
A murderer.
The more that word spun around in her head, the more she didn’t understand it. “There has to be some kind of mistake.”
“What those cops found? It was no mistake. It had to have been planted, Felicity. And if it was planted, someone is purposefully trying to frame you for murder.”
“It also means that poor woman was murdered.”
“Felicity.”
She hated the pity in his tone. Poor, silly Felicity. “It is still possible she just fell. It is still possible...” Yes, she was silly, because there was a part of her hoping for tragic accident over premeditated evil.
“You’re the one who told me the boot in the trail was the same as the last time. Surely you knew it wasn’t an accident.”
“Don’t you ever entertain a hope no matter how unreasonable it might be? Don’t you ever think, well, maybe it’s not as awful and dire as it looks?”
“No,” he said flatly.
She didn’t have to ask him why. In the silence she could hear Ace’s name as if Gage had uttered it himself.
Gage had spent his formative years in the Sons of the Badlands against his will. He’d been eleven when Jamison had saved him and Brady from the gang, gotten them to Grandma Pauline. So by the time he had a real home, with an adult who truly loved him and would care for him, Gage had likely already seen too much to believe in hope.
She’d been young enough that memories of her father’s beatings were vague. Sometimes she wasn’t sure if they were actual memories or nightmares she’d had.
But she’d definitely been in a cast when she’d come to live with the Knights at the age of four. So, it was all true enough.
No matter her past, she could always hope for the best outcome. That’s what the Knights and their love and security had given her.
“If it’s Ace setting me up, I don’t understand why. I don’t understand.”
“You said it yourself. You interfered. You helped Nina and Cody outwit his plans. That puts a big red X on your back, and there was already one there for being a Knight.”
“But I’m not a Knight, by name or blood.”
“By love you are. Which makes you a friend to the Wyatts. One who fought for us. That’s all it takes to make you Ace’s target.”
She knew all that rationally. Though she’d assumed Ace had targeted Liza and Nina because they’d had relationships with his sons, Liza and Nina had also defied Ace’s plans.
And now she’d joined their ranks.
“As for the how... I don’t know how Ace does anything, let alone get hundreds of men to follow his particular brand of narcissism and contradictory insanity for years and years on end. But here we are, and you’re unlucky enough to have connections to us. Maybe Ace never paid much mind to the Knights before this, but he’s certainly making a case for it now.”
Gage brought his truck to a stop in the middle of nowhere. Actual nowhere.
“Why are you stopping?”
“We’re going to hike the rest of the way.”
“And just leave your car here?”
“It’ll be taken care of.”
“But what if we need to get out? What if there’s bad weather? Did you even pack a weather radio? Enough water? Floods, tornadoes, lightning. Rattlesnakes. You know bison are dangerous, right? And prairie dogs carry the plague.”
He gave her a sardonic look and slid out of the truck without responding.
She scurried after him. There were two parts of her brain fighting it out. The one that understood he was doing what he could to keep her out of harm’s way, and the part that had taken an oath to treat the park and its denizens with respect and integrity.
“Backcountry camping is serious business,” she said to him in her firmest park ranger voice as he opened the camper shell on the back of the truck.
“I’ve been camping before,” Gage replied, moving things around and barely paying any attention to her.
“Backcountry camping?”
“Yes.”
“In the Badlands?”
He hefted out a sigh, stopped what he was doing and turned to her. He folded his arms over his chest, which was a distraction for a moment or two. The cuff of his T-shirt ended right at a bulge of muscle, made more impressive by the crossed-arm pose. Something wild and alarming fluttered low in her stomach.
Which wasn’t important when he was talking about hiking without a permit and without taking the appropriate safety precautions.
“Sweetheart, my father left me in the Badlands for seven nights when I was seven years old. I can handle this. So can you.” Then he went back to his rummaging, pulling out one backpack and then another. They were bigger backpacks than the one she’d brought—these were clearly designed for backcountry camping.
“Put anything you brought that you’ll need in the green one,” he said, as if he hadn’t just confided something truly awful about his childhood.
Since Felicity didn’t know what to say, she did as she was told. She pulled out the things she’d need: a dry set of clothes and a sweatshirt, her knife, hat, water bottle and water treatment supplies.
They were silent as she added her things to the backpack Gage had given her. He shouldered his pack, then helped her with hers, working with her to adjust the straps so it hit her where it should.
“You ready?”
She nodded, though it was a lie. She didn’t think she’d ever be ready for being framed for murder. For hiking, illegally and ill prepared, through the Badlands with Gage Wyatt.
But here she was, and she’d have to face up to it. Ready or not.
GAGE THOUGHT HE’D managed to escape the uncomfortable piece of his childhood he hadn’t meant to share with her. He didn’t talk to anyone about his father’s rituals. The initiations, the tests. Not even Brady, because though they’d had to go through them at the same times, what with being born on the same day and all, Ace had always kept them separate.
None of his brothers had ever truly discussed it. They mentioned it and laid out the bare facts when need be. But there was no looking into what it had felt like to jump through Ace’s hoops.
Gage had no interest in ever going there.
“Why did he do it?” Felicity asked, as though she could read his thoughts.
Gage shrugged. If he never discussed it with people who’d understand, he sure wasn’t going to discuss it with Felicity. But as they hiked, using a topography map and GPS tracker and his own internal sense of the land, silence ate away at his resolve to forget he’d ever brought it up.
“He called it our initiation,” Gage grumbled, stopping their progress to determine if they should head east or go ahead and climb the column of rock in front of them.
“Initiation to what?”
“To the Sons.” To the Wyatt dynasty. Gage pointed at the map, his father’s voice echoing in his ears. He had to point at the map so he didn’t give in to the urge to cover his ears with his hands and block out Ace’s insidious voice. “What do you think? Around or over?”
Felicity peered over his shoulder. She’d fixed a baseball hat on her head and pulled her hair through the hole in the back. She’d tied her windbreaker around her waist. Underneath she wore a dark red T-shirt. She’d always been a shade too skinny, but working at the park had packed some muscle on her.
She looked more capable park ranger than inconsequential waif. It was a good look for her, one he had no business noticing at all, let alone here and now.
“Looks like around will be better,” she said, reaching over his shoulder and tapping her finger on the paper. “Best place to camp is going to be over in this quadrant.”
He took her advice, ignoring the flowery scent of her shampoo or deodorant or something that shouldn’t be distracting but was.
They started around the column of rock. The sun was high in the sky, beating down on them. It would have been a good time to stop for water, but it seemed like a better idea to find a good spot to camp.
As far away from this conversation as possible.
“Did you want to be in the Sons?”
“Of course not,” Gage snapped at the unexpected question that felt more like a dagger than a curiosity.
“I mean, when you were little. When you didn’t know any better.”
“I always knew better.” You didn’t spend most of your childhood watching your father threaten your mother’s life—knowing she got pregnant over and over to keep him from going through with it—then watch her lose everything when her body simply couldn’t carry another child into this world.
And you couldn’t believe it was the right way of the world when you had an older brother like Jamison, who had spent his first five years with Grandma Pauline, telling you the world could be good and right.
“I’m sorry,” Felicity said after a while, her voice almost swallowed by the wind. Unfortunately, not enough for him to miss it. He didn’t want her apologies, or this black feeling inside of him that threatened to take his focus off where it needed to be.
He ignored her sorry and these old memories, and focused on one step in front of the other. It wasn’t the first time in his life he’d counted his steps, watched his feet slap down on scrub brush. He’d thought those days were over.
But was anything ever really over? Ace could die and there would still be the mark he’d left on hundreds—if not thousands—of people.
And first on that list were six boys with the Wyatt name who had to live with what they’d come from.
“Do you know anything more about... It’s just I never knew my mother. When they placed me with the Knights they said she was dead. I don’t know how. I thought I didn’t want to know. No. I don’t want to know what happened to her or why. But this connects to my father. This half sister I didn’t know I had and who’s now dead. Who was her mother? Did my father beat her like he beat me?”
“Jamison’s working on it,” Gage said, trying to infuse his words with gentleness. What terrible questions to have to ask yourself.
“It should be me. I should go up to my father and ask him those things.”
“Well, maybe you can at some point.”
“Some point when I’m not going to get arrested, you mean?” she demanded irritably.
“Yeah, that’s what I mean.”
She sighed heavily next to him. “I don’t ever want to talk to him.”
Gage gave her a sideways glance. She wasn’t just certain, she was vehement. Her jaw was set, her gaze was flat and those words were final.
“Then let Jamison do the research on the woman and your father.”
She wrinkled her nose, looking at her feet as they walked. “Isn’t that cowardly?”
“There’s nothing cowardly about your family helping you out, Felicity. Where would Jamison or Cody be if they hadn’t let each other help? Where would Cody and Nina be if you hadn’t helped them?”
Felicity frowned, but she nodded. “Water,” she said, stopping their hike and shrugging off her pack. Gage did the same. They took a few sips from their water bottles and passed a bag of beef jerky back and forth. When they were done, Felicity dutifully sealed the empty bag in a plastic zipper bag and stored it in her pack. Ever the park ranger.
“Ready?”
She nodded, and they started hiking again, in silence for a very long time. When Felicity spoke again, he could tell it was a question she’d been turning over in her mind.
“How do we prove I didn’t do it if we’re all the way out here?”
Gage didn’t know exactly how to respond. He’d promised Felicity the Wyatts wouldn’t take over and leave her in the dark, but the nice thing about leaving people in the dark was they couldn’t take actions that might undermine what you were doing until it was too late.
Still, a promise was a promise.
“This is just step one.”
“Step one?”
“When they come to arrest you, the story will be you went backcountry camping to get your head on straight. By the time they send a team out to find you—if they even do, they might wait—you’ll be gone.”
“Gone where?”
“That’s step two. Let’s focus on getting through step one.”
“Gone where, Gage?”
He sighed. There was no way getting around it. “Back to the scene of the crime.”