Page 32 of Oathbreaker

You will get her back.

I return the gun to the tall Ukrainian. I can tell by his expression that he understands why I did what I just did.

“We will take care of this,” he says, pointing to Adam Collins’ mangled body with the barrel of the gun.

The forest is quiet, near silent in the aftershock of the gunfire. Then a phone rings in the car I was just in. Moments later, Leo yells through the open door.

“We’ve got a signal! The car is moving.”

The car is moving. The signal is moving. Could Winter....

When I round the car to get in the back, Leo throws an extra pair of pants and a shirt at my chest. I catch them before they hit the ground.

“First, change your clothes. Then we’ll go get your girl.”

We have less than an hour of daylight remaining when Veronica calls to confirm she’s heard from Winter. It takes almost five minutes for us to understand what she’s saying through her hysterical crying.

Luckily, Ella was right there, and she took the phone from Winter’s best friend to explain.

Not that Ella was any less frantic.

Winter is here, in this old diner, almost a hundred miles from any major city.

As we draw up to the location, I note the Tahoe in front of the building. I swing the door open before the driver puts the vehicle in park.

“Whoa, wait—” Leo begins, but I’m already running toward the entrance.

Before I can open the glass door, a white-haired woman steps outside with a Remington bolt-action rifle pointed at my chest.

I pull up short, putting my hands in the air.

“What’s yer’ business here?” she drawls in a deep accent.

“Ma’am, I’m looking for—” I search for the right word to describe Winter. Calling her my girlfriend feels wrong, like it’s too small a label to describe how she consumes me.

“I’m looking for my wife. She’s a Black woman with long, curly brown hair. Her name is Winter.”

The thought jolts through me that maybe she dropped the car here and went with someone else. I look through the windshield of the Tahoe. Empty.

“Have you seen her?” I ask. I pull out my phone to bring up a picture of Winter. My hands shake, and a bead of sweat rolls down my back. My chest and head hurt, and the pain pills I took before the flight are wearing off fast.

I land on a picture of Winter taken at La Maison on our first date. She ordered French onion soup, and I snapped a photo of her as she smiled at me. A long string of Gruyère cheese stretches from her bowl to the spoon near her mouth.

“Hmm,” the woman says, gripping her shotgun tighter and ignoring my phone. She doesn’t look at all afraid to light my ass up. “I don’t reckon that I have,” she says.

Leo walks up behind me, offering the satellite phone in his hand like a peace offering. “Ma’am, could you talk to the person on the phone? She’ll explain who we are.” She eyes him for three solid seconds, but when Veronica’s frantic “hello? hello?” rings out over the phone, she reaches a slow hand toward Leo, accepting it.

She listens for a few seconds before she turns her eyes to the two of us standing at her doorway.

Then she steps aside.

“Winter!” I yell as I run through the entrance. I whip my gaze around the sum of the space, analyzing the empty diner.

“Winter, where are you, baby?” I spin around, going from booth to booth on one side of the restaurant. I’m about to check the bathroom when I hear a rustle. And then a sniff.

I turn and rush toward the sound. My muscles threaten to buckle where I stand.

It takes everything within me to not tear this place apart.

---