Page 68 of Wicked Devotions: Part 2

I grab his shoulder, halting our progress back toward the house. “Listen to me, I need you to keep it together.” I give him a little shake to hammer in my point. “Declan and Cy are going to be ready to go down in flames for her. I can’t manage them and you on my own. I need your help.”

He gives me a weak nod. My stomach turns at how unconvincing it is. Fuck me, I need more than that.

“Not good enough.” I swing around and grab him by the jaw, forcing him to look slightly down at me. “Lock it the fuck in, Banks. Harper needs you.”

That is what he needed to hear. It makes sense, he wouldn’t feel the need to help us as strongly as he would Harper. She’s his driving force.

“Got it?” I ask.

“Got it.” He says, clear eyed and focused. “I’ll keep it together.”

“Good. Because you’re about to see some crazy shit.”

We jog up the steps and into the house. Everyone is in the living room, Annabelle has changed into dry clothes, but her hair is still stuck together in stringy, wet clumps. A cup of tea sits untouched on the table in front of her. Cillian is pacing in the corner of the room on the phone with Declan listening in.

Cy walks over as soon as he sees us. “Did you find anything?”

“Just this shell.” I open the drawer with all the food storage bags and grab a freezer bag to drop it into. “It has blood on it.”

“I found it on the jetty. It caught my eye because there’s no other shells up there.”

“Let me see it.” Annabelle stands up and walks over to us. She picks up the bag and looks at the shell. “That’s the one she found right before he came up on us. She must have hidden up her sleeve.”

“Good girl,” Cy murmurs beside me.

“She must have tried to use it to fight him off after she pushed me into the water.”

“She pushed you in?” Banks’s eyebrows raise.

“I think she did it to protect me.” She sets the bag down and runs a hand over her stomach. Her face crumples as she bursts into tears. “We have to get her back.”

“We will.” Banks wraps her in a hug. “We will Annabelle. I promise.”

“My cousin is on the way, along with a team of Lake’s mercenaries,” Declan says. “What’s that?”

We fill him in on the contents of the bag until we’re interrupted by the doorbell. Felix draws a gun and walks to the front of the house to answer it. A moment later he walks back with a man in golf clothes who looks like he just walked off the course. He must be the doctor they called.

Cillian and Felix drag Annabelle into the living room, leaving the four of us standing around the kitchen island.

“I’m going out on our boat to look for her,” Declan says.

“Wait.” I hold my hand out. “You don’t even know which direction they went in.”

“Annabelle said he was headed back toward the coast. Plus, she said it was a little dinghy. He couldn’t have gone out to sea in that.”

“Logically, no. But there’s hundreds of thousands of acres of marsh to the west of us. It’s a needle in a haystack until we have more information.”

“So you just want to let her be taken further and further away? Beaten, raped, tortured, or murdered by fuck knows who while we sit around and talk about how to save her?”

“No.” I put my hand on his chest and push him down onto a barstool. “I think we wait for backup and leadership by Lake and Nolan. The people who have a clue about this type of thing.”

“It’ll take hours,” Cy says. “I’m with Declan. Let’s at least start searching while we wait.”

“What if there’s more than one person?”

“I’m not afraid.” Cy clenches his jaw. “I’ve been through and done worse.”

That’s probably not an exaggeration. I scrub a hand over my face and look to Banks for help. But he’s just staring down at the seashell in a bag, lost in thought. I look over to see if I can get any help from Cillian, but do a double take when I see Annabelle’s shirt pushed up over her abdomen and the doctor holding a fetal heart rate doppler to her pelvis.

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