Page 68 of The Unknown Colton
“There’s a truck…”
A vehicle was involved then. If a truck was still here, hopefully Lakin was, too. But where?
“And a cave…”
The dogs started barking louder, drowning out the voices. While Troy couldn’t hear everything, he suspected he would have heard something over the barking if they’d found Lakin and her kidnapper. Gunfire or screaming maybe…
But there was just barking. So the cave was empty. Since the truck was still here, they couldn’t have gotten anywhere fast. They had to be running around the woods. Maybe the kidnapper was trying to find a new place to hide Lakin and himself.
Or maybe Lakin, strong and resourceful, had managed to escape. Maybe the kidnapper was trying to find her.
Either Troy or the SAR team would have stumbled across them if they’d been going down the mountain, so they must’ve headed up. So he did, too.
Using the branches for balance, he pushed up the steep rocky incline. In one tree, he noticed a strand of long dark hair caught on a twig. Lakin had gone this way.
He wanted to call out to her, but if the kidnapper was looking for her, Troy didn’t want to alert him to her whereabouts or to his. The last time Troy had tried to rescue her, he’d gotten shot at. He needed to be careful. He couldn’t help Lakin if something happened to him. He was damn lucky that last time he’donly gotten a scratch on his face instead of a bullet in his brain. So he kept his head down and moved as quietly as he could through the trees, climbing up the rocks.
The dogs were not moving quietly. They barked loudly as they crashed through trees. He heard shouting again, in another direction.
He’d gone the wrong way, apparently.
But then he found another strand of hair on a branch. As he reached for it, his foot slipped. He dropped down hard on his butt, jarring his back as he hit the ground. His foot dangled over a steep drop.
Ignoring the twinge of pain in his back, he scooted closer to the edge and peered down into a deep ravine filled with trees and boulders. He looked at the branch above him, with that long strand of silky dark hair dangling from it.
The pain in his back moved to his heart. Had she fallen in the ravine?
“Lakin!” he yelled. He didn’t care now who else heard him as long as she did. As long as she answered him. “Lakin!”
As long as shecouldanswer him.
He could see where something, orsomeone, had broken branches in the ravine below. She had to be down there. Unable to answer him.
So he had to figure out how to reach her without falling himself.
Troy ducked under the branches of the trees that grew on the edge of the ravine, obscuring it so muchthat it was easy for someone to fall into it. With the edge of the bank eroding under those trees, one had fallen, giving him a gangplank to the bottom. But with branches sticking up from it, he couldn’t walk down it. So he climbed down its branches, scratching his hands and his face. He didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything but finding Lakin.
The tree branches thinned toward the bottom of the ravine, snapping beneath his weight, and he dropped down into weeds and rocks beneath it.
Pain shot up his spine as his knee jammed into a rock. He flinched but willed the pain away. He had to find the woman he loved. He’d wasted so much time that they could have been together. He should have been living with her in the present instead of planning and saving for a future that might never come. If he couldn’t find her…
He had to find her.
His throat raw from yelling, he shouted again, “Lakin!”
Pushing his way through the weeds at the bottom of the ravine, he found her lying in crushed ferns.
Blood dampened her hair from a wound on her head, and her eyes were closed. Was she just unconscious or…?
“Lakin!” he yelled.
But she didn’t move at all. He couldn’t even tell if she was breathing.
“Help!” he shouted, hurling the word toward the mouth of the ravine. “Help me!”
He could hear the dogs and the voices of the SAR team, but they sounded as if they were moving away from him, not toward him.
He stood up and shouted again. “Help! Come help! I found her!”
