[[OLD]] A Handful of Daffodils (Forgotten Series, #7)

Chapter Thirty-Four

Several days later

A month.

It had been a month since Menza had taken Maeve and left. There had been nothing to go off of, no where to start looking. Anger raged through me constantly and I barely slept, drank far more than I should have been but Stenton said he was working on it, that he was sparing no expense on making Maeve made it home, that she would be back where she belonged. The days were becoming colder and I knew winter was going to settle in and I wanted her home before it snowed.

"Yah... like I understand where the ranks are coming from though." The words came from a male who was next to the bench at the training grounds. I glanced over at them as I used my t-shirt to wipe the sweat from my face. I was exhausted, I was getting drunk and sleeping on the couch, and when I woke up early in the morning I left and came to the training grounds. "If she was lost we would have found her by now. It's been like a month." I worked my jaw side to side, anger rising up inside me all over again and turned my back to the small group.

"I get that point but she's also a half-breed. She's certainly doesn't have the training or conditioning to evade our patrols. If she did leave, we should have caught her by now." The words were muttered out and I felt eyes on my back as the males glanced over at me. All it did was make me tense more. I didn't want to hear their theories. I didn't want to hear about what they thought. My daughter was missing, she was taken away from me. That was what mattered most to me.

"Unless the rogue was telling the truth and they helped her." The words filtered in despite how hard I was trying to tune them out. I figured it was habit by now. I had come down to the training grounds so often to hear what everone was saying about it, that it was habit to listen.

"Yah but looking at the male, I wouldn't trust him." The quietly said words floated over to me and I turned and sat on the bench, shoving my face into my t-shirt and closed my eyes. "I agree with Simon, that male obviously wanted to cause chaos. He saw a chance and he took it." The mention of the whelp had my hackles up, both my wolf and I were getting sick and fucking tired of him and his attitude. "Besides, Jason says that the rogue chasing her was not chasing her in a friendly game, he said it looked like life or death." I clenched my teeth together as I lowered my t-shirt form my face and took in a deep inhale of the cold autumn air.

"I heard that Jason said he thought she had been hurt. Like that the rogue hurt her." More eyes were glancing my way and I kept my face even and blank. I didn't want to give any of them the satisfaction of getting a reaction from me. "Plus he said she had been calling for her brother when he was put onto the trail." The eyes disappeared and the conversation lowered into more hushed tones.

Jason had healed from what the rogue had done, he carried a nasty fucking scar from it. I didn't know what he was telling other people because he had never come to me to tell me about what he dealt with that day. That tiny part of me, the one that tugged at my stomach and whispered shit that caused problem in my life, told me that I needed to talk to him, to ask him. But if he had anything to say to me, he would have come to me by now. I wasn't going to chase someone who didn't want to talk to me.

The group of males got a bit louder. "Nash says that if she was chased into the river it would have carried her down to the river merge or further. She could have landed on the bank there." I narrowed my eyes. I had heard that theory too many times to count but there was no way it would work.

"That's like fifteen miles away. It's unrealistic to think she made it that far. The rapids are brutal there." The other male's words highlighted just what issues I found with that. If Menza went into the river, she wouldn't have come out alive and that meant but she and Maeve were dead. And I wasn't entertaining that idea because I knew if Maeve was dead I would have known. She was alive, I could feel it right down to my soul. My little girl was alive, somewhere out in the world, but she was alive.