The North Star | COMPLETED ✔️

Chapter 67 ~ Walking the Wire

Double upload! I'm so nice 🤗🤗❤️❤️ Next upload tomorrow morning.

Chapter 67

The sound ricochet through the air, and a chain reaction of chaos to filtered through the group.

Drake jumped up and scanned the area, his gun already out and in his hand. The other men looked the same, eyes wide and nervous. Tense moments passed, but no new fire came, and Drake turned hard eyes on me. "You said he was dead!"

"He is," I rasped out. Bard wouldn't have fired a shotgun. He was smarter than that. He'd never alert them of his presence. That left only one other explanation. "Check the trees. There are trip wires set up."

Drake's eyebrows lifted. He slowly moved around the area. Sure enough, he must have found something, because I heard him softly mutter, "Well, I'll be damned." He walked back over to me. "Did you do that?"

I didn't answer.

"Right. He did it." His expression darkened. "That fire ain't going to build its damn self!" he yelled at the men.

They scrambled back to their task.

Drake took back his position next to me, but he didn't speak. He played with his gun, removed the bullets and put them back, pulled the hammer, eased it out. Another mind game. One I'd seen him do a million times before.

It didn't work, not when I was praying he'd stop fucking around and get it over with.

"Sit up!" Drake pulled me by my hair until I was upright beside him.

I hissed and clenched my jaw as he pulled me close into his side. It made me sick. I felt his warmth, smelled his cologne.

He slung an arm across my shoulders and held me as if we were two lovers on a camping trip.

I couldn't pull away. I wanted to. I wanted to run, burn the clothes he'd contaminated, then find the nearest cliff face to jump off of.

But I didn't. I was a coward.

We sat like that while the rest worked to get the fire going, then each of them took a seat around it. I watched them all. Saw their eyes linger over the pair of us, before they'd shift away to feign interest somewhere else.

They didn't like it. I could tell. A change had taken place the moment they'd seen my back. These men may not be good, but even the Onyx Eagles had a code.

Drake, however, didn't. They all knew if they spoke out, he'd put a bullet in their brain without so much as blinking.

I sat stiffly, numb. Emotionally, physically. Even the cuts on my back ceased to burn.

I may as well be dead.

It felt like I was. Just a corpse, being hugged by a demon and staring into the flames of hell.

Then, an angel appeared.

Out of my peripheral, a movement shifted in the trees. I tilted my head over and stared into the dark, waiting to see it again, praying my mind hadn't played a trick on me.

The men around the fire talked amongst themselves, but the words didn't register. Their voices seemed distant, as if each syllable traveled through a tunnel before it reached me.

It happened again, and my heart lurched. I squinted my eyes and fought to make out a shape, but the fire made it impossible. The light turned the dark to black, and the more I focused, the less I saw.

A bush stirred, and a shadow appeared, barely visible, but the movement made it clear. It wasn't my imagination. It darted from one tree to the other, then the next.