He doesn’t second-guess me after that. And I don’t second-guess myself. Neither of us makes the moment, the decision, bigger or smaller than it actually is. Bishop and I together will always be more than what’s happening tonight in this bed. But this is also the most intimate thing we’ve ever done, this act we’ve chosen to do only with each other. No one else knows the secrets we are sharing with our bodies. Only I know the taste of his skin beneath my tongue. Only he knows the way my back arches as he moves above me. Only I know the sheer joy of watching calm, steady Bishop fall apart under my hands.
Chapter Fourteen
I’m alone in our bed when I wake in the morning. From downstairs, I can hear Ash’s voice, the banging of dishes in the kitchen. And Bishop’s deep voice in response, making me remember the things he whispered into my ear last night in this bed. I roll onto my back, trying to fight the ridiculous grin that’s spreading across my face, the hot blush racing up my body into my cheeks. I stretch, feeling the pull and give of my muscles. Not sore, exactly, or at least not a soreness that really hurts. Not one I would ever wish away.
There’s a fire crackling in our fireplace, but I still take a fortifying breath before I tumble out from underneath the warm pocket of blankets, brace myself for the biting cold against my nakedness. I scramble into clothes as fast as I can, tug on a pair of socks, and knot my hair up on top of my head. I’m at the bottom of the steps when I’m hit with an unexpected wave of shyness. I can still hear Bishop and Ash in the kitchen, and I assume Caleb is in there with them. I know it’s silly, but I feel like I have a giant sign on my forehead that Caleb and Ash will be able to read, outlining exactly what Bishop and I were doing last night. It’s not like Caleb would even care. He’s done the same thing on plenty of his walks, I’m sure. And Ash would probably just squeal and pull me aside for details I’d refuse to give her. But last night feels private in a way that I’m anxious to protect. So few things in my life have been solely mine, and what happened last night belongs to Bishop and me alone.
In the kitchen, Bishop and Ash are leaning against the counter while Caleb sits at the small table, dozens of packets of jerky laid out in front of him. Before I can ask him what that’s about, Bishop smiles at me, and Ash holds out a mug of tea.
“Morning, sleepyhead,” Bishop says. His eyes are locked on mine, and I can’t look away, even as I reach out to take the mug from Ash’s hands.
“Good morning,” I say, surprised by how hoarse my voice sounds.
Bishop steps closer and leans his face down, presses a tender kiss against my neck.
“Could you not sleep last night?” Ash is asking. “You’re usually up before this.”
I feel Bishop smile against my skin. “Uh-huh,” I manage, heat rising up from my stomach. Bishop pulls back, one arm wrapping around me to rest on my hip. I let my gaze settle on Caleb and the table, which feels like the safest option. “What are you doing with all the jerky?”
Caleb looks at Bishop. “I told them we’re going back to Westfall,” Bishop says as I lift the mug to my mouth.
“Oh.” My sip of tea hits my stomach like a ten-pound rock. I’d almost forgotten about Callie and Westfall, about vowing to return, my mind too occupied with Bishop. Hearing it out loud makes it real, makes it a commitment I’m going to see through. “That’s too much jerky for us to take, though,” I say. “That’s almost all we have, isn’t it? You and Ash will need that for the rest of the winter.”
Now Caleb looks at Ash. “We’re coming with you,” he says.
Bishop stiffens next to me, his fingers digging into my hip. “No,” I say, before he can. “No, you’re not.”
“We are,” Ash says.
Caleb catches my eye. “We’re not asking, Ivy.”
Bishop’s arm drops from around me as he takes a step closer to the table. “The hell you aren’t,” he says. “We’re not letting you two do this. You have no idea what you’re walking into.”
Caleb shrugs. “Figure we’ve handled worse.”
“Maybe you have,” I say, voice unsteady. “But this isn’t your fight. You’d be risking your lives.”
“You’re our family now,” Ash says. “Both of you. You can’t expect us to sit back and watch you walk into a bad situation without our help.”
I shake my head. My hands are starting to tremble, and I turn to set my mug down on the counter. I thought I’d been so clever, making sure to keep Caleb and Ash at just the right distance. Close enough to feel affection for them, but not close enough to really love. But I was so stupid, because of course I love them. How could I not? They’ve been more a family to me than the one I was born into. “This is all because of me,” I say. “Because of things I did. Or didn’t do.” I look at Bishop. “It’s hard enough knowing that going back puts Bishop at risk. I can’t live with it if something happens to anyone else I care about.”
Caleb leans back in his chair, crosses his arms. He appears completely unmoved by my words. “Will us being there help you?” he asks. “Will it give you more of a fighting chance?”
“What…that’s not…that’s not the point,” I stammer.
“Will it?” He’s looking at Bishop now, and I can see something passing between them, the silent communication that began from almost the moment they met and has strengthened every day since.
“Yes,” Bishop says.
Caleb nods. “Then we’re coming. End of story.”
“Caleb,” I say, “please. You don’t need to do this.”
Something in Caleb’s eyes softens just a bit at my words. He gives me a small smile. “This time it’s not on you, Ivy,” he says. “It’s our choice. And we’re not letting you and Bishop go in there alone.”
I look at Ash, begging her with my eyes, but she only nods at Caleb’s words. “Besides,” she says with a grin, “I’ve always wanted to see Westfall.”
We spend the rest of the day preparing. Bishop and Caleb talk for hours with Tom, getting all the information and detail they can about exactly what’s happening in Westfall. Bishop returns in the late afternoon looking grim and exhausted, filled with stories about armed men ransacking the houses on my family’s side of town, pistol-whipping anyone who gets in their way. Stories of houses burning on his side of town, the powder keg underneath Westfall’s calm exterior finally catching fire. And it all started with me, my attempt to kill the president’s son. Tom said after I was put out, people allied with President Lattimer suspected my father of having more involvement than he’d admitted. They pushed, harder than they had before, and my father and his allies pushed back. Tensions already high were poised on the edge of boiling over. And then Callie was caught outside the gun safe.
“She’s in the cells in the courthouse,” Bishop tells me. I wonder if she’s in the same one I occupied. Just thinking of those cinder-block walls makes me feel claustrophobic. “Or at least she was.” I’m going through our meager collection of clothing, figuring out how much we can carry, what needs to go and what has to stay.
“So how do we get her out?” I ask.
“We have weapons,” Bishop says. He faces me across the bed, grabs a sweater to fold. “But it’s not like we can just burst into the courthouse, guns ablaze. There are only four of us. Maybe it would have been enough, before, when everything was calm. But now they’re going to be on edge, with extra men and guns. They’d take us down before we got ten feet.”
I hold up a shirt, debating whether it offers enough warmth to bother taking it with us, before tossing it aside with a sigh. My mind churns. “We need someone to let us in.”
Bishop’s eyebrows rise. “And who’s going to do that? Not even I will be able to talk my dad into that one.”
I pause, look up at him. “Victoria. No one knows the courthouse better than she does.”
I can see Bishop turning the idea over in his head. “Why would she do that?” he asks finally. “She’s no fan of Callie’s.”
“Who is?” I ask, and we smile at each other, grim an
d quick. “But I think she might do it anyway. No matter what, I can’t imagine Victoria is one hundred percent on board with executing Callie in the town square.” I shrug. “Maybe if I talk to her, if we talk to her, we can get her to help us.”
“It’s a risk, Ivy,” Bishop says. “What if she blows our cover? What if she tries to kill us herself?”
“This is all a risk,” I say, frustrated. More with myself than him. I wish I could talk myself out of going, find some loophole in my conviction that if I don’t finish what my family started in Westfall I’ll never be able to fully move on, some part of me forever stuck. “But that’s the best idea I have. I think it’s worth considering.”
Bishop nods. “Okay, let’s keep it on the table for now. See what develops.”
“Before we even get to the point of rescuing Callie, we have to get back inside Westfall,” I remind him.
“That’s not going to be a problem.”
I raise my eyebrows. “It’s not?”
“I’m Bishop Lattimer. The president’s son. The patrol guard will let me back in.”
“What about the rest of us?”
“He lets me in. I bash him over the head, knock him out.” Bishop spreads his arms. “You’re in.”
I can’t help the smile that slides across my face, even as I’m shaking my head. “That easy, huh?”
Bishop smiles back, but his voice is serious when he says, “It better be. That’s the simplest part of this entire plan.”
I look down at the pile of clothes on the bed. I hate being reminded of the risks we are all taking. The risks Bishop is taking for me. But even filled with fear over what’s coming, uncertainty about how we’re going to attain our goal, I’m suddenly grateful for this moment, this conversation.
“What?” Bishop asks, reading my face as easily as always.
“I was just thinking how different this is, the way we’re talking. With my father and Callie, they were always the planners. They made all the decisions without ever asking my opinion. I was expected to keep quiet and do what they said. Sit in the corner like a potted plant until they needed something from me.”
Bishop snorts out a laugh. “Which is probably the reason their plan failed so spectacularly.”
“You mean because I’m no good at keeping my mouth shut?”
Bishop’s smile fades. “No, because you’re too smart and too valuable to be a potted plant.”
How does he do that? With just a few words, he turns me inside out. My throat knots up, but there’s no time for weakness now, no time for tears. His eyes darken as we look at each other, and I would swear the temperature in the room is rising, pure heat radiating off both our bodies. I am suddenly acutely aware of the bed between us.
“Hey,” Bishop says. “Last night?”
Images of our tangled bodies flash across my vision. “What about it?” I manage, my voice husky.
Bishop reaches across the bed and cups my cheek in his hand, runs his fingers along my jaw. My breath stutters out of me. “No regrets?”
“Not a single one.” I turn and press a kiss against his palm. “Part of me is wondering why we didn’t do it sooner.” But I know why not; it wouldn’t have been the same if we’d come together with lies between us, with the shadow of my father’s plan hanging overhead. We needed to be wiped clean before we could start building something new.
Bishop smiles. “Yeah? So does that mean there are better than even odds of it happening again tonight?”
I laugh, the tension that’s been enveloping me all day dissolving into happiness. “I think that’s a pretty safe bet.”
Chapter Fifteen
We leave town at daybreak, all four of us burdened with heavy packs across our backs. Caleb’s holds blankets and a single large tent that will serve as nighttime shelter as we make our way back to Westfall. The rest of us carry a mix of clothes, food, water, and our scant medical supplies. I double check twice to make sure my knife is in the sheath at my waist, and I see Ash doing the same. Bishop has his rifle, and Caleb isn’t going anywhere without his crossbow. We are as ready as we can possibly be, both for Westfall and what we might encounter along the way.
I stop on the edge of town, turn back to watch the curve of the sun inching up over the still-sleeping houses. A few curls of smoke lift up from chimneys, swirl into the gray morning sky. The air is so crystal clear it looks like you could hit it with a fist and it would shatter around you, crisp and thin as glass. Above me, the sharp call of a crow. To my right, the crack of a branch in the river. Behind me, the icy wind creeping into the collar of my coat. I tell myself to remember these things, this moment. Somehow I already know I will not pass this way again.
“Hey,” Bishop says. “Are you all right?”
I turn toward him, nod. One look at his face, the way his eyes move from me to the silent houses behind me, and I know he feels it, too. We are saying a final farewell to a place that was good to us. It might never have been home, not quite, but it sheltered us, kept us alive. But we have each other now, and that is enough.
“Come on,” I say. I hold out my hand, fingers stiff inside my mitten, and Bishop grasps it with his gloved hand. I don’t shed any tears as we walk away, following Caleb’s steady pace into the trees. Already I am getting better at letting go.
For most of the first two days, Caleb and Ash take turns leading the way. They seem to effortlessly know the exact path to follow. I’m able to discern the general direction we should be headed, but don’t know the terrain well enough to get us back to Westfall by the quickest and easiest route.
The ground is snow-covered in some parts, a soup of slushy mud in others where the sun has done its work. The nights are a mix of relief at being off our feet and sheer misery at lying on the cold ground, wind easing under the edges of the tent no matter how hard we try to seal off all entry points. The first night, after a few hours of trying to give each other a little space, we give up and smash together—Bishop and Caleb on the outside, Ash and me curled around each other in between. I only manage to sleep once I can feel Bishop’s heart against my back, Ash’s stomach under my arm.
On the morning of the third day, Caleb and Bishop are walking ahead, Ash and I behind them, both of us gnawing on half-frozen pieces of jerky. The air is so frigid it makes my gums throb every time I open my mouth for a bite. “Bet you’re wishing you hadn’t volunteered for this,” I say, breath puffing out of me in frosty clouds of steam.
Ash glances at me, her wool hat pulled all the way down to her eyebrows. It makes her look younger, more vulnerable somehow. “What, you mean because it’s cold?” She shrugs. “Cold where we were, too. At least this way we’re all together. Beats sitting in that house for another winter with only Caleb to stare at. Last year there were a couple of times I thought I might actually kill him, just for something to do.”
I laugh, but her words make me feel small, silly to have questioned her loyalty even in jest. “Thank you,” I say quietly.
She bumps her shoulder against me. “For what?”
“For being my friend.” I bump her back. “For coming with us.”
“It was never even really a question,” Ash says, “not for either one of us. For so long, it was just Caleb and me and my dad. I mean, we had everyone else, but they weren’t family. And after my dad…we still had each other, but we didn’t feel quite like a family anymore.”
“And then I came crashing into your life,” I say with a smile.
Ash smiles back. “Yep. And it’s been good, Ivy. Bishop and you, you turned us into a family again. And we don’t turn our backs on family. There’s no way we were letting you two take on Westfall alone.”
I look down at the piece of jerky in my hand, no longer hungry, my stomach curling in on itself. I hate that I’m putting Ash in jeopardy to help someone who will never be a tenth of the person she is. “You’ve already been more of a sister to me than Callie ever was,” I say.
“It’s okay,” Ash says. “You don’t hav
e to explain it to me, why you need to go back. It’s enough that you do.”
We’ve caught up to Caleb and Bishop, who have stopped walking, both focused on the ground, foreheads furrowed. Ash opens her mouth to speak, and Caleb silences her with one sharp look, points down to our feet. There are footprints in the snow. Bigger than Ash’s. Bigger than mine. So probably a man. The footprints veer off into the brush to our right and disappear. Caleb gives Bishop a look and motions Ash to follow him. Bishop holds back with me for a few seconds before we continue on behind Ash and Caleb.
“What are we doing?” I ask in a whisper.
“Figuring out who that is,” Bishop whispers back. “And what they want.”
“How—”
“Just keep walking,” Bishop says. “Stay with Caleb.” Before I can ask him anything else, he’s stepped into the trees to our right. Within seconds, he’s melted away into the maze of gray branches. I want to follow him, my body turning toward the spot he disappeared, but I force myself to keep walking forward, eyes on Caleb’s back. If it were only my life on the line, I would probably crash after him, instructions be damned. But I don’t want to do anything to endanger Bishop. My blood is pounding in my chest, my ears straining for any sound of him. I know Bishop can handle himself, that he’s as good as Caleb at navigating these woods. He’s strong and he has a gun. My brain knows all that. My heart isn’t quite getting the message, throbbing painfully against my ribs. The base of my neck is knotted with nerves, like someone is yanking hard against the top of my spine.
We’ve been walking silently for what feels like an hour but is probably only a quarter of that when I hear branches breaking behind us, something big and thrashing cutting through the trees. Caleb whirls, crossbow already off his back and aimed into the woods in the direction of the sound. Ash and I flank him, knives out of their sheaths, poised and ready to fly.