Iron Daughter

IRON DAUGHTER Chapter 13

"Wren!"

Raine's voice cracked across the dark before she'd even decided to call out, raw and loud in a way that surprised her, and Cash was already moving along the shoulder with his phone flashlight cutting white arcs through the weeds, calling the same name in a register she'd never heard him use before, stripped of all its usual steadiness.

Nothing answered. Just crickets, and the tick of the dying engine, and somewhere below the drop the distant sound of water moving over rock.

"She could've gone over," Cash said, not quite to her, more to himself, already moving toward the edge where the shoulder gave way to nothing.

"Don't." Raine caught his arm before she'd thought it through, some old reflex she didn't examine too closely. "You go over that edge in the dark, we've got two people to find instead of one. Work the tree line first. People thrown clear usually land up, not down."

He looked at her for half a second like he was surprised she knew that, and she didn't have the energy to explain that six years of watching boatyard accidents and listening to Coast Guard radio chatter had taught her more about what bodies did in a crash than she'd ever wanted to learn.

They searched the tree line in widening arcs, flashlights cutting through brush and low branches, Raine's boots sinking into soft ground that smelled like wet leaves and pine sap, a smell that under any other circumstance she might have called pleasant. Every few seconds one of them called Wren's name again, and every few seconds the only answer was the same indifferent chorus of crickets, until Cash's light caught something pale against the dark underbrush and he went still so fast Raine nearly ran into him from behind.

They found her nine feet off the road, tangled in a stand of scrub pine, half sitting up against a trunk like she'd crawled there on purpose rather than landed there by accident, one arm wrapped tight across her ribs, her face streaked with dirt and something darker that might have been blood in the poor light.

"Wren." Raine was on her knees in the dirt before she registered moving, hands hovering over her stepsister without quite daring to touch, afraid of making something worse. "Hey. Hey, look at me."

Wren's eyes found her slowly, unfocused at first, then sharpening with something like disbelief. "You came."

"Of course I came. Don't talk. Where does it hurt."

"Everywhere." A sound that might have been a laugh, wet and broken at the edges. "Mostly my side. I think something's cracked."

Cash was already crouched on her other side, phone pressed to his ear with his free hand, voice low and fast giving their location to whoever had picked up, Widow's Curve, east side, female, conscious, possible broken ribs, and Raine registered distantly that he sounded exactly like the kind of man who'd done this before, calm under it in a way that steadied something in her chest she hadn't known was shaking.

"Don't move," Raine said, when Wren tried to shift her weight. "Ambulance is coming. Just stay still."

"I wasn't trying to kill myself, if that's what you're thinking." Wren's voice had gone thin, stripped of everything performative that usually lived in it. "I wasn't even going that fast. I just took the curve wrong. I wasn't thinking straight and I took it wrong."

"I know."

"You don't. You think I'm being dramatic. Everybody always thinks I'm being dramatic." A tear cut a clean line through the dirt on her cheek, and she didn't seem to notice it had fallen. Her breathing had gone shallow and quick, the kind of breathing that comes from fear as much as pain, and Raine found herself matching it without meaning to, slow and deliberate, the way you breathe at someone when you want their body to borrow the rhythm from yours. "I wasn't running from what I told you tonight. I mean I was, some. But that's not actually why I was out here."

Raine glanced at Cash, who'd gone quiet, phone call finished, listening now with the same careful attention he'd given everything all night.

"Then why," Raine asked.

Wren's eyes closed, just for a second, like she was gathering whatever was left of her nerve.

"The wedding," she said. "I don't want it. I haven't wanted it for months. I don't know how to call it off without everybody in that club deciding I'm just as much of a mess as they already think I am, and tonight, with everything coming out, with you standing there finding out what I did, I just. I needed to not be anywhere near any of it for a while. So I got on the bike and I didn't think, I just rode."

In the distance, faint but growing, a siren cut through the quiet, red and blue light eventually going to bloom somewhere behind the tree line, and Raine knelt there in the dirt holding her stepsister's hand without remembering deciding to take it, processing a confession she hadn't braced herself for on top of one she was still only beginning to carry. Cash had gone very still beside her, watching Wren with an expression Raine couldn't fully read in the dark, something careful and guarded that hadn't been there a minute ago.

"Does Marcus know," Raine asked, careful, because Wren's fiance was Marcus's nephew. "Does he know you don't want this."

Wren's breath caught, and for a long moment she didn't answer, the siren growing louder behind them, closer, and when she finally spoke her voice had dropped to something barely above a whisper.

"Nobody knows. Nobody except the person I actually wanted to marry instead, and he doesn't even know I feel that way, because telling him would mean admitting whose name I actually wrote in the margins of my vows before I threw the page away."

The ambulance lights swept across the tree line, throwing Wren's face into sudden sharp red and blue, and whatever she'd been about to say next died in her throat the second the paramedics' boots hit gravel behind them.