Then again, Lia wasn’t built like this guy either. She catalogued his every trait: six-four if he was an inch, with a chest so dang wide it threatened to split the seams of his T-shirt. He didn’t look like a body-builder though. He was solid muscle, but it seemed like the kind of muscle a man developed because he used his body as a tool. A weapon.
In that moment, Lia knew this man was dangerous. And judging by the fact he’d carried her out of her worst nightmare—he was more dangerous than the crazy inbred and well-armed rednecks.
“Who are you?”
“I believe I asked you the same question several times, and I only got a little slip of a name. You up for a trade?”
A trade. He asked. Didn’t take. This was new and different in Lia’s reset world—one resembling more of a horror movie than reality.
She could do this. There was nothing harmful in giving him her name anyway. “I’m Lia.”
“You got a last name?” he asked.
“McLaren.”
“Lia McLaren. It’s a pleasure.” The way his voice wrapped around the syllables again unleashed a tide of warmth within her. She could listen to him read the phone book and it would chase away the monsters … even better than the darkness.
“I’m Cam.” He stepped forward and offered his hand, and Lia couldn’t control her instinctive flinch. He froze.
Only weeks ago—or maybe only days—Lia had never known the jaw-cracking pain of a man’s closed fist connecting with her face. But that was before she found the darkness. Once she did, she never felt anything again. God only knew what other horrors she would’ve witnessed. Still, she couldn’t control the urge to shrink away as he advanced.
“I’m not gonna hurt you, sweetheart. Just want to shake your hand and wrap up these introductions properly.”
He held his hand out to her, but there was so much more than his hand hanging in the air between them. A shining thought bloomed in Lia’s mind. This hand was an opportunity. An anchor. A chance at safety again. It was irrational—crazy, even—but that’s what she saw when she looked at it.
Did she dare?
Lia closed her eyes for a beat, and the darkness called her back to its sweet oblivion. She snapped them open. Enough darkness.
She pulled her hand out from beneath the sheet and reached out until her palm slid against his. She expected to want to yank it back immediately, but the urge never came.
His voice was amazing.
His touch was better.
He was the light.
She’d had enough darkness.
She curled her fingers around his and clung.
Cam stood outside the clinic and stared at the camp, trying to erase the haunting images from his brain—the woman he’d just left inside, but covered in mud and filth, chained to a pipe like an animal; the way she’d laid limp in his arms as he’d carried her mile after mile through the woods; and the bruises that still covered nearly every inch of her exposed skin. There was still no guarantee she’d pull through, but he liked to think she was a fighter, a hard charger—much like Rowan Callahan, the woman who had alerted them to her existence and the reason the rescue mission had been launched. Rowan was a feisty brunette who was keeping two of his former Force Recon teammates, Graham and Zach, on their toes because of her relentless determination to get home to her family. She was too reckless and stubborn to realize that even though she’d made it this far, the world outside the walls of Castle Creek Whitetail Ranch was nothing like it had been only seven days earlier. Although, Ro should’ve been aware considering the trek she’d made all the way from Chicago. Her journey—which was her own crazy-ass story—had been fairly uneventful until she’d heard a woman screaming and followed the sound to a camp of rednecks in the woods. That screaming woman had been Lia. Ro had almost ended up their next victim, but her sprint away from danger had sent her right into the fence line of the ranch. Cam shuddered to think what would’ve happened to Lia if Ro hadn’t demanded they save the pitiful woman she’d seen dragged on her knees through the dirt.
Firebombing the camp hadn’t been enough. He wanted every single one of them dead—but they’d only gotten two of them.