Page 13 of Sparrow

It’s a girl’s name.

“What?” I hiss.

He doesn’t pause. Doesn’t even hesitate.

“That’s Arden Rossi,” he says quietly. “What the fuck is she doing out here in the middle of nowhere?”

Well that’s the fucking question, isn’t it?

But he doesn’t ask again.

He’s already running for the cabin.

Mars

Arden Rossi. Arden Rossi.

The name pounds out a tattoo in my head, matched to the sound of my feet hitting the forest floor, and before long it’s so loud I can hardly think.

I push it down with more willpower than I realized I had and force my brain into something more useful. Because yes, I know that girl–know her entirely too well, actually–but that doesn’t matter as much as it should.

The facts that matter are much simpler than her identity.

Girl in the woods by herself.

Girl in the woods by herself in a cabin on the compound inhabited by another MC.

By the Iron Saints, who moved into town three months ago without invitation and have been making trouble ever since. Just last week they went out of their way to start a war with my cousin, who was acting sheriff at the time.

They attacked my nephew.

Tried to kidnap my niece.

And now they’ve got some girl in a cabin on their property, her eyes enormous and her skin paler than a fucking whitewashed wall, and my brain is screaming toward a number of conclusions.

Of course none of them matter, either. They’re just noise.

The only truth here, the only thing that matters, is that they’ve got a girl in there and we don’t know why or what they’re going to do with her. What they may have already done. I just know that we have to get her out before they hurt her any worse.

I tear through the woods, moving from tree to tree in some vague attempt to make myself less obvious–in the darkness of a midnight with very little moon–and finally come to a stop at a tree on the edge of the woods. I lean against it and stare around the trunk, trying to get my bearings. It’s dark as a witch’s cauldron out here and the lack of moon makes it difficult to see the ground in front of me, but I can see the cabin well enough.

She’s got all the lights on, like she went through the place and hit the switches, trying to figure out what was in there with her.

I wonder if she feels safer with the lights on. If she’s checked underneath the bed. God, I wonder if she feels any safety at all.

A body suddenly barrels into me from behind and I spin, my instinct screaming that some of the Saints have figured out we’re here, and that we mean to steal the girl they’re holding prisoner.

But it’s just Orion.

He looks like he was born on the fucking land, his hair full of pine needles and his eyes wild, and I wonder again what he was doing up here and why he left the garage in such a hurry. There had been a text, and his eyes had gone wide, then suspicious... and then determined, in a way only Orion can accomplish.

The man doesn’t like to commit to anything, but once he does, the change is like a flash of lightning, altering the landscape from dark and forbidden to bright and intense in half a second. And once he’s decided on something, God help you if you try to talk him out of it.

I’m stubborn as an old tree myself, and I can’t hold a candle to Orion.

“Watch where you’re going!” I hiss. “I could have shot you!”

He narrows his eyes at me and immediately calls my bluff. “You didn’t bring a gun. You never bring a gun.”