I sighed, drinking mine. I didn’t know what to make of this guy. On the surface, he seemed like just some normal backwoods character, but there was something a little off about him, something a little strange. He knew my father but he was pretty vague on the particulars.
“Well, then,” I said to him. “Let’s say you come back tomorrow morning?”
“Okay then.” He stood up. “I got the message. I’ll leave you two lovebirds alone.”
Piper blushed and I sighed. “It’s not like that,” I said.
“Sure, it’s not, sure.” Randy grinned at me and walked to the door. “I’ll be back tomorrow morning, assumin’ the rains don’t make the roads impossible. Sleep tight, you two.” He shut the door and went outside.
I watched him get into his truck, turn around, and drive off. I turned back to Piper. “I have a bad feeling about him.”
She cocked her head at me. “Really? He seemed nice.”
“He’s strange. And how did he know we were here?”
“He said that he saw us.”
“He lives miles away. How did he see us?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.
“There’s something off about that guy, Pipes.”
“He knew your father.”
“Maybe. Probably. It’s hard to say.”
“We’re safe, Gates.” She walked toward me. “You got us to safety. You can relax a little bit.”
I shook my head. “This is the mob we’re up against. I can’t relax for a second.”
I walked away from her, over toward the kitchen, my mind a hot dense sphere of thought and worry.
“You can have the bed tonight,” I said. “There’s only one. I’ll take the couch.”
“Oh,” she said. “Okay.”
I frowned at her. “I won’t be sleeping much anyway.”
“I understand.” She walked back toward the bedroom. “I’ll get settled.”
“Sounds good.”
She disappeared into the back room and I leaned up against the counter, worry rolling through my body. I noticed her disappointment, but I didn’t understand exactly why she was let down. I was trying my best to keep us both alive, and I needed to stay sharp. I couldn’t let some strange guy lull me into a false sense of security.
The thing that kept bugging me was how Randy knew that we were in the cabin. He didn’t come up right away because he was watching some game, but that didn’t seem right, either. If some strangers were going into his cabin and he saw them, he would have followed them right away. Otherwise, how could he have known that the car he saw was going to his cabin? There were other cabins in the area.
Randy wasn’t telling us something. I was absolutely sure of that. He knew something abut this cabin that he wasn’t telling me. Why else would he have kept it in such good condition for so long? I couldn’t imagine it was out of loyalty to my long-dead scumbag father.
I had to keep an eye on him on top of everything else. I was stressed, but I wasn’t going to break. I had to protect Piper. That was my goal above all else.
Nobody was going to come close to touching her so long as I was around to stop them.
Chapter 15
Piper
I woke up on the cold, hard mattress and it took me a second to really figure out where I was. The night before was a blur, and I had to really think back to realize that I had gone into the bedroom to take a look around and ended up falling asleep.
I sat up and looked at the clock. It was six in the morning and the sun was just rising over the trees outside. I must have slept for like twelve hours or something like that.
I shook my head, feeling groggy. Gates wasn’t in the room, though I expected that.
He shut down as soon as that goofy man had arrived. Gates seemed to think that Randy was a threat, but I wasn’t so sure. Randy didn’t seem like he could threaten anyone even if he wanted to. The old man was kooky, that was for sure, but he wasn’t a bad guy.
Then again, my sense of this sort of thing was pretty questionable at best at this point. I never saw what kind of man Tony really was, even after being with him and living with him. He completely dazzled me and hid his true self, and I felt so absolutely wrecked.
As I sat there on the strange bed alone for the first time since it happened, I broke down. I broke down and cried. I let myself have this one moment of weakness, because I was mourning for something. It wasn’t for the relationship with Tony, but maybe for my innocence. I could never go back to before this happened. I’ll always have seen that murder, always have dated a murderer. From this point forward, there was no turning back from what I was.