“What kind of bad feeling?”
Caden didn’t want to hear Ace thought she was dead.
“I don’t know.” He handed Caden the saddlebags and bedroll. “But it’s not good.”
“Well, it’s not going to be more than we can handle.” Caden tied the bedroll and bags to the saddle, grabbed his rifle and slid it into the scabbard tied to the left side. “Maddie’s been hurt enough.”
“Agreed.”
Caden swung up onto Jester. “So let’s go get her back.”
He refused to believe she was dead.
“And if we find she’s been hurt?” Ace asked.
“We bring her home.” Caden smiled as rage poured through his gut in an icy torrent at the thought of anyone touching his Maddie. Thunder rumbled in the distance. “And then we bury the bastards who hurt her.”
Ace tipped his hat and backed his horse around in a tight circle. “I’m good with that.”
* * *
BECAUSE THEY LEFT late in the morning, it took them a day and a half to get to the spot where Maddie had met up with someone. There were still remnants of hoofprints on the hard-packed earth thanks to the ground being soft when the confrontation had occurred. It had dried up since then, leaving plenty of signs there’d been others, but no path that led anywhere because of the rocky nature of the surrounding area.
“Nothing.” Caden squatted beside the footprints, tracing them with his finger, looking for any identifying mark, anything that would give him a clue.
“That’s what Tucker said,” Ace drawled from farther out, where he circled looking for signs.
There was no better tracker than Tucker. No better scent hound than Boone. Caden knew Tucker had searched the area thoroughly, and if Tucker couldn’t track from here then Caden couldn’t, either. But he had to look. He had to try. Maddie was gone. He couldn’t grasp the thought. Couldn’t stand the possibility that it was real.
“Fucking hell.” Nothing. Grabbing a handful of dirt, he threw it and stood. Why hadn’t Maddie stayed where she was safe? “Which way did Tucker say they went?”
Ace pointed down.
“Into the wilderness?” That didn’t make sense. There was nothing that way except emptiness and hostiles.
Ace shrugged. “He said Boone lost the trail about a mile down that way.”
It didn’t make sense, unless they were just pulling off to rape her. The icy knot in Caden’s stomach swelled, choking off his voice as he imagined Maddie being held down and abused. Maddie, who was kindness and hope. Who’d already endured so much. He swung back up on his horse. Ace followed, the way he always did, a silent, deadly companion. It was hard to get to know Ace. He kept so much of himself inside, but if there was a battle, he was there, and if there was trouble—like now—he was ready.
The path was rough. Rough enough even Rage, Ace’s horse, protested. Negotiating the terrain would have been hard for Maddie’s little horse, Flower, who had never traveled along anything more difficult than a meadow.
As if reading his mind, Ace asked, “Would that mare of hers be able to make this?”
“She might not have had a choice.”
“True enough.”
* * *
FEAR TANGLED WITH RAGE as Caden broke through a copse of trees and emerged in a clearing. The clearing was a small oasis in the middle of the darker woods. Cool and inviting and, most important, hidden. It would be simple to rape a woman here in peace. Gritting his teeth against the images in his head, Caden swung down.
Hold on, Maddie.
It was easier to see the disturbance in the soil here caused by many hooves. Harder to sort them out as one smeared into another.
“Is this where Tucker lost them?”
Ace looked around. “Looks like what he described.”
Caden crisscrossed the clearing, step by step. Tucker had already decoded what was in the dirt, but what he needed was a clue, something to give him an idea of who had Maddie.
He was on his third pass over the small clearing when Ace called his name.
“Caden?”
“What?”
“If there was anything to find, we’d have found it by now.”
Caden shook his head. “Keep looking.”
“For what?”
“Anything.” There had to be something here, something to show where Maddie was, but if there wasn’t, he’d simply search house by house, town by town, until he found her or someone who knew where she was. And then there’d be hell to pay.
He pictured her face with her big eyes, rosebud mouth and that smattering of freckles across her cheeks. Kisses of the fairy folk, he’d say. He looked around the little glen, the sunlight filtering through the leaves in small rays, giving it almost a magical feel, and whispered, “If she is one of you, give me a goddamn sign as to who has her.”
He waited in vain for a clap of thunder, a whisper in his mind, a touch on his shoulder. His da always said the wee folk were particular, but then, as he turned, out of the corner of his eye he saw a gleam of metal. It took him four steps to get there. Four steps in which he thought he must be losing his mind, but when he got to that spot, the shine didn’t go away. It grew stronger until he was standing on top of it, and then he couldn’t see it anymore, covered as it was by a low-growing fern. He squatted.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know yet.” He moved the fern aside, and there, camouflaged against the rock, was a button. He picked it up. He felt more than heard Ace arrive at his side. The man was as light as a cat on its feet. He held the button up.
“Hard to see as it was against the rock.”
Ace nodded.
The button had a unique design. Almost a cross but not quite.
“A button,” Ace said, his disappointment as strong as Caden’s should have been.
“Yeah.” Caden whispered a thank-you to the fate, God or whomever had brought him to that button.
Caden stood. Ace cocked his head and observed his face.
“Except you recognize it, don’t you?”
“It’s got a distinct pattern.”
He closed his fingers around it, his mind consumed with all the reasons a man’s button would pop off his shirt. None of them were good.
He ran his thumb over the raised design. “It’s the Culbart brand, a lopsided cross.”
“Culbart has her?”
“So it would seem.” Culbart was a bear of a man. Rough around the edges. Not known for his soft ways with anything, let alone women. His crew was rougher still. And he had Maddie.
“That button could have fallen off for a wide variety of reasons,” Ace pointed out with an utter lack of conviction.
That was true, but in his gut Caden knew what that button meant.
He dropped the button in his pocket and swung up into the saddle. He spun Jester in a circle and kneed him back up the trail.
“But there’s only one that matters to me.”
CHAPTER FIVE
LYING LOW ON a hill above the Culbart spread,