From the #1 bestselling author of The Inheritance Games comes a
gripping mystery-thriller. Years ago, Kira was found alone in the wild
with no memory of her past. Now part of the Bennett family, she’s
trained in search and rescue. When a missing girl disappears in the
wilderness, Kira joins the search—only to uncover dark secrets that
challenge everything she believes. As danger mounts, she must
confront the truth about her past to save the child. Suspenseful and
twist-filled, this novel will keep you hooked until the very end.
Chapter 1
Saint Jude was the patron saint of impossible causes. My foster brother took his namesake very seriously. In the eleven years since his mother had found me, half-wild and dying in a ravine, I had never once known Jude to throw in the towel when the odds were stacked against him. Jude Bennett had never met a lost cause he did not immediately embrace with the whole of his overly optimistic soul.
I was a testament to that sometimes endearing, sometimes frustrating aspect of Jude’s personality—and so was the fact that he was currently standing in the middle of a party at Hangman’s Ridge, holding an old-school boom box over his head, and blasting eighties music in the direction of a girl who literally did not know his name. As in, I had literally heard her call him Kyle.
Twice.
“Boy still insisting that Kyle is a nickname for Jude?” Free came to stand beside me, leaning back against the truck. She shook her long blond hair back over her shoulder and crossed one ankle over the other as she hooked her thumbs through the belt loops on her faded jeans.
“He’s moved on from nickname to term of endearment,” I said, watching as Jude punched a fist into the sky. “Remind me to limit his consumption of eighties movies going forward.”
“Won’t help,” Free opined, reaching up to swat at a mosquito on her arm. “Cady say anything to you about whether or not she’s going to let the military have Pad?”
Free didn’t believe in segues between one subject and the next.
“Not a word,” I said, taking my eyes off Jude long enough to get a better look at Free. “Why? Did she say something to you?”
Pad, short for Padawan—Jude’s choice of name, not mine—was a fourteen-month-old golden retriever and quicker on the uptake than any other dog we’d trained. Jude and Free were holding out hope that Cady—Jude’s mother and my foster mother—would keep our star pupil, but every time I took Pad out, I could feel her energy, her determination. She needed to run, to track, to find.
She needed more than we could give her.
“I am not Cady’s favorite person at the moment,” Free admitted, “on account of the fact that we had a fundamental disagreement.”
Free was as prone to disagreement as Jude was to optimism. She was the most stubborn person I’d ever met—and the woman who’d raised me was number two. Jude insisted that crossing horns was their way of expressing affection.
“Was this disagreement about the fact that you haven’t been to school in over a week?” I asked Free.
Free shrugged. She was infamous in the Chester Falls public school system for two things: her perfect test scores and her less-than-perfect attendance. Free had a system. She aced every single test given during the semester, then skipped finals altogether, ultimately pulling home C’s in every class. Free’s parents, when this was first brought to their attention, had declared that they “respected their daughter’s individuality and right to make her own decisions.”
Cady, needless to say, did not. Our property backed up to the Morrows’, and Free had spent as much time at our place growing up as she had at her own. Cady didn’t treat her any differently than she treated Jude and me—and that meant that she and Free had their share of fundamental disagreements.
“You could just ask the teachers to let you take makeup tests,” I pointed out. “Then you wouldn’t need to ask me whether or not Cady was selling Pad to an army search and rescue unit. You could ask her yourself.”
Free did not dignify that comment with a response. Instead, she nodded her head toward Jude. “It appears our boy has drawn the attention of some unsavory types.”
It took me two seconds to analyze the situation. Jude was standing in the midst of three very large, very angry townies. And being Jude, he appeared to be challenging them to a dance-off.
“My upper lip wanted to pull back.Only years of social conditioning
let me push down the urge to growl.”
I pushed off the truck and headed for trouble. Free followed at a lazy pace.
“I assure you, gentlemen, proving yourselves to be better dancers than me would stick it to me far worse than any act of physical violence possibly could.” My foster brother offered his would-be assailants a conspiratorial smile. “I’m not saying that I’m the second coming of Fred Astaire, but I’m also not denying it.”
One of the townies reached for Jude. I got there first, stepping between them. The townie—twenty-one or twenty-two, too old to be at a high school party and too stupid to know it—barely managed to stop himself from ramming his knuckles into my face. Jude was a head and a half taller than me, six foot two to my five foot nothing. He was gangly.
I was small and dangerous.
“Well, well, well,” the townie said, looking back at his friends, bleary-eyed and clearly amused. “What do we have here?”
I said nothing, but I could feel a familiar emotion unwinding inside of me, an old friend come out to play. These idiot boys didn’t know what it was like to fight tooth and nail for survival. They didn’t know what happened when you cornered an animal in its lair.
They didn’t know that the biggest dog wasn’t always the one in charge.
“Man,” one of the other townies said, laughing, “I’d watch out for this one, Dave. She has the crazy eyes.”
I didn’t move, didn’t stop staring at the lot of them, didn’t so much as blink. All around us, the other partygoers began to realize what was going on. If Jude’s assailants had been a few years younger, they might have realized, too.
I had a bit of a reputation.
“Gentlemen,” Jude said behind me, “this is what is known as a situation. I would suggest that you take a step or two back, and then I can assure you with an entirely moderate degree of accuracy that this will probably not get ugly.”
The party had gone completely silent, except for the music and the distant sound of the river down below. We were maybe ten feet from the edge of the ridge, a hundred feet above the river, 9.6 miles as the crow flew away from the ravine where Cady had found me eleven years before.
“And if we don’t step back?” one of the boys taunted.
My upper lip wanted to pull back. Only years of social conditioning let me push down the urge to growl.
“Seriously,” one of the townies said to Jude, a note of nervousness creeping into his tone at the expression on my face. “What’s wrong with her?”
“Nothing’s wrong with Kira,” Jude said cheerfully. “I mean, who among us doesn’t have anger management issues and difficulty socializing in the human world, am I right?” He laid his hand on my shoulder, a warm and steady weight. Familiar. Home. And just like that, I was five years old again and six and seven, and Jude was the one person in this world hat I trusted. Back then, I wouldn’t have stared down the bullies. Back then, I would have attacked.
“Dude,” one of the townies said under his breath, “is she the one who . . .”
The one they found in the forest all those years ago. The one who’d forgotten how to speak. The one who’d fended for herself for who knows how long.
“And on that note,” Free said, stepping forward, “let’s break this little lovefest up.” Even clad in Levi’s and a ratty blue T-shirt, Free was the kind of girl that guys looked at and then looked at again. It wasn’t the thick blond hair, falling in carefree waves past her chest. It wasn’t her full lips or deep brown eyes. It wasn’t even the hips beneath the jeans.
It was her confidence. It was the fact that Free Morrow walked through life knowing that she could ace any test it threw at her—and didn’t much care either way.
She bent down and picked up Jude’s boom box. “Who wants to dance?”
Extracted from The Lovely and the Lost by Jennifer Lynn Barnes, out now.
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