Cam couldn’t be here. He hadn’t been here in years. And he definitely couldn’t stop a bullet. But a feeling of safety drenched me anyway. It never mattered if the rest of the world saw him as a menace—Cam had always been my unlikely refuge, even when he earned every last bit of his reputation. He’d protected me for the simple reason that I’d been theirs all my life.

The girl who tagged along with the Daniels boys.

The naive teenager who stayed behind when three brothers went to war.

The woman who shattered when only two came home.

Cam might be here now, but one misstep, and we’d both be buried next to Sullivan.

“Stop moving or I’ll shoot!” Mr. Daniels shouted, and Cam obeyed. “Empty your pockets! You’d better not be stealing from me!”

“I’m going to let you go, and I want you to slowly back into the woods and then get the hell away from here,” Cam ordered me softly.

I vaguely heard Mr. Daniels’s agitated muttering in the distance.

“I can’t leave you here,” I protested.

“For once in your life, listen to me, Pika. I’m trying to save your neck. Alexander is coming up behind Dad, and help is on the way, but you have to go.”

The nickname tightened my throat with a lump so big, I couldn’t swallow it down. “He doesn’t recognize you, Cam. He’ll shoot. It’s been six years since he’s seen you. He doesn’t even recognize me, and I see him almost every day.”

“He’ll remember me.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought, too, until he pointed a shotgun at me, you stubborn idiot.”

“What was that?” he whispered. “I thought I heard a squeak, but my coat must have muffled it.”

I would have pinched him in retribution under any other circumstance.

“He’s not going to remember you,” I argued, “and you’ll just agitate him even more when you try to remind him who you are.”

Mr. Daniels’s muttering grew louder until he was shouting again. “You trespassers, trying to steal what’s mine! You can’t have it! Can’t have it…”

Cam’s heartbeat stayed calmingly rhythmic, his breathing deep and even. If I hadn’t seen Arthur Daniels myself, I’d never think there was a gun pointed at us.

“You can’t have it!”

A shot rang out, and birds scattered from the woods at my back. I froze, my grip tightening on Cam’s coat.

His hand splayed wide over the small of my back.

“Cam!” I whispered as loudly as I dared. If he was hurt—if he’d come back only to be buried… I wouldn’t survive burying another Daniels boy. I leaned to see around him, but Cam’s grip tightened, trapping me firmly behind him.