I tried to get a read on his posture, his expression. My fight-or-flight instincts hadn’t kicked in when he’d touched me. Because he’d reached out to steady me?

“Far be it from me to state the obvious, but you took my flashlight.” Gabriel gave me an indecipherable look.

“I did.”

Gabriel arched an eyebrow. “Is this the part where I ask why you followed me here and committed petty larceny against my person?”

I got the distinct feeling that he wasn’t amused, even though he smiled like he was. I should have been on guard. When he asked me why I’d followed him, I shouldn’t have wanted to reply.

“Your brother disappeared four years ago,” I said. Facts were easier than answers. “You’ve been mapping out this mountain ever since. Yesterday, you told me that you’d spent a summer looking for these caves. You said you’d never found them.” My heart gave no signs of thundering in my chest. My breath didn’t come quickly. “You lied. Why?”

I braced myself for him to lash out, to go on the defensive, to demand to know how I knew about his brother.

Instead, he reached forward—and plucked the flashlight from my fingertips.

“I told you I wasn’t the trustworthy type.” He stared at me for a moment longer, then turned. “Come on.”

Chapter 32

As we approached the entrance, I became acutely aware of the fact that the only light in the cave came from the flashlight in Gabriel’s hand. It wasn’t until we came face-to-face with a wall of rock that I processed the implication of that darkness.

“Rockslide.” I beat Gabriel to the observation. He placed his hand flat on the rocks blocking our exit, testing their stability. I assumed he was trying to calculate the odds that we could dig our way out.

“You know those movies where two people get caught in an elevator together at the worst possible time?” he asked.

It took me a moment to understand what he was saying: We were trapped. The earthquake must have triggered the slide. The opening hadn’t been that big to begin with.

I could feel an old, familiar sense of dread rising up inside me, like a whisper of smoke slithering its way up my spine. Trapped. Dark. Let me out. I’ll be good—

“If it’s any consolation, I have it on good authority that being trapped in a confined space with me is a fate at least marginally better than death.”

“I don’t need you to distract me,” I gritted out. I’d seen Jude and Free doing it often enough to recognize the technique.