Not If I Save You First by Ally Carter (9)

Maddie

The summer between eighth grade and Logan’s freshman year of high school, he grew four inches and gained thirty-five pounds. Probably another twenty pounds turned from baby fat to muscle, and his feet grew so much his mother started buying his shoes two sizes too big. The president used to joke that it was going to impact the national debt just to feed him.

It wasn’t fun. And it wasn’t funny. Not for Logan, at least. It was like going to bed one night and waking up every morning in an entirely different body—one that didn’t move the same, feel the same, work in the same way as the one he had always known. His fingers were clumsy and his feet were clunky and it felt like he was constantly at risk of moving too fast in the wrong direction and toppling over. It seemed to take months for his center of gravity to feel like his own again.

This is what that felt like.

Walking through the woods, still numb and angry, his hands bound in front of him as he plodded up a hill and over the rough ground, Logan’s feet were heavier than they should have been. He stumbled and shuffled and dragged his new all-terrain boots over terrain that he never before could have dreamed of.

Logan was in good shape. He played sports in school and liked to swim and play pickup games with the off-duty Secret Service agents who always seemed to be hanging around the court at the White House.

But he was tired. He was winded. He wanted to sit down and stare forever.

He wanted Maddie back.

He’d just gotten Maddie back.

Logan didn’t care when he ran into a tree limb and broke it, when he kicked a rock and sent it down the steep face of the hill, lost in the mud and muck.

It was starting to drizzle, but he barely felt it. Logan barely felt anything. At least he didn’t until the man with the gun started to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Logan spat out the words, rainwater clinging to his mouth and spewing forth like he might be rabid.

But the kidnapper smiled. “You. Thinking you are going to leave a trail for someone to follow. You have seen too many movies, my friend.”

“I’m not your friend.”

“No. You are my hostage. Walk.”

Logan turned and did as he was told, but he couldn’t shut up. That was asking too much. His hands were starting to go numb, and he had to use his arms and lean at the waist to try to get enough momentum to drag his body upward.

“Do you really think no one is going to miss me? I thought you knew who I was. People tend to notice if the first kid goes AWOL.”

“There is no one to miss you.”

Now Logan wanted to laugh. “I’m the president’s only child. When Maddie and I don’t come back, they’ll have an army in these woods. They’ll have the Army.”

He spun on the man, feeling triumphant, but the feeling turned to ice as a cold, cruel grin spread across the man’s face.

“Are you thinking of the men in your camp or of your little friend?” the man asked, then shook his head. “It does not matter. Like I said, there is no one to miss you.”

Suddenly, the ground moved, the earth shifted. Logan blamed it on the wet, steep hillside, but it was more than that.

Charlie had gotten fired because of him, but in that moment, Logan knew that the two agents who’d been forced to follow him to Alaska had gotten much, much worse.

He could barely get the question out: “What did you do?”

“What I’ve only begun to do. Now walk.” The Russian accent seemed thicker now, with this new, awful knowledge. “We cannot fall behind schedule.”

He reached for Logan then, to grab him by the handcuffs and jerk him to his feet, toss him around as if he weighed nothing—were nothing.

But even as the clouds grew thicker, Logan’s mind grew clearer. He could see it now: what had happened—what was happening. The Russian was right about one thing: Logan had watched a lot of movies, and he knew that there would be no negotiating for his freedom, no tearful, tense exchange. He’d seen this man’s face; he’d heard his voice. Logan was a dead man. Just like the two agents who had brought him here.

Just like Maddie.

Maddie.

Logan heard a fierce roar that rumbled like thunder in the dense woods, but it wasn’t a bear—it was his own mangled cry. He didn’t think or feel or worry anymore. He just lunged at the man who was standing beneath him on the hillside.

Maddie was dead. And something inside of Logan was alive and fighting, and he didn’t want it to stop until these woods were covered with blood.

He felt the man falling and grabbed hold tighter, and the two of them rolled over and over across the rocks. Tree limbs slashed against them. Logan tasted blood. His screams filled the air, a terrible piercing cry that he didn’t even try to stop.

His hands were still cuffed, and he slammed them into the man’s gut, pounding like a hammer with both fists. The man was dazed, but he wasn’t stopped, and when Logan pulled back again, the Russian moved like a blur, reversing their positions and leaping to crouch over Logan, pressing his chest against the rocky ground.

Logan never even saw the knife.

Not until he felt it, cutting into the soft flesh between his pinkie finger and its neighbor. At first, his hands were too cold, too numb, and Logan was too high on adrenaline and anger to feel any pain. But then he saw the bright red drop of blood that bubbled up from his too-white skin.

He felt the kidnapper’s warm breath on his cold cheek, heard the accented warning: “This is not the part of you I need,” the man whispered near Logan’s ear. “Now you must ask yourself: Do you want to lose more than just your girlfriend and your pride today?”

The man seemed to think he’d asked an excellent question, made an undeniable point. He didn’t know that Logan had already lost everything that meant anything to him. A pinkie finger was the least of his problems.

No. The only thing Logan cared about was vengeance. And he wasn’t going to get that—not right then; not right there. He wasn’t going to get Maddie back with his bare fists. He had to …

I am never going to get Maddie back, Logan realized.

It was suddenly harder than it should have been to keep breathing.

The man dragged him to his feet, pushed him in the back.

“Now walk.”

Maddie knew her way across the river. Even cold and hungry and still a little too unsteady on her feet, she’d crossed the old fallen tree enough times to know that it could hold her.

The man hadn’t known about it, though. Or maybe he hadn’t wanted to risk climbing down the steep cliff face to reach it. In any case, by Maddie’s estimation she’d gained at least an hour on them. But she’d probably been unconscious at least that long, so she didn’t know how much good it did her. Besides, her head hurt too badly to think too much. So she just kept walking.

When she reached the place where riverbank gave way to trees, Maddie saw the broken branches. Even with the rain, someone had dug so deeply into the soft earth while searching for footing that it was almost impossible to miss the ruts. Now.

Maddie looked up at the sky, at the clouds that were growing thicker, darker. Maybe it was the drizzle that clung to her hair or the shock from her long, hard fall, but it was definitely getting colder. And it was going to get a whole lot worse before it got better. In a lot of ways.

Someone might miss Logan’s tracks if they didn’t know where to look for them—if the weather kept getting worse. So Maddie walked to the river and gathered the biggest rocks she could, then placed them like an arrow, pointing the way. She piled a few smaller stones on top, just high enough to be noticed in a few inches of snow and ice, but not so high that they might topple.

Then Maddie lowered her hood. She brought her hand to the side of her face and pressed her palm against the largest of the rocks until her bloody handprint shone like an eerie beacon, announcing to the world: Trouble came this way.

But trouble was Maddie’s family’s business, so she did the only thing that made sense: She followed it.

The footprints were easy to track for a while, but then the ground got rockier and the rain got harder. Luckily there were a lot of trampled bushes and broken branches. It looked like a bulldozer had passed that way, and a part of her wondered if Logan was doing it on purpose. She didn’t know him well enough to say anymore, and that hurt almost as much as her head.

She could feel the swelling beneath her hair, but that was good, wasn’t it? Better for it to swell out than in? Maybe her brain would be okay even if her hair would look terrible. Maddie consoled herself with the fact that there wouldn’t be anyone around to see it. That and the whole life-and-death thing.

That’s what made her bend at the waist and leverage herself higher. And higher. The rain was still falling, but she was making good time.

Her shoulder hurt, though, probably from the fall. And sometimes she’d find herself stopping, wincing, because it felt like a sword was going between her ribs, but she was pretty sure they weren’t broken—just bruised.

It could be worse, she told herself.

She could have left home without a raincoat like a moron.

Was Logan wearing a raincoat? Maddie couldn’t remember. She just knew he was a moron, and the thought should have worried her, but she just smiled a little. Logan was gone without a trace and she was calling him a moron in her mind.

Things were almost back to normal.

But then Maddie saw something on the hill—an overturned rock, like someone had struggled to make a step.

Not quite a moron, she told herself, and went to the rock, stacked a half dozen others around and on top of it with a small limb sticking straight up for good measure, and then she started up the hill again, certain that she was on the right path.

She wanted to run. She wanted to find him and make sure he was okay and just have the worrying part behind her.

But she also had to be careful, be quiet. If the man thought she was dead, then that could be her best weapon. She’d left her second-favorite hatchet stuck blade-deep in a tree at the top of the cliff, after all. So she stayed quiet, even though that came with its own set of problems.

As Maddie pushed through a piece of heavy brush, she heard a sound that sometimes haunted her nightmares.

Part grunt. Part growl.

Maddie froze on the path as the bear pivoted and saw her. It must have smelled her or heard her messing with the rocks and cursing Logan under her breath. Because, thankfully, it wasn’t scared. It had known she was there, even if Maddie couldn’t say the same.

It was covered in thick fur, fat and ready for winter as it rubbed up against a tree like it had an itch it couldn’t quite scratch. But it didn’t charge at her. If anything, it seemed annoyed that she’d intruded on its solitude. So Maddie did the only thing she could do—she put her hand on the hilt of her knife, then eased back, slowly slipping away.

When her heart returned to its chest, she veered off the beaten path but kept climbing.

She didn’t stop to think about the truth of her situation: There were two predators in these woods, and Maddie wasn’t sure which one scared her most.