Star Crossed Hurricane by Wendy Knight Page B

anger.
    She had to see where he was coming from. She’d been trying to protect Beckett for a year now. She knew where Sawyer was coming from because she was there, too. They couldn’t be together. It would kill Beckett.
    It will kill me to let her go.
    He ran a hand through his hair. There just wasn’t a solution. Not one that anyone ended up happily in. They’d go their separate ways, maybe he’d see her at Kelly and Caleb’s wedding one day, and she would be beautiful and happy. She’d turn every head in the room, and someone else would own her heart.
    And him? He would never own his heart again. No matter how long it took, she would always keep a piece of it. There would be an aching, fiery hole in his heart for the rest of his life.
    A part of him daydreamed about staying in this silent, underground city — never going back to face the real world, or Beckett. Just stay here with Savannah, and he would have everything he ever needed. Maybe, when he found her, he would propose the idea and see if she’d go for it.
    He’d reached the end of the road. In front of him rose a hill with sparse grass and Savannah’s footprints in the sand. He couldn’t see the top, but it looked like it went all the way to the ceiling of the cave. “Savannah?” he called.
    She didn’t answer.
    Swearing again, he started climbing the hill. He could see each place she’d slid or fallen because the proof was right there in the indent. He followed her prints to the very top, where it did not, in fact, touch the ceiling. In fact, there was path going down the other side, disappearing around a bend into the darkness. There was another path that wound around some scraggly trees and man-made stone structures to what looked suspiciously like a way out of this nightmare.
    He jogged to the entrance first. The hurricane was dying down, but the wind still howled and nearly knocked Sawyer over, and the rain still drenched everything around him. Half the mountain had slid down in the storm, giant trees had been uprooted and tossed like toothpicks, but the cave was untouched, protected by an overhanging crop of solid rock above it. He couldn’t see her anywhere, and he couldn’t picture her — even mad — running off and leaving him. So he turned around and went to explore the other path.
    It led down the hill and through a narrow crevice. It was darker here than up by the buildings, and more foreboding. Goosebumps rose up his arms and down his back — and it wasn’t from being wet and cold. This place was creepy. It made the falling down, abandoned house seem like an amusement park.
    The path finally opened up into a wider, darker cave. He dug Aaron’s phone out of his pocket and held it up for light. “Savannah?” he called.
    Again, no answer.
    He gathered up his courage, telling himself that if a little thing like Savannah could waltz right in here, so could he. And that nothing in here could hurt him as bad as she did just by existing and not being his.
    It took him exactly five steps before he realized where he was. Lined up on each side of the chamber, in rows of three, were bodies. Dead, decaying bodies for as far as he could see. Fear froze him for about thirty seconds before he started running.
    Not toward the exit, like anyone with any semblance of coherency would have done, but down the corridor of dead bodies. “Savannah!” he yelled, picturing her being dragged to hell by the hands of the dead surrounding him. Or being torn apart or held down…
    “Savannah!”
    He reached the end of the crypt, nearly slamming into the wall. She wasn’t here. He turned in a circle, breathing fast, his phone light shaking in his hand. “Savannah?”
    He jogged back toward the path, feeling like there were a hundred dead bodies climbing from their crypts and pulling themselves along the ground after him, and he refused to look over his shoulder. He hit the path, slid through the narrow crevice again, and shot up the hill. He raced through