“Da?” Greysen asked then chanted, “Da. Da. Da.” as he orbited Casey and Lottie like an exuberant puppy. Speaking of puppies… “Where is Kingpin? And for that matter, where is Jaesen?”
“He’s hunting a feral pig,” Nyah answered. Casey’s hand dropped to his gun. Feral pigs were nasty. Jaesen might need help, but before he could ask where Jaesen was hunting, Nyah added, “He saw some tracks yesterday too close to camp. Don’t want the babies hurt.”
“Babies?” Casey shook his head, dismissing that question, and instead, asked the more pertinent one. “Which way did he go?”
All the women shrugged collectively, and Casey swallowed back a growl of frustration. His soldiers would have known. Hell, his soldiers would have formed a mission detail and took out the threat. Much like Jaesen was doing… Casey grunted in a mix of satisfaction and residual irritation. The irony of his thought hadn’t escaped him.
His silence appeared to bother Lottie since she wrapped her hand around his forearm and turned her concerned gaze his way. Of course, the women wouldn’t know where Jaesen was hunting. They didn’t have the same training as his soldiers, nor should they.
Casey patted her hand and smiled at her, trying to convey his acceptance of Nyah’s answer. “I’m sure Jaesen has the situation in hand.” After all, he was doing what Casey expected of him, and rather than dwell on his inability to hunt pork with Jaesen, Casey repeated his first question, “Babies?”
Maggie patted her stomach again. “We’re due in less than a month.”
Casey’s throat worked to swallow past his immediate sense of panic. Unless he brought the women to Fort Sutton, there was no way he could attend any of them as they delivered.
Pressing his lips together, they formed a thin line of displeasure. He’d known deep down, that this would be the case, but facing the inevitability of it, left a sick feeling in his stomach. He wanted to be here for each of them, but it was impossible regardless of how he felt. His next scheduled day to visit the camp was in June, seven long weeks away. Anything sooner, and Lincoln would notice.
“Easy, soldier,” Nyah said with a smirk. “This isn’t our first rodeo.” She walked around and put her hands-on Ally and Maggie’s shoulders. “We know what to do. Right ladies?”
Several of the women chirped agreements. “See,” Lottie murmured. “You don’t need to worry. We’ll be okay.”
Casey squeezed her hand as she let go, bent and lifted Greysen, situating him on his hip. Greysen squirmed, reaching for the guitar. Casey pulled it away, and asked, “Hungry Kiddo?”
“‘Gree, daddy,” Greysen agreed, giving Casey’s question lip service since his attention was clearly on the guitar Casey still held.
“Well let’s fix that, shall we?”
Greysen nodded solemnly. His tiny hands still reaching for the neck of the guitar.
Hugging him close, Casey made his way back to his place by the fire, set the guitar on the ground behind his spot and sat. Picking up a now cool bowl of soup, he handed it to Greysen, who cupped it in both hands and took a careful sip.
He was feeding himself!
Greysen’s getting so big, Casey thought. Surely Lottie felt a similar sense of pride at how well he was growing up. Glancing at Lottie, he grinned. Yep. Her pleased smile for Greysen proved she felt something similar.
Sounds of lips smacking and a satisfied “ah” drew everyone’s attention. Greysen held up his bowl. “‘Ore, Daddy.”
“Here, I’m done. So, I’ll get it,” Grace offered.
“Thanks,” Casey acknowledged, handing her the empty bowl, and as Grace served up Greysen’s seconds, the supper conversation returned to typical mealtime subjects.
Sitting there, listening and eating, Casey let his mind float contentedly, not abiding by any one particular topic but letting the cadence of the women’s voices wash him along. As he grew full, he noticed his gaze drawn to Lottie more and more. She laughed easily, so much more carefree than when she went to Gates. He wanted to hold her, to brush the hair from her cheek and tuck it behind her ear. His distraction was so complete that he was surprised when she stood and dusted her hands on her pants, and announced, “I’ll clean up.”
“I will too,” he offered, earning a snicker from Nyah. He ignored it. There was no way he’d let Lottie be off on her own now that he had her back. He’d waited too long for her return.
“Thanks,” she said. “We brought some water earlier and left it to heat at the other fire pit. You want to help me carry the dishes over there?”
“Sure,” Casey agreed readily and began collecting the used bowls while Lottie left his side. She disappeared into the shed, emerging a moment later with a large wooden tub.
A bowl tapped against his arm and he dragged his attention from Lottie’s rear end as she set the tub down at the butcher station. “Forget something,” Nyah asked with a wink.
Casey shook his head, feeling his neck warm. “No,” he grunted and took the bowl from her. Nyah’s chuckles followed him as he finished collecting the dishes and crossed the clearing with them. Dumping them in the tub, he asked, “Why do you wash dishes here?”
“Debris.”
“Debris?”
“Yeah, the food waste. We have a midden pile over there,” she said and pointed over her shoulder. “due to the scraps from butchering. It’s easier for us to lug the tub to it from here than from the cook fire.”
“Ah.”
“There’s a leather dishtowel over there. For drying,” she said, indicating the direction with her chin as she began washing. “It’s not as good as the cotton ones Noah had, but it’ll do.”
Casey silently agreed and went to retrieve it. Once he had it in hand, he returned to her side and took the freshly washed bowl from her. Shaking off the excess water, he asked as he dried, “Tell me about it. Was it bad?”
Lottie glanced up from her task; her eyebrow cocked in question. “It?”
“Gates.”
She shrugged. “It wasn’t as bad as I expected, but it wasn’t fun either. There wasn’t much to do besides sleep, eat, read and do chores. Every woman there had a half-hour a day of free time where you were allowed to go alone to the library, gym, activity room or walk the courtyard, et cetra, without supervision or repercussions. Otherwise, all downtime was spent in your room. Although,” she said after a pause “if you were desperate for company, you were encouraged to seek out the donors. The surgeons didn’t restrict that contact, only the ability to talk to the other women. And after those first few weeks, I didn’t even see the guards more than once or twice a day while they supervised our comings and goings.”
Lottie brushed the hair from her eyes with the back of her hand, grabbed a new bowl from the depths of the tub and started to scrub. “There was a lady’s night once a week where we were able to meet in the library with the others. We’d play games and talk. And plenty of us would use our free time to visit the women ill in the infirmary. With twenty-seven of us, it seemed like someone was always using an infirmary cot for one reason or another.”
“Did you ever need it?”
Lottie grimaced and nodded.
Taking the cleaned bowl from her, Casey wrapped it in the leather and started to rub. “Why were you there? There’s nothing in your file about you being sick.”
Lottie frowned. “I wasn’t sick.” She added air quotes to the word sick, splashing herself with soapy water from the tub, which she then wiped away with the back of her hand. “I had a panic attack when Zoe miscarried right in front of me during one of our chores.” Her expression turned pensive. “At first, I thought she caught me stealing seeds and was going to tell the guards, but then she started gasping for breath and then the blood.” Lottie shuddered, and he wanted to put his arm around her. “Blood everywhere. Probably the scariest thing I lived through while at Gates.”
She was silent for several beats. Casey assumed she was reliving her time at the facility. Keeping quiet, he waited for her to continue, and eventually, she did. With a small smile, she said, “For all their effort to keep the women apart we still managed to form bonds. Everyone over there—except Ally—were my closest friends in that place.”
Turning to look at him, she handed him another bowl. “Last one.”
Good. He was beginning to wonder when the pile would ever run out.
“Anyway,” she went on, submerging her hands once again. Casey groaned. What else needed washed? “Spoons,” Lottie said after chuckling at his reaction. “Two other women were planning to come with us. Lisa and Valery. But they backed out at the last minute.” She handed him the clean spoons. “We were leaving to meet Leo”—Who was Leo? A stab of jealousy hit him hard in the chest—“when we heard them coming down the hall dragging Ally between them.”
“Why did they change their minds?”
Her eyes shown with unshed tears. “They have daughters in St. Louis. They wanted to wait for their girls to get to Gates.” Lottie paused in her washing to stare back at the campfire where a few of the women were sitting and laughing. Greysen, Casey could see, was perched on Grace’s knee as she bounced him up and down. His squeals of delight carried across the clearing.
With emotion choking her voice, Lottie said, “I promised them I would find a way to get them and their daughters out.“
Casey knelt, pulling her into his arms. She wrapped wet hands around his back saturating his shirt, but he didn’t care. She needed him. “You don’t have to. I’ll do it.”
She gave him a watery laugh. “Good. Glad you agree since I already told them you’d help.” He smiled. How had she known he’d be willing? He patted her back. When she spoke again, her words were muffled by his shirt. “We’ll both do it, and Noah too.” Her breath hitched, and he was sure she was crying. He ran his hand through her hair. He didn’t know how they would succeed yet, but those women wouldn’t have to suffer any longer. He’d make sure of it.
*****If you like Acquisition and Preservation, please add it to your library!
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