Ensnared (Brutes of Bristlebrook, #1)(25)

My forehead knits, and I straighten again as the pig gets distracted by the produce. “But feeding them alone would take so much work. How do you even get all of this food?”

Lucky plucks up a particularly fluffy black hen, nuzzling into her.

“This is Henrietta. She’s needy,” he explains. Then he lifts one shoulder, refocusing on me. “They do okay. We had a couple shi—sorry, crap—years when we couldn’t get anything to grow properly. We have the veggie patch over by Jaykob’s workshop. Berries, cabbage, pumpkin, tomatoes, corn. Lots of corn. We also let it pretty much run wild in here, so they get insects and worms and shi—ah, stuff—too. Thought Jasper was going to shoot one of us and use the corpse to feed to the pigs before he finally got the hang of it.”

God. How can they have so much? I stay quiet, just watching the animals and thinking, until Lucky starts shifting beside me, his smile slipping.

“Eden—”

“It’s just— Don’t you ever feel guilty?” I can’t stop the words; they bubble from some dark, envious vault inside me. I starved and scraped through for years while they had all of this? “People would kill for what you have. Literally kill for it.

People starved, good people, who needed homes and safety and food—and you had all of this! How is that fair? Why couldn’t you share? There’s room. There’s so much room. With these caves . . . How many people could you have saved? You were Army, right? Doesn’t that mean you have to protect and serve?”

My hands clench around my shirt, twisting it. The events of the last few days, weeks—heck, years—are bubbling over into my emotions. I want desperately to understand. I need to.

At my words, Lucky’s face turns grim, its playfulness stilled. Henrietta lets out an anxious squawk, and he sets her down with an absent, soothing rub of her feathers.

“That’s the police, I think. We’re ‘Rangers Lead the Way,’” he mutters as he shoves his hands in his pockets. His gaze skirts mine. “Maybe you should chat to Dom about this one, I—”

I lift my chin and force my hands to unclench, and he breaks off with a grimace. I like Lucky. He’s easy to be around and has made me feel welcome and included, without the underlying pressure I feel from the others. But it just isn’t fair, and I can’t pretend it doesn’t matter to me.

If I’m being honest, I wouldn’t have just killed to have what they have—the things or objects. In the early days especially, I was so desperate to feel safe. I’m not a fighter. I don’t have any crazy, special survival skills. Even when everything went dark so suddenly, even though the broadcasts stopped, I was so confident the Army, the cops, someone would get organized eventually. That sooner or later they would sweep through, take control, and protect us. That we would recover some semblance of government and order.

But it never happened.

I learned to protect myself, and I’m better for it. Not with guns and fist fights, but with learning and patience. But how many others died who really needed the help that these men—trained and so much more capable—could have given?

Sure, the Army was scattered, destroyed. But surely even the five of them could have done something on a small scale.

Couldn’t they have helped innocents on the ground, rather than holing up together and only caring about themselves?

I can’t let this go.

So instead of backing away from the confrontation, my usual instinct, I take a deep breath. “No. You brought me out here.

Explain it to me. Make me understand why you all felt it was okay to hide out in paradise while innocent people were butchered.”

Lucky blinks at me in shock.

“Well, damn, sweetheart. And here I thought you were sweet and shy.” He runs a hand into his hair, seeming to forget it’s in a bun. He scowls when it loosens, and his arm drops. “We did try, okay? We tried a couple times early on.”

He hesitates a moment, like he’s trying to find the right words. He looks as though he’d rather be anywhere else. “When we first came out here, we collected nearly twenty people before we even had resources to support them. A few families, some couples, a handful of loners. We lost four on the way—attacked by asshole marauders like your friends from the other day.

They were attracted by a big group of soft targets, I guess. We fought them off, but there were too few of us to protect that many in the open. A woman died, two men . . . and a kid. Wouldn’t have been eight years old.”

My stomach drops, and I bite my lip.

A brown feathered chicken plucks at Lucky’s shoes and he scowls down at it, but I’m not sure what he’s seeing. There’s a vulnerability in the downturn of his mouth. The memory clearly hurts him.

My self-righteous anger melts into concern. Gently, I take his hand again and tug until he lets me lead him out of the clearing. Lucky drops the scoop, but when I move to release his hand, he squeezes it. Avoiding my eyes, he stares at our cupped palms. We’re standing too close, but I don’t move away again. Absently, I run my thumb over his wrist.

When he continues, his voice has steadied. It’s matter of fact, like he’s reading a report. “It got tense after that. A few people started thinking that they could have done better, wanted us to share around the weapons.”

He snorts, and the sound is colder than I thought him capable of. “Like we’d hand our weapons over to civilians who don’t know their asses from the right end of a rifle. ’Specially ones muttering about how they’d be better in charge. By the time we got to Bristlebrook, it was a pot ready to boil over. The rest of the group was picking sides, who they thought would win out.