Page 2 of Untamed Hunter Daddy

I bite down on my knuckle so hard I feel the skin split. My body is shaking. Violent, involuntary tremors that rattle my teeth and make the dry branches around me shift and whisper. The cold and the fear have fused into a single thing and I can't separate them anymore. My mind races through every terrible ending. He finds me. He drags me out of the rocks. He takes me back to Tyler or to whatever is left of the operation. They punish me for running. They make sure I can never run again.

The man stops. He turns his head slowly, scanning the trees the way a predator reads a landscape. Not just looking but listening, tasting the air, feeling for the thing that's wrong in the pattern. He looks strong. Capable. The kind of man who doesn't need to rush because he already knows how this ends.

He takes another step. Then another. Each footfall deliberate and steady. He's moving toward my hiding spot. Not directly. He's following something on the ground. Tracks. My tracks. The ones I tried to cover by dragging a branch behind me but probably only made more obvious because I've never had to hide from anything more dangerous than a difficult customer.

My hand closes around the sharp rock I've been keeping beside me since the second day. It's the only thing I have that could pass for a weapon. A flat piece of granite about the size of my palm with one jagged edge that I used to cut strips from my apron and to scrape bark off a stick I'd been sharpening into something I told myself was a spear but looked more like a sad pencil. The rock is cold in my grip and not nearly enough but it's all I've got.

He's fifteen yards away now. Maybe twelve. Close enough that I can hear his breathing. Steady and even, the breathing of a man who hasn't been running for his life. Close enough that if I don't move in the next few seconds, he'll be standing right over my shelter looking down at me like I'm an animal in a den.

I could run.

The thought fires through my brain hot and electric. The trees are thick to my right. If I bolt now, while he's still a few strides out, I might get enough of a head start to disappear into the deeper woods. My ankle screams at the idea but adrenaline is a powerful liar and right now it's telling me I can do anything, go anywhere, outrun a man twice my size through waist-deep snow in cracked sneakers with a sprained ankle.

Adrenaline is an idiot.

But staying means being found. Staying means whatever comes next is out of my hands completely. Staying means trusting that the rocks will hide me when I already know they won't because he's reading my trail like a book and the last page leads right here.

I shift my weight to my good leg. The branch pile beside me creaks. If I go I have to go now. Right now. Before he clears the last stand of pines and has a direct line of sight to the hollow.

I push up to a crouch.

And my ankle buckles.

Not a little wobble. A full collapse, the joint folding sideways with a white flash of pain so sharp that the air leaves my lungs in a sound I can't swallow fast enough. A short, broken gasp that cuts through the quiet like a handclap. I go down hard on one knee. The rock slips from my fingers and tumbles out of the hollow, skittering across the snow and coming to rest in plain view, three feet from the opening of my shelter, as obvious as a signpost.

The footsteps stop.

Silence. Total. The kind of silence that has a physical texture, thick and suffocating, like the mountain itself is holding its breath to see what happens next.

I'm on my knees in the dirt with my only weapon lying in the snow outside my reach and a sound I can't take back still ringing in the air between us. My hands are shaking so badly I press them flat against the frozen ground just to make them stop. I can feel him out there.

I close my eyes and press my forehead against my knees. My breath comes in shallow sips that taste like blood and cold air and the particular flavor of knowing it's over.

Please don't see me. Please keep walking. Please let me disappear into the snow and the rocks and the cold until none of this is real anymore.

But I heard the footsteps change direction. One step. Two. Coming toward the sound I made, toward the rock lying in the snow like a dropped confession.

The branches above my hollow shift. Daylight floods in, gray and blinding after the shadows. A shape blocks it almost immediately. Massive shoulders, dark beard, eyes that find me instantly and hold.

I'm crouched in a hole in the ground in a ruined dress with no weapon and no way to run and a stranger looking down at me like he's just found something he wasn't expecting to find. Not surprised. Not smug. Something else entirely. Something I'm too scared and too starved and too broken to read.

I don't scream. I don't have the strength for it. I just sit there on my knees in the dirt and wait for whatever comes next, because the mountain has made its decision and taken every choice I had left.

The last thing I see before the tears blur everything is the rock. My rock, my only weapon, my one sharp thing. Lying useless in the snow between us, already half-buried and sinking.

2

Ryker

I count the birds before I count anything else. Old habit from selection that never left. Two Steller's jays yelling at each other in the pines to my left. A Clark's nutcracker hammering a dead limb forty yards south. Somewhere higher, a golden-crowned kinglet whistling. Means the storm building behind the peaks is still a few hours out.

Birds tell you things. Right now they're noisy, which means nobody's been up this trail today except me.

I cut the engine on the ridge and sit for a minute staring down at the old mine site. Feds have been crawling over it for days. Yellow tape snaps in the wind. Black SUVs sit near the empty shipping container. Agents load evidence boxes and take final photos. The place looks smaller in daylight. Stripped of the chaos and the gunfire.

I step out into the cold. Snow crunches under my boots. The air bites at my face, but I've been breathing this mountain air long enough that the cold's just another texture. My breath fogs. I can feel the storm in the low ache behind my left knee, the one I shattered overseas. When that knee starts talking, snow's twelve hours out at most.

I walk down toward the site, scanning the tree line like I always do. Agent Davenport spots me first. He's leaning against the lead SUV with a thermos, silver at the temples, the kind of fed who's been in the field long enough to stop caring about his tie.