Mountain Investigation
Jessica Andersen
Mountain Investigation
Jessica Andersen
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#u7359fa1e-c29c-50bb-987b-acf1d80cc2a9)
Title Page (#u5d2026d9-20fc-5fb9-adf9-321093563a98)
About the Author (#u598016c9-005f-5b01-83ab-9610462edc08)
Chapter One (#ua62893fb-f57b-548c-9f7c-ab673aa8daf7)
Chapter Two (#u2b5bbcdb-2ac3-555c-98ef-8ce7efa4273a)
Chapter Three (#u80db24a9-aa58-5dfe-b693-c34dca4d5977)
Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author
Though she’s tried out professions ranging from cleaning sea lion cages to cloning glaucoma genes, from patent law to training horses, JESSICA ANDERSEN is happiest when she’s combining all these interests with her first love: writing romances. These days she’s delighted to be writing full-time on a farm in rural Connecticut that she shares with a small menagerie and a hero named Brian. She hopes you’ll visit her at www.JessicaAndersen.com for info on upcoming books, contests and to say “hi!”.
Chapter One
Mariah Shore paused on the ridgeline about a half mile from her isolated cabin. Standing in the lee of a sturdy pine, she scanned the woods around her with a photographer’s sharp eye. She wasn’t looking for a subject for her old, beloved Canon 35 mm, though. The camera was stowed safely in her backpack for the hike home.
No, she was looking for a target for the Remington double-aught shotgun she held across her body.
“There’s nobody there,” she told herself, willing it to be true. But the woods were quieter than she liked, and the day was rapidly dimming toward the too-early springtime dusk.
With her curvy figure swathed in lined pants, a flannel shirt, a wool sweater and a down parka, and her dark curls tucked under a thick knit cap, she’d be warm enough if she stayed put. But her hurry to get home wasn’t about the warmth. It was about the cabin’s thick walls and sturdy locks, the line of electric fencing near the trees, and the motion-sensitive lights and alarms that formed a protective perimeter around the clear-cut yard.
The cabin was safe. Outside was a crapshoot.
She needed to keep moving, would’ve been nearly home if she hadn’t heard a crackle of underbrush and seen a flash of movement directly in her path. She’d tried to tell herself it was just an animal, but she’d spent the best weeks of her childhood following her grandfather through Colorado woods like these, and she’d lived in the cabin thirty miles north of Bear Claw City for more than a year now. She’d hiked out nearly every day since arriving, first for peace and more recently for some actual work, as she’d started to feel the stirrings of the creativity she’d thought was gone for good. She knew the forest, knew the rhythms and inhabitants of the ridgeline. Whatever was between her and the cabin, her sense of the woods told her it wasn’t a bear or wildcat. Her gut said it was two-legged danger.
Her ex-husband. Lee Mawadi.
Or was it?
“He’s not there,” she told herself. “He’s long gone.”
She’d kept tabs on the investigation, listening to the infrequent follow-ups on her small radio, and asking careful questions during her rare trips into the city for supplies. Because of that, she knew there had been no sign of Lee in the nearly six months since he and three other men had escaped from the ARX Supermax Prison, located on the other side of the ridge. She also knew—or logic dictated, anyway—that her ex-husband had no real reason to come back to the area, and every reason to stay away.
After a long moment, when nothing could be heard but the muted sounds of the sun-loving animals powering down and the nocturnal creatures revving up as dusk fell along the ridgeline, she even managed to believe her own words.
“You’re talking yourself into being scared,” she muttered, slinging the double-aught over her shoulder and heading for home. “There’s no way he’s coming back here.”
Lee might be a terrorist, a murderer and a liar, but he wasn’t stupid.
Still, she stayed alert as she walked, relaxing only slightly when it seemed like the forest noises got a little louder, as though whatever menace the woodland creatures had sensed—if anything—had passed through and gone.
When Mariah reached the fifty-foot perimeter around the cabin, the motion-sensitive lights snapped on. The bright illumination showed a wide swath of stumps in stark relief, mute evidence of the terror that had driven her to chainsaw every tree within a fifty-foot radius of the cabin, and install a low-lying, solarpowered electric fence to keep the animals away.
In the center of the clear-cut zone sat the cabin. It was sturdy and thick-walled, its proportions slightly off, a bit top-heavy, and if she’d thought a time or two that she and the cabin were very much alike, there was nobody around to agree or disagree with her. She lived alone, and was grateful for the solitude. She used to think she wanted the hustle and bustle of a city, and the mob of friends she’d lacked during childhood. Now she knew better. Once a loner, always a loner.
Reaching into her pocket for the small remote control she carried with her at all times, she deactivated the motion-sensitive alarms. The security system wasn’t wired to call for any sort of outside response, first because she was too far off the beaten track for the police to do her any good, and second because she didn’t have much use for cops. That wasn’t why she’d installed the system; she’d wanted it as a warning, pure and simple. If she was in the cabin and trouble appeared, she’d know it was time to get out—or dig in and defend herself. If she was somewhere in the forest, she’d have a head start on escaping.
The Bear Claw cops and the Feds had offered her protection, of course, first when Lee had been arrested for his terrorist activities, and again when he’d escaped. But those offers had all come with questions and sidelong looks, and the threat of people in her space, watching her every move, making it clear that she was as much a suspect as a victim.
Victim. Oh, how she hated the word, hated knowing she’d been one. Not as much a victim as the people Lee had killed, or the families who mourned the dead, but a victim nonetheless. Worse, she’d been selfish and blind, not looking beyond the problems in her marriage to see the larger threat. She had to live with that, would do so until the day she died. But that didn’t mean she had to live with strangers—worse, cops and FBI agents—reminding her of it, and hounding her and her parents. Not when there wasn’t anything she could do to help them find her ex-husband.
“There’s no way he’s coming back here,” she repeated, shifting the shotgun farther back on her shoulder so she could fumble in her pocket for the keys to the log cabin’s front door. “He’d be an idiot to even try.”
She unlocked the door and pushed through into the cabin, starting to relax as she keyed the remote to bring the motion-sensitive alarms back online.
They shrieked, warning that something—or someone—had breached the perimeter in the short moment the alarms had been off.
A split second later, a blur came at her from the side and a heavy hand clamped on her arm, bringing a sharp pricking pain. Jolting, Mariah screamed and spun, but the spin turned into a sideways lurch as her legs went watery and her muscles gave out.
Drugs, she thought, realizing that a syringe had been the source of the prick, drugs the source of the spinning disconnection that seized her, dampening her ability to fight or flee. The tranquilizer didn’t blunt her panic, though, or the sick knowledge that she was in serious trouble. Her heart hammered and her soul screamed, No!
She fell, and a man grabbed her on the way down, his fingers digging into the flesh of her upper arms. His face was blurred by whatever he’d given her, but she knew it was Lee. She recognized the shape of her ex’s body, the pain of his hard grasp and the way her skin crawled beneath his touch.
He took the remote control from her, and used it to kill the alarm. Then he leaned in close, and his features became sharp and familiar: close-cropped, white-blond hair; smooth, elegant skin; and blue eyes that could go from friendly to murderous in a snap.
Born to an upper-class Boston family, the second son of loving parents with a strong marriage, Lee Chisholm had been sent to the best schools and given all the opportunities a child could’ve asked for. Logic said he should have matured into the cultured, successful man he’d looked like when Mariah had met him. And on one level, he’d been that man. On another, he’d been a spoiled monster whose parents had hidden the fact that he’d had a taste for arson and violence. That nasty child had grown into a man in search of a cause, an excuse to indulge his evil appetites. He’d found that cause during his years at an exclusive, expensive college, where he’d been recruited into the anti-American crusade.
As part of a terrorist cell, under the leadership of mastermind al-Jihad, he’d gone by the name of Lee Mawadi, and had arranged to meet Mariah because of her father’s connections to one of al-Jihad’s targets. Lee had wooed her, courted her, pretended to love her…and then he’d used her and set her up to die.
She hadn’t died, but in the years since, she hadn’t really lived, either. And now, seeing her own death in her ex-husband’s face, she cringed from him, her heart hammering against her ribs, tears leaking from her eyes.
Lee, no. Don’t! she tried to say, but the words didn’t come, and the scream stayed locked in her throat because she couldn’t move, couldn’t struggle, couldn’t do anything other than hang limply in his grasp and suck in a thin trickle of air.
Then he let go of her. She fell to the floor at the threshold of the cabin and landed hard, winding up in a tangled heap of arms and legs, lax muscles and terror.
He crouched over her, gloating as he held up the small styrette he’d used to drug her. “This is to shut you up and keep you where you belong,” he said. Then he stood, drew back his foot and kicked her in the stomach. Pain sang through her, radiating from the soft place where the blow landed. She would’ve curled around the agony, but she couldn’t do even that. She could only lie there, tears running down her face as he said, “That was for forgetting where you belong, wife. Which is by my side, no matter what.”
He grabbed her by the hood of her parka and dragged her inside, kicking the door shut.
The sound of it closing was a death knell, because Mariah knew one thing for certain: the man she’d once promised to love, honor and obey didn’t intend to let her leave the cabin alive.
Five days later
Michael Grayson was a man on a mission, and he didn’t intend to let inconsequential details like due process or official sanction interfere. Which was why, just shy of six months after he’d nearly been booted out of the FBI for sidestepping protocol, Gray was back on the edge of the line between agent and renegade, between law officer and vigilante. Only this time he was well aware of it and knew the consequences; his superiors had put him on notice, loud and clear.
The threats didn’t stop him from taking his day off to drive up through the heart of Bear Claw Canyon State Forest to the hills beyond, though, and they didn’t keep him from using a pair of bolt cutters on the padlocked gate that barred entry to a narrow access road leading up the ridgeline. Up to her house.
He drove into the forest as far as he dared, just past a fire access road that marked the two-thirds point of the journey. He tucked his four-by-four into the trees, off the main track so it couldn’t be seen easily from the road, pointing it downhill in the event that he needed to get out of there fast.
Then he started walking, staying off the main road and out of sight, just in case. As he did so, he tried to tell himself that it was recon, nothing more, that he just wanted to get a look at Lee Mawadi’s ex-wife six months after the prison break. But he couldn’t make the lie play, even inside his own skull. His gut said that Mariah Shore had secrets. There had to be a reason she’d moved into a cabin on a ridgeline that, on a clear day, provided views of both Bear Claw City and the ARX Supermax Prison.
His coworkers and superiors in the Denver field office had put zero stock in Gray’s gut feelings—which admittedly had a bit of a hit-or-miss reputation. The higher-ups had written Mariah off as nothing more than she seemed: a pretty, dark-haired woman who’d married a man in good faith, not realizing that he was using her twice over, once to create the illusion of middle-American normalcy and disguise his ties to al-Jihad’s terrorist network, and a second time to gain entrée to her family.
When the newlyweds moved to a suburb north of Bear Claw City to be close to her parents, Mariah had leaned on her father to find a job for her engineeringtrained husband within the American Mall Group, where her father had been an upper-level manager. It wasn’t until after the attacks and subsequent arrests, when the story had started coming together, that it became clear Lee had manipulated Mariah into getting him the job, just as he’d manipulated her into serving as his alibi through the first few rounds of the investigation.
Or so she had claimed. Gray hadn’t fully bought her protestations of innocence two years earlier during the original investigation, and he sure as hell hadn’t believed them more recently, when her husband had escaped. There were only so many times he could hear “I don’t know anything” before it started to wear thin, especially when the suspect’s actions said otherwise.
Mariah Chisholm, who had gone back to using her maiden name of Shore after the divorce, knew more than she was admitting. Gray was positive of it…he just couldn’t convince his jackass, rules-are-God boss, Special Agent in Charge Johnson, to lean on her harder.
Then again, SAC Johnson was in this investigation to make his career and avoid stepping on any political toes. Gray was in it for justice.
The horrific terror attacks two and a half years earlier, dubbed the “Santa Bombings,” had targeted the start of the holiday season, when families with young children had gathered at each of the American Malls to welcome the mall Santas. The bombs had been concealed in building stress points near the elaborate thrones where the Santas had sat for whispered consultations with hundreds of hopeful, holiday-crazed kids. The explosives had all gone off simultaneously, in six malls across the state. Hundreds had been killed—families destroyed in a flash—during the most joyous of seasons.
It had been an inhuman attack, directed solely at the most innocent of innocents. Terrorism in the truest sense of the word.
In the investigation immediately afterwards, a couple of sales receipts and a glitchy security camera had led the FBI agents to Lee Chisholm—who called himself Mawadi among his “real” family within the terror network—along with his co-conspirator, Muhammad Feyd, and the mastermind himself, al-Jihad. The evidence had been enough to convict the men—barely—and get them sentenced to life-plus at the ARX Supermax. The clues hadn’t seemed to point to the involvement of Mawadi’s wife, who at the time had been dealing with bad press, a quickie divorce and her father’s forced retirement and subsequent near-fatal heart attack. In the end, Mariah Chisholm, née Shore, had been cleared of suspicion as far as the higher-ups were concerned.
As far as Gray was concerned, though, they’d missed something.
He’d been part of the initial interviews of Mariah and her father, and he’d memorized all the reports—both the official file and the assembled news stories. The reports from two years earlier, during the time when Lee Mawadi had been arrested, tried and convicted, had described Mariah as “shocked,” “devastated” and “grief-stricken.” One Shakespeare of a journalist had even called her a “doe-eyed innocent played false by the man she thought she knew.”
The pictures and film clips had backed up those descriptions, showing a lovely, sad-eyed woman with curly, dark-brown hair and full lips that had trembled at all the right moments. For the most part she’d tried to avoid the cameras. On the few occasions she’d spoken publicly, she’d read prepared statements in which she had apologized for not having seen her husband of six months for what he’d been—a monster—and had urged swift justice for Mawadi, Feyd and al-Jihad. Even Gray, an admitted cynic, had bought the routine, all but forgetting about her once Mawadi and the others were behind bars. He’d shifted his attention away from them and focused on tracking down more of al-Jihad’s terror cells.
All that had changed the previous fall, though, when Mawadi, Feyd and al-Jihad had escaped from the ARX Supermax with the help of fellow prisoner Jonah Fairfax. Fairfax had proven to be a deep undercover Fed who’d been charged with flushing out al-Jihad’s contacts within U.S. law enforcement, and had planned to do so by facilitating the escape and then netting all the conspirators when they made their move. But the setup had backfired badly when it turned out that Fairfax’s superior, who had progressively isolated him over the previous two years, had turned, becoming one of al-Jihad’s assets.
In the end, Fairfax had helped al-Jihad escape, and the only conspirator he’d flushed out was his own boss, code-named Jane Doe, who had vanished in the aftermath of a foiled attack on a local stadium. The Feds and local cops had managed to recapture Muhammad Feyd, but so far he had refused to talk, which left the authorities pretty much chasing their own tails.
Worse, in the immediate aftermath of the thwarted stadium attack, Gray himself had wound up as a suspect in the conspiracy. Which was just plain stupid.
Yes, he’d failed to pass along a potentially crucial message, but that wasn’t because he’d been working for al-Jihad. He’d made the decision in a split second of distraction, a moment when his version of justice and the law had clashed and he’d gotten caught up in his own head, stuck in memories. And yeah, maybe there’d been other factors, too, but they were nothing he couldn’t handle. He could—and would—bring the bastards down. No way he was letting the Santa Bombers go free. Not now, not ever. Not after what they’d done.
The thought brought a flash of memory, of concussion and screams, and the rapid flutter of a dying child’s chest in the sterile confines of an ICU.
Shaking off the image, Gray forced his mind to focus on the task at hand. Moving silently he worked his way through the thick forest, headed for Mariah Shore’s cabin. He had no orders, no official sanction. Hell, he was on probation. He was supposed to be riding a desk, monitoring transcribed chatter and helping with the tip lines.
“I’m just out for a hike,” he murmured, keeping his voice very low, even though he hadn’t seen or heard anything to indicate that he had company. “Is it my fault I just happened to wander out of the state park and stumble on her cabin?”
It wasn’t much as plausible deniability went, but he was done with waiting around for a break that wasn’t coming. He’d helped jail Lee Mawadi, Muhammad Feyd and al-Jihad in the first place, using slightly less than orthodox methods in his zeal to gain some measure of justice for the victims of the Santa Bombings. He’d do the same thing again, even if it meant the end of his career.
“Well, well. Will you look at that?” he said, whistling quietly under his breath as the ex-wife’s isolated cabin came into view. He stopped amid the cover of a thick stand of trees and scrubby underbrush, and peered through, scoping out the scene.
It looked like Mariah had been doing some landscaping.
Originally, the cabin had been tucked into the woods, with trees very near the structure, shielding it even from satellite view. Now there was a clear-cut swath a good fifty feet in all directions, with raw stumps giving mute testimony to where trees had once stood. In one corner of the lot, a huge pile of cut and split logs sat beside a gas-powered wood splitter. A thin wisp of smoke rose from the cabin’s central chimney, indicating that someone was home, as did the vehicles parked in the side yard. One was the banged-up Jeep Mariah had registered in her name. The other was unfamiliar, a nondescript, dark-blue four-by-four SUV.
Two cars. Two people, maybe more? Gray thought, tensing further as a quiver of instinct ran through him.
When he’d asked Mariah Shore point-blank why she’d bought the forest-locked cabin no more than thirty miles from the ARX Supermax Prison, she’d claimed it was a sort of penance. She’d said she wanted to be able to see the prison on one side of her, the city of Bear Claw on the other, that she wanted to be reminded of how many lives had been destroyed because she hadn’t recognized her husband for what he was.
And maybe that explanation would’ve worked for him if she’d come off as the grief-stricken victim she’d played two years earlier. But the newer reports—some of which Gray had written himself—described her as “closed off,” “detached,” “unfriendly,” and “nervous”…which weren’t the kind of words he typically associated with innocence. They were more in line with the behavior of a woman who had something to hide.
Unfortunately—as far as Gray was concerned, anyway—a detailed check of her activities since Mawadi’s incarceration hadn’t turned up any indication that she was in contact with her ex. Heck, she’d kept almost entirely to herself, not even visiting her parents when her father had been hospitalized again a few months ago for his recurring heart problems.
In the absence of evidence to the contrary, and with all the available information suggesting that Mawadi, al-Jihad and Jane Doe had fled the country, SAC Johnson had ended all surveillance of Mariah Shore, despite Gray’s protests that she was one of their few remaining local links to the terrorists.
In retrospect, Gray knew he probably should’ve kept his mouth shut. Rather than making his boss take a second look at the decision, his opinion had only made Johnson dig in harder, to the point that he’d ordered Gray to stay the hell away from Mawadi’s ex-wife. But Johnson hadn’t known that she had clear-cut the area around her cabin and strung up what looked to be some serious motion-activated lights and alarms, along with a low electric fence that was no doubt intended to keep deer and other critters out of the monitored zone, lest they trigger the alarms.
She’d turned the place into a fortress.
Question was, why?
“And won’t Johnson be glad I just happened to be hiking this way?” Gray murmured, having taken up the dubious habit of talking to himself over the last few years, ever since he and Stacy had split up.
Refusing to think of his ex-wife, or how things had gone so wrong so fast after their so-called “trial” separation just before the bombings, Gray moved out of the concealing brush and eased closer to the cabin, his senses on the highest alert.
He hadn’t gone more than two paces before the door swung open, and Lee Mawadi himself stepped out onto the rustic porch. Gray froze, adrenaline shooting through him alongside a surge of vindication and the hard, hot jolt of knowing he’d been right all along.
Mariah Shore was in this conspiracy right up to her pretty little neck.
Chapter Two
Gray stayed very still. He was wearing camouflage and stood hidden behind a screening layer of trees and underbrush; as long as he didn’t move, Mawadi shouldn’t be able to see him. Gray wasn’t totally motionless, though: his blood raced through his veins and his heart pumped furiously, beating in his ears on a rhythm that said he was right, the ex-wife was part of it, after all.
And Lee Mawadi had very definitely not fled the country, as all the reports had indicated.
The bastard stood there—blond and Nordic, looselimbed and relaxed, cradling a Remington shotgun in the crook of one arm as he scanned the forest. Then he headed for the corner of the porch, shouldered the shotgun, unzipped and urinated, all the while scanning the forest. He seemed to be looking for something, but what? Had he seen Gray skulking in the trees? Was he expecting company?
Mawadi finished and rezipped, then turned toward the still-open door, calling, “You said they’d be here at five, right?”
Gray didn’t hear the answer, couldn’t tell if the responding voice belonged to a man or a woman. His brain raced, trying to parse the tiny nugget of information. It was just past four o’clock, which meant the meeting was an hour away. And if he could figure out who was coming for the meeting, it could be a huge break in the case, allowing them to identify more of the terrorists, maybe even the traitors they suspected might be working within the Bear Claw Police Department, and maybe even the FBI itself. For half a second, excitement zinged through him at the thought of al-Jihad himself showing up. Gray would give anything to be the one to subdue all of them, the terrorists and the ex-wife, and put them where they belonged—in the ARX Supermax or a grave, either way was fine with him.
Then Gray cursed, realizing that if the newcomers were driving up the mountain, he could be in serious trouble. The only way up the ridgeline to the cabin was the narrow track he’d come up, or the fire-access road that merged with the track just below where he’d parked. His four-by-four was off the road and somewhat hidden, but the concealment was far from foolproof. A driver coming up the lane might see the vehicle, even in the gathering dusk.
Which meant he had two choices. One, he could retrace his path, pronto, in hopes of making it down the ridge and hiding the truck before the other vehicle turned up the road. Then he could boogie down the mountain, get into cell range and call for backup. Or two, he could stay put and hope his four-by-four escaped detection while he cobbled together some sort of a plan to subdue Mawadi and whoever else was in the cabin, then capture the others when they arrived.
Gray wasn’t a glory seeker by a long shot, but for both personal and professional reasons, he liked the image of dragging in the murdering bastards himself. Not to mention that there was a good chance that even if he made it to cell range, SAC Johnson and the others would give him a less than enthusiastic response. Gray had cried “wolf” before and it had come to nothing, and then he’d dropped the ball on that damn message during the festival, with the result that al-Jihad and the others had very nearly succeeded in their aim of destroying a stadium filled with tens of thousands of city residents awaiting a benefit concert. Which meant that Gray wasn’t exactly the go-to guy for anything these days. For all he knew, Johnson would ignore his report and put him back on administrative leave for going near the cabin in the first place.
All of which is one big, fat rationalization, Gray admitted inwardly, staying quiet because Mawadi was still on the porch. But spoken aloud or not, it was the truth. He was making up excuses for doing what he fully intended to do, whether or not it was reasonable. He was going in now and alone, not just because he didn’t trust Johnson and the other special agents in the Denver office, but because he didn’t trust the system itself. Not anymore.
The system hadn’t stopped pampered rich-boy Lee Chisholm from taking his love of violence and his knee-jerk hatred of his father’s politics and turning it into terrorism. The system hadn’t been able to pin any one of a half-dozen other crimes on al-Jihad in the years between the 9/11 terror attacks and the Santa Bombings. The system had let down all the men, women and children who’d died in the attacks; it had failed them and their families twice over—once by not preventing the bombings and again by not keeping the terrorists behind bars. All of which meant the system couldn’t be trusted this time, either.
That was why Gray had taken his day off to hike up the ridgeline, and it was why, even though he knew he should focus on returning Mawadi and the others to prison, in reality he wanted a far more permanent solution, and eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Justice.
An image flashed in his head, a baby in a PICU incubator, her tiny hands clinging to her breathing tube just as tenaciously as she’d clung to life for twenty-two endless hours.
Keeping her memory in the forefront of his mind, Gray unclipped his holster and withdrew the 9 mm he’d carried on this little “hunting” trip, and started working his way through the trees, skirting the electric fence and the range of the motion detectors, heading for the back of the cabin.
The last of the surveillance reports, filed a few months earlier, had noted a rear exit, one that looked new, as though Mariah had put it in after she’d bought the cabin. Sure enough, there was a door at one end of the back of the building, with two windows beside it, blinds drawn to the sills. The rear exit was definitely a point in his favor, Gray decided. Mawadi and the others would have to power down the motion sensors when their company arrived. In that small window of opportunity, Gray planned to slip in through the back.
If he could take Lee and his ex-wife alive, he would. If not, dead was fine. He’d take his revenge however he could get it.
MARIAH FOUGHT HER WAY through fuzzy, drugged layers of consciousness and awoke to heart-pounding panic. Twisting wildly against her bonds, she looked around and found herself where she’d been the last time she’d awakened: tied to her own bed in her otherwise stripped-down bedroom. The nightstand and bureau were gone, as were all her books and personal things. That wasn’t the worst of it, though. The worst was knowing that although she’d woken up this time, it didn’t guarantee that she’d wake up the next.
Whenever she’d regained blurry consciousness over the past few days, she’d seen Lee’s face crowding close. And she’d seen the murder in his eyes.
When the time came for her to die, she knew, he would kill her himself, and he’d relish the process. He’d delight in punishing her for having testified against him, for helping break his alibi and for divorcing him while he’d sat in jail. No doubt he would’ve already killed her by now if it’d been up to him. It apparently wasn’t up to him, though. A second man had stood behind him each time she’d awakened, his figure blurry with distance and the drugs they had pumped into her to keep her sedated for hours, maybe days.
Broad-shouldered and muscular, the second man had dark, vaguely reptilian eyes. Lee had called him Brisbane, though she didn’t know if that was a first or last name, didn’t think it mattered. The big man had arrived sometime between when Lee had drugged her unconscious and when she’d awakened the first time, lying on the floor in a pool of her own filth, still wearing the heavy layers and parka she’d had on when Lee attacked her. She must’ve made some noise when she’d regained consciousness, because she’d heard voices soon after, and Brisbane had come into the room.
At first she’d been terrified of the dark-eyed stranger with the faint accent, sure he was there to kill her. Instead, he’d been the one to keep Lee away from her—mostly, anyway—and he’d been the one who, when she’d begged, had untied her and let her shower and change her clothes. He’d watched her, cradling her shotgun in clear threat, but she’d forced herself through the process, shaking and crying, and weak with the drugs as she’d gulped shower water in a painful effort to slake her thirst.
She’d been almost grateful to collapse back onto her bed, have him retie her hands and feet, and let herself sink back into oblivion. She’d surfaced a few times after that; each time one of the men had untied her and let her use the bathroom, and once or twice she’d been given some sort of liquid protein shake that had made her gag as she’d forced it down. She’d been vaguely aware of questions and threats, aware of refusing to answer.
The last time, Lee had stayed behind after Brisbane left the room. She’d been seriously out of it, but had been aware enough to see the hatred in her ex-husband’s eyes when he’d leaned over her. He’d wrapped one big, hurtful hand around her neck, squeezing lightly at first, then harder and harder, all the while staring down at her with those beautiful clear blue eyes of his, which made him look like a good guy, when he was anything but.
“I’ll kill you for betraying me,” he said, his voice as calm as if he’d been discussing the weather. “And for making me look bad. You should’ve answered questions when you had the chance. Now he’s coming to make you talk.” His eyes had slid to the door, and the quiet woods beyond. “As soon as we get what he needs from you, you’re dead.”
She hadn’t needed to ask who he was; she’d known instinctively that it was al-Jihad. The terrorist leader was the one who’d given Lee a sense of purpose, though she hadn’t known it at the time of their marriage. Al-Jihad was the one who’d told Lee to ingratiate himself into her life and use her father to gain inside information. Al-Jihad was also the one who’d told her husband to make sure she died in the bombings. And apparently he needed something more from her now. But what?
In a way, it didn’t matter, because as Lee had leaned over her in her cabin bedroom, she’d seen her own murder in his eyes. One way or the other, she was dead.
She’d thought he was going to kill her right then, just choke the life out of her. He hadn’t, though, and now she’d awakened yet again, bound to the wall, lying on her stripped-bare mattress. She thought it had been four, maybe five days since they’d imprisoned her. Five days that they’d kept her alive, feeding and watching over her because al-Jihad himself wanted something from her. She couldn’t conceive of what it might be, though, couldn’t remember the questions the men had asked her.
The cops and the Feds had taken everything that had belonged to Lee during their marriage, and she’d been glad to see it go. She’d given the rest of their things to charity, keeping only the few items she’d brought with her into the marriage, all keepsakes from her childhood. Nothing of any real value, and certainly nothing that would interest someone like al-Jihad. What could the terrorists possibly want?
The more her thoughts churned, the more Mariah’s head cleared and the room sharpened around her. Her arms and legs tingled and nausea pounded low in her gut, but the rest of her felt nearly normal, suggesting that she was coming out of her drug-induced daze. Which was good news. But it was also bad news. Lee was too smart to let her regain consciousness unless he’d meant to, and she couldn’t imagine that Brisbane was any less shrewd. So they’d intentionally let the drugs wear off, which suggested things were about the change. Was al-Jihad on his way up the mountain to question her personally? The idea was beyond terrifying. Al-Jihad was said to be an expert interrogator.
Nausea surged through Mariah, along with a rising buzz of adrenaline and the certainty that unless she got away now, she wouldn’t be waking up ever again.
Stirring, she tried twisting on the bed. Her head spun, but her arms and legs moved when and where she told them to before hitting the ends of her bonds. Her ankles were crossed and tied with nylon rope, her hands bound behind her. A loop of rope ran from her feet to her wrists, and was threaded through an eyebolt screwed into one of the heavily varnished logs that made up the cabin wall.
She’d been lying in the same position for so long that her shoulders and hips had all but stopped aching, and had gone numb instead. As she moved, though, the tingling numbness started to recede, and pins and needles took over, making her hiss in pain. She gritted her teeth and kept going, pulling against her bonds, searching for some hint of give. The eyebolt and beam were solid, the bonds on her ankles tight enough to cut her skin. But after a few moments, she thought she felt the ropes on her wrists yield a little.
Excitement propelled her to work harder, and she yanked at the ropes, starting to breathe faster with the exertion. Blood moved through her veins with increasing force, and hope built alongside the panic that came at the thought that she was so close, but still might not get free in time.
“Come on, come on!” she muttered under her breath, working the ropes while straining to hear through the closed bedroom door. Was that a voice? A conversation? Or just the radio the men had been playing each time she’d awakened? Was that a footstep? Were they coming for her? Was it already too late?
The doorknob rattled and turned.
Mariah froze, holding her breath. The door opened a crack.
“Not yet,” Brisbane said sharply from the other room. “They won’t be here for another hour or so.”
Lee’s voice spoke from the doorway. “But I was just going to—”
“I know what you were going to do, and you’re not doing it. You had your chance to question her, and it didn’t work. Leave her be. We need her for another few hours. After al-Jihad’s done with her, you can do whatever you want.”
Mariah barely heard Lee’s soft curse over the hammering of the pulse in her ears. But the door shut once again, and the footsteps moved away. She was saved—for the moment, anyway.
But time was running out.
Hurrying, nearly sobbing with terror, she fought against her bonds, yanking at the loosening ropes around her wrists and twisting against the tie connecting her hands and feet together. Slowly, ever so slowly, she worked her hands free from underneath the first layer of rope, then the second. The nylon strands cut into her skin and blood slicked her wrists, but she kept going, kept fighting, refusing to give up.
She’d given up before, accepting her marriage for what it was. Maybe she hadn’t completely given up, but she’d certainly given in for too long, letting herself be blinded to the truth about her husband.
Not again, she vowed inwardly. Not this time.
On that thought, she gave a sharp jerk. Her left hand came free with a slash of pain as the nylon fibers tore into her skin. But she didn’t care about the injury. She was free!
Working faster now, sobbing with fear, relief and excitement, she undid her other hand, then her feet. Rolling off the bed, she stood, barefoot and wobbly, wearing only the fleece sweatshirt and yoga pants Brisbane had tossed at her after her last shower. Within seconds, the crisp air inside the cabin cut through the single layer of material and chilled her skin, waking her further.
Trying not to think of how much colder it was going to be outside in the cool Colorado springtime, especially come nightfall, she headed for the door, keeping herself from passing out through sheer force of will. Two years ago she’d been too weak to deal with the downward spiral of her life. Now, hardened by time and Lee’s betrayal, she was stronger. But was she strong enough?
“You’re going to have to be,” she whispered, saying the words aloud because the volume gave her growing resolution form and substance.
Brave words weren’t going to get her out of the cabin, though. Not with the bedroom window nailed shut and two armed men in the front room, not to mention the motion detectors she’d so carefully wired in the woods around her home. They’d been meant to keep her safe. Now they would warn Lee and Brisbane if she managed to sneak out the back door. She didn’t have her shotgun, didn’t have the remote control to the security system, didn’t have anything going for her except the knowledge that the men wanted her alive for another hour or two. They needed some sort of information from her, something important enough that they’d kept her alive and untouched for however many days it had been.
They might shoot at her, but they’d be aiming to wound, not kill. And everything she’d learned about firearms since this whole mess began suggested that it was very difficult to purposefully wound a fleeing target. During the trial it had come out that Lee had serious skill in bombmaking, but he’d claimed not to have any experience with guns. If she were lucky, Brisbane wouldn’t be a sharpshooter, either. Even if he were, what was the difference, really?
Better to die trying to escape than let the terrorists use her to kill more innocents.
Mariah paused just shy of the doorway, feeling very small and alone. Raised by parents who’d met as rock band roadies and liked to keep moving, she’d lived in ten different places before her tenth birthday. Even after her parents had finally settled down in Bear Claw and her father had gone into engineering, landing a good job at the American Mall Group, Mariah had remained a private person, a loner who had to make a real effort when it came to meeting people. Her few forays into couplehood—including her disaster of a marriage—had only proved that she was the sort of person who was better off alone. Problem was, she wasn’t always strong enough, smart enough, or just plain enough to do the things that needed to be done.
You have no choice, she told herself, clamping her lips together and fighting to be as silent as possible as she reached for the doorknob. Putting her ear to the panel, she listened intently but heard nothing, not even the radio. Did that mean both men were outside, maybe preparing for the arrival of the others? Or were they somewhere inside the cabin, just being quiet?
She didn’t know, but she wasn’t going to figure it out by listening at the door, either.
Blowing out a shallow, frightened breath, she eased the panel open and paused, tense and listening. Still no sound. She slipped through, unsteady on her numb legs, her heart beating so loud in her ears she was sure Lee and Brisbane would hear it all the way out front and come running.
But there was no shout of discovery as she slipped around the corner to the other back room, where she’d installed a rear door several months earlier. The room had served as her office; now it was overstuffed with the furniture Lee and Brisbane had pulled out of her bedroom, along with her usual office clutter. She glanced at her bureau, but it was facing the wall, which meant there was no way she could pull out clothes or shoes with any sort of stealth.
Crossing the room, barely breathing, she unlatched the dead bolt, wincing when the loud click cut through the silence. Then she opened the door and paused on the threshold, stalled by the sight of the fifty feet of rawedged stumps between her and the relative safety of the forest.
Her heart thumped in her ears. She couldn’t stay in the cabin. But crossing the clear-cut zone would trigger the alarms.
They don’t want me dead, she reminded herself, although that was little solace as she drew a deep breath, plucked up her thin courage and plunged through the door.
She hit the ground running. Splinters and woodchips from the clear-cutting bit into her feet, but she kept going. Seconds later, the alarms went off, emitting a mechanized buzz that sliced through the air and straight through to her soul.
She wanted to scream but held the sound in, hoping to delay discovery as long as possible. Maybe they weren’t even home. Maybe they’d gone to meet—
“She’s out. Get her!” Lee’s shout warned that she wasn’t that lucky.
Moments later, a shotgun blasted behind her, and a full pellet load blew out the top of a nearby stump as she ran past it. The next shot hit the ground behind her, stinging the backs of her calves with dirt spray.
The pain worried Mariah that she’d miscalculated, badly. Apparently, they’d rather have her dead than free.
She screamed once in fear, but then clamped her lips on further cries. She wouldn’t give up! Sobbing, she flung herself the rest of the way across the clear-cut zone and hurdled the low electric line with ill grace.
She landed hard, stumbled and went to her knees, her legs burning with injury and exertion. As she fell, the shotgun roared, and tree bark exploded right where her head had just been.
Blubbering, she rolled and scrambled back up, then ran for her life as Lee and Brisbane bolted across the clearing and plunged into the forest after her. The alarms cut out abruptly. She heard the men’s curses and their heavy, crashing footsteps. They were close. Too close!
She didn’t dare loop around to the vehicles at the front of the cabin; she couldn’t trust that the keys would be in plain sight or that her captors hadn’t created some sort of roadblock farther down the lane. So she ran the other way, deeper into the forest, limping on her badly abraded feet, but unable to slow down for her injuries. Her breath sobbed in her lungs, burning with each inhalation, and wetness streamed down her face, a mix of tears, sweat and panic.
“There!” Brisbane shouted from her right. “Over there! For crap’s sake, get her!”
Brush crashed, the noises closer now and gaining on her. Mariah kept going, but her body was weak; her legs had gone to jelly and her feet and calves screamed in pain. She stumbled, dragged herself up and stumbled again. This time she went down and hit the ground hard. For a second, she lay there, stunned.
Before she could recover, rough hands grabbed her.
Panic assailed her and she started to struggle, inhaled to scream, but someone clapped a hand across her mouth and hissed, “Quiet!”
Then the world lurched and he was dragging her, lifting her and wrestling her into what looked like a solid wall of thorny brush from a distance, but up close proved to be scrub covering a deep depression, where a tree had fallen and the root ball had popped up, forming an earthen cave of sorts.
Excitement speared through Mariah alongside confusion. She looked back and got an impression of a square-jawed soldier wearing a thick woolen cap, heavy, insulated camouflage clothing and no insignia. He wasn’t Lee or Brisbane. He was…rescuing her?
He shoved her into the hiding spot and crowded in behind her.
“Down,” he whispered tersely, pressing her into the cold, moist earth and following her, rolling partway on top of her so she was beneath him and they were pressed back-to-front, with his heavy weight all but squeezing the breath from her lungs.
The fallen tree had rotted over time, providing nourishment for the profusion of vines and scrub plants that had sprung from it, forming an almost impenetrable thicket. But would it be enough to conceal them fully?
Her rescuer’s arms tightened around her, and he breathed in her ear, “Be very still. They’ll see us if you move.”
Coming from nearby, she heard the sound of footsteps in the undergrowth, and a man’s muttered curse. Freezing, Mariah pressed herself flat beneath the soldier, and held her breath, praying they wouldn’t be discovered.
The noises stopped ten, maybe fifteen feet away. After a moment, Lee’s voice called, “Are you sure you saw her? There’s nothing here.”
“She was there a second ago. Keep looking.” Brisbane’s answer came from the other side of the woods, back toward the cabin. After a moment, Lee moved off.
Mariah counted her heartbeats, trying to stay calm as she exhaled slowly, then risked inhaling a breath. Another. The sounds of the search diminished slightly, suggesting that the men had moved to the other side of the cabin.
Hoping that Lee and Brisbane were walking into one hell of an ambush, she rolled her eyes back, trying to get a look at her rescuer as she mouthed, “Where are the others hiding?”
He must be part of a coordinated attack, right? Somehow, someone had learned that she was in trouble and had sent help.
Most likely, the FBI agents—particularly the cold, gray-eyed bastard who’d kept questioning her father even after he’d started complaining of chest pains—had been keeping watch on the cabin. They’d probably identified Lee days ago and were just now moving in, knowing al-Jihad was on his way. The thought that they’d known she was in there and hadn’t bothered to mount a rescue beforehand brought a kick of resentment, but it was no more than she’d come to expect from the Feds. They carried out their own plans on their own timetable, and to hell with the people they hurt in the process.
But the soldier shook his head slightly. “I’m alone,” he breathed in her ear. “Quiet now. They’re coming back.”
What? Mariah’s thoughts churned. It didn’t make any sense that he’d be up on the ridgeline alone, but she couldn’t deny the physical reality of him, either. She would’ve demanded an explanation, but just then, Brisbane and Lee returned, stopping very close to the thick copse where Mariah and the soldier were hidden. The two men conferred in low voices.
Breathing shallowly through her mouth, Mariah flattened herself against the moist, partially rotted leaves and twigs beneath her. She was acutely aware of the man pressed against her. The solid weight of him was more reassuring than it probably should have been, and she fought the urge to huddle her chilled body into his heavy warmth as her mind continued to race.
What sort of soldier worked alone?
“I’ll call down and have the boss bring up more men,” Lee said. “We’ll fan out, search every rock and tree until we find her. The bitch has to be hiding somewhere nearby—there’s no way she got away that fast with no shoes.”
“I told you to keep her drugged,” Brisbane spat, disgusted. “Told you she was smarter than you gave her credit for.”
Lee’s voice edged toward a whine. “I thought al-Jihad would prefer her awake.”
“Awake doesn’t do us any good if she’s gone. This was your idea. At this point, you’d better hope to hell she doesn’t make it down the ridge, or your ass is toast.”
“Al-Jihad wouldn’t do anything to me. He needs me.”
“Al-Jihad doesn’t need anybody,” Brisbane countered. “Come on, let’s keep looking. I’ll start over here while you call down and tell the others we need a fullfledged search party. Have them bring up infrared, night vision, the whole works. They’ll want to watch the roads, too. The bitch is bound to turn up somewhere.”
Despite the warm weight of the man pressed against her, Mariah began to shiver, fear and confusion warring within her. What did they want from her? Whatever they wanted, the men were right about one thing: in the absence of help, it seemed highly unlikely that she’d make it to safety—the nights were too cold, the trails difficult to manage without proper climbing equipment, never mind without shoes of any kind. If she had help, though, she might very well make it off the ridge and into the city safely.
Question was, did the man who held her count as help?
As Lee and Brisbane moved off in opposite directions, the sounds of their steps fading to forest silence, she stirred beneath the stranger, twisting around to get a good look at him. “Who are—” She bit off the question with a quiet hiss when she recognized the cool gray eyes beneath the woolen cap, recognized the suit-clad monster in the man she’d thought was a soldier. “Grayson!” She spat the word out like a curse.
It was Special Agent Michael Grayson, the FBI agent who’d made her life a living hell and nearly killed her father in his efforts to get at a truth that had existed only in his mind.
And now she was at his mercy.
Chapter Three
“I prefer to be called Gray. Not that it matters much to you, I’m guessing,” he said, seeing displeasure flood her face, no doubt due to the way he’d treated her and her family during the investigation. Which was too bad, because as far as he was concerned he’d done what needed to be done.
Besides, it wasn’t as if he was thrilled to see her, either. He hadn’t been about to let Mawadi grab her and drag her back inside, but rescuing her had complicated the hell out of the situation. He’d planned to wait for the five o’clock meet and move in then, when the motion detectors were down, but now there were going to be more men, and they would be searching the damn forest, which shot that plan to shreds.
No, the best thing for him to do now would be to get the woman down to the city and hand her over to Johnson and his crew. The SAC would be furious that Gray had disobeyed orders, but he’d be forced to send a team up to the cabin. Gray knew damn well that by the time they got up to the ridgeline, Mawadi and the others would be long gone. But, unfortunately, as tough as Gray might be, he was just was one man with a 9 mm, and that was no match for a terrorist cell on high alert.
Muttering a curse, he rolled off the woman, banishing the sensory memory of how she’d felt beneath him—all soft, curvy and female. He so wasn’t going there.
Once this was all over and al-Jihad and the others had been brought to justice, he’d allow himself to live again. But at the moment he had no intention of letting himself be distracted by a woman. Besides, even if he had the inclination, there was no way in hell he’d be going for this woman. There was a physical connection, yes—it had been there from the first moment he saw her. But she was a witness at best, a conspirator at worst, and she’d been married to one of the bombers.
She was a means to an end, nothing more. The fact that her glare suggested that she hated his guts made it that much easier to ignore the fine buzz of tension running through his body as they faced each other in their small hiding space.
Her eyes were dark and bruised in her pale face, her full lips trembling, though whether from fear or cold or a combination of the two, he didn’t know. It didn’t much matter, either, because he needed to focus on getting them the hell away from the cabin and down to cell phone range ASAP.
Shucking out of his camo jacket, he shoved it at the woman. “There are mittens in the pocket. Put them on your feet and follow me. And for crap’s sake, don’t make any noise.”
She started to snap in response, but shut her mouth when he pulled his gun from where he’d tucked it at the small of his back, and racked the action to the ready position, just in case.
He waited for a second, watching to see what she was going to do. When she pulled on the jacket without comment, then felt in the pocket and covered her bloody feet as best she could with the mittens, he nodded grimly. “Good call.”
Then he turned his back on her and led the way out of the small copse, moving as silently as he could, but traveling fast because the light was fading. Already, the sky had gone gray-blue, and the world around them had turned colorless with the approaching spring dusk. So he jog-trotted downhill, hoping to hell they’d get lucky and make it down the ridgeline undetected.
The first half mile was tough going through a hilly section of deadfall-choked forest, made more difficult by the fading light. At first Mariah moved quietly, but as they kept going, Gray heard her breathing start to labor, heard her miss her footing more and more often.
He turned back, ready to snap at her to be quiet if she wanted to live. But one look at her waxy, pale face, which had gone nearly white in the fading light, had him biting back the oath and cursing himself instead.
He crossed the small gap between them and caught her as she crumpled, sweeping her up against his chest.
She was feather-light in his arms, though his memory said she’d been solid, bordering on sturdy before. The change nagged at him, making him wonder exactly how long she’d been bound in that cabin, and what Mawadi and the other man had done to her.
Guilt pinched, but Gray quickly shoved it aside, into the mental refuse bin where he consigned his other useless emotions, few and far between though they might be.
After only a few seconds of unconsciousness, she roused against him, pushing feebly at his chest. Her eyes fluttered open. The dusk robbed them of their color, but he knew they were amber, just as he knew he couldn’t trust the stealthy twist of heat that curled through his midsection when their gazes locked. She moistened her lips and swallowed, and he was far too aware of those simple actions, just as he was far too susceptible to the tremor in her voice when she whispered, “Put me down. I can walk.”
“Don’t be stupid,” he said, the words coming out more roughly than he’d intended. He yanked his gaze from hers and pressed her closer, not in comfort, but so he wouldn’t be looking at her face, wouldn’t be thinking of how her body felt against his, flaring unwanted heat at the points of contact.
Gritting his teeth, he shifted his grip so he could shove the 9 mm back in the small of his spine, then took hold of her once again and headed downhill, moving as fast as he could while still keeping quiet. His four-by-four was maybe another mile farther down, and as he hiked, he forced himself to focus on the case, not the woman. The case was important. The woman wasn’t.
By now, Mawadi and the second man would have gotten in touch with the other members of their cell. If Gray could talk SAC Johnson into sending choppers and search teams up to the cabin, they might get lucky. They wouldn’t get al-Jihad, of course; he was too smart to come up the mountain now. But they might get Mawadi, might get some idea of why the terrorists had returned to the area.
As Gray put one boot in front of the other and his back and arms began to ache, though, it wasn’t the terrorists, his boss or even revenge that occupied his mind—it was the woman in his arms. And that could become a problem if he let it.
MARIAH WOULD HAVE held herself away from Gray, but she lacked the strength to do anything but cling, with one arm looped over his neck and her face pressed into the warm hollow at his throat. She despised surrendering control to him, hated that her safety was in the hands of the FBI special agent who had been a large part of making her life a living hell more than two years earlier, and whose relentless questions had put her father in the hospital, nearly in his grave.
But at the same time, the man who held her easily, walking with long, powerful strides, was so unlike the picture in her mind, it was causing her brain to jam. This man was warm to the touch rather than cold, and when their eyes had met, his had blazed with an emotion that she couldn’t define, but had been far from the detached, sardonic chill he’d projected during the investigation.
His warmth and steady masculine scent surrounded her now, coming from the jacket he’d given her and from the solid wall of his body against hers. She’d hated the man who had interrogated her, hated what he stood for and how he treated people. But she didn’t know how to feel about the man he’d turned out to be—the soldier who’d come up to her cabin alone and had been there when she’d needed him in a way that nobody else had for a long, long time.
Confused, weak with drugs and exhaustion, she was unable to do anything but give in to circumstances beyond her immediate control. Closing her eyes, she leaned into her rescuer, anchoring herself to his warmth and strength.
She must’ve dozed—or maybe passed out—after that. She was vaguely aware of Gray loading her into a large vehicle and strapping her in tightly. Through the fuzzedout fog her brain had become, she knew that he was white-knuckle tense as he pulled the vehicle out of its hiding spot and headed it down the road. It was full dark; he wore a pair of night-vision goggles he’d retrieved from the glove compartment and drove with the truck’s headlights off, muttering a string of curses under his breath as he kept the gas pedal down and steered the vehicle along the fire-access road leading down from her cabin. Then they flew through the gate, which hung open, and turned onto the paved road headed toward Bear Claw.
He decelerated, shucked off the goggles and flipped on the headlights before glancing over at her. “We got lucky. No sign of your husband’s reinforcements.”
“Ex-husband,” she corrected him, the faint echoes of warmth and gratitude dispelled by irritation because he’d made the same mistake a handful of times during the initial investigation into the prison break. It annoyed her that he kept insisting on the undoubtedly deliberate gaffe, and that she couldn’t stop herself from correcting him each time.
He nodded, his eyes not quite the cold steel of Special Agent Grayson, not quite the fiery resolve of the soldier he’d been up on the ridgeline. When his gaze met hers, she felt a click of unwanted connection and a shimmer of fear. What next? she wanted to ask him, but didn’t, because she wasn’t sure she wanted to know what his answer would be.
So, instead, she turned away from him, settling into her seat as the truck accelerated, heading for the city. While he drove, he made a call on his cell, tersely reporting the situation, and what he’d seen and done. Mariah didn’t add anything to the conversation. There was nothing she could do to change her situation; she was too weak, too confused. And, bottom line: whether it was logical or not, she was heart-sore.
Being around Lee again hadn’t only been terrifying, it had also brought to the surface of her mind things that she’d thought she’d managed to bury years ago. Seeing him had reminded her of the good times—or at least the times she’d thought were good ones, when Lee had courted her. He’d brought her flowers and silly gifts; he’d made her feel as though she were the center of his universe, that she was special. And when he’d proposed, dropping to one knee and promising that they would be together forever, she’d believed him.
But those memories were overlaid now with the pain of remembering the months after their marriage, when he’d gradually changed, growing cold and distant. After a while, his petty cruelties and outright manipulations had made her grateful for the nights he didn’t come home, and had made her start to think she was losing her mind. It was only later that she realized that he’d purposely broken her down, little by little, undermining the defenses she’d built up over a lifetime of being an outsider. Then, once he’d made her completely vulnerable by promising her forever, he’d started beating her down further, stripping her of her worth until she’d been nothing but his wife, his plaything. Simply because he could, because it amused him.
She knew the authorities thought of Lee as a follower, a patsy. She knew different; he might follow al-Jihad’s orders, but when it had come to their marriage, he’d been the one in control.
Despite the months of subtle torment, though, she’d retained a tiny core of strength. It had been too little, too late back then. Would it be enough to see her through whatever came next?
The bang of a car door startled her, jolting her awake, though she hadn’t realized that she’d been dozing.
She squinted against the sudden glare of lights. When she finally focused on the scene, she recognized the walled-in parking lot of the main police station in Bear Claw City. A tingle of unease and ill will shimmered through her at the memories of being interrogated in the station, then rushing her father to the nearby hospital, where he’d nearly died, not just because of Gray’s heavy-handed questioning, but because of the decisions Mariah herself had made, the horror she’d brought into her parents’ lives.
That was her shame. One of many.
There was a crowd gathering outside the truck; it seemed to be made up of equal parts cops and suitedup Feds, with the latter group gathering around Gray as he climbed from the vehicle. In his flannel shirt and camouflage pants, with his short brown hair bristled on end and his face and clothing streaked with dirt and sweat, mute testimony of their harrowing escape, he should’ve looked at a disadvantage compared to the other agents, neat and clean in their dark suits. To Mariah’s eye, though, he looked like a man of action, one who could break the others in half, and might do just that, given the provocation.
She saw him visibly brace himself as he squared off opposite a salt-and-pepper-haired agent who wore an air of command and a deep scowl. It took Mariah a moment to place the other man, but when she did, nerves bunched in her midsection.
SAC Johnson, the FBI special agent in charge of the federal arm of the jailbreak investigation, had struck her as a pompous ass far more concerned with his own on-camera image than the actual investigation. There was no way she wanted him calling the shots when it came to her cabin…and potentially her life. Because that was one of the things that seemed painfully clear: she didn’t need to protect herself simply from Lee’s personal revenge. The terrorists apparently wanted something from her, which meant she was going to need help staying safe, whether she liked it or not.
Not liking it one bit, she pushed open the truck door, unclipped her seat belt and dropped down from the vehicle, hissing in pain when she landed on her injured feet.
A young, uniformed Bear Claw City cop appeared at her side almost instantly, and took her arm. “This way, ma’am. Agent Grayson said you’re wounded. We have an EMT-trained officer who’ll take a look at you while we wait for the paramedics.”
“Not yet.” She pulled away, focused on the group of FBI special agents, where Gray and SAC Johnson were arguing in low voices, their faces set in stone.
She took a couple of hobbling steps toward the knot of suits, pulling Gray’s camouflage jacket more tightly around her shoulders. As she came closer, she heard Johnson snarl, “Were my orders somehow unclear?”
“No, sir.” Gray’s square jaw was locked, his eyes cool. But underneath that coolness, Mariah thought she sensed an undercurrent of hot anger. For the first time, she started to wonder whether the chill of his demeanor was designed to hide something entirely different, something more in line with the soldier he’d been up on the ridgeline.
And you so shouldn’t be thinking about that right now, Mariah told herself as she moved to join the men.
Johnson glared at his subordinate. “So my orders were clear, yet you deliberately disobeyed them by performing reconnaissance near Ms. Shore’s cabin.”
Gray nodded. “Yes, sir.”
Which explained why he’d been alone. It also reinforced her initial impression that Johnson was more focused on protocol than results, whereas Gray was…well, she didn’t know what he was, but he wasn’t anything like his boss.
“If Agent Grayson hadn’t been up at the cabin, acting on orders or not, I’d probably be dead by now,” Mariah said, coming up beside Gray. “And you wouldn’t have a clue that Lee and the others are back in the area, would you?” When the older man’s attention locked on her and his scowl deepened, Mariah lifted her chin and met his glare.
Johnson must’ve seen something in her eyes, because he brought his attitude down a notch, nodding and holding out a hand. “You may not remember me, Ms. Shore. I’m Special Agent in Charge Johnson.”
“I remember.” She shook because there was no reason not to, then said, “Please tell me that you have men on their way to my cabin.”
“They’re already on scene. The cabin shows signs of having been abandoned in a hurry.”
Gray bit off a curse. “You searched the woods?”
“Of course. Mawadi and the others are gone.”
“What about—” Gray began.
“The investigation is proceeding appropriately,” Johnson interrupted with a sharp look in Gray’s direction. “That’s all Ms. Shore needs to know.” He returned his attention to Mariah. “Obviously, we’ll need to ask you some questions.”
Mariah nodded. “Of course.”
She hoped none of them could tell how much she dreaded the next few hours, how much she wished she could rewind time by a week, to when she’d been at home in her cabin, safe in her delusion that Lee couldn’t get at her there. But she wasn’t back in her cabin. She was smack in the middle of the city, in enemy territory.
She’d dealt with the FBI’s idea of “some questions” twice before. The first time, she’d been weak and soft, and they’d bullied her and her parents until they’d nearly broken. The second time, just after the jailbreak, she’d been in shock, dazed and disconnected, and her flat affect had put her under suspicion, making them think she was hiding something, maybe even that she’d been in contact with Lee. In the aftermath of that second round of questioning, she’d vowed never to make those mistakes again, never to be the victim again.
Lee might have captured and victimized her, but she wasn’t his victim, wasn’t anyone’s victim. If the agents wanted something from her, they could damn well give something back this time.
So she met Johnson’s eyes and said, “I’ll tell you everything I know, but I have conditions.”
Beside her, Gray muttered a bitter oath, but she couldn’t take her eyes off his boss, couldn’t correct what she suspected was a deep misapprehension. There would be time for that later. Maybe.
There was no humor to the wry twist of Johnson’s lips. “Of course you do.” He paused, waving over two uniformed officers.
Mariah stiffened when they flanked her and urged her away from the agents, away from Gray. “Wait!” she cried, unconsciously reaching for him.
Gray drew away, and when he looked down at her, his eyes had gone even colder than before. He said, “They’re taking you inside where it’s safer, and where they can clean up your injuries, find you some shoes and socks, and something else to wear. They’ll get you some food, something to drink. I’d advise you to take them up on the offer. I have a feeling it’s going to be a long night for all of us.”
Even wearing camouflage, he’d gone back to being the no-nonsense agent she remembered, and she hated the change. But in a way it was a good thing, because it forced her to step away from him, made her remember that they weren’t friends, that there was no real connection between them. He might have gotten her off the ridgeline, but that didn’t make him her white knight.
She nodded and took a big step back. “Thanks for the rescue,” she said, which didn’t even begin to encompass what she was feeling just then.
His eyes went hooded. “Sorry I didn’t get there a couple of days earlier.” He turned away before she could process the flicker of emotion she thought she’d seen in his eyes, the one that suggested she wasn’t alone in feeling a spark of attraction where none should exist.
Part of her wanted to ask him to stay with her, but what sense did that make? He might have rescued her, and he might have disobeyed orders in the process, but that didn’t mean he was on her side. Far from it, in fact. Because how could she forget what he’d done to her father? Gray had hammered at him with the same questions over and over again, implying that her father had known about Lee’s plan, that she and her whole family had knowingly helped the terrorists. Which was so wrong it should’ve sounded preposterous, only it hadn’t, coming from him. And as the first hour had turned to three, he hadn’t eased up, hadn’t given up, even when her father’s color had started to fade. Eventually, he’d let them go, but not without a stern warning to stay available, that there would be more questions to come.
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