Page 31 of Danger In The Backcountry
And then she kicked.
Her heels connected with the soft tissues of Shawn’s stomach, just as Rome had taught her during all those hunting lessons years ago. His grunt filled her ears, but he held on. Tighter and tighter until her toes tingled. “You caught me by surprise once, Arlette. I won’t make the same mistake twice.”
He pressed her feet into the floor of the van. Just before securing another line of zip tie around her ankles. No. No, no, no. Her heart rate skyrocketed as the panic set in. Throwing everything she had into shoving him back, Lettie hauled her feet as close to her body as possible.
Forcing Shawn to overextend into the van. “I hate that name.”
She rammed her forehead into where she thought his nose might be. Hitting her target. Bone cracked under the strike, his blood spurting all over her face and T-shirt. Pain splintered into her skull and down her face, but she had to keep moving. His roar echoed off the panels of the van, deafening in the enclosed space. Shawn reared back, assumably to stop the bleeding. This was her one opportunity. And she wasn’t going to waste it.
She scrambled to get her feet under her and vaulted for the door. The van’s floor dropped out from under her, and she hit the ground hard enough to dislodge the blindfold. It fell around her neck, exposing the vast wilderness surrounding a small cabin down the dirt driveway.
She wasn’t going in there. If she did, something deep down told her she wasn’t ever coming out.
Shawn ripped his hands from his face, turning all that rage he’d hidden behind the exterior of being her friend on her. She didn’t give herself the time to wonder how that was possible—how he’d gone so long hiding the monster beneath all those smiles and nervous waves—and ran. The soles of her feet felt as though they’d been scraped raw by the blisters still healing beneath the bandages, but she pushed through. Hard breaths,steady footfalls. The adrenaline wouldn’t last, but she’d use it as long as possible.
Flashes of that night in the woods—of the predator right behind her—spurred her further.
She didn’t make it far.
A mass of muscle slammed into her from behind. Lettie didn’t have any way to cushion her fall with her hands zip-tied. Her face met sandy red dirt, and she slid, pieces of gravel tearing through thin skin across her chest and neck. She sucked in a mouthful of dirt and choked. Couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. Her lungs spasmed for that next breath, but it felt like it would never come. Weight pinned her to the ground and sharpened the pain down her front. A hand fisted in her hair, forcing her to arch.
“What did I tell you, Arlette?” Okay. Now he was just calling her that to piss her off. Shawn set his mouth against her ear. “You can’t run from me. I won’t let you. Besides, I know these woods better than anyone else. There’s no place you can run where I won’t find you.”
“Please.” Small cuts along the inside of her mouth intensified the pain. She’d bitten into her cheek when she’d hit the ground. Copper and salt coated her tongue. Blood. She didn’t have the courage to look at the state of the rest of her. She could feel it. “You don’t have to do this.”
“Ah, but I want to.” His low inhale right beside her ear skittered an unwelcome shiver across her shoulders. “I’ve been waiting a long time to make you mine.”
Her laugh was nothing but inappropriate and borderline hysterical. It gave her too much courage in the face of her attacker as he hauled her to her feet. Blood—sticky and warm—leaked from the corner of her mouth and spread across her T-shirt as she stared up at him. A thousand little cuts with the potential to kill her before Shawn got what he wanted from her.If she was lucky. “You’re kidding, right? I’m married, and I’m in love with my husband. You know what that means?”
She waited a moment. Letting every ounce of hatred for this predator, for the time she’d spent pretending Rome didn’t matter, for not seeing the danger standing right in front of her to settle in her expression.
“I’ll never be yours.” She spit everything she had in her mouth directly at his face. And hit her target. “No matter how long or how many times you try to force me, I won’t submit. I will fight you every day and every night. I will never stop trying to escape. Because what you feel for me? It’s not love. It’s control, and I will never give you that. Ever.”
“What do you think is going to happen, Arlette? That Ranger Foster will track you down and rescue you from the dragon? That you’ll live happily ever after and ride off into the sunset together?” Wiping the blood and saliva from his face with one hand, Shawn smiled. “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but he’s not coming. If my trap worked the way I planned, he’s already dead.”
Cold leaked into her gut. “You’re lying.”
Rome wasn’t dead. He wasn’t.
“Shall we find out?” Her intern dragged her kicking and screaming—all too easily—toward the cabin. And slammed the door closed behind them.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Sam was going to make it.
Zion’s on-call vet had gaped at the fact Rome was still alive after trying to treat a wild black bear not under sedation, but then again, so was Rome. He might’ve been mauled if he’d made a mistake, but thankfully, he wouldn’t have to be the one to inform Lettie the bear had nearly died.
Rushing through cleaning the blood off his hands and changing into a set of clean clothes in the ranger’s private bathroom at headquarters, Rome tried calling her for the third time. He’d noted her missed call and listened to her voicemail more than four hours ago, but the reception in the middle of the woods had been nonexistent up until now.
Again, the call went straight to voicemail. He’d already left two messages. Either the battery in her phone had died, or she’d turned it off. Considering she’d been the one to reach out to him, he doubted the latter, but it wasn’t like her to let her devices die. Shoving his phone into his jacket pocket, Rome unloaded his rifle and set it in the back of the pickup he’d borrowed from Randy.
Something about the way Sam had been nearly gutted and left to die didn’t sit right with him. Not just from the cruelty of it—real hunters followed through with their kills and put their prey out of their misery—but the timing. Sam hadn’t been out there long, maybe a couple hours. Any longer and the black bear might’ve bled out. The killer had known that, had potentially practiced on another animal or maybe the victims he’dmurdered. But why? What was the point of it? To lure Lettie to those woods? The tracker they’d recovered was no longer active. Neither him nor Lettie had any idea where Sam had gone in the past couple of days, but maybe their attacker hadn’t considered that. And he would have had to have known about Lettie’s work in the first place.
Lettie.
Her name stuck in his head on repeat. Like a song he couldn’t get out of his mind until he heard it played a few times, he wouldn’t be able to rid himself of this anxiety of the unknown until he had her in his sights. Randy hadn’t seen her, and there was no answer from her hotel room when he’d gone to check. The forensic unit was finished with her van and had identified three distinct sets of prints, the first theorized to be Lettie’s based on the number of samples found all over the vehicle, including the steering wheel. Rome had already given Randy permission to pull his prints from the National Park Service records to rule out himself as a suspect. But the third set were what the team was really interested in and would rush to identify through federal databases and local police resources.
The prints of a potential stalker.
