Page 87 of Ruthless Possession
There's movement behind the timber.
I go still. Every muscle locks. My finger finds the trigger guard without thinking.
The sound comes again, a scrape, then nothing. Not an animal. Animals don't stop moving when they've made noise. Animals freeze or they bolt. This was a man adjusting his weight and then catching himself.
I signal Trenton with three short taps on my phone, our backup comms for when we need to be silent. The response is immediate: two taps. He's heard it too, and he's close.
I move left, keeping the dump truck between me and the timber stack. The ground is uneven here, broken concrete, rebar stubs jutting up like fractured bones. I place each foot with the kind of care that only comes from years of doing this in places where one wrong step means you don't get to go home.
Morgan's face when we left the cabin. Charlie asleep with her unicorn. The note impaled on the deer's antlers.
Your time is running out.
I round the back of the dump truck and stop.
Harris is standing in the gap between the timber stack and the quarry wall. He's smaller than I remember, maybe five-ten, lean, the kind of build that's all tendon and wire. The beard the men described is there, patchy and dark. He's wearing a dark jacket and baseball cap. In his right hand, angled down but not holstered, is a hunting knife. The same one, probably, that he used on the deer. On the women.
Our eyes meet.
For a half second, nothing happens. He's calculating, I can see it in the way his weight shifts, the way his gaze flicks left, then right, then back to me. He's looking for a way out, for a weapon on me. He's looking at the distance between us and doing the math.
Then he moves.
He turns and bolts for the quarry wall, not the way we came down but a narrow cut in the stone that I didn't see from above. A fissure, barely wide enough for a man, which opens onto a game trail on the other side of the ridge.
I'm already running.
The ground is treacherous and I'm moving too fast for it, but the alternative is letting him reach that cut, and if he reaches it, he's gone. The trail on the other side connects to a network of logging roads that spiderweb through these mountains for fifty miles. If he disappears into that, we won't find him for days. Maybe weeks.
I fire once into the air. The report cracks across the quarry like a thunderclap, echoing off the stone walls, and Harris flinches, I see it in the hitch of his shoulders, but he doesn't stop. He's ten feet from the cut. Eight. Six.
I holster the weapon. I'm not going to shoot him in the back. Not yet. Not until I've looked him in the eye and made sure he understands exactly who's ending this.
I close the last five feet and launch.
My shoulder drives into the small of his back and we go down together, hard, into the broken concrete. His knife skitters away, and I hear it, but I don't see it, and Harris makes a sound that's half grunt, half scream as the breath leaves his body. He's trying to roll, trying to get his hands up, and I'm already on top of him, my knee driving into his spine and my hand fisting in the back of his jacket.
"Don't," I say. One word. Quiet.
He stops moving. Not because he's decided to comply. I can feel the tension still running through him, the fight-or-flight system working at full capacity, but because my knee is positioned in a way that makes every movement hurt, he's just smart enough to understand that struggling will make it worse.
Trenton's boots hit the ground beside us. I don't look up. I keep my eyes on the back of Harris's head, on the way his breathing is coming in short, shallow pulls, on the tremor running through his shoulders.
"On his feet," Trenton says. Low. Controlled. That voice.
I stand and haul Harris up with me. He's lighter than he looks, the kind of weight that comes from running, from not eating right, from the constant pressure of being hunted. His face, when I spin him to face us, is pale and sharp and angry. Not scared. But angry. His eyes are those of a man who believes he's been wronged.
"You took my daughter," he says. His voice is steady, which surprises me. I expected more panic and pleading.
"We rescued her," I say.
His jaw works. There's a shift behind his eyes, a flash of something that looks almost like confusion, then it's gone, replaced by that cold, righteous anger. "She's mine. Her mother?—"
"Her mother is dead," Trenton says. He's standing two feet to my left, his weapon holstered but his hand resting on it. "Like the others."
Harris's face doesn't change. He heard the words. I watch him process them, and the processing doesn't look like guilt.
"They weren't right," he says. And his voice has gone quieter, almost thoughtful, like he's explaining something to a child. "None of them were right. They were weak. They needed to be made pure."
