Page 115 of With Spite

I pulled in and found trucks parked about halfway down the path.

I parked behind them because there was no other choice and took the rest of the way on foot.

When I got to where I could see the house, my phone rang in my pocket.

I didn’t answer it, though, because I spotted Denver with his phone to his ear.

“Denver.”

He looked up, spotted me, then shoved his phone back into his pocket.

I stopped next to him and said, “Did you find her?”

He shook his head.

“No sign of him.”

My eyes raked over the house, the barn, and the side structures that were used to store hay.

I threaded my fingers together and rested them on top of my head as my chest felt like it was about to cave in.

“Where the hell is she?” I asked in agony.

Just as I asked that, Chan came around the corner of a tree and spotted us.

He froze for a few long seconds, then started to run in the opposite direction.

Seeing as guilty people didn’t usually stick around to be questioned, I took off like a shot, utilizing my knowledge of the land as well as my track star status from high school.

I caught up to him when he reached the small hill that would peak before leading down into an alfalfa field that elk liked to bed down in at night.

I’d been in that alfalfa field more times than I could count hunting elk.

That, and retrieving elk with my friends that would later be processed.

So when Chan started to run down the side of the valley, I caught him in a matter of seconds.

I caught him by the hair and yanked him backward, stopping him mid-run and slamming him onto his back.

He hit with a wheeze and stared at me unblinkingly for a long few seconds before he croaked, “I won’t let you have her.”

And because he was all of a hundred and thirty pounds soaking wet, I knocked him out cold with one punch.

By the time I got him to the top of the hill, I could hear the commotion.

I heard someone say “ambulance.”

Another one says “she’s alive.”

I started to run as fast as my legs and the weight I was carrying would take me.

When I got to the first person I saw—Boone—I tossed Chan at his feet like a sack of grain and sprinted to where I could see Denver holding a very bloody and unconscious Bernice.

She looked awful.

As I got closer, I could see the blood on her throat.

The line through the middle of it.