Page 16 of Untamed Hunter Daddy

"Time of day?"

"Late afternoon. Close to the end of Zoe's shift."

"Ryker. I need a straight answer. The tracks you reported. Two sets, heading north toward the ridge. Have you seen anything since?"

"Negative. Storm closed back in before I could do a follow-up sweep. No activity around the cabin perimeter. But I can't rule out movement on the far side of the ridge during whiteout conditions."

Mason sucks in a deep breath and lets it out slowly. "I'm moving the timeline up. Jax and Kane staged in Timber Creek as soon as the roads allow. When that storm breaks, I want boots on the ground within hours, not days. In the meantime, you watch those trees."

"I watch the trees every day, Mason."

"I know you do. Watch them harder."

The line goes dead. The storm has the signal again. I stand on the porch for a long minute.

I go back inside. The fire’s burned down to a deep orange glow. Zoe’s fallen asleep in the chair by the counter, the book open on her lap.

I sit in my chair. I pull the sketchbook from the drawer under the table and a pencil. Instead of finishing the landscape I started last week, I turn to a new page and draw her hand. The one resting on the quilt, fingers curled loosely, the knuckles still scraped from eight days of gripping and holding on. I draw the shape of her fingers and the shadows between them and the way the firelight catches the ridges of her knuckles. I draw the edge of the quilt where it meets her wrist and the sleeve of my flannel shirt hanging past her palm, too big for her.

It takes a while. When it's finished I look at what I've made. Just a hand. But it belongs to a woman who had no one, who was taken by a man who saw the aloneness and used it, who ran into the mountains because even death by exposure felt safer than one more locked door.

A woman who now, for whatever the word is worth, has someone.

I close the sketchbook. I put the pencil down. I feed the fire and check the locks and lean the rifle against the wall and stretch out on the couch with one boot on and my sidearm within reach.

The wind screams. Zoe sleeps. And somewhere in the dark, the sketch of her hand waits in the closed book like a secret I've told myself I’m not yet ready to say out loud.

8

Zoe

Ryker goes out for his morning perimeter check and I explore the cabin the way a person reads a diary they found in a drawer. Carefully. Guiltily. Unable to stop.

He's been going out twice a day since the tracks. He doesn't say it's because of the tracks. He says it's routine, part of storm management. But the rifle goes with him now, and when he comes back inside his eyes do the sweep before his boots clear the mat. He's watching the trees harder.

I'm not snooping. I tell myself that on the way from the stool to the bookshelf. I'm existing in a space that contains objects, and the objects have stories, and I've always been good at noticing things.

The bookshelves take up most of the wall between the fireplace and the window. Rough-cut pine, hand-built. His books tell me things. A worn copy of Marcus Aurelius sits beside a field guide to Rocky Mountain wildflowers, which sits beside a paperback thriller with the spine cracked in six places. There's a book on woodworking with pencil notes in the margins. A collected poems of Mary Oliver with a dried aspen leaf pressed between the pages of a poem called "The Summer Day." I read it standing on one foot because my ankle is complaining.

The leaf is yellow and papery, the veins still visible. Someone put it there because the poem and the leaf belonged together. The fact that Ryker Stone, US Marshal, reads Mary Oliver and presses leaves into her poems rearranges something in the picture I've been building of him.

I put the book back exactly where I found it. I'm careful about that. Tyler used to go through my things and move objects just enough that I'd know someone had been there. I will not do that to Ryker's shelves.

The lower shelves hold small collections. Smooth river stones in shades of gray and green and a red so dark it's almost black. Feathers. A jay feather, blue and banded. A hawk feather, brown and curved. What I think is an owl feather, soft even lying still. Each one placed carefully.

He collects things. Just like how I collect mugs. I picture him on a trail, pausing to pick up a stone because the color was right, slipping it into his pocket. The image feels private enough that I almost stop looking.

Behind the feathers, leaned against the back of the shelf, there's a photograph.

It's small, in a plain wooden frame. A woman, early twenties, dark hair pulled back, caught mid-laugh with one hand raised like she's waving or trying to block the shot. She's standing on a porch, sunlight behind her. She's beautiful in the way that laughing women in photographs are beautiful. Just alive.

I stare at it longer than I should. My stomach tightens. Not jealousy. Something more complicated. A woman. Laughing. On a porch. Placed there with the same care he gives to everything he keeps.

Who is she? Girlfriend, ex, sister, friend. The photo doesn't say. I put it back. My fingers are trembling and I'm not sure whether it's the ankle or the fact that I care enough about the answer to feel anything at all.

A week ago I was eating berries in a snow hollow and wondering whether dying would feel like falling asleep. Now I'm standing in a man's cabin having feelings about a photograph. I squeeze my eyes shut, and breathe the way Ryker taught me. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four.

When I open my eyes I move to the desk.