Page 3 of Untamed Hunter Daddy

"Stone. Thought you'd be halfway to your cabin by now, feet up, fire going."

"Feet up isn't really my thing." I take the thermos he offers. The coffee's terrible. Thin and burnt. I drink it anyway. "You boys wrapping up?"

"Just about. Evidence is logged. Container's processed. The women are all placed. Haven 7 or back with families." He pauses. "Fourteen women, Ryker. Fourteen. And Weathers had routes set up to move more. If your team hadn't gotten to that semi when you did⁠—"

"But we did."

"Yeah. You did."

I don't say what I'm thinking. We got lucky on the timing. Skill only explains about sixty percent of any good outcome. The rest is the universe deciding not to kill you today.

"The count," I say. "Fourteen match your intake intel?"

His face tightens a little. "We had reports of fifteen to eighteen being cycled through. Hard to pin down. Fourteen is what we pulled out. Could be the others were moved before the raid. Could be the numbers were wrong."

"Could be."

"You don't sound convinced."

"I'm not paid to be convinced. I'm paid to make sure your perimeter's clean before you pull out and leave these mountains to me." I nod toward the tree line. "I'm doing a sweep of the outer trails. Make sure nobody cached anything or left a bolt hole we missed."

Davenport waves me off. "Have at it. We're wheels up by thirteen hundred regardless."

I leave him to his bad coffee and move into the trees.

This is the part I'm good at. Not the briefings or the paperwork. Boots on frozen ground. Eyes reading what the snow has to say.

I work the perimeter outward from the main structures. Tracks everywhere. Federal boots. Equipment drag marks. Vehicle ruts already filling with powder. All expected.

Then I see it.

A faint trail leading away from the site. Not toward the road. Into the deep timber. Small prints, half-filled with fresh snow but still legible. Days old. From right around the time the shooting started. Spacing's wrong for walking. Too wide at first. Running. Then the stride shortens and gets irregular. Limping. Right foot striking lighter. Low branches snapped at about five and a half feet. Shorter than any of the men we ID'd.

One of the women. She bolted when the chaos hit. Got scared, didn't know we were the ones coming to pull them out, and ran straight into the wilderness.

My jaw tightens. These mountains don't care about fear or good intentions. They'll kill you either way. And someone in flat-soled sneakers has been trying to survive out here for days.

I follow the trail.

It winds deeper into the pines, away from roads and lower elevations. She went up. Into harder country. The kind that gets people killed in summer with full gear, let alone in winter with nothing.

I read the signs without slowing much. Falling. Getting back up. Places where she sat against a tree long enough to compress the snow. She tried to cover her tracks once by dragging a branch. It might've fooled a casual hiker. It didn't slow me down.

The wind picks up as I climb. My radio crackles with static from the feds below, but I don't answer. The storm in my knee is getting louder. Sky confirms it. Heavy gray stacking over the peaks. Snow starts falling thicker.

I should turn back. The trail's old. Whoever left it has either made it down the other side or⁠—

I stop that thought.

The trail goes cold at a creek crossing, then picks up again upstream. She's barely walking now. I can see where she went down hard on one knee and stayed there long enough for snow to start covering the impression before she got up again.

The will it takes to get up from that—I've seen trained operators fail to summon it. This woman has it.

I keep going.

The trail leads higher into a cluster of granite outcroppings and a big fallen pine that's created a natural hollow against the rock face. I slow my approach. Identify cover. Listen. Wind in the canopy. My own breathing. And underneath it, the thin rasp of someone pulling air through a throat that's too dry and too cold.

I move around the edge of the fallen pine. Disturbed snow. Branches stacked in a rough lean-to that's half collapsed. Someone tried to build a shelter with apron strings and desperation. A few stripped sticks propped against the rock, one sharpened to a rough point. Not useful, but she tried.