Page 83 of Hunter or Hunted

“I guess, yeah. But she has no evidence. And Simone didn’t do it anyway. They’re not gonna find the body.”

They could. If Angela could build enough suspicion, Rhiannon would let them search this land without a warrant. They wouldn’t find anything, but if they kept digging? If they connected Gwen to it, I wouldn’t be far behind. My land would be next.

“Soon, there won’t be a body to find.” I dropped the pack off my shoulder, unzipped the front pocket, and lifted out a sheet of folded paper. I passed it to her.

Gwen squinted for a second or two, reading the document, then side-eyed me. “A crematorium?”

“I’m signing the papers next Monday,” I said. “The sale’s gonna be quick because I’m paying cash. As long as Angela doesn’t find enough evidence to connect it to us in the next month, we’ll be fine.”

Blinking hard, she dropped the papers to her lap. “You bought a crematorium?”

“One of my conditions. We leave no trace. No body, no crime.”

“You know, this is gonna sound crazy.” Her eyes softened. “But this is the sweetest thing anyone’s ever done for me.”

“More depressing than crazy.” I tucked the papers into my jacket pocket.

“Touché.”

“And don’t get all hot and bothered. It’s just as much for me as it is for you.”

She laughed, though it lacked humor, and there was no real joy in my smile. Just an ironic, deadpan reaction to the venture we’d decided to walk.

“Also fair,” she said. “What else do you have in that bag?”

“Another condition.” I went back into the front pocket for the sheet of paper I planned to burn later. “We’ll get to that one last. There are a lot to get through first.”

“Alright.” She swiveled on the bench to face me head-on. “Throw them at me.”

“Well, both of our first times were a mess,” I said, looking at my notes. “We were angry and scared, so we let our emotions get the best of us. We lost control because we didn’t have someone else to lean on. We carried it all on our own. It can’t be like that. Before doing this, we have to figure it out together. All the decisions, the planning, we discuss it and confide in one another. We know how hard it is to do this alone, and I don’t think either of us could survive that loneliness for much longer.”

Something sparkled in her eye. Kinship? Appreciation? But she nodded. “Acting alone’s dangerous. We’re better together.”

My chest warmed. I cleared my throat. “Whatever we do, whoever we’re after, it can’t touch our lives. We have to take precautions to make sure that we protect our reputations, but also that we protect the ranch. We can’t use the incinerator at the meatpacking plant, even if we’re in a bind and something happens with the crematorium. Rhiannon has spent her entire life protecting the women here, and we can’t risk hurting them.”

“Or her.” Gwen lifted one leg onto the bench, tucking it under her thigh. “I agree. No one in town, nothing gets back to the ranch. That keeps us and our people safe.”

So far, this was going better than I expected.

I turned back to my notes, breath clouding before my face on this one. “We always have to weigh the risk versus the impact. There are more bad people out there than we have time or capacity to handle. We won’t be able to get them all. There might be someone who really deserves it who we just can’t get to because doing so would guarantee we wind up dead or in prison.”

“We can’t protect anyone if we’re dead or in prison.” At Gwen’s feet, Honey sat up with a stick between her teeth. She started a game of tug-of-war with her, sparing me a half smile. “I’m not arguing with you. That’s fair.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

“But you came into this conversation half expecting an argument, didn’t you?” She arched a brow at me, still smiling, and still tugging on that stick for Honey. “You can let out that breath you’re holding.”

I chuckled, my shoulders falling.

Maybe she was right. Maybe I had expected an argument. And maybe that had nothing to do with Gwen and everything to do with the fact that conditions and boundaries were as foreign to me as they had been to Gwen when she’d first arrived at the ranch.

“Go ahead. Looks like you got a few more on there.” She gestured to my paper. “What’s the next one?”

Running a hand over my mouth, I skimmed down my page. “Four and five kind of go together. About the planning. We can’t do this all the time. Not just because neither of us have time in our schedules for it, but because we want to stay away from patterns. I’d say the most we can manage is two per year. Which also ties back into risk versus impact, but it’s just a matter of realism. We can’t handle more than that.”

“That’s probably all I have the emotional bandwidth for anyway.” Honey finally released the stick, and Gwen tossed it. Honey barreled to the end of her leash in search of it. “If that, even. It’s not like I meet people every day who deserve to die. But around here, around all these women…” She gestured vaguely around the ranch we sat within. “After Evan, there could be another. I don’t know when, and I’m not on a mission to find him. But the goal here is to be prepared when that time inevitably comes, right?”

“Right.” Hearing it spoken that way softened the remaining tension in my shoulders. “In that same vein, if we get interrupted for any reason, if there’s a witness, we walk away. Run, I guess I should say. It’s better that we get caught and put in prison for attempted kidnapping than murder, but my point is just⁠—”