Every hair on her body stood up. “I’m not alone.”
Another movement from him, just as slow but more theatrical, as he took in the room, then faced her again with the grim, flat expression that appeared to be his baseline. “Look pretty alone to me.”
“I need that gear.” And what about her sat phone? Had he found that? She tried to remember. Did she have it with her when she crashed? No. She’d tucked it into the plane’s storage pocket. Gone. She couldkickherself right now. Food poisoning or not, she’d gotten herself into quite the bind here.
“Making sure we don’t double up.” He was all business now, returning items to her pack and discarding others—like her bright orange vest, which would be useful if her guys, indeed, came looking for her.
Had he taken her weapons? There was no sign of her Glock 20. She’d had it in the Cub. She knew that. She shut her eyes and tried to remember. Nothing. No idea what had happened to her firearm. This was bad. Slowly, she rubbed one leg against the other, knocking her shin bone into the knife strapped to her ankle. Good. She wasn’t entirely unarmed.
Her eyes followed his movements as he repacked her bag along with his and set them both against the back wall beside the wood stove.
“They coming?” He turned.
The dog woofed from its place by the front door, dragging Leo’s gaze back in that direction. It was one of those fuzzy white-and-gray animals that looked like it was made for Alaska. MadebyAlaska. Right now, it stared at the door, its big, pointy ears standing at attention.
“Time to get up.”
That wasn’t happening. If she sat here unmoving, the pain in her head was bearable. Almost.
The man—whose bulk took up most of the space—grabbed a pile of clothing and set it on the bed beside her. “Clothes are a mess. Put these on.”
“I’m not getting undressed.”
“Bad idea to be—”
A sound echoed, outside the house. It sounded like a scream. Leo pictured the scene—cabin, woods, harsh screams in the night.What Alaska Chainsaw Massacre nightmare have I fallen into?
“Forget it. Time to go. Got two choices right now, lady.” He glanced at the dog, who’d stood and started a low, ominous growling. “Now’s the time to tell me who you are and why you’re here, or I send you out there.” He pointed at the front door. “To the wolves.”
With effort, she pushed herself to standing, knowing as well as he did that the biggest threat in this wilderness—inanywilderness—wasn’t wolves or bears or even the goddamn cold.
It was humans.
***
A scream pierced the night’s subtle cacophony.
Lightly poised on the balls of his feet, Ashwin Benton went very still and listened. The agonized sound went on for a few seconds before cutting off abruptly.
Whoever had let out that godawful shriek was in terrible pain. A foothold trap, perhaps, with tightly sprung steel jaws. The kind that sliced through flesh and crushed bone. He’d seen two in the last few minutes. They had told him a few things. First: the traps had just been sprung. This was clear because very fresh tracks led to it and the greenery hiding it had been put there quite recently. Which confirmed that the traps weren’t meant to kill animals. They were meant to slow humans down. Second: the man expected pursuit. And he was well prepared. Interesting.
There would be no emergency medical evacuation tonight. The poor bastard who’d been caught in their quarry’s trap would never walk the same again. This job wasn’t starting well. At all. Already, the complex plan had been thwarted. By someone in an antique aeroplane, no less.
Oh, Deegan—the one in charge of this venture—hadn’t liked that at all. Ash, however, had found it rather charming. The irony of it was rather poetic.
He went on as before, slowly and carefully, studying the soggy, half-frozen ground. He took another silent step, paused, took another. Another.Hewouldn’t be stepping in any traps tonight. But then he didn’t rush into things the way other operatives did—impatient Americans with their high-tech gadgets and thirst for violence.
He thought back to the crash site—a treasure trove of information that the others had glanced at before taking off in hot pursuit. Ash knew, for example, that the pilot was injured—likely a head wound, given the splash patterns in the cockpit, and the volume of blood. He also knew that the pilot was a woman and that the person she’d met with was a large male who left very little sign of his passage, accompanied by a canine. Neither was Campbell Turner.
Patting the handgun he’d slid into his pocket, Ash pulled in a satisfied breath.
Movement up ahead made him freeze again, this time watching as the people he was purportedly working with forged on, utterly insensitive to the destruction they wrought. Thankfully, their heavy, steel-toed footprints were easily identifiable. They were also at least an inch shorter than the ones belonging to the man he was stalking, whose feet were a size sixteen American, he’d venture to guess. There had been no mention of either a woman or a bigfoot in their briefing. Their target—Campbell Turner—was a midsized fifty-three-year-old man.
Curiouser and curiouser.
Eyes hitching on an irregular shape, he paused. There, hidden alongside a fallen branch, was another trap. He squatted to get a closer look. It was clean, not marred by a single speck of blood, as if it had never been used before. This little monster would do significant damage.
Up ahead, the injured operative groaned deeply. Someone else spoke—a woman. So much for stealth.
