She forced herself to look, too, to really see instead of just staring in shock.
Fresh boot prints marked the dirt around the trailer, deeper than the tracks they'd left yesterday, the edges still sharp and defined in a way that meant the mud had been wetter when they were made.Someone had walked up to the trailer, paced back and forth a few times as if deliberating, then turned toward the cabin.
Toward her future.
"Those aren't ours," she said, pointing at the clearest set of prints.
"No," he said."They're not.Different tread pattern.Heavier weight, based on the depth.Someone bigger than you, probably bigger than me."
She tracked the direction of the steps with her eyes, following the path from the access road to the trailer to the cabin and back again.A circuit.A reconnaissance."You think it was kids?Teenagers looking for something to mess with on a boring night?"
"Kids would've taken something they could sell or brag about," he said."The nail guns, maybe.Definitely the generator if they had a way to carry it.And they would've left a mess.Empty beer cans.Graffiti.Something to mark territory."He shook his head slowly."This is too neat.Too deliberate."
Her mouth went dry, her tongue sticking to the roof of her mouth."So this was about sending a message."
"Feels that way," he said.
She heard the word that went unsaid, hanging in the air between them like smoke.Again.The inn.The fire.The way her entire life had gone sideways in one awful, violent evening that still visited her in nightmares she couldn't shake.
Her hand flew to her throat before she could stop the motion, fingers pressing against her pulse point as if she could slow her racing heart by force of will."Colby."
He closed the distance between them in three long strides and put his palms on her upper arms, grounding her with the solid warmth of his hands."I've got you.Breathe."
"This is my land," she whispered, the words scraping out of her like gravel."No one should be here unless I invite them.No one should be walking around in the dark, touching my things, and leaving footprints on ground that belongs to me."
"I agree," he said, his thumbs making small circles against her shoulders."And we're going to find out who did this."
The urge to scan the tree line nearly overwhelmed her, that primal instinct to check for predators, to identify the threat before it could strike again.She forced herself not to whirl like prey, but every rustle of leaves and twitter of birdsong sounded amplified, suspicious.
"What if they're still here?"she asked."Watching?"
"They're not," he said with a certainty that felt like an anchor."The tracks are dry.They were here before the sun got high enough to bake the moisture out of this mud.Probably early this morning, before dawn.Long gone by the time we arrived."
"How do you know that?"she asked."How can you tell just by looking at dirt?"
He huffed out a breath that was almost a laugh."Because my brain likes patterns more than is strictly healthy.I notice things.Track conditions, weather effects, and the way mud dries differently depending on when it was disturbed.Occupational hazard from years of reading fire scenes."
It should have been funny.It almost was.Then her gaze snagged on something near the first pier block, and the laugh died in her throat before it could form.
She pulled away from his grip and walked toward it slowly, her boots feeling heavier with every step.
One of the stakes they had used to mark the cabin's footprint lay on its side in the grass, yanked from the earth like a tooth from a jaw.The orange twine that had stretched between corners, the line they'd measured and re-measured until even Colby was satisfied it was perfectly square, had been cut.The severed ends lay curled in the dirt like dead snakes, bright against the brown and green.
Sabrina stared at the broken line, her vision swimming.
"We didn't do that," she said, her voice barely above a whisper.
"No," Colby said, coming to stand beside her."We did not."
She crouched and picked up the stake, the wood rough and splintery in her hand.It felt lighter than it should, stripped of its purpose.Useless.
"They wanted me to see this," she said, turning the stake over in her fingers."They walked right up to the bones of my cabin, the thing I'm trying to build out of nothing, and undid a piece of it.Deliberately.They wanted me to know someone had been here."
Colby's jaw clenched, a muscle jumping beneath his stubble."Yeah."
"Who does that?"she asked, though she already knew the answer sitting like a stone in her stomach."Who goes out of their way to scare someone without actually doing real damage?Without taking anything?"
His silence was its own answer.
