"Sure you do." He's snarling now, practically gnashing his teeth at me. "Big guy. Lives alone. Got a dog. We've been looking for him for a while now. Imagine our surprise when a pretty girl shows up in the woods and leads us right to him."
The second man has circled around the back of the van. I hear the rear doors swing open behind me.
I open my mouth to scream, but Buzzcut is on me too fast for that. His hand clamps over my mouth—calloused, reeking of cigarettes—and his other arm locks around my waist, pinning my arms there. He lifts me off the ground like Afon did, except there's nothing careful about it, nothing that even remotely resembles concern for my well-being.
I bite down on his palm. He swears—"Fuck!"—but doesn't let go. The second man grabs my kicking legs.
They carry me to the back of the van. I thrash, I claw, I do everything the self-defense class at the 92nd Street Y taught me, but there are two of them and one of me, and I've been through so much in the last few days that I just don't have much fight left in me anymore.
The last thing I see before the doors slam shut is the blinking red light of the security camera on the bait shop wall, recording everything or perhaps nothing at all. And even if it is recording, who would be around to watch it? The fishermen are out, Barb is at the dentist, and God is busy ensuring that all the dog owners pick up after their pets.
There's no one to see me. No one at all.
There's only closing doors, and then darkness.
8
AFON
Somehow, the cabin has changed since I left an hour ago.
It'squieter.
I've been alone up here for the better part of a year. Before Caroline showed up, I went days without hearing another human voice. Weeks, sometimes. But the silence was the point. The only alternative was continuing to be a man whose scarred, bloodstained hands had done things that no amount of silence could make right.
In the silence, I could be no one.
But now, the silence is all fucking wrong.
It has a Caroline-sized hole in it.
Wolf can feel it, too. He's standing in the middle of the living room staring at the couch where she slept, tail low, ears rotating like satellite dishes searching for a frequency that's gone dead.
"She's gone," I tell him. "That was the plan."
Wolf looks at me and tilts his head to the side as he lets out a confused whine.
"Stop it," I scold.
He keeps looking.
I hang the Remington back on its rack and shrug off my jacket. The fire's gone cold while I was out, so I kneel at the hearth and start rebuilding it. My hands know the work: ball the newspaper, arrange the kindling, pile on two freshly split sections of birch. They've done it ten thousand times. But my mind is still back in the Bronco as I idled in Pike Hollow, watching Caroline step out onto the gravel…
Go home, Caroline. Please.
I strike a match and hold it close until the newspaper catches. I watch the flame curl through the kindling. A slow heat begins to rise to my face, but I'm so damn cold inside. It's a cold that no fire can touch, no matter how much I feed it.
I stand and wince as my knees pop and twinge. When I look over, I see that Wolf hasn't moved from his post by the couch, and his head is still rotated forty-five degrees sideways.
"I said stop it," I snarl.
He lies down with an enormous, theatrical sigh. Melodramatic fucking animal. I wish he'd keep his damn opinions to himself.
I go to the kitchen with no real purpose or plan. I wash the mug she used this morning, then dry it and put it back on the shelf next to my own. When that's done, I look around for something else to do.
I could eat, but I'm not hungry.
I could check the trail cameras, but I know already I won't find anything.
