Page 42 of Her Mountain Man Protector

I can't reach the strap. I can see it. That has to count for something.

I wish I could put a sign in the snow. I wish I could call the mill and tell Alden to lock the gate and tell Crewe to sit on Colt and tell Billy Hawthorne that his breadcrumb already cost enough. I wish I could tell them not to come. Coming is how they die in a circle someone swept for them.

Most of all I wish I could talk to Colt one last time.

Not a speech. Not a goodbye he would refuse to accept. I want his voice in my ear saying stay breathing, sunshine, in that growl he used when he thought I was just some girl and then when he knew I wasn't. I want to tell him the passenger has a scar. I want to tell him the driver never speaks and wears the ring on his right hand. I want to tell him I heard a train when we turned off the washboard road, close, maybe a half mile. I want to tell him I love him in the plain way, without a joke attached, because I didn't say it in the cabin when I had his mouth on my throat.

I didn't say it. That sits in me hotter than the rope.

Scar-guy stands. "She's quiet. That's new."

"I'm thinking," I say.

"Think all you want. You can’t think you’re way out of this one."

He walks the perimeter. The driver stays on the crate. Two men. One phone. One padlocked door. One unlocked door I can't get to with my ankles bound to bolted wood. I work my wrists anyway, slow, the way Colt showed me in the first house when he thought a lesson was a boundary. The rope burns. It also gives a fraction. A fraction is a start.

"He'll come," I tell them, because lying is useless and the truth might buy minutes. "He'll come and he won't come alone. You should be afraid of that."

Scar-guy smiles with no warmth. "We're counting on it."

The driver looks at his phone again. He shows the screen to his partner. I can't read it from here. Something on it makes Scar-guy's mouth go pleased.

"Soon," he says to me. "Sit pretty."

I don't sit pretty. I sit and I map the room again. Window. Chain. Inward door. Catwalk. Screw. Strap. Train somewhere beyond the brick. Colt somewhere on a road I counted in turns. I pull at the rope until blood warms my palm and I keep my face wet so they keep thinking the only thing happening in this chair is a girl falling apart.

Inside the falling apart I'm doing the other job. Witness. Find the gap.

If there's a way out of this chair before they get their Hawthorne reunion, I'm taking it. If there isn't, I'll still be awake when the door opens. I already missed saying it once. I'm not missing him twice.

17

Colt

Marin finds the van on a county cam eight miles north of the washboard turn, sitting dark behind a brick warehouse that the tax rolls still call vacant. Train tracks run a half mile west. It’s almost too easy.

"Three heat signatures inside last pass," Marin says in my ear. “One’s seated and still. That's her. Don't you dare go through the front. That's a trap."

"Copy."

We stack in the trees on the east side. Nash on my right. Crewe on my left. Sin and Jace already circling south. Mack and Banks with Alden at the lot edge, Banks running a jammer off a box that looks harmless. Harlan from Equinox takes the chain door. Wyatt takes the tree line and the road. Billy stands where I can see him, which is the only place I'll allow him to stand.

"They want all of us in one room," I say. "So we don't give them that."

Alden's voice is flat on the comm. "Harlan hits the padlock on my count. Wyatt calls any runner. Marin keeps the county blind another four minutes. You get the girl. The rest of us get the men. Billy, you stay off the trigger unless the man you've been hunting walks out wearing a name."

"He's in there," Billy says.

"Go," Marin says.

Harlan's cutters take the chain. The sound is ugly and short. Crewe and I are through the inward door before the echo dies. Snowlight cuts a stripe across a swept circle and a bolted chair and Oakley tied in it with her face wet and her wrists dark.

She's alive. Something in my chest slams so hard I miss a step.

A man turns from a crate with a pistol already coming up. There’s two other men close by.

I don't give the man the shot. Nash puts him down from the side door without conversation. One of the other men goes for the boarded window and runs into Sin. Jace is on him a second later. The last guy tries the padlocked door that isn't padlocked anymore and finds Harlan filling it.