Page 7

For fuck's sake, Savannah. Calm your ass down.

I press the stock against my hip and close my eyes. Breathe. Just breathe. The house settles around me, all its familiar groans and sighs, the timber expandin' and contractin' with the cold the way it has since before I was born.

The grandfather clock downstairs keeps its rhythm. Steady. Indifferent. The kind of constant that should comfort me but tonight just sounds like countin' down to something I can't name.

You're makin' things worse. You are standin' in your own damn house. Your house. On forty-seven thousand acres of Ashby land in the middle of absolutely nowhere, Montana, where the nearest neighbor who isn't on your payroll is a twenty-minute drive down a private road that requires a gate code to enter.

You are fine.

You are the opposite of vulnerable.

You are fortified by geography, and inheritance, and sheer square footage.

And there are people here. Forty at least, on the grounds right now. Almost all the hands live in the bunkhouses year-round because that's the one perk you can't get anywhere else but a working ranch—a roof, a meal, a bed that doesn't cost you half your wages.

They're out there right now, behind the tree line, in the low buildings with their yellow-lit windows, and they would come runnin' if I screamed. They would. I know they would.

I'm not alone, I'm not alone, I'm not⁠—

The phone buzzes again.

The sound cuts through the silence like a blade on glass and my whole body locks up.

Shit.

I set the shotgun down on the bed and reach for my phone, pullin' it from my pocket, and the screen glows against my palm like a small bright wound in the dark of this room. The notification sits there, waitin'.

It's from Mercy.

My thumb hovers for half a second—then I tap it.

The message stream opens.

Another picture stares back at me.

I gasp, and the sound that leaves my mouth isn't composed or measured. It's raw, and ugly, and then I'm cryin'. Just like that. Full, stupid, useless tears rollin' down my face because I am lookin' at a nine-year-old child who weighs maybe sixty pounds soakin' wet and she is blindfolded and tied to—a post? A wooden post, rough-cut, the kind you'd see holdin' up a fence line or bracin' the wall of a barn that hasn't been maintained in decades.

And suddenly I'm not here anymore. I'm back in the cabin. I'm tied to the bed, and the zip ties are bitin' into my skin, and Marcus is sittin' on the edge of the mattress with that calm, senatorial smile, tryin' to spoon-feed me cherry pie like we're on a date, like he didn't kidnap me, and violate me. Like restraint is just another word for devotion⁠—

No.

No. Stop it, Savannah. Stop it right now.

This isn't about you. This is not your trauma to center. Get it together. Get it together.

There's no caption, just the picture. I force myself to see it critically. She's wearin' her school uniform. Why? It's Sunday?

Oh, my God—oh, my God—oh, my God…

The blindfold looks like a rag. Just a filthy strip of fabric torn from somethin' else, tied too tight across that small face, and the knot at the back has caught strands of her dark hair in it, pullin' them sideways.

Her hair is all messed up—not the way a kid's hair gets messed up from playin' or sleepin' on it wrong, but the way it gets messed up when someone has been handlin' her, movin' her, and she's been thrashin' against it.

And her cheeks are stained with dirt and streaked from cryin', the kind of cryin' that goes on so long the tears carve little rivers through the grime and then dry there, layer upon layer, like sediment in a creekbed that tells you exactly how long the water's been runnin'.

My fingers are flyin' across the keyboard before my brain has fully caught up. If you hurt her, I will kill you myself!

I press send.