Hero (Alpha Mountain 1)

I gulped at all the non-suspicious options. I needed to get off this mountain in one piece. If I told him now, he’d kill me and return to the lake and murder the family I’d brought up here too. They’d seen him. Knew I’d left with him.

I ran shaky fingers over my dry lips. Tried to think. Think! Wait. He had only mentioned that I’d searched for his name. Not where I’d found it. I might have a bargaining chip.

“I saw a video,” I blurted. My hands were slick with cold sweat, and my tongue felt too large in my mouth.

His eyes flared. Yeah, I’d surprised him with that one.“What video?” he hissed. His brows slashed down in angry points.

“The one Buck sent me.” I tipped my chin up. “Of you shooting Abdul Tareen.”

Tully hesitated for a moment, then he said, “Bullshit.”

“Buck was translating, you were torturing. A semi-dark room, dirt floor. The man you killed in a dark Afghan uniform.” I tried to think of every possible detail of what I’d watched. “Then you ended him with a bullet through the head? Does that ring a bell?”

He scowled at me, and the evil in him registered in my body. This man was more than dangerous. He was deranged. He shook his head, eyes narrowed. “There’s no video.”

“It was on an SD card–recorded from Buck’s bodycam. He mailed it to me three weeks before he died, but I hadn’t found it until three nights ago. Right before I did a search for your name, which was mentioned in the video. Why do you think I recognized your face up there?”

I tipped my head in the direction of the lake.

He narrowed his gaze and studied me. I waited, trying to remain calm. I needed him believing firmly in the existence of the video because it was the only thing keeping me from dying on this mountain. It was the bait I was going to use to lure him off this mountain and hopefully straight to Ford.

“Where’s the SD card?”

Bait. Taken.

“Why would I tell you that?”

In a flash, he tackled me to the ground, pinning me beneath his larger body and choking me with both hands at my throat. My backpack had me bowed, and my head canted back. Shit, I should have ditched the stupid thing.

I kicked and writhed, struggling to breathe until I remembered that he needed me alive. Through my panic, I realized he wasn’t going to kill me.

I held up my hand, waved it in front of his face in surrender.

Still, he meant to scare the crap out of me because he didn’t let go until stars were dancing in front of my eyes. He needed me alive, but whole and healthy was something else entirely.

I sucked in ragged breaths, my body wracked with the fear of death.

I held my hand again, still struggling for breath. “I have it,” I wheezed. “I hid it.”

He gripped my throat again and used it to pick up my head and bang it back against the dirt. “Hid it where?”

I winced at the sudden burst of pain.

I clawed at his wrists to pull him off my neck. “Wait…hang on,” I wheezed.

“I’m listening.” His fingers clenched.

“I’ll make you a deal.”

“No,” he said immediately. “Tell me where it is, or you die.” He reached for his pocket and produced the pistol I’d suspected was there. He pressed it to the center of my forehead.

I tried but failed to keep the image of Abdul Tareen getting shot out of my mind. I needed to keep it together. I owed it to Buck not to allow this guy to get away with murder again. If I could just lead him down to Ford’s place, I knew he and his team would take over. Save the day like they’d been trained to do.

“Hang on!” I said. “Just wait. It’s a decent offer. I’ll get it for you. We’ll go down together. But I want you to leave that family back at the lake in peace, okay? They barely saw you, they’re not going to remember anything about you. You and I can just go down the mountain, and I’ll give you the SD card. I found it the night before I took this trip, so I didn’t have time to show it to anyone or make copies. I just put it in a safe place before I left.”

For a second, I thought he was going to accept my plea bargain. He definitely was considering it, but then he shook his head. “No fucking deal. Tell me where the card is, or I will go back and you can watch me shoot that family one by one until you do.”

Fuck. Me.

FORD

* * *

“Why the fuck don’t we have a helicopter?” I snarled at Kennedy as he, Hayes, and I hit the trail leading in the direction of Glacier Lake. If we had one, we’d have been to the lake within minutes, not after hours of flat-out running. Kennedy had linked Indi’s GPS to all of our phones, so we could track her, and I’d sent a text message to it in case she looked but hadn’t heard back. The blip showed her at Glacier Lake and hadn’t moved since we first pulled it up.