Claiming the Enemy: Dustin (Porter Brothers Trilogy 3)

Dustin straddled it, looping the rope around his waist to gradually lower himself. Gloves protected his hands as he went down. When he got to the point with the dark soil he had seen from the railing, he moved faster, seeing where shoes and handprints had dug into the dirt and the groves of rocks marking a clear path down the cliff.

“Jessie!” Dustin unwound the rope, leaving it behind as he started scouring the area where Jessie had gone after reaching the bottom.

Looking for signs of her, Dustin steadily began walking, intermittently bending down to pick up a broken twig or crushed leaves. A couple of times, he had to backtrack to track Jessie. He’d seen several specks of blood on the cliff and at a spot where she must have rested against a tree trunk. As he drew deeper within the trees, the sun started sinking, disguising the blood trail he was following.

“Jesus, how far have you gotten?”

His heart picked up its pace when he saw a ramshackle log home ahead of him. He started running through the leaves, nearly tripping and almost sinking through the floorboards when he rushed through the open doorway.

Opening his backpack, he took out the LED torchlight, surveying the floor. Bending down to the side of the door, he saw a patch of dried blood. Standing, he used his boot to tap a tree branch, quickly realizing she had used it to hold the door closed.

“Which animal were you trying to hide from, Jessie? The animal that threw you down the cliff or the ones that live in the woods?”

Unzipping the outer compartment of the backpack, he took out the revolver, tucking it inside the back of his belt and hiding it under his camouflage jacket. Going outside, he circled the old cabin before finding which new direction she had gone.

Every step he took brought him closer to her, his senses going into overdrive.

While moving quicker, he took lighter steps, not wanting to alert others that were stalking her. The last thing he needed was to walk into a trap. So far, though, he hadn’t found anything that would suggest anyone but him was trailing her. Still, he didn’t want to make a deadly mistake that would cost them both their lives.

He was about to bend down to look at a small plant, pointing the flashlight at the area, when he caught a splash of color out of the corner of his eyes. All sense of caution deserted him as he ran, realizing someone was leaning against a tree. He couldn’t see who it was, but from the color of the material, it could be Jessie’s shirt.

“Jessie?” Going to the front of the tree, Dustin found the woman the whole town believed to be dead.

He had to bite back the scream of rage at what had been done to her.

Tearing the backpack off and dropping to his knees, he checked for her pulse, thanking God when he felt the faint beating under his fingertips.

“Jessie?”

Unconscious, she didn’t respond, not even when he shifted her into a sitting position.

Unzipping the backpack, he took out a thermal blanket and placed it over her. Then he took out the flare pistol before finding a space where the flare would make it through the tree branches. Setting off two flares, Dustin knew that Greer or Tate would know that they meant Jessie was alive and he needed help getting her out.

Returning to Jessie, he gathered what he would need for a fire so that she could feel its warmth and would be able to see him in the dark … if she could with both eyes swollen shut.

Her face was a grotesque mask of bruises. One side had been scraped raw, and her lips were so bloated that they had split in several places. But the part that infuriated him the most was that the only clothes she wore were a pair of panties, a shirt, and tennis shoes.

“So help me, God, Jessie, whoever did this to you is going to die.”

Pulling a bottled water and the first aid kit out, Dustin did what he could to keep her alive until help arrived.

“Don’t you dare die on me. Holt and Asher won’t be worth a plug nickel without you.” Carefully raising the blanket, he searched her body, making sure she didn’t have any open wounds. She was scraped and bruised all over, but it was the dried blood on her thighs that had him hoping to hell and back that he was mistaken at the cause.

He wrapped her back up when he was done. “Come on, Jessie, open those pretty eyes for me.”

He did what he could for her face, pressing a damp cloth to her mouth and letting drops of water slip between her puffed-out lips.

Checking his cell phone, he saw there was still no service.