Dread leaks from my eyes.
Agony stabs through my chest.
My insides shatter into panic-stricken tremors as I sit on the couch and spread my legs.
Sheriff Fletcher drives his SUV with Mary in the backseat. I sit beside him, my pulse beating a cold, steady rhythm and my pistol trained on his sobbing wife.
As we approach the lake cabin, my jaw locks.
Raina’s in there. She’s so fucking close I can feel her in my skin. As much as I want to storm in with guns blazing, I can’t.
Fletcher warned me about the security system, so this won’t be a smash and grab situation. Right about now, John’s being alerted of intruders. He’ll use Raina as a hostage, and there will be a standoff. Since Fletcher’s a wild card, Jake is my only backup. My biggest concern is Raina getting caught in the crossfire.
My plan accounts for all of this. It’s complicated, risky, and fucking perfect as long as there isn’t a single misstep.
Up ahead, Jake parks my truck on the vacant road. He’ll do a perimeter check and catch up.
Fletcher motors past him and pulls into the driveway.
“If you don’t give me your full cooperation,” I say, “Mary dies.”
She whimpers from the back seat.
“I said I would.” He stops the SUV and kills the engine, his face gaunt and pale.
Before we left Sandbank, he gave me the keys to the cabin and a layout of the floor plan. Then Jake returned his gun to him.
Fletcher rolled over on John, and John will feel that betrayal the instant Fletcher enters the cabin with me.
Arming the sheriff with a gun makes him more pliable. Whether he turns that weapon on Jake or me is uncertain. Doing so would risk Mary’s life, which is why he didn’t try to shoot me on the way here.
But the night is still young.
“Get her.” I motion at Mary.
He carries her to the door, and I follow, scanning the empty windows of the one-story cabin. He steps aside so I can push the key into the lock. Then we’re in.
The door opens to a vast sitting room, wall of glass, and open kitchen. I’m aware of everything. Every shadow. Every creak. I’m so reined in and calm I don’t react to the two dead bodies on the floor near the back.
One is a woman, probably the kidnapper from the vet clinic. If so, John cleaned up loose ends I won’t have to deal with.
I keep Fletcher and Mary in front of me, my pistol sweeping between them and the surrounding rooms.
A few more steps into the cabin brings John into my line of sight.
He lies face down on the couch with Raina struggling beneath him. Hips thrusting between her kicking legs, he pins her arms above her head and holds a gun to her cheek.
A sucking, roaring maelstrom of madness and violence implodes beneath my skin, and I brace against it with everything I have, desperately trying not to let it pull me in.
He slows his vile humping and slides his soulless gaze to mine.
My self-control is a jagged crag on which cold fury teeters. I dangle an impulse away from filling this room with hailing blood and carnage.
His finger curls around the trigger, the gun aimed at Raina. He only needs to squeeze.
He may not have it in him to murder his sons, but the rest of us mean nothing. If I shoot, he’ll pull that trigger. If I so much as move, he’ll kill her.
I take calming breaths, center all thought on the plan, and leash the ravenous storm inside me.
With a clearer mind, I’m able to acknowledge the details, like the fact that she’s wearing clothes. Her shorts are fastened. Her cries have fallen quiet, and her liquid brown eyes find mine from across the room.
She’s scared. Terrified. But not broken.
John isn’t inside her. Doesn’t mean he hasn’t already violated her, but he’s in this position because he wanted me to walk in and find him bucking on top of her with a gun to her head.
He intended for me to see it, imagine the worst, and come unglued.
I lost my shit when I was eighteen, and I paid gravely for it.
Lesson fucking learned.
“Don’t move.” He pushes off her, pointing the gun at her chest.
Her eyes stay with me, questioning.
John and Dalton taught me how to shoot. John is the best marksman I know. He can probably hit her and me before I fire a single round. One false move and we’ll both be blown to bits.
I give her a slight shake of my head and fight the pull of fear.
Fear is the rope around wrists in a ravine. It’s a knife in the heart, slowly twisting.
It hammers in my head and throbs behind my eyes, but I shake it off.
I need to be the one tying the rope and twisting the knife. I must keep my shit together.