by Megan Crane
All day, if he had his way.
Here, now, he helped himself to her coffee and sat out on the porch of his cabin in pretty Fool’s Cove, glad to be alive at last.
Alive. And so in love, it hurt him, too.
And then he settled in to watch Everly Campbell, the love of his life, ride around and around in circles on a perfect replica of that pink bike from way back when, her pink and white streamers flapping in the breeze.
Keep reading for an excerpt from the next book in the Alaska Force series
SNIPER’S PRIDE
Available in May 2019
After the second time her husband tried to kill her, Mariah McKenna decided she needed to get out of Atlanta.
The first time could have been an accident. She had gone to yet another strained charity dinner that night, where everyone smiled sweetly, blessed her heart, and made it perfectly, politely clear they wouldn’t be taking her side in the divorce. And even though Mariah knew better than to touch shellfish, it was always possible that there could be cross-contamination. Especially in a hotel banquet situation with complicated hors d’oeuvres passed around on self-consciously gleaming silver trays by bored college students.
Mariah knew it was entirely possible that she’d tossed back what she’d thought was a clever little cheese puff pastry when it was really something involving shrimp. She’d been too busy pretending not to notice the speculative, not particularly friendly looks thrown her way to taste a thing.
It could easily have been an unfortunate accident. Or her own fault for not paying attention.
But she thought it was David.
He had gone out of his way to get particularly nasty with her only the day before.
“You can’t divorce me,” he’d snarled at her, getting much too close to her in the sunny parking lot of the Publix in her new neighborhood. That had been her fault, too, for not paying closer attention to her surroundings. She should have seen David’s overly polished Escalade. She shouldn’t have imagined for a single second that he’d allow her to go about without permission, having a normal life like a regular person. “You can’t divorce me.”
That was why, when her throat had started to close up, the first thing she’d thought about was the way his face had twisted like that, out there in a parking lot in the Atlanta spring sunshine. When David got mad, his accent—what Mariah’s mother had always called high Georgia—changed. Then there was the red face, the bulging eyes, that vein on his forehead, and the way he bared his teeth. None of that was pleasant, surely.
But for some reason the fact he sounded less Georgia old money and more clipped when he was mad was what got to her the most. Because she’d worked so hard to get the redneck out of her own, decidedly lowbrow Georgia accent and she never, ever let it slip. Never.
Still, accidents happened. That was what the doctors told Mariah when she could breathe again. It was certainly what the hotel hastened to tell her, in the form of half their legal team crammed into her makeshift cubicle in the emergency room.
And despite the leftover hungover feeling that stuck with her every time she flashed back to that ugly parking lot confrontation, Mariah accepted the idea that it was an accident. She wasn’t living in a Gothic novel. Her divorce was ugly, but what divorce wasn’t? There was no need to make everything worse by imagining that David was actually trying to kill her.
But the second time she found herself in the hospital, she stopped kidding herself.
It was while she lay there in another hospital room cordoned off from the rest of the emergency room by a curtain—staring up at the fluorescent lights while she waited for her EpiPen to finish letting her breathe and to see whether she’d have a biphasic second reaction—that she finally understood.
There was no safe space. Not for Mariah.
David shouldn’t have been able to get into her apartment, but he had. She was still trying to breathe, feeling like there was a hand wrapped tight around her throat, so she didn’t bother telling herself any stories this time. Somehow, David had gotten in or hired someone to do it for him. She figured the latter was more likely, because David was not a man who did a thing when he could hire someone to do it for him. She felt something greasy and sick roll over inside her, then, adding to the panic. It felt a lot like shame.
Or worse, fear.
Because David or some faceless minion had been in her pretty little furnished apartment with its pastel walls and view over Piedmont Park. They had touched her very few personal things. Riffled through her clothes. Sat on the furniture she’d started thinking of as hers. And at some point, done something to her food to make sure she ended up right back in the emergency room with a far worse reaction than before.
They’d defiled the one place that had ever been hers, then she’d put their poison in her own body, and she hadn’t even known it.
Mariah wondered what it meant about her that she found the violation of it almost harder to take than her own near death. Again.
“You need to be very careful, Mrs. Lanier,” the doctor said, scowling at her as if she’d thought to hell with this potentially lethal allergy and had treated herself to a big old lobster dinner.
“I’m always careful,” she replied when she could speak. “And it’s Ms. McKenna, not Mrs. Lanier. My name change hasn’t gone through yet.”
“Two anaphylaxis episodes in one month isn’t being careful, ma’am.”
And what could Mariah say? My husband would rather kill me than divorce me, actually. I think he snuck into my new apartment and doctored my food so this would happen. Even if the impatient doctor hadn’t already been scowling at her, she wouldn’t have risked it.
David’s family had a wing named after them in this hospital. The last thing she wanted to do was find herself remanded to the psych ward where he could kill her at his leisure.
“I’ll be more careful,” she murmured.
But inside she thought there was no longer any choice. If she wanted to live, she needed to run.
The only question was how to do it.
She had to assume she had no friends or allies in Atlanta. There was no one she’d met here who didn’t have ties to David in some way. That meant none of them were safe. And she hadn’t been back to her hometown in years, but it stood to reason that she might try to run back there—because people did that in a crisis, she was pretty sure—which meant she couldn’t. Especially because she wanted nothing more than to slam through the old screen door into the farmhouse kitchen, let the dogs bark at her, and sit at the table with a slice of her great aunt’s sweet potato pie until she felt like herself again.
Whoever that was.
Mariah blew out a shaky breath. She could always just . . . go on the run and plan to live that way, she supposed. But that seemed inefficient at best. She would have to take such care in covering her tracks, always knowing that one tiny slip could be the end of her. Every book she’d ever read or movie she’d ever seen about someone going on the run ended the same way, after all. They slipped up and were found or they were caught by whoever was after them or they couldn’t handle the isolation and outed themselves.
Whatever the reason, the life on the run part never seemed to work all that well.
Panic kicked at her, and for a minute she couldn’t tell if it was another episode. Mariah lay her hand against her throat and reminded herself that she was fine. That she was alive and could breathe. She told herself that a few times, then a few more, until her heart slowed down again.
She decided it was nervous energy, and she decided to deal with it the only way she could. By doing something. She pulled one of her bags from under the bed, settling for the one she knew she could pick up and run with, if she had to. And then Mariah took her time packing, letting her mind wander from the task at hand to all those videos she’d watched online about how to pack a carry-on bag for a monthlong trip. Or
three months. Or an indefinite amount of time. It had been one more way she’d tried her best to fit in with the effortlessly languid set of people with whom David socialized. Women who seemed to be able to trot off to Europe for a month with either the contents of their entire house or nothing more than a handbag, a single black dress, and a few scarves.
David had mocked her, of course, though she’d thought it was good-natured teasing at the time. She’d told herself that’s what she thought it was, anyway.
Maybe you can watch a video on how to make a baby, he had said once, smiling at her across the bedroom as if he’d been whispering sweet nothings in her ear.
The cruelty of it took her breath away now, the same as it had then. This time, however, she didn’t have to hide it. She blinked away the moisture in her eyes, then threw the shirt she’d been folding to the side because her hand was shaking.
Had she really tried to tell herself he hadn’t meant that? She knew better now. But she’d spent years excusing everything and anything David did.
Because she’d been the one who was broken.
David had kept up his end of the bargain. He’d swept Mariah away from that abandoned backwoods town and he’d showered her with everything his life had to offer. He’d paid to give her a makeover. To make her teeth extra shiny. He’d found her a stylist and paid for a voice coach so she could transform herself into the sort of swan who belonged on his arm. Or at the very least didn’t embarrass him.
All she’d ever been expected to do was give him a baby.
Looking back, it was easy to see how David’s behavior had changed over time with every passing month she didn’t get pregnant. Less Prince Charming, more . . . resentful. And increasingly vicious.
When she’d walked in on him and one of the maids, he hadn’t even been apologetic.
Why should I bother to give you fidelity when you can’t do the one thing you low-class, white-trash trailer-park girls are any good at?
She would hate herself forever, she thought as she packed the last of her little suitcase, for not leaving immediately that first time. For staying in that house and sleeping in that bed. For telling herself that it was a slip, that was all. That they could work through it.
As if she hadn’t seen the hateful way David had looked at her.
When she had. Of course she had.
That charming man she’d fallen in love with had never existed. David could pull out the smiles and the manners when he liked. But it only lasted as long as he got his way.
And Mariah had turned thirty. Despite years of trying, they hadn’t even had so much as a pregnancy scare. She’d found David with the first maid the following week.
He was never going to bother to pull out his charm for her again and she’d spent more agonizing months than she cared to recall imagining she could fix something he didn’t think was broken.
In the end, after the second time she’d caught him in their bed with another woman, Mariah had been faced with a choice. She could look the other way, the way she knew many wives in their circle did. She could figure out a way to keep what she liked about life as Mrs. David Lanier and ignore the rest.
But it was as if the part of her that had been sleeping for a decade woke up. That scrappy, stubborn McKenna part of her that she’d locked away when she’d left Two Oaks. McKennas had rough and tumble stamped into their stubborn, ornery bones. They fought hard, loved harder, and didn’t take much notice of anyone else’s opinions on how they went about it.
Roll over and play dead long enough, her grandmother used to say, and pretty soon you won’t be playing.
Mariah had decided she’d played enough. And so she left.
And she would live through this, too, by God.
“I should watch a video on what Mama would do to a man who treated her like this,” Mariah muttered to herself, aware as she spoke that her accent didn’t slip no matter how angry she got.
But the idea of a video made her laugh a little because she already knew what her mother would do in this kind of situation. She’d gone ahead and done it to Mariah’s father, back in the day, when she’d thrown his drunk, cheating butt out and had never let him back in.
That was when something clicked.
It wasn’t the legend of the way her mother had tossed her naked father out of the house in the middle of the night at gunpoint, then all his belongings after him, though that was one of Mariah’s most tender childhood memories. It had something to do with all those videos she’d watched so obsessively over the past years.
And then it came to her. Just the tiniest little memory of one of those late nights she’d sat up, pretending not to wonder where her husband was—or who he might be with—clicking through video after video on her phone, careful to leave all the lights out so she could pretend she was sleeping and David’s spies could report back to him accordingly.
Somehow she found herself watching an unhinged conspiracy theorist ranting on about satanic signs he’d found in a children’s program. Maybe she’d found a little comfort in the fact that there were people out there a whole lot crazier than a lonely Buckhead housewife whose husband hated her. Openly. She might have been the one staying put in a marriage gone bad, but at least she wasn’t ranting out her every paranoid thought to a video camera.
But the man had said something interesting, there at the end of his garbled insistence that the end was nigh. He’d mentioned a group of superhero-like men off in the wilderness somewhere. Like the A-Team, Mariah had thought at the time. But not illegal. Or faked for television.
Mariah cracked open up her laptop and got to work. It took a while for her to find her way back to that odd video. And then another long while to try to figure out whether or not anything in that video was real.
But eventually she found her way to a stark, minimalist website that had nothing but a name. Alaska Force. And a choice between a telephone number and an e-mail address.
Mariah didn’t overthink it. She typed out an e-mail, short and sweet.
My husband is trying to kill me. He’s already come close twice, and if he gets a third try, he’ll succeed. I know he will.
Help me.
About the Author
Megan Crane is a USA Today bestselling and RITA-nominated author. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband.
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