Sniper's Pride

by Megan Crane

  He pulled something awful out of his jacket and threw it at her. And Mariah would have screamed as it flew through the air, hairy and wrong, but her throat was as tight as her mouth was dry. It wasn’t until it slithered across the unmade bed toward her that she realized it really was hair. A brown wig.

  “You’re going to put that on,” he told her calmly, and even though he didn’t do anything else, Mariah got the distinct impression he was enjoying himself. “Then we walk out of here and down to the water on the far side of this shit stain of a town. You’re not going to try a thing. You’re not going to signal anyone or make a scene or whatever else you think will save you.” And maybe he was smiling, then, behind the beard. “It won’t. If you do anything, all I’m going to do is send a text, and my buddies down in Georgia will start carving pieces off your mother.”

  Mariah began to shake, and couldn’t seem to do anything about the way her eyes watered as all kinds of images cascaded through her head, each more upsetting and awful and nauseating than the last.

  “How . . .” she managed to get out, though she sounded as if this man had already choked her half to death. “How do I know she’s okay?”

  He was definitely smiling. “You don’t.”

  As her head spun and her calves cramped with the effort of keeping her from crumpling where she stood, only the horror of making herself even more helpless kept her upright. That and Blue’s voice, telling them the same thing over and over in class. Don’t go to the ground. Fight to stay on your feet.

  “Get dressed,” he told her, no noticeable change in his voice or in the steady, awful way he watched her. “And bring your ID.”

  He made no move to offer her privacy while she found her clothes, and Mariah didn’t argue. She was picturing all the parts a body could lose before a person bled to death, in far too much detail, and moved around the bed to pick up her jeans from the floor. The jeans that Griffin had removed last night—but she couldn’t let herself think about that. Or him. Or how this man had gotten to her when Griffin should have been downstairs.

  Was Griffin—

  But her mind shied away from even forming that question.

  Her jeans were on the other side of her bed. She pulled them on while hiding herself behind the mattress, concealing not only her private bits but the miracle she discovered when she picked them up.

  She’d left her cell phone shoved in one of the front pockets.

  Mariah expected the man to notice. To see the outline of the phone as she yanked the jeans on, bending over so her T-shirt covered as much of her as possible. To text his friends before she could do a thing to stop him—

  But he only watched her like he was bored. He didn’t lunge for her phone. He didn’t reach for his.

  Mariah said a small prayer of thanks that she’d pulled on her loosest T-shirt this morning. She picked up her slender billfold of a wallet from her nightstand and made a show of sticking it in her other front pocket.

  Then she pulled on a sweater that was more of a tunic, the hem brushing the middle of her thighs and further concealing the phone in her pocket. She shoved her feet into her hardy flats. Only then did she go about tucking her still-damp hair up under the awful, scratchy wig that made her shudder. Everywhere.

  “Remember,” the man told her in that same toneless, disinterested way. “One text and your mother starts losing digits. And if I don’t check in at regular intervals, guess what happens?” He didn’t wait for her answer. “More pieces. Or, hell, they’ll just kill her and pick up another one. I hear you have a lot of family. It could take awhile to cut through all of them.”

  It didn’t occur to her to fight him. Or test him.

  Because this is who you are, a voice inside her whispered, sounding a lot like her ex. It felt like one more assault to add to her collection. Once a coward, always a coward.

  Mariah blinked hard to keep more pointless tears back, because there was no point crying over something that was true. A brave woman wouldn’t have stayed with David as long as she had.

  The man marched her out of her room and down the stairs, one hand on her arm in a way that made it obvious he was taking her against her will. And Mariah braced herself as they hit the lobby, because surely Alaska Force would do their thing and handle this—

  But there was no one in the lobby. There was only the rearing, ferocious stuffed grizzly bear and Madeleine behind the front desk. Mariah expected Madeleine to notice what was happening, or that the man was a stranger—but the other woman didn’t even look up from her book.

  It was okay, Mariah told herself as the man took her outside. It was still okay. What mattered was that Griffin’s body wasn’t on the floor of Blue Bear Inn. He wasn’t there, but he wasn’t dead—and that meant he could be anywhere. She was pretty sure that was the entire point of a sniper. He watched and waited and would handle everything when the moment was right. She felt herself settle at the thought.

  All she had to do was trust that he would take care of this.

  She did.

  Deep down, she truly did, because that was who he was.

  And that belief allowed her to take a deep, steadying breath as the door to the inn slammed shut behind them.

  The man’s hand on her arm hurt. He was gripping her too hard as he propelled her down the wooden street, away from the town docks, and Mariah was sure that she would bruise. He was actually going to bruise her. He truly didn’t care if he hurt her, just in case she’d doubted that earlier.

  But she couldn’t think about that now.

  She focused on walking in time with the man’s long strides because she worried that he would drag her along after him if she didn’t and, worse, would view that as her trying something. Mariah couldn’t have that. She hurried along with him, waiting for one of the locals they passed to see that she was being marched off right under their noses, but no one looked at her twice.

  It wasn’t only the wig, she acknowledged as they walked right past the big window at the Water’s Edge Café and . . . nothing happened. It was the wig plus the stranger accompanying her. She’d lived in Grizzly Harbor long enough now to know that no one looked too closely at the tourists wandering around unless they made particular spectacles of themselves.

  She had Alaska Force, she reminded herself. She had Griffin.

  She expected to hear a shot at any moment. Or something less dramatic, like Griffin appearing from behind a tree and the other men falling in behind him, prepared to take this man out. She was ready for it with every step, every breath.

  But instead, her abductor marched her onto a private dock on the other end of town, then into a battered old seaplane headed toward Anchorage, piloted by the old man Mariah saw every day at Caradine’s. She waited for him to recognize her, to help her—but his gaze grazed right over her as if he’d never laid eyes on her before in his life.

  It was a loud, uncomfortable, very long flight, with refueling stops along the way. There was nothing to do but hold on and hope the moody weather didn’t swat them down into a bad landing out there in the middle of absolutely nowhere.

  And wonder how Griffin and his friends had allowed this to happen.

  The only positive about the experience was when the grizzled old pilot gave her thick, faintly musty blankets to huddle beneath, allowing her to surreptitiously sneak her hand into her pocket and access her phone. She wondered if she could manage a text—but she didn’t like the way the man was watching her. She was afraid that too much movement beneath the blanket or peering beneath it would lead him to do the same. When she could manage it without moving much, she switched her phone off. Before it rang and the man made her—and her mother—pay.

  Once they got to Anchorage, he took her to the airport and bought flights to Atlanta with cash. They flew from Anchorage into Seattle, where Mariah was sure she’d have a chance to make her move. Make a call, at the very lea
st, with the phone she’d managed to get through security and back into her pocket without him seeing it when she’d accidentally gotten into a different line from him. Get away from him in a crowd, maybe. But she quickly thought better of it when they got off the plane, because who knew what his friends would do to her mother while she was running around, trying to convince someone in authority to listen to her?

  And despite her crisis of faith on that rickety plane earlier, she still believed that Griffin was coming for her. He had to be. All she needed to do was make sure she was ready.

  “I have to use the bathroom,” she told her abductor.

  The look he gave her chilled her straight through. Especially when they were this close to so many TSA agents. Because it told her—once again—that this man didn’t care about consequences. He only cared about hurting her.

  “Too bad. You went on the last plane. You can wait and go on the next plane, or piss all over yourself. I don’t care.”

  “But—”

  “This isn’t a negotiation, bitch. I said no.”

  She didn’t argue further. She didn’t dare. Mariah followed him meekly to their gate, sat down in the chair he pointed at, and kept her mouth shut.

  And tried her best to think this through.

  If he didn’t want her going in a public restroom, she assumed that was because he was afraid of what she could get up to in there. She would have too much time to convince another woman to help her, for example. Or pass on a message, or any number of other possibilities. She could even barricade herself in a stall and refuse to come out, forcing him to cause a scene when he tried to come get her.

  The fact that he was worried about any of those possibilities—even though he’d warned her what would happen to her mother if she tried anything at all—told her he wasn’t just some muscle-bound idiot.

  That didn’t bode well for her.

  Mariah’s best option was still Alaska Force. She didn’t know why no one had been keeping watch in the lobby of Blue Bear Inn. She didn’t know why her abductor had been able to take her out of Grizzly Harbor. On that long, low flight to Anchorage, she’d had a lot of time to think it over while she was rattled around in the noisy little plane. And what she’d kept coming back to was the simple fact that even if, for some reason—and she could think of a pretty big reason that had taken up most of the night—Alaska Force had decided to drop her as a client, they wouldn’t do it without telling her.

  No one had told her. That meant someone was coming.

  She believed it with a wild fervor that bordered on religious zeal, and she was perfectly okay with that.

  In the meantime, she had no good choices when it came to rescuing herself. Her mother’s life and limbs were hanging in the balance. She still had her phone shoved in her front pocket, and that was the only bit of hope she had to cling to just now. But it was of no use to her if she couldn’t access it.

  Just wait, she told herself, again and again. Just wait for the right time.

  When they boarded the red-eye flight to Atlanta, the man took the middle seat and trapped her against the window. Mariah made sure not one part of her body was touching his, pressing herself against the cold, smooth side of the plane as it took off.

  She wrapped herself in the flimsy blanket that had been on her seat, happy that it let her secretly touch the phone stuffed in her pocket like it was some kind of talisman. Then she squeezed her eyes shut and let her mind spin from last night, and all its impossible wonder, to the grisly future that waited for her in a few hours.

  If Griffin didn’t show up and handle this, she was going to die.

  Mariah had understood that fact the moment the man had stepped through her hotel room door and stared her down. He was taking her back home, no doubt so David could enjoy the spectacle of her death. That was the point of this. And it probably wouldn’t be a quick spectacle, either.

  Though her mind shied away from all the ways a violent death could go slow.

  All she could hope for was that she could get to her mother. And in the meantime, she would have to be glad that at least when she went to meet her maker it would be with the full carnal knowledge of Griffin Cisneros to sustain her through her premature afterlife.

  She would have shouted down heaven itself if she’d died without knowing what it was like to kiss him. Or what it was like to take her time exploring that sculpted warrior’s body of his. Or better still, what it was like to feel the sheer joy and exquisite pleasure of him surging inside her, driving them both gloriously mad as he took his sweet time.

  She had lived all her life without knowing that it was possible to feel that way about anyone.

  And up there at thirty-five thousand feet above the earth, chasing the night across the country, Mariah kept her eyes shut tight and did her best not to cry out loud at the sheer unfairness of it all.

  It didn’t seem right that she’d suffered a decade with David and only got one night with Griffin. She wanted more. She wanted so much more. She recalled what it had been like waking up in that bed, feeling dreamy and satisfied straight through, wondering what it would be like when she saw him again. The man loved nothing more than pretending he was an icicle, so she’d anticipated there would be more of that—but now she knew what it was like when he melted.

  How was she supposed to live without it?

  A cross-country plane ride in the dark was a lot of time to think about her life.

  She had nearly died twice before she’d discovered what it was like to truly live, and that struck Mariah as a terrible shame. If she’d known how little time she had, she would have done everything so very differently. Of course, the twenty-year-old she’d been would always have taken that ride in David’s fancy car the night they’d met. Because that twenty-year-old had wanted to get out of Two Oaks more than she wanted to breathe, and Mariah couldn’t begrudge the choices she’d made even in retrospect.

  But it hadn’t taken her ten years to know better. It hadn’t even taken a pair of maids in his bed. That was where her cowardice came in.

  She had known within eighteen months that David wasn’t any kind of Prince Charming. She’d been fully aware he wasn’t much of a man well before the five-year mark. She could have left. She could have figured out her life then, instead of waiting for it to get to this point.

  But if you’d been that smart, a voice inside her whispered, more kindly than she felt about herself at the moment, you never would have met Griffin.

  And he was worth it, she decided, somewhere over Missouri. One night with Griffin was worth ten years of David.

  She’d had no idea that her body could do the things it had done spontaneously with Griffin. She’d had no idea that she could feel those things, over and over again.

  She’d had no idea.

  And if she wasn’t on a red-eye flight headed straight toward what might very well be her own unpleasant end, she might have been more reserved. She might have lied to herself, built a few walls, tried to play it cool to modify her own expectations.

  But the reality was, she’d fallen for that man, and hard.

  From the very first moment he’d looked at her as if she’d offended him simply by walking off the ferry, she’d been fascinated by him. That fascination had only grown worse over her weeks in Alaska, and by the time she’d stormed down the hotel stairs to get in his face, well. She’d been done for.

  Griffin had listened to her. She trusted him. He was kind beneath his gruffness, when the men she’d known these past ten years had been polite on the surface and vicious underneath. He had seen her drunk and scared, all of her Atlanta polish gone, and that hadn’t seemed to faze him. He had even let her goad him, repeatedly, without exploding into anything like a violent tantrum.

  All that, and he had touched her anyway.

  More than touched her, he’d turned her inside out with sheer joy.

>   He pretended to be so cold, but up in that bed, Griffin had showed her the truth about him. He’d trusted her, too.

  No one else in her life ever had.

  Mariah didn’t sleep as the plane took her closer and closer to the end of the line, because she didn’t want to miss a single second of what might be all that was left of her life.

  Griffin will come, she told herself fiercely. He’ll come.

  But if he didn’t . . .

  She wished she had more time. She wished she’d spent what time she’d had better, too. She wished she hadn’t let all that distance grow between her and her family, so confident that sometime, somewhere, there’d be some far-off future when she could fix it.

  She wished and she wished, but no matter how hard or how fervently, the plane still landed in Atlanta early the next morning.

  No Alaska Force men waited for her as the plane emptied. No reassuring officials surrounded them as they walked through the airport.

  It was all too tempting to give in to that knotted, panicked weight in her gut and give up in defeat.

  Mariah didn’t let that happen. Griffin would find her.

  She trusted him, even now.

  The man shoved her into a car he’d left in a long-term parking lot and drove her out of the Atlanta airport. He headed away from the city instead of into it, driving south. He drove for about forty-five minutes, then took an exit toward one of Georgia’s many small towns made of tidy brick buildings and lush greenery. He kept going through what passed for the town center, then pulled off the narrow two-lane country road onto a dirt track.

  He stopped when the road was no longer visible. And it was suddenly hard for Mariah to breathe. She longed to put her hand to her throat, to check that she was still alive, pulse kicking, but she didn’t dare move.