Page 2 of Sniper's Pride

“I’ll be more careful,” she murmured.

But she decided there was no longer any choice. If she wanted to live, she needed to run.

The only question was how to do it. If David had people jimmying locks and dosing food to kill her with her own allergy, she could hardly expect that a change of address would do the trick. She’d already tried that when she’d left that cold, bitter house of his.

She decided she couldn’t call anyone she knew. She couldn’t trust any of the friends she’d made since David had swept her straight off her feet and out of that tiny nowhere town in backwoods Georgia. She also couldn’t go back there, no matter how many times she woke in the night with tears on her face, a deep longing for her mother’s coarse smoker’s laugh, and the scent of wild honeysuckle in her nose. Because David had found her there all those years ago, and it would be the first place he’d look.

Mariah was tough, but David was vindictive. And vicious in the way only a very rich man could be. His family had been proud residents of this city since they’d come in with the railroads, and he had allies everywhere. All his Southern captain of industry friends and their wide-ranging, overlapping networks of influence and threat. Police. Government. Charities. Media. Name it, and some person who supported David had a finger in it. Or three.

And he had already tried to kill her twice.

By the time she was released from the hospital, she’d tried to talk herself out of it a hundred times. After all, accidents really did happen. It was entirely possible that these were freak occurrences and she was letting David get to her. Letting him win without him having to domuch more than say a few ugly words to her in a supermarket parking lot.

Imagining that he has this kind of power is giving him exactly what he wants,she lectured herself in the back of the taxi that took her home from the hospital. She gazed out at another spring morning, bright and sweet, filled with flowers and lush green trees and good things that had nothing to do with David Abernathy Lanier.He would love nothing more than thinking you werethisscared of him.

It was all in her head. She was sure of it. She needed to pay closer attention to the ingredients in the things she ate, that was all. Hadn’t she heard allergies got worse as people got older? She needed to be more careful, just as the exasperated doctor had suggested, and she’d be fine.

But when she let herself back in to her cute apartment and stood there, looking around at the cheerful rooms that had brought her such pleasure only last night, she knew better.

David wasn’t going to stop.

Because David didn’t have to stop.

He had determined that he would rather be widowed than divorced. It would be better for the political career he’d informed her he was plotting, since he planned to run on wholesome family values—none of which, she’d pointed out at the time, he actually possessed.

“And whose fault is it I don’t have a family?” he’d asked her, his blue eyes glittering, never dropping that soft drawl that sounded the way old gold would if it could speak.

And if Mariah had learned anything over the course of their ten years together, it was that what David wanted, David got. Her wishes and feelings were utterlyunimportant to him. He had picked her because she was a good story he got to tell. She got to play Cinderella games, sure, but he was the benevolent Prince Charming in that scenario.

David really liked playing Prince Charming.

And when playing roles no longer worked to keep her in line? He’d showed her what was behind the mask. Threats. Contempt. Maybe even outright loathing.

What Mariah had to live with now was why she’d seen the truth andstayed. For much longer than she should have. And worse, why she hadn’t seen these things lurking in David from the beginning, the way her mother had.

Mariah sat on the edge of the bed in the charming bedroom she doubted she would ever sleep in again and forced herself to think. To really, trulythinkwith all the desperate clarity brought on by two near-death experiences.

Anaphylaxis got worse, not better. She had to assume that all the food in her house was tainted. That anything she touched could have been doctored and likely was. And that if she ingested shellfish even once more, it could kill her. Especially if she ran out of EpiPens.

She also 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 couldn’t head home, no matter how much she wanted 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.

Whoeverthatwas.

Mariah blew out a shaky breath. She could always just... go on the run and plan to live that way. But thatseemed inefficient at best. She would have to take excruciating 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. They slipped up and were found. Or they were caught by whoever was after them no matter what they did. Or they couldn’t handle the isolation and outed themselves, one way or another.

Whatever the reason, life on the run never seemed to work out all that well for anyone.

If David was prepared to kill her—really and truly kill her—going on the run would only make it easier for him. And Mariah had no intention of dying in an out-of-the-way horror show of a motel somewhere, on the requisite dark and rainy night, with some pitiless henchmen of David’s choking the life out of her.

She had no intention of dying at all. Not now.

Not when she’d finally gotten herself free of the lie she’d been living all these years.

If David succeeded in killing her the way he’d told her he would, he won. And if he won, nothing would change. He would go right on being the smiling monster she’d married because she’d wanted so desperately to believe that Cinderella stories could be real. Even more hilarious, she’d convinced herself that a white trash girl from those no-account McKennas out in Two Oaks could wake up one morning and find herself starring in a fairy tale.

If she died, David would tell her story however he liked, and no one would know any different.

But if she lived, Mariah could change everything.

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