Page 27 of Sniper's Pride

The headache in her temples pounded to match her pulse. She was frozen into place, watching with sick, mute horror as her doorknob began to turn. All the way to the right, then the left. Then again.

There was another faint, almost silent creak of the floorboards, and then the door moved inward.

Only a tiny half inch, until the deadbolt caught it.

Mariah found her hands in front of her, palms out, as if she intended to catch the door when it swung inward. As if she could fight whoever was coming for her.

For a second, there was nothing. No sound. No movement.

He’s listening,a voice said with utter certainty from deep inside her.

But she was listening, too.

Was that his breath she heard? That sharp intake, quickly exhaled? Or was that her?

She couldn’t have said how long she stood there, unable to move and barely able to breathe, staring at her hotel room door until her eyes crossed. But eventually the door moved again, that same scant half inch. She heard the floorboard in the hall protest, such a soft sound that if she hadn’t been standing right there, if she’d been across the room in her bed, she wouldn’t have heard it at all.

She waited. Was he still right there? Standing on the other side of the door? Waiting for her to reveal herself?

Mariah counted to a hundred. Her skin was so cold, goose bumps shivered up and down her calves, her thighs, and all along her arms. But she didn’t move. No matter how much she wanted to.

She counted to a hundred again.

Only then, still holding her breath, her pulse like a maddening drum and shaking so hard it made her bones hurt, did she ease her way over to the spy hole in her door and look out.

But there was no one there. And she didn’t dare open the door to look out into the hallway in case he’d done nothing more than step to the side and wait for her to do something that stupid.

Just as slowly, just as carefully, she backed up. She kept going until she put the bed between her and the door. She pulled the quilt off her sleigh bed and wrapped it around her chilled body. Then sank down on the narrow strip of floor between the bed and her window with her cell phone clenched in her hand so she could call for help if necessary.

When Mariah woke up the following morning, her mouth too dry, her head still much too thick, and still in a heap on the floor, she was safe and warm and in one piece.

And she told herself it had been nothing but a bad dream.

Eight

Griffin started the following day the way he always did when he was home, with a five- or six-mile trail run to blow out all the cobwebs from sleep—and today from Mariah’s adventures in tequila, too. Which definitely hadn’t disrupted his sleep, because he’dwantedto do a blistering set of five hundred push-ups on his knuckles at three in the morning. The steeper and more dangerous the trail, the faster he ran. Then he made his way over to Isaac’s torture chamber of a gym in a cabin on the beach for the daily community sweat session at 0700, where all the Alaska Force members not away on active missions engaged in a nasty workout involving wall balls, burpees, and killer sprints along the tide line.

“I hear your Georgia peach enjoyed herself at the Fairweather last night,” Templeton drawled, with that uproarious laugh that made all the insinuations his words hadn’t.

“Keep it up,” Griffin suggested, his tone rivaling theglaciers out in the bay. “And I’ll use your face for target practice.”

Templeton tsked. “That hurts my feelings, brother.” His grin told a different story. Especially when it widened. “I’m much too pretty to shoot in the face.”

Griffin responded the only way he could—with a burst of speed on the last, uphill sprint, leaving all his brothers in the dust.

Though it didn’t get them to stop laughing.

All except Isaac, who Griffin figured wasn’t abstaining because he was so much holier than the rest, but because he didn’t want to give Griffin the opportunity to comment on Isaac’s ongoing Caradine situation.

“What’s going on with that idiot in Juneau?” Isaac asked Templeton as they all stood around getting their wind back and stretching out their ravaged hamstrings. “Still ramping up the threats?”

Templeton shoved his hair back from his face. “Probably all talk.”

“All talk, but all over some pretty questionable sites,” Blue countered. “Sites that generally lead to a whole lot of bad decision-making.”

Griffin had taken part in the mission Templeton had led last fall that had liberated a handful of women and their children from the control of an unhinged doomsday preacher—though maybe that was redundant—out in the Alaskan bush who claimed the end was nigh. But the only end that had been nigh for him was Alaska Force, who had relieved him of his power and his unwilling followers in one fell swoop. Now the self-styled preacher was back, shooting off his mouth all over Juneau and, worse, in the darker corners of the internet. The kinds of places people gravitated toward when they wanted to seeif their ominous mutterings could render a real-life body count.

Not on Alaska Force’s watch.

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