Page 49 of Sniper's Pride

The next time she woke, she was alone.

There was light outside the windows. And Mariah felt different.

Reborn.

She swung her feet over the side of the bed, cataloging all the delightful aches and tugs that reminded her what kind of night she’d had. She saw the wrap she’d worn downstairs folded neatly on the chair and smiled. She couldn’t remember wearing it when they’d beenstanding in the doorway up here. She’d likely dropped it downstairs.

Meaning that after Griffin had left her, he’d snuck back in and neatly folded it while she slept.

It was absurd how warm that made her feel. It was a folded length of merino wool, not some kind of valentine.

But she couldn’t seem to wipe the smile from her face.

Mariah made her way into the shower, aware of her body in a way she wasn’t sure she had ever been before. Every square inch of her skin felt alive and brand-new, so that even the water running down her arm made her shiver.

By the time she came out of the hot water she was warm and pink, and still couldn’t stop smiling.

She left her hair to dry as it liked, made herself a cup of the inferior coffee she could produce in her tiny microwave—because she needed some caffeine before she let anyone see her in public, even someone as uninterested in her nonsense as Caradine—and settled back in her bed with her laptop.

She felt dreamy. Sated all the way through.

Happy,a voice in her supplied, and goose bumps rose up and down her arms in a kind of alarm.

Because that was a magical word. And one she hadn’t ever used before about her own life.

She went through her email, deleting all the usual junk, then took a quick glance at the news before catching up with the New York Stock Exchange. It was while she was scanning theAtlanta Journal-Constitutiononline that her email pinged. She clicked over automatically.

Then stopped, frowning.

It was a weird email address she would have deleted as junk, but the subject line caught at her.

Blood always tells,it read.

Her pulse was hammering and she hadn’t even opened the thing.

Mariah couldn’t help herself. She clicked on the message, frowning even harder when it opened to show her an embedded video clip.

She knew better than to play random videos that were sent to her as spam. But there was something about this one. The still screen was blurry, so she couldn’t make out the image. She could only see the faintest hint of a deep, reddish brown, and the play button.

Of course she shouldn’t click on anything sent to her by someone she didn’t know. She ran it through her antivirus software and it came up clean. She told herself that didn’t matter, that she should delete it and move on with her life, but there was something about that blurry image—

She clicked on it.

The video opened with a view of a dirt road with lush green trees all around, and even as she identified the fact that the blurry red-brown she’d seen was a road, Mariah also knew where it was.

She knew every inch of that dirt road. She’d walked it. In bare feet, some summers, for the sheer pleasure of the cool patches of mud between her toes. She’d driven it in later years, each and every turn stamped deep into her, like her own breath.

Here, sitting on her bed in an inn in Alaska, Mariah could do nothing but watch, a terrible dread making her feel weighted down and heavy all the way through.

She clicked another button, trying to turn the sound up, but there wasn’t any.

That made it worse.

Soon enough, the camera went around the final curve. Mariah found herself with her hands over her mouth once she saw the farmhouse.

Home.

It looked exactly the same. Peeling paint, weeds, and too many cars in the yard—very few of them in decent condition. She saw that old tractor her brother Justin had claimed he’d build back up but clearly never had. She was holding her breath, creeped out and panicked and scared straight through, afraid to draw the conclusions that were sitting there, right out of reach.

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