Page 56 of Sniper's Pride

“I’m not liking this,” Blue muttered.

“She can’t have disappeared into thin air,” Griffin said. “Even if it was possible to disappear off of this island without leaving any trace, Mariah isn’t the person who would manage it.” He faced the obvious. “Do we think the new guy...?”

“No,” Jonas said flatly. “He’s one of us. I’d stake my life on it.”

That was the highest accolade Jonas could give, and he gave very few, so Griffin accepted it with a nod. But that left even fewer good options. For both Rory and Mariah.

“The couple,” Griffin muttered.

“You think she’s not alone,” Blue said flatly. “You think the couple who left fifteen minutes after those people from California checked in was her. And whoever he is, if he’s not Rory.”

“He’s not Rory,” Jonas growled.

“If she was leaving voluntarily, she would have taken her stuff,” Griffin continued. “And she would have told someone.”

He meant him. No way would Mariah leave this place without tellinghim.Especially not after last night.

It took hours of searching every fishing boat that came in and talking to all the people who worked on the water before they found old Ernie Tatlelik’s buddies throwing back a few drinks at the Fairweather, talking about the weird couple the crusty old bush pilot had set out to fly all the way to Anchorage in his seaplane. Because Ernie was just nuts enough to fly up along the coast and risk the notorious bad weather and big waves in the Gulf of Alaska. Ernie was nuts enough to do anything if the price was right.

When they got the old man on his phone, he’d bunkeddown for the night with his sister’s kid up in Anchorage before attempting the flight back the next day. And he’d been happy to describe his customers. The big, burly man with a beard—like all the mountain men wannabes who flocked to Alaska from Outside each spring—who wouldn’t listen to reason and fly to the much more accessible Juneau if he wanted a city. Only Anchorage would do. And the woman, who’d done nothing but sit like she was frozen solid through each refueling stop, never so much as cracking a smile—though Ernie allowed as how that could have been due to the inevitable turbulence on takeoff and landing.

“There it is,” Blue said in a low voice when they’d let Ernie go back to his dinner.

Mariah wasn’t simply gone. Someone had taken her.

Griffin was forced to sit with that. And while he was trying to get right with it, Templeton found Rory tied up and gagged in a backyard shed a few buildings down from the inn, bleeding from the head. Pissed and woozy.

There it is, all right,Griffin thought grimly.

Because Mariah had been snatched from under their noses and his brother was hurt, and there was no pretending this whole mess wasn’t entirely his fault.

Fourteen

At first Mariah was in shock.

There was a man in her room.

Insideher room.

A big, terrifying man who looked at her with a certain focused and yet pitiless expression that made her skin crawl. Right there in front of an unmade bed that seemed to her, suddenly, to pulse with a kind of revolting invitation that made her entire body go cold.

Her body that was currently barely covered by a T-shirt and a pair of underpants.

Nausea made her stomach cramp, but she didn’t dare bend over or draw attention to all the parts of her body that were so... accessible.

Mariah reminded herself—fiercely—that she’d trained for this over the past few weeks, no matter howaccessibleher body currently was. Blue had prepared her, and she’d practiced it over and over in their makeshift classroom. She slid her laptop onto the end of her bed, took adeep breath, and tried to remember all the various strikes she’d been taught.

“You can try one of those cute moves you’ve been learning with your friends if you want,” the man said, and there was a note in his voice that made Mariah’s stomach twist harder. Like he wasn’t simply doing this, he wasrelishingit. “But you should know that I don’t care if you get hurt. And you will. Badly.”

In her head, Mariah was bold and mouthy and effortlessly brave. But her actual mouth was too dry to work, her knees were threatening to give out beneath her, and her stomach was staging a riot. She didn’t feel at all brave. She wanted to cry.

More than once, David had looked at her as if she were something stuck to his shoe that he’d very much like to scrape off. Maybe hundreds of times. And she’d been very aware of how dangerous Griffin was from the first moment she’d clapped eyes on him at the docks.

But she wasn’t sure she’d ever stared straight into the face of a man who both didn’t care about her at all and really, really wanted to hurt her.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” he told her in that same creepy, casual voice. And it hit her then why he knew she’d been training with Blue. He’d been watching her. She remembered that shadow she’d seen across the street her first night here. That twisting doorknob. It all led straight to this scary man, with his bushy black beard and that glittering promise of pain in his gaze. She wasn’t sure she would ever breathe fully again. “We’re going to walk out of here. None of your friends are around, and no one is going to recognize you anyway.”

He pulled something awful out of his jacket and threw it at her. And Mariah would have screamed as it flewthrough 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.

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