Page 67 of Sniper's Pride

The whole kidnapping thing, horrifying from the start, wasn’t getting any more fun as the hours dragged by.

Mariah was exhausted. More than exhausted. She wished she’d actually tried to sleep on the plane, where the man who’d abducted her couldn’t actually have hurt her. Not in any serious way, surrounded by so many people. But she hadn’t, and she knew that was making all the many ways she ached worse.

It had been bad in the trunk. Dark and bumpy and sweltering, and she kept slamming against the trunk’s interior no matter how she tried to brace herself.

But it had been worse when the car stopped.

Her heart had pounded so hard she worried she might be sick, but there was nothing she could do. The engine turned off. She stayed where she was, curled up in a sweaty ball she knew perfectly well wouldn’t protect her from anything, and waited for the man to come and open the trunk again.

When he finally did, the sudden shock of sunlight was so bright it made her eyes water.

And he wasn’t alone.

They’d hauled her out of the trunk, and Mariah couldn’t remember which one was which. It was all flat eyes and cruel faces, awful laughter, and worse, the sure knowledge that not one of them was going to help her. She kept hearing the same whimpering sound again and understood on some level that she was the one making it—but she couldn’t do anything about it.

There were men all around her. Men in a Georgia field that she could tell, with old senses she hadn’t used in years, was far away from everything. It was the silence. The breeze in the trees that carried no sounds from nearby roads. The way the men’s unpleasant laughter seemed to spread out all around them. At first she thought there were crowds of them, big and scary men with that same dead look in their eyes, like a forest all their own.

It took Mariah a long time to downgrade fromcrowdstomaybe five, but that wasn’t much better.

One of them took hold of her with an unpleasant grip that wrenched her arm from her shoulder, and she blurred it out even as it was happening. There were too many of them for her to process anything too closely. It was as if her brain were curling itself into the fetal position when her body couldn’t. Her head was pounding, there was a humming noise in her ears, and it was easier to think about death in the abstract. It was easy to sit on a plane and imagine you were accepting the inevitability of your own end...

But there was so much light everywhere. There was sunshine and the smell of home, honeysuckle and deepgreen mixed in with the rich smell of the Georgia dirt. There was the soft press of the humid air against her face, feeling cool and very nearly refreshing after the trunk. There was the salt in her mouth, tracking down from the water in her eyes, and all these things seemed like reasons enough to live.

She wanted tolive.

They’d hauled her into a big empty barn, and one of them had shoved her, hard. Mariah should have expected it. The force of it knocked her straight off her feet, sending her tumbling for the floor, where she’d hit her face on the way down before she caught herself on her palms.

She’d been so dazed, it had taken her a long time to realize that what she’d hit was a metal folding chair, set out in the middle of the barn floor.

But she had Griffin’s cool gaze in her head, watching her from the open door of the community center the way he had on so many afternoons. When she’d practiced situations like this over and over again. She heard Blue’s voice in her ears, ordering her to get up. Now.

She wanted to crumple on the floor, bury her head in her arms, and cry for a year or two about the flaring pain across one cheekbone and the panic and fear that felt like more bruises all over her body.

But there were men behind her. Awful men wearing the same nasty, pitiless expression as the first one, and she didn’t dare stay where she was.

She swiveled around as she rose, careful not to make it look like she was trying to do anything but get up quickly, because the fact that she’d practiced getting up off the floor—a lot—seemed like a good thing to keep to herself.

But none of them were actually paying any attention to her. Not really.

They have you. You’re here.The voice inside her was far more matter of fact than she felt.Why should they pay attention to you now?

The men were talking to each other, but her head was filled with too much noisy chaos to hear what they were saying. The man who’d pushed her to the floor shoved her again, this time down into the chair. And he barely looked at her as he tied her to it, using strips of duct tape he ripped off with his yellowing teeth.

Mariah used it as an opportunity to count her blessings.

She was fully dressed and no one had seemed all that interested in changing that. No one had patted her down for any reason, which meant she still had her phone tucked into her pocket. She was still wearing a sweater over a T-shirt and jeans, and they’d tied her to the chair this way, suggesting no one was going to try to take her pants off.

Just now, anyway.

She tested the duct tape on her hands when the man walked away, wiggling it this way and that to see if she could loosen its hold. She couldn’t.

The sound of her voice when she asked “Where’s my mother?” electrified the cavernous space. It quieted all the men, and Mariah couldn’t say she particularly enjoyed the way they all swiveled around to look at her. Each one of them more terrifying than the next.

Maybe it had been better when they hadn’t paid her any specific attention. When they’d acted like she was nothing but an inanimate package someone had delivered.

“What did you say?” asked the man who had brought her here, in that oddly mild voice. The same one he’d used when he’d talked to her about the things he’d do if she defied him.

“I’m wondering where my mother is,” Mariah said, and she sounded weird. So weird that if she hadn’t felt herself speak, she might’ve doubted it was her at all.

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