Page 68 of Sniper's Pride

It took her another moment to realize that she was shaking.

And she couldn’t lift a hand to soothe herself the way she wanted.

“She’s fine,” the man said. “Or she’s dead. Which do you want it to be?”

That didn’t help. Mariah swallowed, hard.

“You should worry more about yourself, girly,” one of the new men said, and the way he stared at her made her breath stutter to a stop in her chest.

But when she dropped her head as if she were overcome—mostly because she was—all that attention eventually drifted away from her.

Mariah braced for the next slap. For an actual punch. For some of the dread and threat that seemed to be weighing down her bones where she sat to burst, one way or another.

But nothing happened.

She watched the shadows move across the barn, tracking the way the sun fell through the wide-open door. She thought time was passing, though she couldn’t tell for sure. They’d gotten off the plane sometime before eight. The last time she’d looked at the clock on her phone in that stifling trunk, it had been closer to noon.

The longer she waited with nothing awful happening, the easier it was to breathe. It wasn’t that she stoppedbeing afraid, but she was slowly able to make herself focus. She listened to the muttered conversation the man who had brought her here had on his phone, but she couldn’t quite make out the words.

One of the other men carried the most enormous gun Mariah had ever seen in real life, and she’d grown up out in these woods, surrounded by hunters and gun enthusiasts of all shapes and sizes. The gun was worrying enough, but the tweaked-out way the man holding it was walking back and forth was truly disturbing.

Mariah knew a meth user when she saw one.

The third man in the barn, the one who’d shoved her, tied her up, and called hergirly, was sitting down. He stared at her. A lot.

And unless she’d panic-hallucinated the whole thing, there were more men outside.

But still they waited.

Mariah kept her head tilted down for a while, then tilted it up for a change of pace.

“What are you looking at?” the staring man asked, a touch of Alabama in his voice and straight evil in his gaze. He followed her line of sight to the ceiling. “If you listen real good, I bet you can hear your mama sniffling up there. She’s a feisty one. I’m wondering if it runs in the family.”

Mariah had to bite down on her tongue to keep from screaming. For her mother, to her mother, or just to scream.

But whatever expression she wore on her face must have satisfied the man, because he let out a creepy giggle, and then resumed that dead-eyed stare.

Like he was already dead. Or she was.

And this time, when Mariah studied the battered oldceiling above her, she could have sworn she saw a shadow move, almost as if Rose Ellen was up there wandering around.

If she was, God help these men.

Mama was the one who had taught Mariah how to shoot when she was seven.

More time dragged past. Mariah had to go to the bathroom, but she refused to ask. She didn’t want to introduce the idea of pulling down her pants.

And she didn’t understand how she could be bored and terrified at the same time, but this was a long day of unpleasant firsts.

She didn’t want to call attention to herself—or no more attention than she was already gathering simply by being the guest of honor, tied up in the middle of the room. She sang herself songs inside her head. She recited every prayer she knew, and came up with quite a few new ones.

The shadows lengthened. She could see a difference in the way the sun hit the field outside and the way it moved through the big trees on the far side.

“It’s time,” growled the man who’d brought her here.

Mariah shifted instantly from a sleepy sort of daze—with nothing to do but contemplate shadows and recite song lyrics in her head—to total alertness. She braced herself again, as if that could help her if they decided it was time to really start hurting her.

The staring man giggled, then rolled himself up into a squat, so close she could smell him. Old fish and motor oil. She didn’t know how she kept from wrinkling her nose in disgust.

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