Page 74 of Sniper's Pride

I love you,she had said, and it had never been like this before. He had never had all this weight and ache sitting on him while he did what he’d been born to do. Itwas a lot worse than a distraction, because he wasn’t distracted. He was focused. He just...felt.

He could fight it, Griffin realized after a moment of trying, or he could give in.

He had his scope at his eye. He had his gun against his shoulder.

And he’d learned a long time ago that there was no fighting the inevitable. There was only leaning into it, settling into whatever parameters were available, and taking it to that still, focused place where he could exist forever.

I love you,Mariah had said, bright and easy.

He breathed out, then in. And slowly, slowly felt his heartbeat begin to chill.

I love you,she’d said, and it was like those words wrapped around the barrel of his gun, flowing from the elegance of the rifle deep into him, changing everything.

I love you.

He held it like he held his rifle, his aim true.

She loved him. And he would save her.

Those were facts, the same as the weight of the rifle, the angle vectors and wind resistance, all of which he calculated by rote. All of which helped make him who he was.

He leaned into them, they became part of him, and Griffin went still.

Finally, he went still.

And waited.

•••

It wasn’t the first time in this long ordeal of a day that Mariah thought she was dreaming. Possibly dead.

But no amount of blinking could change the fact that she knew the man standing there in front of her.

It was her father-in-law, Walton Chandler Lanier.

And he looked the way he always did. Dapper. Put together in a Southern man’s outfit of linen and pastels, like he’d gotten lost on the way to one of those garden parties with refreshing mint juleps that seemed to be the entire point of slow, hot Southern summers.

He even cracked the same toothy grin she’d last seen at the Thanksgiving dinner table.

“Walton?” she asked, as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

Because she couldn’t.

“I get it,” Walton said, grinning even wider. “I do.”

David took after his mother, and Mariah had always secretly regretted that he’d missed out on Walton’s truly luxuriant mane of hair. It had been golden blond in his youth and was now a pure, flowing white. Mariah had never understood how all that hair never responded to the humidity the way hers always did. Even now, when her father-in-law was standing in front of her in this barn where she was tied to a chair—or supposedly tied to a chair, and clearly by his orders—she was marveling at that hair.

“I truly do get it,” Walton was saying in his thick, affable drawl. “You’re a pretty girl, and men lose their minds over pretty things. I can’t say I’m not guilty of the same. But you never should have married him, Mariah.” He shook his head as if he were sad. “You should have known your place.”

Mariah was glad that she was pretending to still be tied up, because no one was likely to notice it when she clenched her hands into fists.

She was buffeted by competing emotions. First, she still didn’t feel anything like brave ought to. She wasafraid she might throw up at any moment. And second, she was swamped with an overpowering sense of relief that didn’t make the slightest bit of sense under the circumstances, when she didn’t have a lot to be relieved about.

It took her a moment to understand that she’d really expected it to be David.

She’d steeled herself for it, in fact.

And Mariah wasn’t sure what it said about her that even though she knew what kind of man David was, she hadn’t wanted to believe that he could really want to kill her.

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