Page 93 of Sergeant's Christmas Siege

Her mind raced. It would take so little. Just hunker down, spend time in the Fairweather, and they’d hear enough about Alaska Force to track them. Mess with them the way someone had been this last year, but making sure that mess triggered a review by the Alaska State Troopers. Because the officer who was usually dispatched to look into groups out in the Alaskan wilderness making trouble was Kate.

They’d done all of this to get her and Will here, where they could perform that damned ritual and make the pair of them pay the way they would have years ago if Kate hadn’t escaped.

And Kate should have remembered that Tracy might have been Samuel Lee’s victim at first—but these days she was a willing one. And this kind of thing had her fingerprints all over it. Kate had no doubt she’d left prison, found these two and dried them out, then started plotting.

Kate couldn’t believe she’d walked right into it.

“Whatever works,” Tracy said, with her smoker’s cough as punctuation.

One of her long-lost cousins duct-taped Kate’s hands in front of her, and then Tracy encouraged her to climb into the boat. By jabbing that gun hard into her lower back.

The boat was smaller than the Alaska Force skiff that Templeton had used to take her to Fool’s Cove. Much smaller. Worse, it was completely open to the elements. And a temperature that seemed warm and practically springlike on the ground, after a tour of the interior the past few days, was going to be significantly less pleasant out on the water.

Something Kate got to experience in full, because she and Will were placed side by side on the bench in the bow of the boat. Tracy sat behind them with her gun. Kate’s cousins pushed the boat out and then jumped into the stern to pilot it with an outboard motor.

When the first slap of water splashed over her, Kate steeled herself and tried not to hide behind Will like a princess. The second time, she understood exactly what her mother was planning.

The only question left was whether Kate and Will would succumb to hypothermia before Tracy got around to making them strip and jump overboard to drown. Jumping into the ocean at this time of year was as close to the original ritual—strip, then get dropped out in the frigid bush to freeze—as it was possible to get. The water was usually around thirty-six degrees in December. The air tonight was about the same, if not colder. It was a half hour to exhaustion and potential death if submerged—and that was a best-case scenario.

“I can’t believe you’re going to make us walk the plank,” Kate said, because she needed to extend this. To stay on the boat as long as possible. “That suggests a level of whimsy I didn’t think you had in you, Mom.”

She had to shout to make sure her mother heard her.And all she got for her efforts was that gun in her back again, a hard jab that she suspected would leave a bruise.

“Enjoy that mouth,” Tracy told her, raising her voice so the wind didn’t steal it. “You won’t be using it much longer.”

Next to her, Will kept fidgeting. Kate assumed he was cold. And getting colder, as the December air and the ocean spray got beneath the layers she wore. Which spelled certain doom. Exposure to water plus a winter night in Alaska led nowhere good.

Kate supposed she really ought to feel a lurching sense of betrayal. But instead, all she felt was pissed. At herself.

She should have known. She should have gone with her initial instincts instead of suffering through prime rib and her mother’s terrible performance of fake emotion. Tracy had kept a low profile since she’d come out of prison three years ago, and that was a warning sign right there. Because Tracy had always lived in Samuel Lee’s shadow, sure. But she hadn’t exactly withered away there.

Kate hadn’t expected her to get in touch when she got out, but now, with the benefit of hindsight, Kate could see that the fact Tracy had seemed to take so meekly to postprison life was a big clue. One she should have picked up on.

Tracy hadn’t changed. Maybe she couldn’t change.

But Kate still should have seen this coming.

Beside her, Will kept moving his legs restlessly. Kate didn’t want to get close to him, or anyone else in this suicidally small boat that seemed tinier the bigger the swells got, but she found herself huddling against him anyway. Because it was warmer. Marginally.

She reviewed their situation. Cold. Wet. The boat was heading away from Grizzly Harbor, and not to navigate its way around the side of the island toward Fool’s Cove. If Kate, personally, was a homicidal maniac bent onenacting a twisted revenge on her own child, she wouldn’t choose one of the islands in the archipelago. She would go right for the ocean. And she would motor out as far as possible, to make sure that there was no coming back.

She had to assume that was what her mother had planned. And if all else failed, Tracy could shoot them both, drop their bodies overboard, and be done with it.

The boat kept chugging toward open water. Kate stared down at her hands and the duct tape wrapped around her wrists. Given a little time and some effort, she thought she could work her way out of it. But even if she couldn’t, they’d thoughtfully left her hands in front of her body. That gave her more options.

And the ace in her pocket, of course, was Alaska Force. Templeton.

Something yawned open inside her, dark like despair, but she slapped a lid on it. And shoved it away.

Because the minute she thought she wasn’t going to see him again—the minute she believed she wasn’t going to get out of this—that was the moment she lost.

Fifteen years ago, some seven hundred miles north of here, she’d told herself something similar, and she’d made it.

Kate couldn’t say she particularly liked the poetic symmetry. But she intended to keep it symmetrical. Shewouldescape this.

And while she figured out how to handle what was happening on this boat, Alaska Force was doing its part. She knew it. Templeton would notice she wasn’t there. Bethan had been in the café and would know she’d disappeared with her mother. Kate couldn’t imagine it would take them long to figure out what had happened.

All she had to do was keep herself out of the ocean.

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