Page 39 of Mountain Defender

I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I’m ready. What do you need to know?”

Flipping open the tablet on the table in front of him, Enzo says, “First, we’ll talk about strategy. Just to give you an overview of how we’re handling your case. Then we’ll get into all the questions we have for you. People from your background who might hold a grudge, previous relationships…” He makes an apologetic grimace. “I know it sucks. But if there’s an ex who’s upset you broke up with him…”

“Not likely,” I blurt before I can stop myself.

“You never know,” Enzo replies. His gaze shadows. “Winter thought her ex was over her. She never imagined…”

But Winter is gorgeous. I can understand—however screwed up it was—why her ex was hung up on her. But me? I can’t imagine any of the few men I’ve dated even think about me anymore, let alone have reason to want me dead.

Gage touches my hand. “We’ll go over it anyway, just to be safe.”

Alec glances up from his laptop. “I’ve already started researching. Looking into jobs you’ve had, courses you took in college, even activities you did in high school. It might sound impossible that someone could hang onto an obsession for so long. But a friend of ours; his wife was stalked by a guy she barely knew from high school. He was the last person anyone would have suspected.”

Gage’s voice takes on a warning tone. “Maybe we don’t need to talk about stalkers right now.”

“Sorry,” Alec responds. “It’s important?—”

But the rest of his words fade into the background as I realize what Alec’s research really means.

He would have found the hospital records. The police reports. Possibly the photos from the lawsuit, the ones my attorney insisted on using to ensure the best settlement.

God. Did Gage see them? Does he know how horrible I looked back then?

“Ror?” It’s lower than a whisper, just loud enough for me to hear. Gage reaches beneath the table to rest his hand on my leg. “Is this too much?”

I want to say yes. I want to go back to the cabin with Gage and have the day we were supposed to have yesterday, with episodes ofToo Cuteand lunch from Mariano’s and watching Gage demonstrate his flight simulator again, which I discovered is just as sexy as I thought it would be. I want to pretend there isn’t someone out there trying to kill me.

But the team is here, all of them looking at me with open concern. They’re here for me. Or at least, they’re here because Gage asked them to be.

And the man who came after me could hurt someone else.

So I need to suck it up. Ignore my own discomfort. Do whatever I can to help solve this.

“No.” I lift my chin. Cast my gaze around the conference table, giving each man a quick nod of acceptance. Then I turn to look at Gage. “I can do this. Iwantto do this.”

An hour later,I’m not so sure.

At first, it started out okay.

First, Enzo outlined what they knew so far. No evidence was found on my property that might help identify my first—is it only one? or was the gunman a second?—attacker. No fingerprints, no blood, not even a usable footprint in the soil.

The police sent the bullets from yesterday off to forensics, so it’s possible they might find a match to a registered gun, but as Knox—the team’s resident weapons expert—explained, “Yes, forensics can match the striations on a bullet to the gun thatfired them. But if I had to bet, the shooter used an unregistered gun. So the bullets won’t tell us much.”

But it wasn’t all bad news. Alec’s poring through security footage, traffic light cameras, satellite images, and pretty much every surveillance camera in a ten-mile radius of my property. He even pulled in his techie friends, Leo and Matt, who are both former military and work for a different security company, for help.

“I know it’s frustrating,” Enzo said. “With your house being so isolated, it’s harder to track down this guy. But we’ll get him. And in the meantime, you’ll be safe here.”

I believed him. Ido. Even in the short time I’ve been staying here, I can see how safe it is. And with Gage spending so much time with me—no complaints, there—the only times I feel scared are the nights I spend by myself.

Then we moved on to the personal questions, and honestly, I thought I held up pretty well. Even when I had to admit my embarrassing lack of relationships and hermit-like lifestyle. It didn’t hurt that Gage kept his hand on my leg the entire time, giving me little reassuring pats and squeezes whenever he thought I was struggling.

But it was the last stretch of questions that really got to me. The ones about what happened that night. Even though it’s still a relative blank, the parts I can remember are not fun to relive—nightmare flashes of menacing eyes and stinking breath and breath-stealing terror as hands wrapped around my neck.

That last memory is the one I can’t get rid of. It still lingers, like ghost fingers digging into my throat.

Though I’m about as safe as I could be, sitting at this conference table surrounded by five former Special Ops soldiers, my body doesn’t want to believe it.

Even as Enzo works his way through that night, gently asking me to recall simple details about feeding the dogs and lockingup the house, I can feel the familiar signs of a panic attack threatening. My brain jumps from the mundane—turning out the downstairs lights, grabbing my Kindle from the charger in my office—to the fractured memories that come after it.

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