Page 12 of Flashback

He’d only meant to relate, but the grief in her eyes rocked him.

Obviously, he wasn’t the only one haunted by his own history. What was Allie hiding?

“But the past is the past, right?” She gave him a tenuous smile, all traces of sorrow swept away. Maybe he’d only imagined it. “And for the record, I’ve always known you were a hero, Dakota. Just as much as Will is.”

Really? Then why did she act so cold with him? “Thanks?—”

Her brows furrowed as she looked over Dakota’s shoulder.

“What is it?”

“Scout is going off the trail.” She jogged after the dog. “Come on!”

Scout led them down a slight incline covered with scrub brush and fallen logs.

“Look!” Allie knelt down in a patch of ferns where Scout sat with his long tongue hanging out as he panted.

She held up a child-size hat. A dark red blob with streaks of mud stained the brim. Studying the ground, Dakota noted a long stretch of bare earth streaking downhill—fresh dirt where someone had fallen and slid.

She looked over with those big eyes. “One of the kids is hurt.”

THREE

Allie heldNolan’s little explorer hat. They were on the right track, thank God. But they were far off the trail. Her eyes stung from the growing haze in the air as she strained to see more signs of them.

Why would the boys have left the trail? And who’d fallen and slid so far? It looked like blood on the hat. Her chest squeezed.

Dakota pointed at the hat. “Are you sure that’s?—”

“Nolan, the younger brother, was wearing this when he came by my campsite this morning.”

The boys were out here somewhere. Was it just her, or was it getting harder to breathe?

Without warning, memories battered inside her head. A cold sterile room. Blinding lights glaring down at her.

Dakota’s hand rested on her shoulder. She shook off the memories and looked at him.

“You okay?”

She nodded.

He kept his hand on her another moment. She tried not to hate herself for finding comfort in it. She hadn’t been lying when she’d said she knew Dakota was a hero. Thanks to his nephewssharing all their “Uncle Kota stories,” she knew he’d gone above and beyond when he worked SWAT. He’d put his life on the line for the sake of others, and Will was so proud of him. No wonder she’d felt such an immediate connection with him last year.

But the boys.

“I wonder what they were doing to lose the hat,” she said. A hat she should mark. She opened the GPS hiking app on her phone and dropped a pin.

“Not sure. But it looks like one of them, or both of them, slid quite a ways down this incline. I’m going to call this in.”

While he talked to his crew on the radio, she knelt by Scout.

“Good job, boy. You’re on the right trail.” She gave him a little scratch on his chin and offered him more water.

See. She showed him affection. They could…bond.

“We can’t stop long. That fire is coming closer. I can hear it now.” Dakota turned a slow three hundred sixty degrees.

Sure enough, a dull roaring could be heard through the trees. Allie took a swig of water to wash out the metallic taste of fear, still lingering in her mouth. She quickly finished watering Scout and let him smell the hat. “Find, Scout!”

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