Page 8 of Captive at Rescue Ridge

Did she have time to grab the evidence bag?

Glancing around, she didn’t see anyone coming out of the woods behind her, but she’d given her location away. It would only be a matter of time if the stalker was out there. With no time to waste, she reached in for the backpack, grabbed it, and then bolted through the woods. Waiting around, her mother had taught her, was the best way to get caught. There were times to cut your losses and run. This was one of those times.

Annalee pushed her legs until her thighs burned, and she was far enough away from the vehicle to be reasonably certain no one had followed her zigzag pattern through the dense trees.

Gasping for air, she stopped long enough to catch her breath. Bent over, she pinched her side where it ached. It occurred to her that the rest of her supplies were back in the sedan. How long could she last without food or water? Or a coat in this wind?

Not long.

Could she circle back? It was possible she’d drawn the man away from the vehicle. Or would he wait for her to return?

She wasn’t familiar with this area of Saddle Junction. Then again, she hadn’t lived in one place long enough to memorize the nuances of any location. These woods definitely qualified as nuanced. Only a local would know how to navigate through the scrub brush, dense mesquite, and oak trees.

Lucky for her, she had a cell phone to help navigate her way back to the vehicle or, at the very least, the farm road where she could possibly hitch a ride in the back of a pickup truck. Folks still did that, right? Pick up hitchhikers?

Plopping down, she landed hard on a jagged rock, then cursed her bad luck. Annalee almost laughed out loud. Luck was made. It often came dressed in overalls and looked a lot like hard work. She’d read that somewhere on the internet. It had stuck.

The lesson being she was in control of her own destiny, not a random, chaotic universe. Annalee had her own back.

At thirty-two years old, she was getting tired of being a one-person army.

Letting her guard down now might prove a fatal mistake for her mother, so Annalee wouldn’t. Lately, however, her thoughts had drifted back to being seventeen again and in the one place she’d considered coming back to time and time again.

Of course, she’d returned after being texted a picture, but she could have studied the image long enough to figure out if it was AI-generated. There were always telltale signs, like fingers on one hand twisting in the wrong direction. A strange-looking watch. Or slightly distorted features.

Had she come back to test if the image was fake, or was there more to it? Something even more personal?

A branch snapped to her left. Annalee bit back a curse.

Was this it?

Had she been found?

4

Night had fallen, and there was still no word from Owen or Hudson. There was no reason not to hope the two were together, somewhere safe, other than the niggling feeling something was bad wrong—a feeling Archer couldn’t shake.

The events of the day had thrown him off balance.

On the flip side, cell connections were lost in plenty of areas out on the ranch. Plus, Owen had a bad habit of letting his battery run down. The man refused, as he put it, to spend the price of a laptop on a new phone no matter how many times Archer had reminded him that it was a business expense. Owen was as stubborn as a damn post when he put his mind to something.

Archer couldn’t fault his brother because he had the same fault. And that same stubbornness had caused Archer to end up back at Sky’s The Limit, searching the area for clues that Black Hat had been Annalee and not a figment of his imagination. He needed to prove that he was right to himself and his family, and this was the best place to find evidence. Plus, he didn’t like the thought of his vehicle and house key sitting on the ground somewhere.

Mentally, he was still off. The shock of seeing her, of feeling that familiar pang of regret, had him shaken up. Then there was the lack of response from his brothers after everyone had reached out to them, eating away at the back of his mind. If Owen or Hudson sent a text in the group chat, everyone would be able to exhale. As it was, all of Archer’s siblings promised to keep looking until the others were found or turned up on their own. Even Beau was pitching in to help with the search.

Until recent events, not much good or bad ever happened in Saddle Junction. As far as he knew, that hadn’t changed in the years he’d lived on a horse ranch in another state. Some folks whispered Beaumont’s death had brought a crime wave to their front door. Growing up here, Archer’s life had been lived under a microscope, which was a big part of why he preferred to be outdoors and far away from people.

Archer ventured away from the parking lot and into the woods. In his youth, he’d spent most of his free time exploring. The woods had been his second home. This particular area might not be as familiar to him, but he could always navigate using his cell, and he knew enough to get back to a road if it failed.

Light beams up ahead caught his attention. The trees were too thick to see what was going on, so Archer jogged to get a closer look.

An abandoned sedan, crashed into a tree, sat five feet in front of him.What the hell?

The driver’s door was still open. The airbag deployed.

He circled the vehicle to get a closer look. At least the windshield was intact, and there was no blood splatter that he could see on the inside of the vehicle. He fished out his cell to report the incident to Travis, then checked the screen.

No bars.

---