Page 32 of Naughty With The Mountain Man
The hum of the heater dies. The lights vanish.
My breath clouds in the cold.
No. No, no, no.
I spin around, heart pounding. My phone is on the coffee table. I sprint for it, grabbing it just as a crash shatters the back window.
I scream?—
But it’s too late.
Hands grab me.
A cloth presses to my face, and I kick, scream, claw, but the scent hits my nose—chemical, sharp, terrifyingly effective.
My limbs go heavy.
The world tilts.
Micah—
I try to call his name, but it dies on my tongue.
I’m dragged backward, out the broken window, into the cold, and the last thing I hear before everything goes black?—
Is my heart breaking.
14
Micah
The woods give me the answer I don’t want.
No tracks on the north ridge. No movement through the aspens. No second crack after the first—just the wind and the faint metallic tang of a silenced engine that’s already gone.
A bad feeling lifts the hair on my arms.
I turn and run.
Boots chew snow. Ranger paces beside me, ears up, a low, frustrated whine in his chest like he already knows what I’m about to find.
“Ellie?” I shoulder through the front door after opening it.
Cold air hits me in a rush. Glass litters the floor by the back window—spiderwebbed, caved inward. The power’s dead. The living room is wrong in small ways only I would notice: her mug knocked sideways, the quilt dropped in a heap, the lamp cord torn where someone tripped it.
“Ellie!” I roar, scanning corners, moving fast room to room. Bedroom—empty. Bathroom—empty. Closet—empty.
Silence. The kind that means absence.
My eyes cut to the back window. Broken latch. Boot scuffs on the sill. A smear where a shoulder or a hip slid through. Outside: two sets of prints dragging, not walking. A third set—heavier—covering their retreat. Tracks angle to the service road that sits behind the ridge like a private lane for people who don’t knock.
I hit the door again and burst onto the porch.
A black van is already fishtailing at the curve, snow rooster-tailing behind it. No plates. Tinted—mirror dark. It drops into the trees and vanishes, engine note fading to nothing.
I lift my weapon, know the shot is wasted at this range, and drop it again. Anger almost whites out my vision, then collapses into a cold knot in my gut.
They took her.
