LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter One

      Mariah Shore paused on the ridgeline about a half mile from her isolated cabin. Standing in the lee of a sturdy pine, she scanned the woods around her with a photographer’s sharp eye. She wasn’t looking for a subject for her old, beloved Canon 35 mm, though. The camera was stowed safely in her backpack for the hike home.

      No, she was looking for a target for the Remington double-aught shotgun she held across her body.

      “There’s nobody there,” she told herself, willing it to be true. But the woods were quieter than she liked, and the day was rapidly dimming toward the too-early springtime dusk.

      With her curvy figure swathed in lined pants, a flannel shirt, a wool sweater and a down parka, and her dark curls tucked under a thick knit cap, she’d be warm enough if she stayed put. But her hurry to get home wasn’t about the warmth. It was about the cabin’s thick walls and sturdy locks, the line of electric fencing near the trees, and the motion-sensitive lights and alarms that formed a protective perimeter around the clear-cut yard.

      The cabin was safe. Outside was a crapshoot.

      She needed to keep moving, would’ve been nearly home if she hadn’t heard a crackle of underbrush and seen a flash of movement directly in her path. She’d tried to tell herself it was just an animal, but she’d spent the best weeks of her childhood following her grandfather through Colorado woods like these, and she’d lived in the cabin thirty miles north of Bear Claw City for more than a year now. She’d hiked out nearly every day since arriving, first for peace and more recently for some actual work, as she’d started to feel the stirrings of the creativity she’d thought was gone for good. She knew the forest, knew the rhythms and inhabitants of the ridgeline. Whatever was between her and the cabin, her sense of the woods told her it wasn’t a bear or wildcat. Her gut said it was two-legged danger.

      Her ex-husband. Lee Mawadi.

      Or was it?

      “He’s not there,” she told herself. “He’s long gone.”

      She’d kept tabs on the investigation, listening to the infrequent follow-ups on her small radio, and asking careful questions during her rare trips into the city for supplies. Because of that, she knew there had been no sign of Lee in the nearly six months since he and three other men had escaped from the ARX Supermax Prison, located on the other side of the ridge. She also knew—or logic dictated, anyway—that her ex-husband had no real reason to come back to the area, and every reason to stay away.

      After a long moment, when nothing could be heard but the muted sounds of the sun-loving animals powering down and the nocturnal creatures revving up as dusk fell along the ridgeline, she even managed to believe her own words.

      “You’re talking yourself into being scared,” she muttered, slinging the double-aught over her shoulder and heading for home. “There’s no way he’s coming back here.”

      Lee might be a terrorist, a murderer and a liar, but he wasn’t stupid.

      Still, she stayed alert as she walked, relaxing only slightly when it seemed like the forest noises got a little louder, as though whatever menace the woodland creatures had sensed—if anything—had passed through and gone.

      When Mariah reached the fifty-foot perimeter around the cabin, the motion-sensitive lights snapped on. The bright illumination showed a wide swath of stumps in stark relief, mute evidence of the terror that had driven her to chainsaw every tree within a fifty-foot radius of the cabin, and install a low-lying, solarpowered electric fence to keep the animals away.

      In the center of the clear-cut zone sat the cabin. It was sturdy and thick-walled, its proportions slightly off, a bit top-heavy, and if she’d thought a time or two that she and the cabin were very much alike, there was nobody around to agree or disagree with her. She lived alone, and was grateful for the solitude. She used to think she wanted the hustle and bustle of a city, and the mob of friends she’d lacked during childhood. Now she knew better. Once a loner, always a loner.

      Reaching into her pocket for the small remote control she carried with her at all times, she deactivated the motion-sensitive alarms. The security system wasn’t wired to call for any sort of outside response, first because she was too far off the beaten track for the police to do her any good, and second because she didn’t have much use for cops. That wasn’t why she’d installed the system; she’d wanted it as a warning, pure and simple. If she was in the cabin and trouble appeared, she’d know it was time to get out—or dig in and defend herself. If she was somewhere in the forest, she’d have a head start on escaping.

      The Bear Claw cops and the Feds had offered her protection, of course, first when Lee had been arrested for his terrorist activities, and again when he’d escaped. But those offers had all come with questions and sidelong looks, and the threat of people in her space, watching her every move, making it clear that she was as much a suspect as a victim.

      Victim. Oh, how she hated the word, hated knowing she’d been one. Not as much a victim as the people

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