Steph, Jocelyn, and Brooke all knew she was out there. They knew her route. The personal beacon SOS was transmitted. Gina might even be part of the team that was sent out. She and the rest of the SARs team would target their GPS location, thanks to the device.
Those were the things she’d done right.
What she’d done wrong, what she’d been incredibly stupid about, was to follow snowmobile tracks into the trees and search out a camp that held dangerous criminals.
She knew better, of course she did. Jack knew better too. He hadn’t wanted to do it. He’d wanted to head back and call someone else to investigate, but she’d convinced him that they should check it out, thinking it might have been nothing.
Wrong. It was definitely something.
Jack had been there, and she’d made a different choice than she would’ve made alone. She wasn’t going to spend time thinking about that right now, but she would spend time on it later. She knew herself well enough to know she’d be replaying her decisions over and over for some time to come.
The snowmobiles were the problem she kept returning to. Three men on machines could cover ground fast, andtwo people on foot in deep snow...if they ran and the poachers followed, the outcome didn’t work in their favor.
But staying where they were wasn’t smart either. The leader was still listening, and the spotlight was still moving, and their tracks were in the snow.
Jack’s pistol was a good thing to have, but it wouldn’t do much against three rifles, and she knew it. She didn’t doubt he knew it too.
The spotlight swept toward them.
She put her mouth against Jack’s ear. “When it passes us, we move. In the direction of the meadow. Stay in the trees. Try to be silent.”
The beam crossed their position, and she felt the light against the brush, diffused and broken by the branches but present. She held herself flat and still and watched it go.
The moment the beam angled away, she was on her knees, then her feet, and then she was moving.
She came out of the brush low and fast, angling back through the trees, away from their original tracks, choosing her footing by instinct rather than sight. Behind her, Jack’s footsteps were right there, close, matching her pace, surprisingly quiet this time.
The voices from the camp rose briefly. She didn’t catch the words and didn’t slow down to try.
The trees were dense in this section, and the snow was unpredictable, crusted in some places and knee-deep in others. She punched through twice and pulled free without breaking stride.
Their sleds were at the edge of the meadow where they’d hidden them, nearly half a mile away. They’d need to weave around the meadow, staying in the trees to reach the sleds.
Leaving the sleds wasn’t an option—at least, leaving hers wasn’t. She kept her name and address on a card inside the individual packs in case something fell out, so she could have it returned to her. What had always seemed a smart idea could now end up putting her in danger.
The spotlight swept again behind them. She could tell by the way the light changed through the canopy—there one moment and gone the next—that the men had heard them. Whether they’d decided it was worth pursuing was something she wouldn’t know until they either heard the snowmobiles or they didn’t.
Jack caught her hand, glove against mitten. The warmth of him pushed through the wool. In the middle of danger closing in around them, that small touch gave her confidence.
The snowmobile engines roared to life behind them.
Her confidence drained away.
“Run!”
Chapter 18
Jack
The snowmobile engines were loud and getting louder.
Jack didn’t know this terrain. That was the fact he kept returning to as they pushed through the trees, branches catching his face, snow collapsing under his feet without warning.
Steph knew the area. She’d trained here, run here, studied the landscape the way she studied everything that mattered to her. He stayed on her heels and trusted her to find something, because he had nothing to offer on that front.
The meadow was out. The moment those engines fired up, he knew they needed to hide. Out in the open, the spotlight would find them, and that would not end well.
Steph was angling through the timber, away from the meadow and away from the camp, moving fast but not recklessly, still reading the ground even in the dark and at speed. He matched her stride for stride, keeping his breathing controlled and his eyes forward.
