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fill that hot little mouth of yours right up. And you’ll love it.”
She shuddered inside. Thought she might be sick and throw up all over him.
From astride her he laughed, a brittle sound as hollow as all the caverns of hell.
“We’re going to get you,” she warned. “If not me, then someone else. They’ll never give up. They’ll run you to the ground like a rabid dog.”
He struck quickly. Plunged the needle into her arm.
She felt a sharp, cold sting against her skin, then the horrifying pressure of some unknown drug being forced into her flesh.
“You bastard!” she hissed and he laughed again, that low, sick growl, and he crawled slightly upward, forcing his crotch even closer to her head. Her stomach roiled and still she swiped at him, her legs kicking upward.
Her attempts were futile, all her struggling in vain.
The penlight rolled noisily across the stone floor, stopping against the door, its tiny beam offering faint, narrow illumination. There wasn’t enough light to see his features clearly, just a glimmer of thin luminance that threw his face into a shadowy, macabre relief. His eyes were shielded by dark glasses, a baseball cap covered his head, and a beard darkened his jaw, yet she caught a chilling glimpse of his features. Rugged. Rough. Scratches down one cheek where she’d scraped his skin with her fingernails.
I know you, she thought, her arm suddenly heavy,
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the pain in her chest easing as she started to drift away. I know you, you miserable whack job, and damn it, somehow, someway, I’m going to get out of here and when I do, I swear to God, I’m going to nail your sorry ass . . .
Chapter Six
Nate Santana snapped open his pocketknife, then sliced the twine holding a bale of hay together. The horses were waiting patiently in their stalls, ears pricked forward, dark, liquid eyes assessing him, only Lucifer showing impatience by snorting and tossing his dark head.
Daylight was still a couple of hours away but Santana was up even earlier than usual. Restless. His elusive sleep interrupted with dreams of Regan Pescoli.
Either she’d been making love to him, staring up at him with a naughty smile and arched eyebrows as he’d stripped away her clothes and made love to her, or she’d been lost in the darkness and he’d been running through a dark, night-shrouded forest calling her name, catching glimpses of her as she vanished into a thicket of brittle, snow-covered trees. He’d woken up in a cold sweat, that tingling sensation that warned him of danger, ever present.
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Using a pitchfork, he spread hay into the waiting mangers of Brady Long’s small herd. He’d already exercised the horses as much as the small arena would allow and now was finishing up with the feed, measuring oats, tossing hay, making sure the water was running into the troughs, that the pipes hadn’t frozen in this last arctic blast that had left so much of the state crippled.
Sometimes he wondered why he’d come back to this part of Montana. It wasn’t as if he had any family left. You just had to get the hell out of California, that’s why, and Brady Long offered you a job and a place to stay.
He opened another bale, smelling the fading scent of summer in the dry grass, then forked it into the next box where Lucifer waited patiently, as if he were the most well-mannered colt on the ranch.
“I’m not buying it,” Santana said to the black devil-horse, but his mind wasn’t really on the task at hand. He was just going through the motions, getting through his morning chores, waiting for daybreak and the phone to ring. He finished up and walked into the predawn darkness. Usually this was his favorite time of day, just before the sun rose, when the stars lit up the sky, the air was clear, and there was a calm to the universe, a quietude and peace that disappeared with daylight.
This morning, however, the stars were obscured and a bitter wind swept through the cluster of buildings that made up the heart of the Lazy L, the sprawling ranch owned by Brady Long.
A single security lamp shed an eerie light onto the snow-covered landscape and for the first time in 86
Lisa Jackson
days no snowflakes danced and swirled in its bluish beam.
Thankfully, the snowstorm that had ripped through the heart of the Bitterroots had stopped. At least for a while. But he still hadn’t heard from Regan Pescoli.
And he’d caught the news last night that the police in Spokane had taken a woman into custody, believing her to be responsible for the deaths of several women and possibly even the serial killer who had terrorized this section of the Bitterroots. His first thought was that Regan was in on the bust, but a second later he negated that idea, as Alvarez had phoned him after the arrest.
He locked the door of the stable and hiked across the parking lot, a hundred yards through the drifting snow to his cabin with Nakita at his heels. The husky, full of energy, romped through the drifts, disappearing beneath the mantle of white, his tail all that was visible of him, only to reappear, eager for another foray in a new direction.
