Page 77 of Northern Escape


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As soon as the rescue team landed, they wasted no time air-lifting Bree to the hospital in Fairbanks. They said she’d probably end up in Anchorage, but Fairbanks was closer right now and she wasn’t stable enough for a long flight.

Not stable enough.

Meaning they were worried she might die en route.

Jesus.

Ellis ached to go with her, hated letting her out of his sight when he only just found her again, but there wasn’t room on the helicopter. And she’d kill him if she woke up and discovered he left her dogs behind. So he stood on the ice and watched the helicopter until the night sky swallowed it. Dread constricted his chest. He couldn’t breathe.

If she died…

Nate gripped his shoulder. “She’ll be okay.”

He sucked in a shaky breath and let it out in a cloud. “Yeah. Yeah, she’s strong.” He wouldn’t think about her dying. Refused to consider a world without her in it, singing to her dogs. Teasing him. Loving him.

He faced his brothers. “Day, were you able to send someone to her kennel?”

Damian nodded. “Yeah. My production crew went out. They said the dogs were lonely and hungry but otherwise okay.”

“Good.” He drew another breath. The tightness in his chest eased a bit. “C’mon. I want to show you guys something.”

Back at the cabin, he let Nate and Damian go in first and watched their reactions. Damian’s shoulders tensed up. Nate glanced back with a question in his eyes.

Yeah, he hadn’t been imagining their dad’s scent. They both smelled it, too.

He followed them in. “When I found Bree, she said she saw Dad. She said he was here, that he saved her.”

Damian whipped around. “No. He’s dead.”

They had all seen the text message the hired killer had sent to taunt Bree.Run, Brielle Ives. Make this more fun than the old man did.Everyone, state troopers included, assumed it meant they’d be finding William Hunter’s body somewhere nearby. The current running theory was that Bones— or Larson or Krane or whatever his real name was— had found Will hiding in this cabin, killed him, and then used Happy and the pilot Jim Hopkins to lure Bree away from town.

Though that still didn’t explain Harold Cooper’s death back in Solitaire.

Actually, it didn’t explain a lot of things.

“He’s dead,” Damian repeated, but his tone said he wasn’t entirely convinced of that fact.

Ellis lifted a shoulder in a half-hearted shrug.

Nate studied him closely. “You don’t think so.”

“I don’t know.” He pulled out a chair from the table in the middle of the room and sank into it. “When I was hypothermic, I saw a lot of things I thought were real. A moose. Dad. You guys. So, yeah, it could just be Bree’s mind playing tricks on her, but… I believe her. I think Dad was here.”

“She was shot,” Damian pointed out. “She lost a lot of blood on top of being hypothermic. She was hallucinating.”

“Then why does this cabin smell like Dad? And who killed Bones? Bree attacked him with a snow hook, but someone else blew out the back of his head with a large caliber rifle. You saw his body. She couldn’t have done that. She didn’t have a weapon. Her gun was on the sled when I found it.”

“I don’t know. A good Samaritan hunter?”

Ellis sent his youngest brother a dry look. “Because that makes so much more sense than Dad saving her.”

Damian flapped his arms in exasperation. “Then where is he? Why didn’t he stay with her until you got here? She could’ve died before you found her.”

“I don’t know, Day, but I’d like to ask him.”

The three of them said nothing more for several minutes.

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