Chapter 1
1
ROBE
Bodies littered my cabin floor in various states of déshabillé. Stale piss and body odor overpowered the ever-present scent of spruce and brisk mountain air my remote ridgeline in the Adirondacks failed to combat.
One man groaned, and I knew they weren’t out for good. Still, it annoyed the shit out of me that I couldn’t use my own living space.
“I came out here to be alone,” I grumbled, gesturing to the mountains that surrounded my forest cabin. “Not host an overage frat party every damn night.”
My college years were well behind me. Easy days with no sense of responsibility and even less care factor. Those days were gone, trapped behind an unopenable door of my own making.
“Yet you take in strays with the heart of a philanthropist and the ease of a five-dollar hooker.” Jonothan Littleman pressed a mug of black coffee into my hand. Thick blond hair that matched his wild beard shot through with the occasional strand of silver cascaded down his back. He looked less like an Upstate New York taxpayer and more like a Viking who had stormed my house and taken up residence. The latter was true, in retrospect. “Be honest with yourself. You came out here to hide behind a mountain and lick your wounds.”
“And hide the devil within.” The corner of my lip curled. “We’re all damaged goods, unfit for human consumption.”
Jon snorted. “That’s why you are who you are, isn’t it? Robinson fucking Huntingdon, Earl of this shitful patch of ground away from everything and everyone we love, and rescuer of assholes like yourself.” He swept muscle-bound arms in a wide circle to encompass the living room, which was the largest part of my cabin home and in dire need of expansion.
I stared at the semiconscious men littering my floor, each of whom would wake with a hangover worse than the next. My heart clenched at the sight of the broken boys— men —I collected, rescued before they suffered a fate worse than mine. Before they hit the realm of unredeemable.
Each thought they’d already met wrecking-ball status. I knew better.
I grunted over my coffee, letting the dark ambrosia unpack what I kept hidden from the most prying mind: my own. Sleep itched the corners of my consciousness as I processed Jon’s words, though I rose a full hour earlier.
My response came out more than a little salty. “Yeah, but it’s my shitful patch of ground.”
The cabin walls closed around me, a too-tight fit for a woodsman and a displaced trust-fund-kid-cum-officer-cum-CEO who had learned to rough it alongside the rest of my outcast crew.
Never created with the girth of five large men in mind, we inhabited out of necessity the space I had originally built by hand for a contingent of only two. Recurve Ridge nestled among a brutal section of the Adirondack mountain range in Upstate NY. Full of unforgiving granite outcrops and pitfalls, not to mention my own improvements to every defensible aspect of the land, it suited each of our flawed personalities to perfection.
I’d always intended to build a larger bunkhouse behind my cabin sometime after my other tenants arrived, but seeing as we were now all shoved into the cramped space, that time had come. I flicked my toe at a beer bottle that drifted near my foot. It rolled across the bare floorboards and bumped into a half-empty glass of cheap whiskey.
If I expanded, the space needed to be usable. More than just room to sleep. I drew out plans in my mind’s eye for an additional kitchenette, their own bathrooms—the latter because I was a pedantic asshole and refused to share. A man cave for toys and… more toys.
Change required topping up supplies, and that meant a trip out of Recurve Ridge and back into the dark lure of civilization for someone. Heading off the ridge to a place where only one of us was welcome incurred danger for us all. The rest may as well wear a shoot on sight tag knotted around his neck and have a bull’s-eye tattooed on his ass.
My stomach protested the thought of losing one of the boys I had collected before they healed enough to seek their own futures. I covered my disquiet beneath a long draw from my mug. Scalding, bitter liquid seared my throat that instantly craved a second hit of the dark ambrosia. I relished the sharp pain that numbed a different sort, no matter how brief.
What didn’t kill me created a new evil, or some bullshit affirmation regular people invented to protect their cloistered lives. Pain offered a tainted strength that propelled me forward, each of us craving his preferred brand of poison.
The youngest man in the cabin stirred on the floor. Cracking a swollen eyelid that looked like it bore the brunt of fisticuffs from the night before, Will offered me a sloppy salute that might have been a thumbs-up and returned to his sloth-like state. The man beside him, who sported a home-job military-grade haircut, lay face down in a puddle of his own drool.
I might have worried for Miller’s existence if his barrel chest didn’t lift every so often in the deep sleep of an inebriated man. That, and he snored like a local drunk.
What else did we have to celebrate but surviving one more day against our personal battles?
I served with both Will and Miller in the Middle East, working shoulder to shoulder as their commanding officer for too many years. The latter retained a desire to address me as sir , though I no longer held any right to the title. Jon, I had found in the midst of his blackest moment, while my newest recruit, Alan, fell into our ramshackle life through a design of fate I didn’t stop to study too hard, lest it replace their heartache with a loneliness once they left.
My lost, broken boys.
A piece of my splintered self featured in each man, giving us a common, if neutral, ground. Their healing provided me with a selfish version of pride as I strove to give them what I couldn’t fathom for myself: redemption.
A life outside this pitiful existence.
These loyal men looked to me for protection and had decided to stick around to make a hash of my self-imposed serenity. Some part of me liked that a few salvageable qualities remained from my previous life, because the mission I set us on didn’t allow for error, only a skewed sense of morality.
One of the assholes broke wind in his alcohol-imbued stupor, filling my living room with a vile stench. I slugged the remnants of my coffee and thrust the cup at Jon. One bushy eyebrow rose, and his beard twitched.
“Make sure they clean up after themselves. I’m out.”
Jon said nothing as I stormed from the house into the welcoming arms of the forest blanketed in snow. A stubborn Eastern white pine stood above everything else, its many stoic faces battered by winter’s kiss.
I needed to shoot something.
* * *
The weight of the axe soothed my calloused palms as it sliced a parabolic arc through Recurve Ridge’s crisp winter air. Sharp pine and warm, earthy mulch wrapped around me in a cocoon only the forest could offer as comfort as I disturbed the thin layer of snow that fast turned to slush beneath my boots. The numbing cold edged beneath my jacket, but I was more at ease here than I’d ever been in the city among everything I hated.
A city that hated me in return.
One day I would return to the lights and face my nemesis, but for now… I took a sense of peace in the ache of muscles tight from a lack of work that craved action. Sweat soaked my shirt with each swing, log after log. But as good as the repetitive action felt, it wasn’t enough.
Shooting was my preferred method to redirect the coiling violence that writhed beneath my skin. The twang of the bow and a breath of mountain air at my cheek settled a sense of peace into my heart. Despite firing off several dozen quivers earlier, the tension remained, the sort no bow or amount of spent arrows could fix.
I returned to my axe, a therapy Jon taught me when we first scouted land for the cabin together. My next exhale clouded around me, condensation obscuring my vision before air and breath melded in an invisible seam. A neat pile of split logs lay by my feet, dusted by a skiff of fresh snow. My therapy billets of chopped wood far outweighed our actual usage in the cabin. I kicked the halves over to the heap and hefted the next round onto the stump.
Snow crunched underfoot in the wrong direction. The mountain stilled in a pensive air.
The only warning the forest provided that all was not well.
Hair rose on the back of my neck. I pivoted, reaching toward a change my brain reacted to but hadn’t processed yet.
Fleeting sounds traveled between the trees, shattering and rebounding to displace its origin, but the predator in me refused to be distracted by splintered echoes. I closed my eyes, my breaths softening as I listened to the forest. The irregular stumble of prey that had already forfeited its life filtered into the clearing.
A dual need— to hunt, to protect —rose in my chest as I swiveled on my heel, tracking my prey’s path across land I knew too well to allow its escape.
I marked the thrashing gait against an invisible map in my mind as I scanned the spaces between scant evergreen foliage. There—a flicker in the shadows between the trunks. The light shifted, then again. This section of the forest around my cabin was thickened by nature rather than design. I never bothered to clean out the underbrush and smaller saplings that vied with the natural giants, seclusion being the aim of the game.
My game.
My blood heated as my boots carried me one step forward, then another, each lunge faster than the last as the panicked flurries neared. I wanted to pause and study the rhythm of the creature’s flight, but my heart put together what my mind still fought—the frantic, fleeing form was human .
Another person in my patch of the forest where no one else should be. Only those with a preconceived death wish sought access through my trees, not one whose survival instinct kicked in to extend a life. My land didn’t come under the category of safe by any definition, occupied as it was by some of the deadliest creatures in Upstate New York, including the local human contingent.
Which begged the question: What could be so big and bad that it drove desperation in my direction in our coldest season?
Nothing else came close to the ruckus a person created in their struggle to survive. A black bear lumbering through the Adirondacks in search of its dinner had more grace than a stumbling amateur hiker on a trail rated beyond their ability. Pure panic sat under its own category for the average, untrained person.
Good thing that neither Jon, me, nor any of my boys back in the cabin counted as the average human . Years of training kicked in as adrenaline dumped into my system at will.
My prey appeared to be a solitary chaos. I paced the clearing’s boundary on silent feet, seeking what tore through my section of the woods. The flighty sounds stumbled on alone long after its predator had been outrun. Snapped twigs brushed the pads of my fingers as I passed, their sharp edges digging into hardened calluses.
I stepped around small depressions that disturbed pine needle mulch and bared the earth in tiny sections. No heel prints indented the exposed soil. I knelt at the side of the damage path, letting my fingers sink into the exposed dirt beneath the cypresses’ overhang where less snow gathered. The shallow imprint had no defined edges. Less than what a full-grown man would make, which meant my prey was either a small-framed person or a child.
Or a barefoot woman running alone.
That thought spurred me into the depths of the forest that had become my home over the past five years. I learned the ridge’s secrets though never divulged my own in turn, relieved by its silent support. The perfect companion for a man who took society’s eviction notice and hung it over his threshold in place of a welcome mat.
A flash lit a path beyond the trees. I frowned. Skin had a way of throwing light in the darkest places, an easy giveaway for any unassuming target. I spotted that earlier when she first darted away.
When had I become so sure the runner was female?
That should provide her more endurance than a child. I filed the extra information away as a wild guess at best. Regardless, those rare flashes gave me something to aim toward.
The dodging pattern transformed into a primal path, the brain existing in pure survival mode after more than a few minutes after her critical incident. Soon the spike would deplete, and she’d crash.
I intended to be there when she fell.
But for now, she ran.
I timed my breaths with her movements, catching the second the pattern changed—a falter in step, a dodge around a fallen log…. I weaved between scarred trunks and snagged a flailing limb as she shot past.
The body attached to the slim extremity followed as I swung the cold arm in a broad arc. She grazed the next tree, knocking small heaps of snow to the forest floor, tangled in the undergrowth, and crashed face-first into my chest, slamming the breath from us both.
No startled cry ripped from her as I cupped a hand behind her head, worried I broke the poor creature’s nose. A handful of twigs and pine needles trickled from her damp, mussed hair and streamed over the back of my hand in a steady cascade. She didn’t make a single sound or move at all.
The woods settled as I wove my fingers through her dark chocolate curls, a natural silkiness detectable among the snares. What should have been long, luscious waves resembled a hawk’s nest that tumbled over my knuckles, massing about her head like a dark halo to a fallen creature.
A tearstained alabaster face turned up. Eyes older than her maybe nineteen, early twenty years perhaps stared at me. Her gaze slid out of focus, glazed with unadulterated terror. I doubted she saw me or anything else in front of her. Despite her pale skin, ice cold beneath my roughened palms, her body warmth soaked into my torso too fast. I registered the lack of clothing barrier at a sensory level before my eyes took in the additional information. Barefoot and naked.
She was naked.
In my arms.
Bruises bloomed on every surface in a wide array of blacks and blues, all recent. I scanned her arms and legs, but there were no telltale yellowish tinges, no evidence of older abuse. She was blessed with deep blue irises ringed with violet, a hue somewhere between midnight and dark ocean. I wanted to fall into her eyes and never escape. Fear, along with exhaustion, dulled their luminous quality, but her stunning beauty still sucked breath from my lungs. My chest closed tight on expired air that refused to escape.
Whoever hurt you just topped my shit list.
A ripple of renewed energy slid through my heated veins. I didn’t quell the urge to find who had ruined her and revisit the pain she suffered on the asshole tenfold.
Biting back a growl, I scanned her body for more immediate injuries. Puffy pink lips were split in more than one place and torn in others. I leaned forward, tracing the rounded depressions with my gaze alone. Were those teeth marks ?
Someone ripped her from whatever coddled world she had existed in before her assault and threw her into my dark territory where civilization and soft people had no place.
That made both her person and her vengeance mine to safeguard.
Fury seared my insides as I stared at her bare form, my gaze utterly uncontested. The woods fell into an eerie purgatory. No call echoed through the close-knit branches often filled with the soft chatter of my furry and feathered neighbors.
The girl took a shuddering breath that should have jerked her back to the present but didn’t. Her pulse fluttered beneath my fingers in an erratic rhythm that began to slow as her body accepted her current predicament over the ongoing struggle to escape.
One breath became many. She gulped at the frigid air in shallow gasps that barely made it into her lungs before she expelled short pants in racking, tearless sobs. My heart wrenched as I held her tight, weathering the remnants of her fear and wondering what the fuck to do with her.
I was used to triaging broken bones and burns or worse on a battlefield, not recuperating a shattered mind in a fragile body.
I stared over her head, my jacket heavy across the taut line of my shoulders. No threat appeared from the gloom that might obscure an enemy. The only other heartbeat came from the prey in my arms, and even that thumped at half the rate I expected.
My gaze swept back to the girl, and a different muscle turned over.
I traced a light fingertip over plump dusky pink lips, noting every tear in her swollen skin. Keeping my touch gentle, I cataloged each mark, lodging the damage in a running list entitled due rewards for when I identified whoever had hurt her. The bruises mapped her torment in a stunning array of torture that cost hours of her life not so long ago.
Four close-together spots looked like finger marks. I sought out the thumbprint, finding it where I expected over the other side of her shoulder. The handprint dwarfed her dainty frame. I picked out more of the same prints in varying sizes. Each mark on her differed enough to suggest a line of attackers. A similar puzzle covered her torso.
I didn’t need to check her legs to know they would show the same.
Christ.
“How many?” I grated, grazing my thumb along her arm.
My other arm wrapped tight around her back, holding her to me. Unprotected, my ass. Anything that came at her had to deal with a whole lot more than a tiny, unarmed, and untrained woman.
The girl stood statue still during my inspection. A cool breath brushed my cheek through the untamed growth there. What did I look like to her eyes? A great brute of a wild mountain man, perhaps. A far cry from the silk-blend suits I had worn after my uniforms were stripped away. Three lives in a single lifetime. We all wore many hats in different seasons. My scars were covered with checked shirts and a beard, while she stood bare before me.
Exposed. Raw.
“Where did you come from?” I didn’t expect an answer as I fell into her galaxy-dark gaze, processing the too-still woman in my arms.
My mind kicked into gear, and it took me too long to realize that she stood still and quiet, not a shiver in sight. Cursing myself as a goddamn fool, I shucked my jacket free and covered her battered body. My lungs closed tight when she didn’t flinch, though the damage to her fine-boned frame bordered on horrendous. That she was still standing at all was a miracle. Shock did that to a person.
I’d seen soldiers trained for combat situations struggle with the reality of the traumatic aftermath when enemies returned to plain old human forms. This slip of a girl had no defense mechanism to rely on other than what her mind provided, and now me. I shoved back the violence that pulsed beneath my skin, aching to erupt and tear the woods apart for her.
“What’s your name, sweetheart?”
Darkened eyes shifted to my face, the lone sign she heard me.
I caught her chin between firm fingers, careful not to incur further damage. Either someone was overzealous with their impact play or abused this girl well past a horrific level. It didn’t take much nous to select the latter option as her fate.
“Your name,” I repeated, cradling her face between my hands, and prayed she’d emerge from her head for me. “You’re safe. I promise. What’s your name?”
She stared at me through hollow eyes, and I swore she wouldn’t answer. Then those pale lips parted, and she offered me a part of herself I’d covet for eternity.
“M-Mari.”
The inflection of her British accent whispered around me. I struggled to hear her, though she pressed against me. I squelched the need to hunt the fucker down and show him what being the recipient of those bruises felt like firsthand.
Sliding an arm across her body, I wrapped my jacket tighter around granite skin covered in a cold flush. How long had she run, how far? I cupped her bruises with as much gentleness as I could offer.
“Where did you come from, Mari?”
Her luminous gaze dimmed as she retreated. Whether triggered by my words or my presence, I’d likely never know. The girl possessed an ethereal beauty. Cleaned up, she’d be stunning, and I had a damn good idea what had made her a target for such an attack.
I kept murmuring, offering her what warmth I could, though she didn’t seem to make sense of my words. A flicker of attention entered her sapphire gaze as her brain appeared to process her adjusted situation.
Carrying her wouldn’t be hard, but we had a distance to reach the house, where I could offer a hot shower and food, plus medical supplies. She would need a whole lot more to heal her mind. I could provide the basics, at least.
As I prepared to hoist her over my shoulder and run her back, a part of me worried that placing an abused woman in a small space with five filthy men used to surviving in an all-male environment might not be my best idea, but it was the only option I had to offer her.
Mari blinked once and twisted in my arms. I held my breath as one hand rose. Soft, slim fingers grazed the rough edges of my beard, pressing close enough for her natural heat to brush my jawline. I held her gaze, keeping myself still and unmoving beneath her discovery tour, waiting for her to open to me. My heart slammed in my chest hard enough that she must have heard it firsthand.
Awareness slipped behind her eyes a second before her palm cracked across my face. Fine fingers tangled in my untamed beard. I caught her wrist, confining her as she writhed in my arms, scratching and clawing in a delayed reaction. Holding her at bay without hurting her took little effort. The size difference between us bordered on ridiculous. I dwarfed her as a mountain overshadowed a pond nestled at its foothills.
Her knotted fists pounded my shirt in weakening thumps. I weathered her beating until she panted, her frantic energy spent against my chest. Mari rested her forehead over my heart, her arms limp over my shirt. Ragged breath huffed against my lips as she turned up her midnight gaze clouded with fear and desperation.
Need.
For the base conditions a body required: food, water, warmth.
Security. Love.
A thin, strained keening tore from her throat in a pathetic whimper that shrouded my thoughts in a tempting promise of violence.
What the hell happened to this woman, and who do I have to kill to make it right?