Captured By the Mountain Man Bounty Hunter (Mountain Man Bodyguard Protector #11)

Chapter 1

one

Rafe

Pine needles. Wet granite. The specific cold that lifts off a BC lake before sunrise, when the mist is still holding against the shore and the sun hasn't decided yet whether to show.

I've been in position for six hours.

The cabin sits in a half-acre clearing a hundred and fifty meters downslope.

Log construction. Older than me. The kind my grandfather's generation put up in a weekend with a cousin and a case of beer.

One window lit dim, oil lamp not electric.

Woodstove chimney putting a thin line of smoke that bends east. That tells me more about the wind than a ribbon would.

The smoke tells me the fire was banked three hours ago. She hasn't been up. She will be soon. Bodies know dawn.

One vehicle in the yard. An older Subaru with Alberta plates. Mud up the fenders. Gas station windshield wash barely scraping through two weeks of highway grime. That plate confirms what the file said.

The outhouse is twenty meters behind the cabin. A worn footpath ground between. Old cedar. Crescent moon on the door, a joke someone made permanent.

That path is where she'll walk.

I adjust my weight against the spruce I've been using as a backrest. My left knee aches, old. My right hand is steady. I haven't eaten since yesterday morning. I won't eat until this is done.

A few minutes after that, the cabin door opens and she steps out.

She's smaller than the photo in the file. Thin. Thinner than thin, the kind you get from not eating. Dark hair cut to her shoulders, roots lighter than the rest. Hoodie that doesn't fit her. Jeans. She pulls the door closed carefully behind her, like she's been doing it for days and has a system.

She walks to the outhouse. Head down. No glance at the treeline. A fugitive running for two weeks should have learned to look by now. She hasn't. That detail files itself.

I move.

I come down the slope quiet. I'm six-four and two-twenty. I have been moving quiet for a long time. It's a skill, not a gift. I've trained it. By the time she comes back out of the outhouse, buttoning her jeans, I am on the path between her and the cabin.

Three meters from her.

Two.

One.

She sees me. She doesn't scream.

"Don't," I say, low. I put my left hand over her mouth. The right one catches her across the collarbones, not hard. "Don't scream. Don't fight. I'm not here to hurt you."

She doesn't fight. Doesn't bite my hand. Doesn't buckle. Doesn't kick for my knee. She goes still under my palm. I can feel her heart beating against my forearm, very fast. The rest of her has stopped. Waiting.

I steer her back up the path. Door. Inside. The cabin smells like woodsmoke, cedar, something warm from last night. A pot of stew on the two-burner.

One chair at the table is a kitchen chair. The other is a stool. I put her on the chair.

I take my hand off her mouth. She doesn't scream now either.

I go to the sink. Cold water. I fill a glass and set it in front of her. She looks at the glass. She looks at me.

"Drink it."

She picks it up with her free hand. Her hand is shaking. She drinks half of it and sets it down carefully, like a person who is trying to appear calm for someone with a badge. Which I am not.

"Hazel Mercier. You know who sent me."

She swallows. Her eyes go to the window, to the floor between my boots, up to my face. "He found me." Her voice is flat. No tears, no bargaining. "Okay. Just do it here, please. Not in front of the lake."

I pause.

I've been doing this work eight years. Before that I spent two tours carrying a rifle for the Canadian Forces.

I have caught forty-seven people on bondsmen contracts.

I have done twelve private recovery jobs where the paperwork was tighter.

I know what a fugitive sounds like. I know the three things they do. They run. They lie. They beg.

She hasn't done any of them. She has asked me not to kill her.

That isn't what a fugitive says.

That's what prey says.

I sit down across from her on the stool and leave the cuff on her. I take my field jacket off and hang it on the peg by the door. I want her to see I am not in a hurry. I am not going to hit her.

"Who do you think sent me?"

Her eyes go to the cuff. Back to my face. "Marcius Voclain."

Right name. My client used it openly in the contract. That proves nothing.

"Why do you think he sent me?"

She takes a breath. It catches. She lets it out. "Because I found a set of flagged transfers in one of his portfolios. Because I told one person at the firm I was going to the RCMP with it. Because that person is dead. The police called it a suicide. It wasn't."

I keep my face still.

The file on my phone says Hazel Mercier is a thirty-one-year-old woman with an untreated psychotic disorder.

It says she disappeared from her uncle's private equity firm with proprietary client data during a break from reality.

It says the family wants her recovered safely and her laptop secured before she publishes information that will ruin innocent investors.

None of this is true.

"What's on the laptop?"

"Ledger reconstructions. The shell layer. I mapped three years of placement and layering across four accounts. It's in the woodpile. Third row from the bottom, behind the split cedar. Cooler bag inside a plastic bag inside a ziplock."

I say nothing but snort a little.

"I didn't know where else to put it," she says. "It's not funny. I was tired."

"It's a little funny."

She looks at me.

I take the phone out of my jacket. I open the file. I read her the name the client gave me. The birthday. The diagnosis. The family.

She is shaking her head by the second line. "That's not me. I've never seen a therapist. My uncle is in Winnipeg. We don't speak. My birthday is in April." She is talking faster now, the words coming in a rush. "He'd need to build that file. He'd have to have someone write it. And you believed it."

"It came with two notarized documents and a court filing. It checked on three databases. I don't take family contracts without paper."

"Then the paper is fake."

"I know."

She stops.

"I know," I say again.

She puts her free hand over her mouth. Her eyes fill but don't spill. She gets them back.

Here is where I am supposed to feel the contract click over into something else.

It doesn't click. It has already clicked.

It clicked four minutes ago when she asked me a question I have never been asked by a person I was paid to recover.

Her hair is badly dyed at the roots. Her wrist in my cuff is so thin my thumb and middle finger would close around it with ease.

Her free hand is pressed flat on the table. The nail beds are pale.

I stand up. I take the key out of my pocket. I unlock the cuff from her wrist. The metal comes off. I drop it on the table.

She stares at her own wrist like she's surprised it's hers.

"Don't leave this cabin," I say. "I need an hour."

"Where are you going?"

"Outside. To read the file again with what you just told me."

I move outside to put some distance between us. Give her space. Give her room to breathe. Then, I open the file on my phone. I start reading it from the top.