Crosscurrent (Sweet and Sawyer Romantic Suspense #4)

Prologue

The phone in the false bottom of the woman’s bag buzzed for the first time in over three years.

She froze beside the unmanned reception desk, yoga blanket still in her hands, and stared at the satchel next to the class calendar.

For a moment she simply stood there, listening to the rain whisper against the studio’s windows and the soft metallic tap of a halyard somewhere out on the dock.

The studio had been empty almost an hour.

The last students had drifted out at around four, smelling faintly of eucalyptus lotion, carrying their expensive mats, thanking her for class while gathering water bottles and gossip and car keys.

Now the room sat quiet under the dim red glow of the EXIT sign.

The hidden phone buzzed again.

Not possible.

Or technically possible, she corrected automatically. Batteries failed. Towers glitched. Signals crossed. Strange things happened on the coast during storms.

But not to this phone.

She kept it charged because she kept everything charged.

Every six months she rotated the battery.

Once a year she powered it on long enough to verify the encryption app still functioned properly.

Then she sealed it back into its wax-paper sleeve and returned it to the false bottom of her bag where she tried hard not to think about it.

Because any incoming message meant disaster.

She set down the blankets and rounded the desk, shoving her hand into the deep bag until she could grip the edge of the hidden compartment beneath the bag’s satin lining.

The older phone rested exactly where she'd left it.

Buzzing.

Her pulse gave a painful kick against her ribs. She pulled it free and looked at the screen.

BLOCKED NUMBER: AVALANCHE

The word sat in plain white text against black.

No greeting. No punctuation. No explanation.

Not like it was necessary.

The agreed-on word for threat level rising, prepare to move in hours, or days, was TORTOISE.

The agreed-on word for disappear immediately and trust no one was AVALANCHE.

Her handler had set up the system in a cramped attic apartment in Salem while rain hammered the roof hard enough to shake the windows.

He'd sat cross-legged on a faded rug with a mug of instant coffee balanced on one knee while patiently explaining emergency protocols. Not that any explanations were necessary. For as long as she could remember, she’d slept with a knife under her pillow, waking instantly at any unfamiliar sound.

“If I send TORTOISE,” he'd told her, “you prep whatever needs prepping.”

Then he'd gone quiet for a second before adding:

“If I send AVALANCHE, you don't go home.”

She read the message again.

AVALANCHE

The studio suddenly felt too open and far too bright. She moved quickly now, though not fast enough to become careless. Carelessness killed people far more reliably than panic ever had.

Bag over her arm now, she switched off the lights, checked the back office, and verified the knife at her boot and the second one inside her jacket pocket.

The small electric kettle her student, Reagan Byrne, had given her last Christmas sat cooling beside the sink.

The diner owner believed everybody needed hot tea after exercise.

She personally believed most herbal tea tasted like boiled leaves and disappointment, but Reagan’s heart had been in the right place, so the kettle remained.

She emptied the water into the sink anyway.

No sense leaving traces of routine behind.

Outside, the rain had settled into a fine drifting mist that softened the outlines of the boats rocking against their slips. The fish-and-chips place next door wouldn’t open for another hour. The kayak rental stood dark. Somewhere down the dock a gull complained bitterly.

She locked the studio door behind her and paused long enough to listen. Old habit.

No footsteps. No engines idling nearby. No voices carrying over the water. Still, the skin between her shoulder blades prickled hard enough to hurt.

The purse rested heavily against her ribs while she headed north along the dock at a measured pace, head slightly down against the mist. She did not run. Running on wet marina planks would make her a target.

Her car waited four blocks away on a side street between a contractor van and an aging delivery truck. She'd moved it there Tuesday morning after rejecting two other parking spots for visibility concerns.

Predictability got people killed.

She slid behind the wheel, locked the doors automatically, and headed north through the rain.

Traffic was sparse but not absent. A logging truck thundered past in the opposite direction. Then nothing but wet pavement stretching ahead of her.

The overlook road appeared on the right about a mile beyond the last cluster of coastal houses, marked by a county sign somebody had shot repeatedly and nobody had ever bothered replacing.

She drove past it.

Another half mile north she turned around in a logging pullout and headed back.

No vehicles followed.

Good.

The gravel road up toward the bluff had washed out twice during the winter storms. The county still hadn’t repaired it properly, though calling the old track a road at all felt generous.

Deep ruts collected standing rainwater beneath low cedar branches that scraped softly across the roof of her car as she climbed.

She turned in at the second switchback and let the vehicle roll the rest of the way in low gear. The forest closed around her immediately: dark, wet, and silent except for rainwater dripping steadily through the trees.

She parked near the trailhead and stepped out into cold mist carrying the scent of bark and ocean and distant woodsmoke from somewhere farther inland.

The dead drop sat a hundred and forty paces north through the trees behind a hemlock she had marked herself three years earlier.

She knew every root crossing the trail and every hollow where water gathered after storms. She knew where the canopy thinned enough for moonlight to break through and where the undergrowth thickened near the bluff edge.

Her boots made almost no sound on the wet ground.

At the hemlock, she crouched, noting the notch she'd carved into the bark. The cache stone beneath the third exposed root looked untouched.

Only the color wasn’t right.

Brown.

Not white.

A cold pressure settled behind her ribs. Brown meant disaster.

She stopped herself from touching the stone directly. Touching contaminated surfaces. Fibers transferred. Prints survived.

Ray used to laugh when she reminded him of that. “You're the only protected witness I've ever met who gives forensic lectures,” he'd told her once.

Using a stick, she found the hidden seam beneath the bark covering and lifted it gently.

The cavity underneath sat empty. Cash gone. Burner phone gone. Backup license gone. The eastern Oregon address that was supposed to become her next life if AVALANCHE ever came — gone too.

Three boot prints marked the loam nearby.

Fresh.

Two approaching. One leaving.

All the same tread pattern. Her heartbeat pounded in her ears.

Across the clearing, movement flickered between the trees. Wide shoulders. Dark clothing. Two men stepped silently out from the forest line.

The first carried a telescoping baton already extended. The second held a pistol low against his thigh.

She stayed down. Panic pressed hot and sharp at the base of her throat, but discipline shoved it back down where it belonged. Panic made people sloppy. Sloppy people died.

She forced herself to think. Distance to cliff edge: thirty paces. Distance between her and the men: roughly eighty.

Wet ground would slow everybody, but not equally. She had rehearsed this route. They probably hadn’t.

One breath later, she ran.

Her boots tore through wet loam as branches whipped past her shoulders. Behind her somebody shouted. The first gunshot cracked through the trees, and bark exploded off the spruce beside her head.

She ran faster.

The cliff edge appeared ahead where the canopy finally broke open against the storm-dark sky. Her hand found the steel anchor ring bolted into the trunk of the wind-bent spruce. Exactly where she'd left it.

The second shot was closer. Soon, they’d zero in.

She clipped into the anchor, dropped into the narrow gap behind the tree, and launched herself over the cliff edge.

The world vanished into roaring surf.

The rope burned through her gloves while wet stone flashed past beneath her boots. Rain slicked the cliff face, turning every foothold treacherous, but she’d measured this descent enough times to trust the rhythm of it.

At forty-one feet her boots struck the narrow sandstone ledge hidden beneath the overhang. Invisible from above. Her secret.

She unclipped immediately and slipped sideways into the narrow pocket concealed behind hanging roots and folds of basalt. Then she pulled the curtain of roots back into place and disappeared.

Above her, the men reached the cliff edge.

Flashlight beams stabbed wildly through the rain and dimming light, while one man barked something short and angry. Another answered while radio static crackled faintly overhead.

She pressed herself deeper into the stone pocket and forced her breathing slow despite the adrenaline trying to tear it apart.

In for four. Hold. Out for four.

Yoga breathing. Useful despite what most people assumed.

Water trickled cold down her cheek. Above, the flashlight beams swept lower again, then higher, then away. One of the men swore viciously.

A minute later the lights vanished altogether.

Carefully, she edged closer to the opening in the rock pocket and looked down toward the surf below.

The cliff dropped into roiling white waves and jagged stone. Something dark rolled between two wave-battered rocks far beneath her.

A body. Floating, face down, arms out. Male. Heavy coat. Broad shoulders. Dead or close enough not to matter.

Her stomach twisted hard.

Ray?

Maybe not. But highly likely.

No chance her luck had suddenly become that good.

She shut her eyes briefly against the mist from the pounding surf, then opened them again, gathering her wits.

Survival had rules. The first one was simple.

Keep moving.