Untamed Hunter Daddy Sneak Peek
Chapter One
Zoe
I press my back harder against the cold rock wall and pull my knees up until they touch my chest. The little hollow under the fallen pine feels smaller every hour.
Snow keeps sifting down through the branches above me, soft and steady, landing on my hair and melting into icy trickles that run down my neck and pool in the collar of my dress.
My waitress dress. Thin polyester with the Timber Creek Diner logo stitched over the left breast in red thread that's started to unravel.
It's soaked at the hem and the sleeves and everywhere else.
The fabric sticks to my skin like a second layer of something useless.
I can smell myself now—sour sweat and damp earth and something sharper underneath, something animal.
The kind of smell that comes from a body running on nothing but fear and cold water sipped from icicles broken off low branches.
My sneakers are useless. The soles cracked somewhere on the second day and the fabric ripped in places where I tripped over roots and rocks I couldn't see under the snow.
My right ankle throbs with every tiny shift I make.
It swelled up two days ago—or maybe three, I've stopped being sure—after I stepped wrong on a slippery log crossing a frozen creek.
The skin around the joint has gone tight and dark, stretched shiny over the swelling.
I can't put full weight on it anymore without wanting to scream.
So I don't. I sit here instead, folded into myself like something waiting to be thrown away.
I don't know what day it is. I stopped counting after the third night because counting made it worse.
If I knew the number I'd have to face it as a real thing—that many days lost, that many nights survived, that many hours left to go.
The sky stays gray and heavy, the same color from morning to whatever passes for evening.
The trees are everywhere, tall dark pines with branches sagging under the weight of the snow.
They creak when the wind pushes through them.
Sometimes the sound is soft, like a sigh, like the whole mountain is breathing in its sleep.
Other times it cracks sharp and sudden and my whole body jerks like someone fired a gun right beside me.
My hands fly up. My heart slams. And then nothing.
Just the wind. Just the trees. Just me, shaking in a wet dress in a hole in the ground.
I'm so cold my fingers have gone past burning and into something else entirely.
Numb isn't the right word. It's more like they've stopped being part of me.
I keep flexing them inside the thin pockets of my apron, but the movement feels distant, like I'm watching someone else's hands open and close.
The apron is still tied around my waist. The strings are frayed from where I used them to tie branches together for a windbreak that fell apart the first time the wind really blew.
I saw a show once where a man wove pine boughs into a lean-to shelter that looked almost cozy.
Mine looked like a pile of sticks a child would build and then forget.
It kept nothing out. Not the snow. Not the cold.
Not the feeling that the mountain is slowly digesting me.
My stomach doesn't ache anymore. That's the part nobody tells you about starving.
After the first couple of days the pain changes.
It stops being a hollow ache and becomes something stranger.
My vision goes swimmy at the edges when I move too fast. Yesterday—or whenever it was—I found a patch of small red berries under a bush that still had some green showing.
I ate three of them, one at a time, waiting between each to see if my tongue would swell or my throat would close or the world would go upside down in a new and terrible way.
Nothing happened. So I ate three more. They tasted sour and a little bitter, like chewing on a penny wrapped in leaves.
I don't know if they were safe. For all I know they're working through my system right now, shutting things down one quiet organ at a time.
But I was so hungry the trees had started to look like they were leaning toward me, bending down to watch, and the hunger felt more dangerous than the berries.
Sleep deprivation does strange things. I know this the way I know facts from magazines I read during slow shifts at the diner.
But now it belongs to mine. The edges of things ripple sometimes, like heat coming off pavement in summer.
Twice I've heard music that isn't there, faint and faraway, something with fiddles.
Once I had a full conversation with my mother before I remembered that she's been dead for three years.
She told me to get up and walk south. I told her I didn't know which way south was.
She said I never did have a good sense of direction, and then she was gone and I was talking to a rock with snow on it and crying so hard my ribs ached.
I lick my lips and taste the faint metallic tang of dried blood where I bit the inside of my cheek last night when I heard a branch snap close by.
I held my breath for so long my lungs burned and dark spots floated across my vision.
It was probably just a deer or a rabbit moving through the snow.
But my brain doesn't care about probably anymore.
Every sound could be them. Every shadow between the trees could be Tyler or one of Dale Weathers' men coming to drag me back to the place with the locked doors and the women who cried so quietly it was worse than screaming.
I squeeze my eyes shut for a second and try to picture the Timber Creek Diner instead.
The red vinyl booths that always stuck a little to the back of my legs on hot days.
The bell over the door that jingled every time someone came in, bright and cheerful, like it was announcing good news no matter who walked through.
Old Mr. Henderson sliding onto his usual stool at exactly 8:15 every Tuesday, ordering cherry pie and decaf with a wink and a five-dollar tip even though his bill was never more than four.
I miss the way the morning light came through the big front windows and made everything look golden and safe.
I miss the quiet rhythm of carrying plates and refilling coffee and smiling even when my feet ached after a double shift.
It wasn't exciting. It was small and ordinary and mine.
The worst thing that ever happened there was a customer sending back eggs that were too runny or a tourist asking for directions to a trail that didn't exist on any map.
Then Tyler started coming in.
I don't want to think about it. Not the full thing.
Not now. But the memories come in flashes whether I want them or not.
His perfect white teeth. The way he called me darlin' like it was a word he'd invented just for me.
The slow tightening of his grip on my life—first a locked door, then another, then a room full of women who looked the way I felt.
The business opportunity that was really a cage. The charm that was really a leash.
I shove it down. Thinking about Tyler makes me careless and right now careless means dead.
I open my eyes because the memories are heavier than the cold.
The snow is still falling. My breath comes out in little white puffs that disappear fast, like even the air doesn't want to stay near me for long.
Somewhere far off a bird calls, sharp and lonely, and the sound is so ordinary it makes my chest hurt.
My ankle pulses with dull heat. I want to whimper but I don't. Sound is dangerous.
I learned that the first night after I ran.
The escape. That's what I call it in my head even though it doesn't feel like an escape yet. More like a different kind of trap. I’m basically trading locked doors for open sky that's trying to kill me just as thoroughly.
I was at the old mine site with the other women.
They kept us in a shipping container sometimes, the big metal kind that smells like rust and diesel and fear.
Tyler was there that day, arguing with some of the other men about schedules and payments.
I stayed quiet in the corner like I always did, making myself as small as possible, trying to disappear into the shadows. Then the shooting started.
Gunfire cracked through the air outside.
Men shouting. Engines roaring. I didn't know who was attacking and I didn't wait to find out.
Tyler had told me the police were paid off, that the only people we had to worry about were rival crews who would be worse.
So when the chaos hit I slipped out a side door while the guards were distracted and ran.
I ran until my legs burned and my lungs felt like they were tearing apart inside my chest. I ran until the sounds of fighting faded behind me and the only thing left was the crunch of my feet through snow and my heart hammering so hard I thought it would simply stop.
I kept going. Deeper. Higher. Away from the roads, away from everything.
I thought if I could just get far enough I could find a way down the other side of the mountain.
Find a town. Find help. But the snow came harder and the trees all started to look the same.
My phone had no signal. My shoes weren't made for this.
My dress wasn't made for this. Nothing about me was made for running through the wilderness while people who wanted to sell me hunted for the one that got away.