and no one did. This was Alaska, where people respected one another’s privacy. Because that privacy often came heavily armed.
It was nice that it was summer, she thought, as she hit the ground twenty seconds after waking up. Cool, but not cold, and that weird almost-light she’d never quite gotten used to. She froze when she landed and assessed the situation. Half hoping it had been nothing but another bad dream—but no, she could see the glow of a real, honest-to-God fire flickering in the gloom, from the front of the restaurant.
There was no time to mourn her life here. There was no time to grieve for what she was losing in those flames.
It was never your life in the first place, she reminded herself fiercely. Not out loud, because she had to assume that whoever had started the fire was still here. Waiting for her to reveal herself.
She executed her plan, the way she’d practiced and plotted so many times. She slunk up the hill, trying to blend in with the shadows and make as little noise as possible, then caught the trail out to the community hot springs. She changed her shoes when she hit the cabin that made the hot springs accessible and comfortable all year round, grabbing the hiking boots she kept there for precisely this purpose, then kept going.
And she didn’t look back.
She told herself she didn’t want to look back, because the next step was all that mattered.
Caradine had worked out a lot of contingency plans over the years. If they came when it was winter and too cold to risk prolonged exposure outside. If an assailant broke into her apartment and attacked her, leaving her injured but still needing to disappear. If they got the drop on her and incapacitated her. If they reverted to type and used a fire—either meant to lure her out or meant to kill her.
They’d gone with the fire. Downstairs, in the middle of the night. That suggested they wanted to give her the chance to live long enough to be killed in a more personally upsetting fashion. And they weren’t chasing her out of town now, meaning whoever had started the fire probably figured she was still inside. They’d have to look for her body before they decided to look for her, and she could use that.
She would use everything she had, the way she always did.
The minute she was in the woods again on the trail that led away from town, she ran. Flat out. And she was grateful that she’d trained so hard all this time. So relentlessly, year after year, without any contact, because she’d known that sooner or later, it would come to this.
It would have been so easy to get soft. To let herself imagine she was safe, here on a faraway island with its very own collection of commandos. To shift over into complacency about this, too.
That was what they’d been banking on. Caradine had no doubt.
A brutal and vertical forty-five minutes after she’d been woken up by the sound of shattering glass, Caradine made it to the inlet she’d found by accident her first year in Grizzly Harbor. When she’d done the same hike at a reasonable pace and it had taken hours. She was more breathless than she liked, sure, but that was as much to do with adrenaline-fueled trail running in the half dark as it was the fact she’d heard the Alaska Force helicopter overhead.
Another thing she couldn’t let herself focus on. Not now.
Not until she found a place she could hole up in, assess the scope of the damage, then figure out her next steps. Caradine knew there was no point succumbing to emotion when she couldn’t contain it—and when she couldn’t tell if she was blundering into a wider trap.
And maybe by that time she could forget that when she’d heard the helicopter overhead, her first reaction had been relief. As if they were coming to save her.
As if she could be saved.
She climbed down the sharp ravine and found a boat that looked like the one she’d practiced on, pretending for years that she truly wanted to learn how to fish and wasn’t scoping out escape routes. She checked the fuel gauge, started it up, and headed out fast. Straight out across the choppy water to the neighboring island she’d explored years ago. She left the boat in another isolated cove, nicely tied up so it would find its way back to its owner