jumped back and pulled out her gun. She aimed it at his head.
Careful, don’t blow your cover, June.
To the best of her knowledge, no one in town knew she worked against Samuel. Like most of the two thousand residents of Cold Plains, June attended his motivational seminars on Being the Best You. She pretended to hang on to his every word, painting herself as a potential Devotee on the cusp of conversion. Samuel had even suggested she come to one of his private counseling sessions, which were where he did most of his mind control. He was a master at preying on any insecurity, exposing a person’s deepest fears and then promising to make them feel safe. His message was that as long as you were a Devotee, you were safe—in turn he wanted obedience, time and money. But if you tried to escape, as Lacy just had, he wanted you dead.
“What’s your name?” she demanded. “What are you doing out here in the woods?”
His hand went to the holster at his hip.
“I have your weapon. It’s missing rounds. Did you shoot at them?”
He frowned.
“Shoot at who?”
“There’s a young mother and her two children lost in these woods. I’m looking for them. Are you chasing them? Did you hurt them?”
He tried to sit up, groaning in pain. And as he moved June caught sight of something lying in the soil behind his shoulder—a little, sparkly red shoe.
Rage arrowed through her body, obliterating any trace of fear.
“Don’t move! Or I will shoot you dead. Where did you find that shoe?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about … I can’t seem to remember … anything.” His voice faded and he touched the wound on his brow, his fingertips coming away bloody. He stared at the blood, a look of disorientation on his rugged features.
“What’s your name?” she repeated.
His gaze lifted slowly and met hers, and in his eyes June saw the beginnings of fear. “I … Jesus—I don’t know my name,” he whispered.
June swallowed.
Was he playing her?
What was she going to do with him now? Leave him out here to die—which he might if he was disoriented and lost more blood. And if hypothermia kicked in, he was finished.
June glanced at his GPS device lying near her feet.
“Where were you going when you fell down here?”
“I told you, I don’t know.”
“Which way is Cold Plains?” she said.
“Cold Plains?”
“You’ve never heard of Cold Plains?”
“I …” He cursed softly.
June swore to herself. She was not capable of leaving him to die out here. She was programmed to rescue, had been ever since she was a kid. June was the child who saved bugs from puddles. It was why she became a paramedic. It was why she worked for SAR—she was wired to help those in despair.
But she had not been able to help her husband. The sudden memory stab, the sharp reminder of her inadequacies, hurt.
Holding her gun on him with one hand, she reached down and picked up his GPS with the other. She pressed the menu button, saw that he’d been saving his route—and he appeared to have hiked in not from Cold Plains, but from over the mountains.
“You’ve come a long way,” she said. “You’ve saved a route into these mountains from forty miles north—where were you before that?”
He groaned, lay back. “I wish I knew.”
He needed help—he was still losing blood. He might have been lying here for hours. She had no idea how bad his leg wound was. And daylight was beginning to filter down into the ravine. She had maybe an hour to hike all the way down into Cold Plains and to head around to the search base camp on the other side of the mountain, and she’d still found no sign of Lacy and the twins.
Her only solution—if one could even call it that—was to take this stranger back to the safe house and hold him there until she could fetch FBI Agent Hawk Bledsoe. It was risky, but she didn’t have time to think further.
“I’m going to help you, okay?”
He nodded.
“I’m putting this gun away.” Please don’t let this be a mistake … “And if you hurt me, you’re going to die out here, alone, understand?”
His eyes remained locked onto hers. “I don’t hurt people.”
She holstered her Glock. “How would you know?” She shrugged out of her backpack as she spoke. “You don’t even know your name.”
Crouching down next to him, she opened her pack and removed her first-aid kit. His pulse was within range, and he was breathing okay—she’d seen that much.
“Can you move your limbs? Any numbness in your extremities?”
He grunted. “No. Just … weak.”
Blood loss was her priority now.
“I’m going to cut open the bottom of your jeans. I want to take a look at that injury on your leg,” she said as she reached for her scissors and began splitting open the base of his pants. The gash on his head was bad, but the one on his leg could be worse—she needed to see what she was dealing with.
He groaned in pain as she peeled the bloodied and rain-soaked denim off a deep gash on his calf.
He was going to need sutures.
She worked quickly to clean and dry the wound as best she could, shielding him from the rain with her body. There was no arterial damage or obvious fracture—just a big surface gash probably caused by sharp rock during his fall.
Pulling the edges of the cut together, she applied butterfly sutures from her kit. Then she wound a bandage tightly around his calf, urgency powering her movements.
“This should work as a temporary stopgap,” she said as she began to clean the cut on his temple.
His gaze caught hers and she stilled for a second—the intensity in his eyes was disturbing. He smelled faintly of wood smoke.
“You been camping?” she said.
He inhaled sharply as disinfectant touched his cut. “I—I really don’t know.” Then, as he thought deeper: “Do I have a backpack with me?”
“I can’t see one.”
He closed his eyes, clearly straining to remember. Then he swore softly again. “I feel as if I might have had a pack or something. That I was going somewhere … important.”
The cut on his head, if
