the screen, and the unseen monster who had left his child to die.\n\nLena reached for her phone.\n\nRick stopped her.

‘Not local dispatch.’\n\nShe looked at him, then at the screen, then back at Ava.

She understood immediately.

Any call through county channels would land under Mercer or one of his loyal deputies before help ever reached the girl.

If Mercer had dumped his daughter in a ditch, there was no reason to believe he would stop at lying to cover it.\n\nLena lowered the phone and dialed a different number from memory.

Maggie Sloan answered on the third ring.

She was Washington State Patrol Major Crimes, an old friend from Lena’s Army days, and one of the few law officers Rick had ever heard described with respect by people who distrusted badges on principle.

Lena spoke in clipped sentences.

Child victim.

Severe hypothermia.

Repeated abuse.

Named suspect is county sheriff.

No local dispatch.

Need state eyes now.\n\nMaggie’s voice sharpened instantly.

‘Do not take her to a county facility.

Get her across Mercer County line.

St.

Brigid emergency clinic in Fall City is staffed tonight.

I’m on my way.’\n\nThat would have been hard enough in clear weather.\n\nThen the scanner on the wall crackled to life.\n\nA dispatcher announced a be-on-the-lookout for a black Harley ridden by Richard Gallagher, suspected in the abduction of a minor female named Ava Mercer.

Mercer had moved fast.\n\nRick let out a slow breath through his nose.

‘He knows she’s gone.’\n\nAva heard the name over the scanner and clutched the blanket at her throat.\n\nLena thought for only a second.

‘He’ll watch the highway and the hospital.

We don’t take the bike.’\n\nOne of the chapter members, Coop, tossed Rick the keys to an ancient plumbing van parked behind the garage, the kind nobody ever noticed twice.

Another biker peeled out in Rick’s Harley as a decoy, roaring east into the storm.

Within three minutes Ava was wrapped in blankets in the van’s back bench seat, Lena beside her, Rick driving with both hands welded to the wheel.\n\nThe snow turned the windshield into a shifting white curtain.

Every passing set of headlights made Ava flinch.

Somewhere outside town, once the road smoothed and the immediate panic loosened just enough for words, she began to talk in the thin, careful voice of a child who had learned that truth could be dangerous.\n\nHer mother had died of an aneurysm two years earlier.

Since then Dean Mercer had become worse, not better.

He controlled everything: what Ava wore, what she said at school, where she stood during church photos, when she smiled.

If she cried, he called her dramatic.

If she bruised, he called her clumsy.

The housekeeper who once asked questions was gone within a week.

A nanny left after three months.

Ava had stopped trying to tell adults because the first time she told a deputy that her arm hurt because Daddy squeezed too hard, the deputy laughed gently and told her not to give her father a hard time.

After that, Mercer started locking the cellar when he left the house, telling her it was for her own safety.\n\nThat day at school, her teacher noticed bruises when Ava reached up for paper snowflakes.

She had quietly slipped Ava a note card and told her to write anything she wanted someone to know.