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didn’t coddle her like the nurses; he didn’t cry like her father; he didn’t shuffle his feet nervously like Sheriff Donaldson had when he interviewed her the day before.
    Quinn Peterson stood like granite, tall, strong, firm, never wavering, never letting her see pity in his eyes.
    Her entire body ached. The cuts on her feet stung even with the antibiotics and painkillers. Many of the cuts on her body had to be stitched, leaving scars she’d have for the rest of her life. The doctors had saved her breasts, though the damage had been severe.
    She was alive, Sharon was dead. The scars on her skin were nothing compared to the jagged pain of guilt splitting her heart.
    “You don’t have to do this,” Special Agent Quincy Peterson told Miranda when she said she would take him back to where she and Sharon had been held captive.
    “Yes I do, Agent Peterson,” she’d said when they left the hospital. “I have to take you.”
    She couldn’t think about her pain. Not now. She would do anything to find the man who murdered Sharon, because her best friend was dead and she was alive.
    If it took going back to the rotting, moldy, rodent-infested hovel she’d been imprisoned in for seven hellish days, she would do it.
    “I understand,” he said, and she believed he did. Everyone else who’d spoken to her seemed to want to placate her, but not this man. “Do you think you could call me Quinn? Agent Peterson seems too formal.”
    “Okay.”
    She had pinpointed the general area on the map and they drove in as far as they could before having to get out on foot, but they were three miles away.
    If only they’d run in the other direction! They’d have hit a narrow road, but a road nonetheless. Would that have changed their fate? Would Sharon still be alive?
    “I told her we should split up,” Miranda whispered when it was just her and Agent Peterson—Quinn.
    “That was a good idea.”
    “Sharon refused. We were so scared, I didn’t argue. And—” She stopped.
    “Go on.”
    “We didn’t understand why he was releasing us. Until we saw the gun. Then it was very clear—he wanted to hunt us down like animals. I don’t think we even thought about it, we certainly didn’t talk about it. We had no time. He told us to run.”
    Run. Run!
    “And we both knew exactly what he was going to do. He was going to kill us. Injured game.” She laughed bitterly.
    During that walk, Quinn stayed at her side. Asked her quiet, firm questions. Never saying he was sorry. Never placating her. Never telling her she should have done something different, as she had the million times she’d questioned herself in the seventy-two hours since she’d been found on the bank of the Gallatin River.
    She led them right to the decrepit shack in the middle of Nowhere,
Montana
, six miles west of the river where she’d jumped to her freedom. She stared at the rotting, worn planks that had been thrown up, seeming too weak to support the corrugated tin roof. She’d seen the outside of the shack for only a brief moment before she and Sharon started to run. But the inside of the cabin was burned into her mind.
    Miranda couldn’t go inside. She sat in the dirt and cried.
    Quinn went in. The sheriff’s people gathered evidence at his direction. Sheriff Donaldson was nearing retirement and wanted to catch Sharon’s killer as his swan song, so he took all advice from the FBI agent he’d called in the day before.
    Quinn then sat down on the ground next to her.
    “You’re going to get your nice pants dirty” was all she could think of saying. He certainly wasn’t dressed for a mountain trek, but he didn’t seem to care that his expensive shoes were scuffed and dirty.
    “I will find this guy. I promise you, he will pay for what he did to you and Sharon.”
    She stared at him, searching his dark eyes for pity, revulsion, or distaste. All she saw was strength, compassion, and anger.
    “I will do everything I can to help.”
    But in the end, for all