Boneyard Ridge. Пола Грейвс

spend a whole week of secret practice sessions with her cousin from Raleigh before she could navigate her way across the room in a pair.

      How had she turned into such a girl?

      The obvious answer was leaving Boneyard Ridge, making a new life for herself in a world where little redneck tomboys from the hills could easily find themselves chewed up and spit out before they could blink twice.

      She wasn’t going to let her grandmother down, the way everyone else always figured she’d do.

      As she waited for the elevator to the third floor, where Ken Dailey, head of Highland Hotel and Resort’s security team, would be waiting for her with three of the law-enforcement society’s event organizers, she ran the coarse file across her nail, wincing as it snagged heavily on the broken edge. The friction, she saw with dismay, was doing horrible things to the French tip polish. Giving up on the nail-file attachment, she flipped open the scissors and snipped off the whole tip of the broken nail.

      The elevator dinged and the doors swept smoothly open just as she snapped the scissors back into the knife handle. She quickly dropped the knife into the pocket of her jacket and pasted on a smile to greet whoever might be inside the elevator car.

      There was only one other occupant, a scruffy-looking man wearing a maintenance-crew jumpsuit. His green eyes lifted in surprise as he pulled up to keep from running straight into her.

      “Sorry,” he said in a voice as deep as a mountain cavern. He stepped back into the elevator to let her in.

      “You aren’t getting out?” she asked.

      “I pushed the button for the wrong floor.” His gaze dropping, he reached out and started to push the button for the third floor, then looked sheepish when he realized it was already lit up.

      He was a rangy man in his early thirties, with shaggy dark hair that fell into his darting eyes, making him appear to be looking at her from under a hood. He would probably be nice-looking if he didn’t come across as such a sad sack, Susannah thought, torn between pity for his obvious discomfort and irritation that he wouldn’t lift his head and look her in the eye.

      He had spoken in a strong hill-country twang, reminiscent of the harsh mountain accent she’d ruthlessly subdued since leaving Boneyard Ridge.

      “Grubby little tomboys from here don’t get to live out their dreams, Susie,” her grandmother had told her as she handed Susannah $400 in cash and a bus ticket to Raleigh. “You gotta learn how to make it out there in the real world.”

      The maintenance man let her off the elevator first when they reached the third floor. She moved ahead, trying to ignore the prickle on the back of her neck as he brought up the rear. He didn’t overtake her, despite his longer legs. When she stopped to straighten her clothes before entering Meeting Room C, she spared a quick glance his way.

      He kept his head down, apparently determined not to meet her gaze as he passed behind her. He walked with a strangely deliberate gait, as if each step were a decision he had to make before he committed himself to the next one. A couple of steps later, she figured out why. He had a limp.

      She couldn’t remember ever seeing him around the hotel before, but maintenance workers and hospitality staffers had a pretty high turnover rate. Plus, while she wasn’t someone who saw the people who pushed mops and brooms as interchangeable drones, the stress and speed of her job as the resort’s head events coordinator meant she didn’t have the time or opportunity to get to know many people outside of her own office.

      For that matter, she thought as she pasted on her best go-getter smile and opened the door to the meeting room, she barely knew the staff in her own office, including Marcus, her right-hand man. They rarely had time for chitchat and she wasn’t one to socialize with her coworkers off the clock. Or anyone else, for that matter.

      She couldn’t afford friends.

      Four men awaited her in the meeting room, Ken Dailey with hotel security and three others. They stood in a cluster near the large picture window that offered a spectacular view of the mist-shrouded Smoky Mountains to the east.

      She looked with envy at their cups of coffee but knew she didn’t have time to get a cup of her own. They had business to discuss, and she was running out of daylight.

      “Gentlemen, sorry I’m late,” she said, even though she knew full well she was at least five minutes early to the meeting. “We have a lot to cover, so shall we get to work?”

      * * *

      HUNTER BRAGG STOPPED at the end of the hallway and turned back toward the meeting rooms clustered in the center of this wing of the hotel. The door closed shut behind her, and he started to relax, shoving his hair out of his face and straightening his back.

      She hadn’t recognized him from the news reports. He hadn’t really feared she would, given how different he looked from the clean-cut Army sergeant whose abduction had been a weeklong sensation until something new came along to take over the news cycle.

      Of course, he’d recognized her easily from the photo Billy Dawson had shown him and the men he’d selected for the job a few days earlier. “Her name is Susannah Marsh. She’s in our way. Y’all are gonna take her out.”

      In that photograph, taken by a telephoto lens from the woods that hemmed in the resort’s employee parking lot, Susannah Marsh had given off a definite aura of money and sophistication. Her well-tailored suit, the shimmery green of a mallard’s head, and shiny black high heels had offered an intoxicating blend of power and sexuality that had sent the other militia members privy to the plan into flights of lustful fancy.

      All Hunter had been able to think about was the fact that Billy and the others—men he’d spent the last three months befriending—wanted him to take part in killing a woman just because she was in the way of their plans.

      They seemed so ordinary on the outside. Billy Dawson fixed cars out of his garage for a living. Morris Bell drove a Ridge County school bus. Delbert Yarnell worked at the hardware store in Barrowville. They had wives and kids.

      And a festering hatred of authority.

      Down the hall, the elevator dinged and the doors swished open. A well-dressed man in a silk suit and shiny wingtips stepped out and started to turn away from the end of the hall where Hunter stood, but his gaze snapped back in his direction and he changed course, his long strides eating up the distance between them.

      “What are you doing up here?” he asked, frowning.

      The question caught Hunter by surprise. He didn’t know this man, though he looked vaguely familiar. They’d probably passed each other in the halls at some point in the last week.

      But why was this man challenging him?

      The other man’s nostrils flared. “You can’t afford to make her suspicious of you.”

      Hunter blinked. This man was part of Dawson’s crew, too?

      “Don’t worry,” he assured the other man aloud. “She sees me as part of the wallpaper.”

      “We’re making our move tonight.”

      Hunter’s gut clenched. Tonight? Nothing was supposed to go down until tomorrow. What had happened? And why hadn’t Billy Dawson warned him of the change in plans?

      “I know,” he bluffed. “What’s the plan?”

      The other man narrowed his eyes. “Billy didn’t tell me to share it with you.”

      “I thought we were on the same side.”

      “Are we?”

      Hunter returned the other man’s skeptical gaze with a cold, hard stare of his own. “Think I’d be cleaning toilets in this place if we weren’t?”

      The other man straightened his tie, a nervous habit, obviously, since his tie was already immaculately straight. “Just don’t screw this up.”

      “Wouldn’t dream of