Until Clear Creek, I’ve never lived anywhere that had forests like this. Abby preferred cities when she was free, for obvious reasons. But hiking with Wes through middle school and high school had taught me not just the beauty but the value of the woods. They’re secret and silently loud, and the forgotten mining roads make the part of me born to run and hide settle sweetly. And now it’s proving useful.
I feel kind of silly lurking behind the trees downhill from the deer blind, listening to the mayor’s bad shots and waiting for the beer to catch up with him and open my window of opportunity. Finally, the erratic shooting ceases, and I hear the thump and creak of the ladder. He’s on the move.
I move when he does, watching him disappear through the trees to go pee somewhere away from his hunting ground. I hurry up the embankment, heading toward the trees he’ll pass on the way back to the blind. I tape the pictures against the trunk at eye level, where he won’t be able to miss them. Then I climb up into the blind, pulling the ladder up and inside behind me.
Sitting back into the shadows, I wait, my heart ratcheting up with each moment that passes. His rifle is right there. I edge away from it. It’s not that I’m scared . . . and it’s not that I’m tempted.
It’s that I know where things go if I touch it. So I don’t.
His footsteps crunch through the underbrush, so loud they probably send any prey scattering for a half mile. My nails bite into my palms. I guess he found the photos. I hope he’s terrified.
“Hey,” he shouts from below.
I give myself a moment to breathe. Because a part of me is scared, but a part of me is gloriously excited. The kind of happy that little kids feel when they see their birthday cake. Gleeful in the I’m gonna win way, because this is what I’m good at. But I need to play it right. There’s too much riding on this to mess it up.
“I know you’re in there!”
I pop up into view in the doorway of the deer blind like the nastiest of surprises. “Hi, Mayor.”
His jaw is probably still hurting, it drops so hard. It takes all the wind out of him, and he sags in shock, almost wheezing out my name. But in his hand is one of the photos I’d taped to the tree. It’s glossy and high definition. I’d splurged on the good paper for effect. It creaks and crumples as he fists it.
“I’m gonna stay up here while we have this talk,” I say, taking great care to settle myself in the doorway and letting my legs dangle along the edge.
He doesn’t sputter, but he takes a good ten seconds to respond. They tick by, because ten seconds is a long time when it’s just us two in the woods and there’s blackmail material taped to the trees. A little drama to get his blood pumping.
“What are you doing here, Nora?” he asks, like that day in the kitchen where my hand curled around the butcher knife.
There’s no running from this. I don’t want to. I came here for this.
The mayor’s never liked me. I’ve always unnerved him, and I could never tell if it was because I wasn’t as girly as he’d like or if he somehow senses the grift in me.
Besides preachers, politicians are the other acceptable kind of grifters, after all. I’ve known from day one that the mayor’s more than a little shady. And now there’s proof in his hand and on a few trees he missed on his run back here to get his gun.
“Did your sister take these photos?” he demands. “Is she around here, too?” He looks over his shoulder, nervous for the first time.
“I took the photos. Lee doesn’t know anything about your after-work activities. Just me.”
His expression shifts, and even though I’ve been waiting for that, adrenaline has my heart knocking against my ribs as he steps forward, going from I’m fucked to fuck her up in a blink.
“Uh-uh.” I press my thumb down on the stun gun that I take out of my pocket. Does he even recognize the jacket as Wes’s? Probably not. I wore it as a reminder. I wore it for strength.
Electricity sparks, the zap crackle of it filling the space between us, and just like a dog brought to heel, he stops.
His eyes narrow. He’s thinking it through. Putting it together. That afternoon in the kitchen when I stopped him from checking on Wes. All the little moments before that. What kind of girl would anticipate his every move? What kind of girl would do this? He’s getting there.
“I’ve got backups of the photos,” I continue. “I hacked into your email, so I have all of those, too. You need better answers to the security questions. Now it’s all triggered to get sent to local news sources—and the sheriff—unless I enter a password every day. So you’re not going to do anything stupid right now, like try to kill me and bury me in the woods.”