Page 15 of Disappearance at Angel’s Landing (Red Rock Murders #2)

Pain arched straight down her front.

Rock cut into Lila’s chest, palms and hips as the weight on her back held her in place. Agony ripped through her scalp as the killer pulled her hair back, forcing her upper body off the ground. Another scream tore from her throat, echoing down the canyon a mere few hundred feet in front of her.

She’d almost made it. She’d almost escaped.

But despite the wound in the killer’s leg, he’d somehow caught up to her. Had tackled her from behind. Driving a knee into her spine, he pressed his mouth against her ear. “Hello, darling.”

Tears burned in her eyes, but she wouldn’t let them fall. Not for this asshole. Her lungs had yet to get the message to start functioning again. They spasmed from the impact as she clawed at his hand in her hair.

In a move any professional wrestler would be proud of, the killer flipped her onto her back with ease. His knees locked down on her arms, holding her in place. “What did I tell you would happen if you ran, Ranger Jordan?”

The sun glared down on her, blocking his features, but she didn’t need for him to see her clearly for him to kill her. Or to feel the gun pressed against her temple. The metal was surprisingly cold in a landscape toasting at a pleasant one hundred and six degrees.

“It’s amateurs like you who give kidnapping a bad name. I mean, come on. Didn’t you see the water bottle coming?”

The words were a farce. A desperate attempt to distract her brain from recognizing these were her final moments. Her laugh—something along the lines of hysteric and disassociated—cut between them. “You should’ve seen your face.”

He dragged the barrel from her head down her cheek, clutching her jaw with his free hand. His strength was enough to leave bruises if she walked away from this alive. “That mouth of yours just doesn’t stop, does it?”

“I’ve met scarecrows with more spine than you.

” The words were garbled due to the restraint on her jaw, but based on the contortion of his expression, she felt he got the gist. Pushing against his knees, Lila fought to free her arms, but he only shifted his weight forward.

She bucked her hips. Again, going nowhere.

She pinched her eyes shut against the frustrated growl trying to escape.

Oh, dang. No wonder Branch growled at her so often.

This was aggravating as hell. “Get off me.”

“You’re exhausting, you know that? No wonder someone tried to cut your throat.

” He set the barrel of the gun beneath her chin, then dragged it across the scar tissue spanning from the right side of her neck to the left.

“They wanted to steal your voice, didn’t they?

Wanted to shut you up. Maybe I should be the one to finish a job. Hmm?”

His words hurt more than she wanted to admit, and the first tear fell.

Shame spiked through her, and she tried to buck him free again, but it was no use.

He held her steady, pinned against the very earth she’d worked so hard to protect from people like him.

People who didn’t appreciate the beautiful things in life.

Who saw something fragile and pushed it to the breaking point.

Who walked through this world with the expectation for everyone else to fall on their knees in gratitude for their mere presence. People like her brother-in-law.

“No, no, no. Don’t cry, Ranger Jordan.” Lowering his face over hers, he cocked his head to one side, studying her as the park geologists studied sediment rates under a microscope.

His breath fanned down her neck, over her scar, until it was all she could focus on.

“Relax. I’ll make it quick. You won’t even feel a thing. ”

Don’t scream, Lila. Every time you fight me, I’ll make it hurt more.

That voice. It didn’t belong to the killer. The words played on repeat until the man in front of her didn’t exist at all.

She was back in her bedroom in her parents’ basement.

His hand clamped over her mouth, pressing her deeper into her pillow.

It hurt. The way he handled her. She didn’t know how it was possible she hadn’t heard him come into her room.

She’d locked the door, hadn’t she? She locked it every night since he’d moved in upstairs, noting the way he watched her do the dishes or how his face changed when she came home sweaty from soccer practice.

She couldn’t see his face right now, but she knew every angle from their time together over the years.

Every line. Even the jagged scar down the side of his face.

From a fight, he’d told her, but something about him being in her room in the middle of the night—pressing her into the mattress with his weight and nothing but whispers—made her think tonight wasn’t the first time he’d done this.

That maybe he hadn’t escaped unscathed. He pried his hand from her face, trusting her not to scream.

But she’d never taken well to following orders.

Lila screamed into her attacker’s face, and he reared back.

It was all the chance she needed as his knees briefly lifted off her arms. She dug her fingernails into his face and scratched downward as hard as she could, her survival instincts consuming logic.

His scream fed into a sick satisfaction a split second before the gun slammed against her head.

Lightning exploded behind her eyes as she fell back, but the need to escape had already taken hold.

She shoved her bloodied palms into his chest as hard as she could.

He fell back, pinned her legs to the ground, but it was enough.

The gun went with him. Snapping out of his grip, it landed too far away for her to grab.

Lila flipped onto her stomach. Run. All she could do was run.

She pushed upright. Her toes failed to leverage packed, cracked dirt, and her boot slipped out from underneath her.

She went down but managed to get her balance as the killer fought for his.

She pumped her legs as hard as she could.

She’d been training for this day. Every single true crime podcast had led her to this moment.

With his DNA under her blood-crusted fingernails, she’d give the National Park Service everything she could to identify her killer.

“You bitch!” Pure rage laced those two words. Too close. How the hell did he manage to stay on her heels with that wound?

Aiming for the canyon mouth, Lila maneuvered over a felled tree that hadn’t survived the forest fire two years ago.

Her hot pink boot lace caught on a branch, and she thrust her leg forward to break through.

The overly loud snap gave up her position, but she wouldn’t stop.

Couldn’t. A cool breeze taunted her from the canyon entrance.

She was going to make it. She didn’t have any other choice as the memories of that night in her bedroom waited for the smallest sliver of her attention.

She hated this feeling. Helplessness. Weakness. Pain. It was too similar to those horrifying minutes a man she was told to trust had turned into a monster. Her throat convulsed as though she was right back there in that basement, a scream trapped in her throat.

Shadows crept toward her as the cliffs took shape on either side.

Her skin cooled instantly as she scrambled along the riverbed.

Smooth stones and awkwardly angled trees growing out of the rock face threatened to trip her up.

The canyon itself offered little protection from the killer at her back, but without the sun beating down on her, she felt more herself. Clearheaded.

She couldn’t go like this for miles. She’d already burned through the hit of caffeine from this morning and hadn’t eaten more than a protein bar before the landslide.

Every step took her deeper into Zion wilderness, where the rangers assigned to the backcountry patrolled few and far between.

She was actively running away from help, and the killer must know that.

He was isolating her. Keeping her from seeking help. Prey to his predator.

Hide. She needed a place to hide, then she could worry about contacting NPS and making sure search and rescue looked for Branch.

Lila shut down the sob fighting for release.

No. She couldn’t think like that. He was alive.

They were going to make it out of this and meet up for coffee the next time neither of them had a shift to cover.

He’d given her his word. It was all she could focus on as a dark hole took shape in the rock face up ahead.

A cave.

It sat about twenty feet off the canyon floor with a few rocks and trees acting as stairs if she was careful. It was also the first place the killer would look for her. And potentially where she could be eaten alive by the mountain cougars that lived in the park. But she had to take the risk.

Her palms screamed in protest as she hauled herself up the first oddly angled tree. The bark fell away under her weight, and she slammed into the wall at her side. Rock grated against her exposed skin, but she pushed to the next obstacle. This would make a great audition for American Gladiator .

Darkness enveloped her as she reached the mouth of the cave.

Cold air raised the hair on the back of her neck.

It was damp and smelled of carnage and decomposition.

Something definitely lived in this cave full-time, and she hoped whatever it was had gone hunting instead of waiting for food to walk right in the front door.

The cave curved deeper into the mountain, cutting off the only source of light at the mouth, but distance didn’t ease the tension knotting in her stomach.

Wetness clung to the walls and soaked into her uniform, and it took everything in her not to groan out of disgust. It’d take a miracle to get the decomposition smell out of cotton.

She could already see Risner’s signature drying on another write-up for disgracing her uniform.

Cringing against the sticky substance now coating her hands, she moved deeper into the cave.

“I know you’re in here, Ranger Jordan. You can’t hide from me.”

Movement echoed down the tunnel of the cave, accentuating every word out of the killer’s mouth. She hadn’t heard him follow her inside. How had he managed to keep his footsteps from bouncing off the rock walls? Or had she not noticed due to the chaos in her head?

“I know every inch of this park.” He was getting closer. “Most likely better than you.”

Fresh images reserved for her nightmares were right there on the cusp of her waking mind, but she couldn’t think about that right now.

Lila felt her way deeper into the cave. This was a bad idea, but it was the only option she had right now.

She’d brained him with his own water bottle, then scratched caverns down his face.

Nope. She wasn’t getting out of this alive if he had anything to say about it. “Why did you kill Sarah Lantos?”

His low laugh leaked into her body like a cold drip that stole her body temperature.

“Some people deserve to die. Sarah was one of them. She made me suffer by keeping her secret all these years. Threatened everyone I cared about. I granted her a mere taste of my pain by stabbing her. But then she had to go trip on a rock and fall over the edge of the cliff. Ended my fun too soon.”

Lila’s gut clenched. “Do I deserve to suffer?”

She hadn’t meant to ask the question. Didn’t want to give him any sort of power over her, but there it was.

The one question she’d asked herself a thousand times since the fallout of her actions from that night.

Did she deserve to suffer? Her family certainly thought so.

Sometimes she did, too. Maybe this was always going to be her ending.

But then why had the universe allowed Branch to come into her life?

“You’re just like her, you know.” Gravel grated nearby, and then she could feel him.

Right in front of her. As though he’d simply thought of her location and appeared.

His outline solidified the longer she begged her vision to catch up.

As did the gun. “You latch onto your targets by pretending to be something you’re not, then manipulate them into following your agenda. And for that, you’re going to die.”

A gunshot exploded.