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“No one here by that name. You must have the wrong address.” She had no idea what made her blurt the denial.

Maybe the ghost of her father’s delusional warnings before his death, that if anyone called or came by asking about him, she should deny knowing him or his whereabouts.

Yes, that was part of an old man’s paranoia, but the denial spilled from her lips before she had time to think better of it.

“You’ll find,” the dark stranger said slowly, “that it’s not a real good idea to lie to me, Lexia.” She blinked rapidly, drew in a shallow gasp. “That is who you are, isn’t it? Dr. Lexia Stoltz?”

"Lexi Stoltz,” she said. “Now it’s your turn. Who are you? How do you know my name? And what are you doing at my door in the middle of the night?"

“I told you, I’m here to see your father.”

Another sound came from upstairs, and it shouldn’t have. A tingle of ice crept up her spine and she glanced over her shoulder toward the stairs. There was definitely something going on up there. Maybe a raccoon had got in, like in the fall.

“My father isn’t here,” she said. “I’m sorry you came all the way up here for nothing.” She started to close the door, but he stuck a foot in the way, and her heart gave a warning flutter. “What do you think you’re–”

“Sorry. I’m not buying it." He shouldered his way past her into the house. Then he took a long, slow look around as Lexi stood there watching him and trying to decide what the hell to do. She was alone. There were no landline phones and cell service was spotty at best. But he wouldn’t know that.

His soulless gaze swept the room, from the flickering scented candles burning here and there, to the fireplace, to the giant spruce tree standing in the window.

“Where is he?” As he said it, he took a deliberate step toward her.

She shook her head and took an equal step away from him. “I’m calling the police. And then I’m going to turn my dogs loose, and?—”

“You’re not calling anyone, because there’s no phone up here. And if you had dogs, they’d be barking at me by now. Listen, Lexi, I’ll be a lot easier to deal with than whoever comes through that door next.”

When he said that, it scared her, and the noises upstairs came back to her mind.

Involuntarily, she glanced toward the wide staircase.

Each step was a half log, flat side up, and the railings were birch branches and limbs still dressed in their white, knotty bark, preserved under layers of shellac.

Her heart tripped over itself again and then launched into a full gallop.

“Someone’s upstairs, then. Who, Lexia? Your father?”

“Stop calling me that.” She averted her eyes, tried to focus on getting her heartbeat under control, but it was too late. The tachycardia was off and running.

She felt as if she wasn’t getting enough air, which made her breathe more quickly, which made her dizzy. This was not an unfamiliar event, and not a dangerous one, but its timing sucked. Another sound came from upstairs then and her expression probably gave away that it shouldn’t have.

The stranger—whose eyes were the darkest imaginable blue, she saw now that the firelight reached them—reached inside his coat and pulled out a handgun.

When she saw it, her heart sped even faster.

It felt like a jackhammer trying to break out from inside.

She pressed her hands to her chest, an automatic reaction to the thundering of her heart, then spun around and ran out of the great room.

She didn’t even know whether she was running away from the gun or toward her stash of meds.

She needed to take a pill and take it fast, before this episode got out of hand.

The beautiful Dr. Stoltz had run through a dark archway before he could stop her. Romano hadn’t expected it, and something, instinct maybe, made him hesitate before going after her.

He saw where the broad staircase began, saw her stop at the base of it, and snatch a pill bottle from a stand there. She twisted it open and then quickly dry-swallowed a pill. Then she bowed her head, deliberately breathing slowly and evenly while apparently waiting for relief to come.

She stepped around the staircase, just out of his line of vision. And the second she was out of his sight, he heard her scream.

Romano ducked to one side of the doorway, peering around it, cursing his eyes for not adjusting more quickly to the dimness.

Then she came into sight again, a dark angel in a white cotton nightgown, her eyes wide with fear.

But her fear had little effect on the brute who pressed a gun barrel so tight to her temple that it was probably biting into her skin.

The thug, all in black and wearing a ski mask, crushed her to his chest.

There was a deep growl that drew his gaze, and then a yellow cat the size of a small mountain lion arched its back, hissed and disappeared into the depths of the place.

Romano cussed mentally, bringing his attention back where it belonged.

Lexia Stoltz's eyes were rounder than ever. Dark brown, with lashes like paintbrush fringe. The guy who held her was almost invisible in the darkened room, and he apparently wasn’t aware of Romano’s presence.

Experience and caution— or maybe instinct— had told him to park his own ride a few hundred yards down the dirt road, so they wouldn’t have seen that, either.

And he had no doubt it was “they” and not just “he.” Because this fellow was not Mr. White.

Romano was one of the only men in US Intelligence ever to have seen White in person, if from a distance.

And there was no mistaking him. This guy was one of White’s henchmen, and while their boss worked alone, his muscle worked in bunches.

Romano sidled his way to the front door and slipped through it, unseen, into the winter night.

Lexi still had her pill bottle in her hand. Her heart was still running like a freight train on crack, and it would take a few minutes for the medication to kick in and convert it back to a normal rhythm.

She felt sick and dizzy, partly from fear, but mostly from the racing heartbeat.

The man's grip was too tight on her, crushing her chest, which wasn’t helping her tachycardia.

The gun barrel pressed painfully against her temple and she was trying not to think how easily he might pull the trigger by accident.

She scanned the room for Jax. Her poor cat would be terrified by all this disruption. He was probably hiding, scared half to death.

“Where is your father?” the man rasped into her ear. When she didn’t answer instantly, the gun barrel drove harder into the side of her head. “Where is he!”

He had an unusual accent. Russian, she thought. “I don’t?—”

“Is he here, in the house?”

“I don’t know what you’re?—”

The barrel embedded deeper. It cut. Warm blood trickled down the side of her face. “He’s not here!” She’d lost track of the stranger, but assumed that this guy was with him.

The pressure eased a little. Maybe now they’d leave, go search for her father somewhere else. What did they want with him? Why was this happening?

Someone might be after me, Lexia.

Her father’s words floated back to her, as if he were speaking them now. But her father had been delusional, sick. And that was more than six months ago, almost seven, for God’s sake!

The man shoved her through the archway into the great room, toward the door. She tripped over Jax and he let out a howl before streaking out of the room to hide. She stumbled on the rug but couldn’t fall down. The man’s grip on her was too tight to let her.

“You will take us to him, then,” he said in that accent.

She’d never been so afraid in her life. And she wondered if these men meant to kill her. And where was the other one? The one who’d played good cop by knocking on the door like a human while his pal had apparently scaled her cabin and come in through an upstairs window.

“I know who you are, Lexia Stoltz,” the man with the gun whispered into her ear, and his accent made his words seem even more frightening. “You will take us to your father or we will kill you. A simple choice, really. Take us to him, and we let you go.”

“But my father isn’t?—”

The gun pressed harder. “No talk. You will take us to him.”

She bit her lips to stop them from trembling. She had a feeling that no matter what she said, this animal would kill her anyway. And she couldn’t have spoken a coherent phrase even if she’d wanted to, with her heart racing, and that sensation of no air. Her words were whispery at best.

Could her father have been sane all along? Was this what he’d been running away from? Had he been telling the truth when he’d told her that someone might come after him?

The man in the ski mask pulled her backward, through the front door.

He stopped just outside, turning again, staring down the gravel driveway into the darkness beyond.

“If you do not cooperate, it will be most unpleasant for you. And in the end, you will talk all the same. Better to do so now, and spare yourself a lot of pain.”

Lexi stared into the darkness, across snowy meadows and forested hills, but there was no help for her out there.

The wind was icy on her cheeks. Pine boughs sighed in time as it whispered through their needles.

Early winter’s chill laced the air, and it tasted like snow.

It seemed like such an ordinary night. Clean and crisp and cold.

She wished the cold would snap her heart back into rhythm.

It might, if she could get a handful and press it to the back of her neck.

He backed down the front steps then turned to wave, and she saw a black van parked at the end of her driveway like a shark waiting there to devour her. Even the windows were tinted.

The van’s headlights flashed on and it rolled closer. Ski Mask shoved her forward as the van stopped and its side door slid opened.

The interior lights came on. She planted her feet, resisting as the thug tried to shove her toward that open door.

And then she saw a form crumpled on the van’s floor, dressed entirely in black just like the one who held her.

From inside, a booted foot nudged the body, and it rolled out and dropped to the ground.

The man holding her pushed her to down to her knees, shouting a curse, lifting his gun, and firing at the van.

The other man—the hollow-eyed stranger who’d come to her door tonight—came out of nowhere and took Ski Mask right to the ground, yanking his gun from his hand on the way, then with a bash of the butt to his skull, either knocked him out cold or killed him.

Panting, he looked up at Lexi. Her eyes never leaving his, she backed away a step, then two. He’d saved her, but for what purpose?

He bent down to pat the other man down, yanking weapons from him and shoving them into his own pockets and holsters and whatever. Then he straightened and she saw the blood on the front left side of his shirt.

It didn’t matter that he’d been hurt, she told herself. He was no better than the other one, and she was getting the hell out of here.

She turned to run and wondered if she should or even could in a state of tachycardia.

“There’s more of them on the way, Lexia. You won’t get far.”

The words were low, and she could hear the pain that laced each one. It was enough to make her pause and look back. He was pointing the gun at the ground, but he hadn’t put it away. “You’re either going to have to deal with me, or more like these two. Believe me, they won’t be far behind.”

She shook her head, shock seeping like ice water through her veins. She lifted her hands to press them to either side of her head, biting her lips to keep them from trembling. She was dizzy and her heart was still pounding far faster than it ought to.

“Dammit, get a grip. Tell me where your father is or he’ll end up dead … or worse.”

He was bleeding a lot. The gleaming scarlet stain on the front of his shirt grew and spread. His left arm hung useless at his side while his right one gestured with the gun as he spoke.

She took another step backward. Her car was in the garage, she thought. If she could only get to her car …

One of the men on the ground moaned, and she went still.

“Snap out of it, Lexi! Your life is in danger, or haven’t you figured that out yet? You don’t really want me to drive off and leave you to these two, do you?”

She dragged her eyes from the man on the ground, to the one standing in front of her.

His hair was tousled and wild and his eyes were intense.

His arm must be hurting. His unshaven jaw was rigid and she could see the corded muscles in his neck standing out.

Yes, he was in pain. A lot of it. He came closer, lifted his wounded arm, gripped her shoulder in a hand that dripped blood. “Dammit, where is your father?”

She blinked, tearing her eyes from his to look down at one of the forms on the ground— the one that groaned again and moved a little. Then she focused on those intense eyes. In the moonlight, she saw them, pain-glazed, but piercing.

“My father is dead,” she whispered, because she couldn’t seem to speak louder. Fear and the tachycardia made her throat swell nearly shut.

“Dead?”

She nodded, and he swore fluently.

“All right. Okay, we’ll have to search the house.” His hand finally fell away from her, but she felt the sticky warmth it left behind. “Get me some rope, or duct tape or whatever you have, so I can keep these two from kicking the hell out of me. And make it fast. We have a couple of hours at most.”

Lexi blinked, not moving. This wasn’t happening. This couldn’t be happening. My God, what did this man want? What did it have to do with her father? Why did he want to search her house?

Of all the questions swirling in her mind, she only voiced one. “A couple of hours until what?”

“Until some friends of these guys show up, or maybe some other guys who'll be just as nasty. The rope, Lexi.”

“What is this all about?”

He scowled at her until his dark brows touched.

Still breathing as if she’d just run a marathon, she shook herself and turned toward the little greenhouse beside the cabin.

On the way, she scooped up a handful of snow and slapped across the back of her neck.

The shock it made her gasp, and there was an awful sensation in her chest as her heart converted itself back into a normal rhythm. And then it eased.

She continued on to the garden shed, the one that held all of her father’s gardening tools.

He used to love to putter in his garden at home, and the first thing he’d done upon arriving up here was to start a new one in the back, hoe out the old greenhouse and get it fixed up.

The last three months of his life, he’d spent more time on his gardening than he’d spent with her.

Lexi hated the greenhouse.

But she went inside anyway, and she found some rope.