“They started shouting at each other. My mom was furious because he’d scared the hell out of me. She stood up to him, and shoved him back, trying to push him out of her studio. He pushed back. My mom almost fell but caught herself. And then he held up the painting, stabbing and slashing through the canvas until it hung in shreds. It was horrible. I couldn’t stop crying.”
Roan scowled. It was a sign of things to come from Leath. And he was out there, somewhere, right now. But where?
Chapter Twenty-One
Anton moved his thumb lightly down the curve of his SOG SEAL Team Elite seven-inch blade. He sat in his hide on the largest of the two Pine Grove halves. It was the closest, distance-wise, to that cedar cabin sitting out half a mile away on the valley floor. And his target, Shiloh Gallagher, was in that cedar cabin.
The chill of the morning was deep as the sun just began to climb over the horizon. He’d been in his newly created hide, halfway up the hill, surrounded by Douglas fir, for two days. Getting lucky on his stakeout, lying prone in a pasture of deep grass on the ranch, he’d seen her ride up to the hills and disappear.
Anton had waited until night, left his sniper post in the pasture, and walked the mile to Pine Grove as marked on the topo map he carried. What surprised him was the cabin hidden on the other side of the tallest hill. And it was there that he’d seen not only Shiloh, but a cowboy. He’d lain perfectly still until they’d both ridden away. Clearly, there was a relationship between them and it only made him feel even happier that he could destroy both of them.
Moving his thumb down the titanium nitride–coated blade, he visualized how he was going to use it on that bratty Shiloh. He’d stalked her for six months in Manhattan. And he found he enjoyed this stalking out here in Wyoming even more. Leath liked nature. He liked the challenge. He was the hunter. Shiloh was his quarry and, now, he was in active stalk mode with her whether she knew it or not.
The SOG SEAL knife was used by the black ops teams. It was a special knife created for special needs. His full lips pulled upward slightly as he closed his eyes, visualizing exactly what he was going to do with her once he captured her. He was waiting for that cowboy to drive off sometime this morning without her. He was hoping Shiloh would be left alone. Alone and unable to defend herself against him.
First, he would silently enter the cabin. He’d already checked it out at night, using his infrared rifle scope. It had two entrances. One on the east side and one on the west side. He’d looked into the windows when there was no one around. Laid out the room design in his mind. There was one working bedroom, so he knew where she’d be sleeping. Two rooms were empty except for what he thought might be a large gun cabinet in one of them. He knew of Shiloh’s hatred of weapons, figuring the cowboy was the shooter, not her.
He had a police scanner radio on him and knew the Lincoln sheriff’s department was actively trying to locate him. They would never find him. He’d spent time hunting in Africa in all kinds of challenging situations and changing conditions. Anton knew how to hide. None of these law enforcement idiots would ever think about looking for him here. He was sure they were tearing up Wind River Valley all the way to Jackson Hole from one end to another, trying to locate him. He’d left no trace of where he was or where he’d gone. Knowing how to stalk, how to become a shadow, using the night as his friend and cover, Leath smiled a little more.
The SEAL seven-inch blade was coated with a matte black finish of titanium, making it invisible in the night. There was no flash or reflection off it. The AUS-8 steel it was created from contained vanadium in it, making the blade incapable of breaking even when encountering the thickest bone in the human body, the femur. And he had been envisioning how he was going to use this knife on her.
He was pleased that the blade had serrated teeth all the way across the top, which meant he could jerk it upward, tearing open her flesh. The knife also had a staggered serration beneath it, as well as on the first third of the blade. Serrations were like tiny sharpened teeth that could surgically cut through soft skin and sink down, ripping and shredding fibrous muscle, ligaments, and tendons beneath it. The serrations were so sharp, it could move through skin and muscle to the vulnerable organs like a hot knife through butter with absolutely no resistance.