Chapter 32. The Logging Road

Wade POV

Bring her back talking.

I held on to those four words the whole way up the ridge.

Crystal had a forty-yard head start and cheap boots. I had two legs, broad daylight and a wolf that wanted very badly to stop using them. I let it have my nose and nothing else. Her trail was easy: hairspray, cigarettes, fear-sweat, the sharp chemical stink of paint thinner still in the seams of her boots.

She was fast for someone who smoked. She went up the old logging road, then off it, scrambling up through the scrub pine toward the ridge. I could hear her breathing, ragged and sobbing. I could hear her heart going like a hummingbird's.

I didn't run flat out. I could have caught her in thirty seconds. I didn't want to catch her. I wanted her to stop.