Page 3 of One Last Stand

Don’t think about the darkness, the feeling of suffocation, the sense of aloneness that can sweep over a person?—

He uncovered a shoulder, spotted movement—hallelujah—and followed the arm down, found a helmet. Maybe they’d found a pocket of air?—

He cleared out the snow, and there, at the base of the tree, a space of air. And then?—

“Help!” The voice lifted—a female. She started to wriggle. The snow had trapped her arms behind her, so she was unable to leverage them to push herself free.

Terrible way to die.

“I got ya,” he said, trying to pull her up, but the position wedged her tight. He would need to get in with her?—

Shouting sounded behind him. Over his shoulder, he spotted Oaken and Boo fighting toward him through the snow and trees.

“For a second, we thought it wasyoutrapped in the trees,” Oaken said as he fell to his knees opposite the woman and also began to dig.

“Careful not to cave in more snow on her,” Shep said and handed him the shovel. “And don’t get crazy with the shovel—you don’t want to break bones.”

He handed his radio to Boo, who stepped back to check on patrol status.

Oaken raked back more snow, and Shep freed her shoulders. A long blonde ponytail snaked out the back of her helmet.

Shep climbed down into the well, nearly to his hips in depth. “Ma’am, did you hit your head?”

“No—no—” She started to cry.

He’d prefer to put a C collar on her, but she might be going into shock, hyperventilating, so he slid an arm under her, around her shoulders. Oaken got in on the other side, did the same.

“Boo, stabilize her legs,” he said. “On three.”

They pulled her up, heaving until her body came free of the hole, some five feet deep.

The woman rolled over, gasping. She still wore her goggles and a helmet, but with her blonde hair unraveled from her braid, she looked like?—

His breath caught.No . . .It couldn’t be.

And he knew—he’d seen her body, after all—that London was dead. The facts confirmed it—her car found in a nearby lake, her body mutilated but still the same frame, height, and weight. Most of all, the terrible emptiness in his soul. So yes, even if his heart didn’t want to believe it, facts were facts.

Yet this woman lying in the snow, breathing hard, maybe crying, had brought him right back to the what-ifs.

What if the body wasn’t London’s?

What if she’d reactivated what he knew was a clandestine past with some interesting skills he’d never suspected and . . . what? Faked her death?

Let it go. Lethergo.

Words he’d been dodging for the better part of a month.

Oaken had unhooked the woman’s skis, retrieved her poles.

Okay, so he was desperate, but as Boo, the team EMT, leaned over her and moved her goggles off to check her vision, he hoped?—

Nope.Midtwenties, freckles on her face, brown eyes. Not London.

Ski patrollers had arrived with a sled, one of them trekking out to their position.

“Get a collar on her,” Shep said, and reached for it as the first patroller handed him the bag.

He snapped it on, leaning over her.

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