Page 1 of Recurve Ridge

PROLOGUE

Mulch scattered beneathmy feet as I tore through the forest, its soft crackle overriding a brittle roar that consumed all thought inside my head.

Get away. Can’t stop. Don’t let them catch me.

If I went back, I might never get out.

No “might” about it. I couldn’t go back to that table. The shadows. The hands?—

—can’t, can’t, can’t?—

I couldn’t stop, not even if my brain kicked into gear. Something primal had been activated, and my body entered flight mode without my mind’s permission. Not that I needed to give it. Every nerve ending numbed in a desperate bid to survive, leaving me a willing host carried away from horror and death and seeking the facade of freedom and safety.

There was nothing worse in the woods than him. The darkest monsters resided in their plush upper-class digs, not out in the roughened forest like wild mountain men… right?

Wrong.

I would discover just how dark the monsters in the forest could be.

Myself most of all.

1

ROBE

Bodies litteredmy cabin floor in various states of déshabillé. Stale piss and body odor overpowered the ever-present scent of spruce and brisk mountain air my remote ridgeline in the Adirondacks failed to combat.

One man groaned, and I knew they weren’t out for good. Still, it annoyed the shit out of me that I couldn’t use my own living space.

“I came out here to be alone,” I grumbled, gesturing to the mountains that surrounded my forest cabin. “Not host an overage frat party every damn night.”

My college years were well behind me. Easy days with no sense of responsibility and even less care factor. Those days were gone, trapped behind an unopenable door of my own making.

“Yet you take in strays with the heart of a philanthropist and the ease of a five-dollar hooker.” Jonothan Littleman pressed a mug of black coffee into my hand. Thick blond hair that matched his wild beard shot through with the occasional strand of silver cascaded down his back. He looked less like an Upstate New York taxpayer and more like a Viking who had stormed my house and taken up residence. The latter was true, in retrospect. “Be honest with yourself. You came out here to hide behind a mountain and lick your wounds.”

“And hide the devil within.” The corner of my lip curled. “We’re all damaged goods, unfit for human consumption.”

Jon snorted. “That’s why you are who you are, isn’t it? Robinson fucking Huntingdon, Earl of this shitful patch of ground away from everything and everyone we love, and rescuer of assholes like yourself.” He swept muscle-bound arms in a wide circle to encompass the living room, which was the largest part of my cabin home and in dire need of expansion.

I stared at the semiconscious men littering my floor, each of whom would wake with a hangover worse than the next. My heart clenched at the sight of the broken boys—men—I collected, rescued before they suffered a fate worse than mine. Before they hit the realm of unredeemable.

Each thought they’d already met wrecking-ball status. I knew better.

I grunted over my coffee, letting the dark ambrosia unpack what I kept hidden from the most prying mind: my own. Sleep itched the corners of my consciousness as I processed Jon’s words, though I rose a full hour earlier.

My response came out more than a little salty. “Yeah, but it’s my shitful patch of ground.”

The cabin walls closed around me, a too-tight fit for a woodsman and a displaced trust-fund-kid-cum-officer-cum-CEO who had learned to rough it alongside the rest of my outcast crew.

Never created with the girth of five large men in mind, we inhabited out of necessity the space I had originally built by hand for a contingent of only two. Recurve Ridge nestled among a brutal section of the Adirondack mountain range in Upstate NY. Full of unforgiving granite outcrops and pitfalls, not to mention my own improvements to every defensible aspect of the land, it suited each of our flawed personalities to perfection.

I’d always intended to build a larger bunkhouse behind my cabin sometime after my other tenants arrived, but seeing as we were now all shoved into the cramped space, that time had come. I flicked my toe at a beer bottle that drifted near my foot. It rolled across the bare floorboards and bumped into a half-empty glass of cheap whiskey.

If I expanded, the space needed to be usable. More than just room to sleep. I drew out plans in my mind’s eye for an additional kitchenette, their own bathrooms—the latter because I was a pedantic asshole and refused to share. A man cave for toys and… more toys.

Change required topping up supplies, and that meant a trip out of Recurve Ridge and back into the dark lure of civilization for someone. Heading off the ridge to a place where only one of us was welcome incurred danger for us all. The rest may as well wear ashoot on sighttag knotted around his neck and have a bull’s-eye tattooed on his ass.

My stomach protested the thought of losing one of the boys I had collected before they healed enough to seek their own futures. I covered my disquiet beneath a long draw from my mug. Scalding, bitter liquid seared my throat that instantly craved a second hit of the dark ambrosia. I relished the sharp pain that numbed a different sort, no matter how brief.

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