CHAPTER THREE

The key turned with a rusty click as Alice locked the flimsy mobile home's door. Her fingers lingered on the cool metal, turning the knob to make sure it had indeed locked. She nodded and stepped into the small home. Even after just a single step away, she looked back to the lock again, making sure it was engaged.

This was her life now. Obsessively checking that she'd locked doors and left no traces of herself. Looking over her shoulder wherever she went.

Presently, she'd just returned from the small corner store down the road, her arms laden with nondescript brown paper bags.

The air in the mobile home was thick despite the chilled, slightly wet air outside. Everything about this house felt stale and somehow bland. But she did her best not to let it bother her. It was, after all, just a temporary hideout. The trailer sat like a forgotten relic in the midst of sprawling fields in one of the more rural sections of southern Virginia. It was the kind of place that people overlooked, a place where secrets could fester undisturbed…the sort of place many didn't even know about.

She moved through the cramped space with the precision of someone who knows they are being hunted. With swift motions, she drew the curtains across the windows, muting the afternoon sun to a dim glow. The fabric was rough against her palms, a reminder of the distance she'd put between herself and Rachel Gift—two and a half hours that felt like a chasm.

As she peered out through a sliver in the curtains, memories pressed in. This small town, a dot on the map, was a place she'd once thought she'd never see again. But anger and desperation make for strange bedfellows, and so she found herself renting from Mark, a man whose smile had once made her heart quicken. Now, he was just a means to an end—a nameless figure in her grand scheme.

She was done with running, nearly done with hiding. And she'd vowed to spend no more time in hotel rooms, wasting that money. So she called Mark and asked if he still had his little get-away trailer. He'd offered it to her for as long as she wanted, payment coming in the form of a single night where they revisited certain things they'd once done in their youth, under wide-open Virginia night skies. She hated him for asking for such payment; she'd not slept with a man in nearly three years, and to break such a streak with an ex-boyfriend who'd become a drunk shadow of his former self was demeaning. But she was beyond caring. It had only been a single night, and he'd been done in just ten minutes, anyway.

To destroy Rachel, she'd do anything.

To seek vengeance for her beloved Alex Lynch, she'd do even more.

Her eyes scanned the horizon through the crack in the blinds, the flatness broken only by the outlines of distant trees and the occasional silhouette of a passing car, little more than a gleam of headlights on the two-lane road eighty yards away. Each vehicle raised her pulse until it passed by, oblivious to her presence. She was a ghost in this place, and she intended to keep it that way.

The trailer creaked as she moved around it, the sound unnerving in its ordinariness. In this game of cat and mouse, every noise was a potential harbinger of discovery. Alice knew the stakes; she'd set them herself. She knew her next move, but she also knew that Rachel Gift was, among many other things, stubborn. Alice had no delusions about that. She wouldn't be at all surprised to find the bitch waiting outside of the trailer tomorrow, having found her in this godforsaken stretch of countryside.

Alice made her way to the bedroom and knelt to the floor by the bed. She reached under and stretched until she gripped the canvas strap of a small duffel bag. She dragged it out into the dim light, unzipped it, and surveyed its contents: neatly folded false identification documents and a thick wad of cash bound by a rubber band. Each ID bore a different name, a different life etched onto laminated falsehoods. Her fingers brushed over them, a tactile reassurance of her preparedness for flight. Getting these all those months ago when she'd started planning her quest had been the most expensive part.

She pulled out the burner phone next, its screen cold and blank. Pressing the power button, she watched as the digital interface buzzed to life. The battery icon displayed full—good, no surprises there.

With a heavy sigh, Alice sat on the bed and booted up the old laptop that had seen better days. Its fan whirred like an asthmatic wheeze as she went online, running the same basic search she'd run countless times before. She scoured for any new developments, any whispers or rumors that might indicate the FBI was on to her. She knew that they'd learned her true name, but that was no matter. She very seriously doubted they'd ever find her. Still, all the same, there were some words that seemed to leap at her: ‘large-scale manhunt' and ‘inter-agency cooperation' were not phrases she wanted to read.

Alice snapped the noisy laptop shut, the finality of the act echoing in the cramped space of the trailer. She rose and shuffled to the tiny kitchenette, the scent of metallic water and cheap seasoning packets already filling her nostrils. She prepared a package of Ramen noodles. It was either that or oven-cooked chicken nuggets again. Because of the hotels (and, if she was being honest, her location) it was pretty much all she had. Mark offered to take her to a nice dinner at some point after he'd received his so-called payment, but she'd declined.

As the water bubbled and the noodles softened, Alice let her guard down just enough to allow a sliver of remorse to seep through her hardened exterior. Grandma Tate... that had been an unfortunate casualty, collateral damage in a war waged on an invisible battlefield. Alice hadn't meant to add the old woman's death to her list of sins; kidnapping Paige had been the plan. Clean and simple.

Yet sometimes fate played its hand cruelly. She felt bad for taking the life of that poor woman, an old woman who had simply been trying to protect Paige because Rachel had, of course, not been there.

But the thought was fleeting, replaced by a colder, harder truth. Rachel would come, propelled by rage, seeking vengeance. Alice welcomed it. This was her design, her lure set with meticulous care. Because when Rachel stepped into her web, the confrontation would not be about hatred—it would be about justice. Justice for Alex, whose memory refused to fade into the shadows of her mind. If anything, she felt him even more now that she had killed Grandma Tate. There were some nights when she fell asleep that she was sure he was in the room with her, looking over her.

With the noodles done, she drained them, placed them in a bowl, and stirred in the contents of the flavor packet. She flicked off the small stove and sat down at the wobbly table.

She thought of her original plan and realized it had been a good one. She'd simply not expected Grandma Tate to get in the way, to become such an obstacle.

No, the plan had been a good one. Paige was the key; she always had been. If the FBI was casting a wide net, she needed to weave a smaller, tighter one—one that could slip through theirs unnoticed. Taking Paige would force Rachel out, compel her to act recklessly.

That was when Alice would strike, when the pain and anger made Rachel vulnerable.

If she had Paige, she had the power. She'd seen what losing her grandmother had done to Rachel. Good Lord, what would become of that woman if she was without her daughter, too?