He stroked her hair. “You’re safe here.”

“I don’t have a home.” She sobbed against his chest. This realization was the worst. For days she’d wondered about her family, the people who might be missing her, worried and waiting for her to return. Did she have a husband? Children? A mother and a father?

“Your father’s dead?” he asked.

“Years ago.”

“So where is home?”

“With my husband,” she whispered, closing her eyes at the memory of Carlos, who he was, what he had done. Her emotions hadn’t caught up with her brain, but they were coming-

she could feel them lurking in the shadows, ready to spring her limbs and squeeze her heart.

Silas stiffened at her response. “But you said you don’t have a home…”

“I can’t ever go back there,” she confessed, realizing the truth of her statement. Home wasn’t safe. There was nowhere in the world that would be safe from Carlos.

“Why?”

She realized how cryptic and strange her words must be and tried to explain. “Because Carlos is my husband. He’s the man who tried to kill me. Those men you found, they were his.

He hired them, told them, to kill me.” They both sat in silence, letting that knowledge sink in.

“What am I going to do?”

He sighed, rocking her in the darkness. “You don’t need to think about it now.”

“You found me,” she whispered, incredulous. He had been her rescuer from the beginning, but she hadn’t understood just what he had saved her from, and clearly he hadn’t either. It wasn’t just the accident-in fact, the accident had been part of her salvation. “You saved me from those men. They were going to kill me.”

“They’re dead.” His voice was like steel.

“If that elk hadn’t come along…”

“But it did.”

She tried to hide the sob rising in her throat and it came out anyway. He tried to hold her but she struggled, pushing at him. “I thought if I could remember, everything would be okay again. But it’s worse. Everything’s worse.”