My head throbbed and my mouth was dry. I couldn’t see anything. I tried to force my eyes open, but they refused to cooperate. Beyond the thump of blood in my ears, I could hear the sounds of someone moving nearby. I concentrated, trying to remember what had happened. It all flooded back to me in an instant.

Blair on the ground.

The intruder, face hidden by a balaclava.

The gun.

The letter.

Then a prick in my upper arm, which must have been a needle. He’d drugged me.

Keeping my eyes shut, I drew a slow breath through my nostrils, gathering what information I could about my surroundings. Based on the woody scent of the air, I assumed I wasn’t at the cottage anymore. I couldn’t feel a breeze, so we might be indoors. Not in a car because I was lying on something soft and had plenty of room to stretch my limbs. I shifted my feet and felt something coarse rub at my ankles. He must have bound them with rope. Testing my wrists, I felt the smooth, cool plastic of a zip tie around them. He’d restrained me the same way he had Blair. But what was over my face?

I tried to focus on the sensation of the fabric against my skin. It was soft. Dark. Covering not only my eyes, but my cheeks and chin as well. Not a blindfold. I moved my head ever so slightly and felt fabric brush against the back of my neck.

It was a hood. Perhaps a bag of some kind or a pillowcase. It wasn’t secured around my throat, which meant that if I wriggled down, I might be able to get free of it. But I might also attract my captor’s attention.

A latch clicked, and a draft swirled through the room. Something rustled, then the latch clicked again, and the draft ended. Perhaps it had been a door opening and closing. I strained my ears for several seconds but didn’t hear anything, so I shimmied down the soft surface, slowly working the covering off my face. It took a few minutes, and the adrenaline surging through my veins reminded me that my captor might return at any second, but eventually, I was able to shake it off, blinking against the light.

As my vision adjusted, I realized I was in a poorly lit room, lying on a broad bunk bed. There was a wooden counter along the opposite wall and an old-fashioned fireplace standing empty. My best guess was that I was in an old musterer’s cabin.