Nicole pulled her jacket around her more tightly and held her hands out to the fire. Cricket’s head lifted and she yawned widely, revealing her teeth, then dropped her head again. Nicole reached over and pulled Cricket’s body against her own. Though it was not yet nine o’clock, the chill was deepening rapidly. She turned to look at the dark shape in the sleeping bag next to her and listened to his deep breathing.

The pain pill had put him under quickly, almost before he could direct her on securing the camp. Wrap the food in plastic bags—carefully so as to not attract shuffling brown visitors—build a fire, get enough wood to keep it going all night, hobble the horse and turn it loose. No wonder she was exhausted, hopping around, chopping wood, drawing water from the river.

She had finished fifteen minutes ago, but instead of crawling inside her bag, she had sat and stared at the fire, trying to sort through her thoughts. In a way it would have been easier if Eric hadn’t come. Her feelings had been clear enough up to that point: bitterness, resentment, determination to get free of him. Now? As much as she longed for home and a bath and clean sheets over a mattress, she knew she couldn’t leave him. The image of the mother grizzly bearing down on her, and Eric standing between her and the hurtling fury with nothing but a pistol in his hand, was etched so deeply in her memory that she would never be able to put it fully from her mind. Once he could cope on his own, the debt would be paid, but for now, she had to stay.

But it was more than that. Eric’s words about freedom and individual rights kept battering at her as they had done for the past two days. Today she had come within a fraction of losing her life, and never had it seemed so sweetly precious. Why was it that life meant so little to Eric and his friends that they would risk it so easily? Or was freedom of greater worth than life itself? Had she taken the loss of others’ freedom so lightly because she herself had never lost it? Until this week.

She shook her head, and suddenly her thoughts flashed to the events at the dam—and to Travis. She frowned as she thought of the expression in his eyes when Eric had put the knife to her throat and challenged Travis’s willingness to sacrifice her. At that moment Travis’s eyes had flicked to hers, then to the knife at her throat, and then away, and she knew the answer. He was only ninety-five percent sure Eric wouldn’t hurt her. And yes, five percent was acceptable.