Saskia barked again, and I turned to her, as shredded inside as the skin on my battered hands. And then I took in her posture and she let out a third bark, sharp and crisp. Unmistakable.

I whirled, scanning our surroundings, trying to figure out what she’d found. My gaze stopped on a tree, older and thicker around the base than any of the others. Etched into the trunk of that tree was a series of hash marks.

Hundreds of them.

Thousands.

I made my way toward the tree, let my bleeding fingers trail over the hash marks before I could bring myself to believe that this was real. Bella’s kidnapper had been here.

Sound. To my left. I turned on my heels. Willing my heart to hush in my chest, I prepared to bolt, but when the sound made its way to my ears a second time, I recognized it as human, young.

Alive.

Saskia lay down on her stomach and poked her nose under the brush. I knelt, blood rushing in my ears, and a pair of muddy brown eyes stared back at me.

There, beneath a makeshift canopy made of dirt and wood, lying on her stomach, was the missing girl.

Chapter 47

“Bella?” I kept my voice soft and made no move to touch her.

The little girl stared at me, her face smudged with dirt, her expression eerie and calm. “The angel said someone would come for me.”

Her voice was high-pitched but coarse. Moving slowly and keeping my hands where she could see them, I withdrew a bottle of water from my pack. I opened it and set it on the ground in front of her.

Seconds passed before she sat up, still hunched beneath the canopy’s branches. First one hand closed around the bottle, then the other. Her eyes never left mine as she lifted it to her mouth.

“Slowly,” I told her, unsure how dehydrated she was.

After a moment, she lowered the bottle, her hands still wrapped tightly around it.

“Are you hurt?” I asked. So far, Bella had been calmer than I would have expected. I didn’t want to spook her, but I needed to know what I was dealing with.

Her expression impossible to read, the child answered my question by sticking out her right leg. She pulled up the mud-caked pajama bottoms she was wearing and showed me a long scratch that ran the length of her shin. The wound looked clean, all things considered.

It had already started to heal.

“Anyplace else?” I asked her.

Bella shook her head.

I heard movement to my right a second before Saskia took up position in front of Bella. The combination of movement and sound reminded me that we had no way of knowing if Bella was alone out here.

No way of knowing when the person who’d taken her would be back.