I watched, camouflaged. We were on the near side of Bear Mountain, opposite the place where the copter had dropped us the day before. Soon, Gabriel stopped climbing. He contorted his body, and in the space between one blink and the next, he’d disappeared from sight.

The tracker in me said that no one ever really disappeared, and as I climbed, following the path he’d laid, I knew exactly what I was looking for.

An opening.

A cave.

Cady had said there was a whole system of underground caverns. Multiple entrances—or depending on your intention, multiple exits. My foster mother had estimated that it could take the rangers weeks to map them all. My first thought, when I started thinking again, was that it could take one person—one single-minded, driven person—years.

I almost missed the gap between one rock and the next, where Gabriel had vanished. The opening was small—smaller than the one I’d entered the day before.

Fortunately, this time, there wasn’t a drop.

I squeezed through. What little light followed me told me that it was going to get very dark very quickly, and unlike Gabriel, I hadn’t brought a flashlight. I was far enough behind that I couldn’t even tell, for certain, which way he’d gone.

What are you doing, Gabriel? The question kept me from turning back. Just how well do you know these caves?

I braced my right hand against the wall, steadying myself as I crossed slowly into darkness.

This was probably a bad idea. I was following someone who’d been accused of kidnapping and assault, someone who’d lied to me the day before and was behaving suspiciously now. I was perfectly aware of those facts, but I also knew that Gabriel had been at the Bennett house when we’d arrived. I knew that he’d made another appearance there that night, that he’d been on the property when I’d woken up the next morning, that he’d spent hours that day searching alongside me.

If he’d been the one to stash Bella in the cave, he wouldn’t have had time to move her.

Would he? That thought batted at me as my surroundings went from dark to pitch-black to eerie, velvety nothingness. Up ahead, I heard something. As I inched along the wall and slowly made my way around the bend, the uncompromising darkness began to recede.

Within minutes, I saw it. Light.

I’d found Gabriel. He’d left his flashlight on the cave floor, pointed upward, illuminating his climb. By the time I spotted the outline of his form, he was already ten or fifteen feet overhead.

I had no idea how Gabriel was creeping his way up the cave wall—or why—but as I watched, he reached some kind of landing and pulled himself onto it, stomach first. He inched forward, then disappeared.

Again.