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State as a godsend, and it had cut his ties to the town that had made him what he was with the finality of a guillotine. It had certainly been a transition, he thought wryly, as he strolled through the lamp lit kitchen and claimed a longneck beer bottle from the icebox.
    And it had propelled him into a direct orbit around one Caitlin Johnson.
    College had been good to him, something he took to naturally, and even though he’d participated in his share of extracurricular activities, namely Caitlin, he’d graduated early, getting his bachelor’s in three years. He’d signed up with the San Jose Police Department right after graduation and been assigned to the street almost immediately. Those first few years of patrol work had been an education, even in a town as tame as San Jose was in those days. Working toward his master’s degree by day and riding shotgun at night, he’d become an ace at getting by on little or no sleep and a complete overload to the brain by the time he was twenty-three.
    He’d headed to Los Angeles with a fresh master’s in hand, a wife looking for something she couldn’t or wouldn’t name, and a cocky attitude that the first day on the L.A.P.D. had shot right out of him.
    Well, not the L.A.P.D., he corrected himself with a half-smile as he stood on the deep veranda, looking out over the Ashton holdings as they glimmered in the moonlight. It had actually been a gangsta by the name of Little Tommy who’d done the honors and nearly killed him in the process. But that was a remembrance for another day. Today he had too much gunplay on his mind, too many pictures of Kim Ross floating through his head, too many memories of days gone by, lived a lifetime ago. He needed to forget about all of it, if just for tonight.
    He knew he’d be up and about before dawn broke anyway, and he always did his best thinking in the morning. He’d ponder death and destruction and young girls destroyed before their prime by the time the sun birthed a new day. But for right now, all he wanted to do was assume his other career, slide into the role of rancher. Lose himself in the soft low of cattle settling in for the night, the companionable stomp of a horse’s hoof in the paddock, the screech of a barn owl as it prowled the night in search of dinner. He wanted to immerse himself in grain prices, what beef was going for on the hoof, and whether or not his only live-in hand, Jimmy, had begun to restring the back fence line as instructed.
    And so he did just that, muting the constant scanning and replay in his brain that made him an outstanding cop and tuning into the rancher that had been bred bone deep and stayed true, no matter how hard he or his wife had tried to citify it out.

 
    The Second Fold
     
    Samantha Henning knew, without even opening her eyes that she was in deep shit. She had awoken in her share of strange places over the course of a lifetime and intuitively knew that something was just WRONG. She didn’t know where she was, and she had no idea how she’d come to be wherever ‘here’ was. She lay completely still, listening for something, anything, and got nothing.
    She slowly opened her eyes, furtively glancing around the room without moving her head. Her first impression was green. The walls, the floor, the ceiling. She tilted her head slightly. The only relief from the overwhelming greenness was the spines of hundreds of books in the floor-to-ceiling library to her left.
    She experimentally shifted her hands and feet, finding both free of any binding. With this relative illusion of freedom echoing through her thoughts, she sat up to survey the room that had become her prison.
    Her head throbbed in dull counterpoint to her heartbeat as she scanned the room. Her eyes felt grainy, out of whack, and her muscles had a rubbery looseness she’d never felt before. She knew she should be panicking, racing around the room to look for an escape, or even for evidence of her captor, but she just couldn’t