She turned her head back to face inside the house to start their charade. “I can’t sleep, honey. I’m going to take a look at the night-flowering plant Nonny asked me to check on before we left. I won’t be long. You stay in bed.”

She waited a heartbeat or two as if listening to his answer, and then she stepped onto the raised porch and closed the door. As soon as she turned back, she let her senses expand. Paid attention to all the feelers and alarm triggers she had strung around their home. In the last month she’d managed to add long and short lines. She had every inch of the yard surrounding the house inside the fence line rigged with feelers. Outside the fence and in the trees and brush, she had more.

It wasn’t difficult to locate the hiding place of the uncles. They hadn’t let something like a few spiderwebs deter them from hiding at the western corner of the fence. From where they were, she knew they could see her perfectly. She hurried down the stairs as if she didn’t have a care in the world and headed toward the marsh, skirting around the plants Nonny had spent so many years transplanting into one large area for the people in the swamp. When they needed medicine and had no money, they went to Nonny to have her mix one of her concoctions.

Cayenne didn’t use a flashlight. She didn’t need one. She knew exactly where she was going and where to step. She came up to the darker grove of cypress trees, the ones she’d mentally marked just in case she needed a disposal site. Beneath two of them was particularly thin ground. She knew, because weeks earlier, when she’d examined it, she’d nearly fallen through. There was still a divot in the ground where her foot had sunk into water.

She sauntered as if she were entirely at ease or didn’t suspect she wasn’t alone. She even hummed. Still, over her humming, she heard them. Twigs snapped. Leaves crackled. Twice, someone stumbled and muffled a curse. Sound carried at night, especially in the stillness of the swamp.

An alligator bellowed somewhere close by. A barred owl sounded an eerie two-toned hoot, the last note drawn out like a Cajun accent. She crouched down abruptly in the higher grasses, looking as if she was inspecting a plant. She turned slightly to watch the two men split up and come at her from either side. Both held an object in their hands. Not guns, but Tasers. She suspected that was how they’d managed to subdue Trap’s aunt and take her from the house.

As the one to her left closed in on her, she stood up fluidly and lifted one hand toward the cypress branch sweeping over the marsh. As the man triggered the Taser, she flew upward, on the thicker anchored silk. Using momentum, she shot out more silk, wrapping him thoroughly and efficiently, so fast, his body spun as the thick, sticky silk wrapped him up like a spider’s midnight snack. She kept climbing, out of reach of the second Taser and into the higher branches where the second man would have a difficult time shooting her, even if he had a real gun.

She anchored her lines, added several more for structural strength and yanked the body up off the ground so he swung in the air from the branch she’d carefully chosen. All the while she continued to spin the cocoon around him. Her spinet glands were located in her palms, something she was grateful for. She could produce various types of silk when needed. Each was from a different gland. She used her strongest silk for her anchor lines and her stickiest for wrapping her prey.

“Bobby!”

“Get me out of this, Richard,” Bobby shouted hoarsely.

His brother rushed to help him, and the moment Richard was out in the open, Cayenne dropped a woven web around his neck like a noose, pulling him up short. She quickly began to bundle Trap’s uncle up. He tore at the silk, but the strands stuck to him like glue. She was fast. She’d been practicing from the time she was a toddler, and she took particular delight in speed. She wrapped him in thick, sticky silk until only his head showed above the cocoon and he was suspended from a second tree, facing his brother.

Cayenne lowered herself from her anchor thread and stood on the outer edges of the marsh. “I guess you came looking for me. Did you have something you wanted to say?” She studied their faces. “You both clearly drink a lot. You lived well on Trap’s ransom money. I guess you had to pay someone a lot of money for new identities.”

Richard spat at her. “You bitch. Get us down.”

She ignored his command, wondering if he believed anyone would be stupid enough to obey him when he’d come to kill them.

“Trap’s on his way. He was covering you the entire time with his rifle. One wrong move and he’d have splattered you all over the swamp, and we’d roll you into a gator hole, but you were easy. Too easy.” Contempt edged her tone. “You got lazy on that money, thinking you could do the same thing you did the last time.”

Again it was Richard. “You can smirk all you like, but we’ve done it dozens of times, collecting ransoms from rich fucks like Trap,” he boasted. “All brains, no brawn, that’s my weak nephew. Scared shitless and willing to pay anything to get his whore back.” He fought the restraint of the silk, wiggling, cursing and swinging his weight in an effort to dislodge himself from the tree. The more he fought, the tighter the loops bound him until he was nearly completely enshrouded.

“I’m going to tear out your heart, bitch,” Bobby screamed, bucking wildly. The branch creaked ominously. “What the hell are you anyway?”

She smiled up at him. “In some circles I’m known as the black widow.”

The two men gasped and rocked hard, bundled in their cocoons.

Trap came up behind her, his eyes as cold as ice as he surveyed her handiwork. He loomed over her, close. The heat of his body warmed her cool skin. She leaned back into him as his arms came around her.

“They like to kidnap people, honey,” she said softly. “Apparently your aunt wasn’t their only victim. They were easy though. Really easy. Made noise, weren’t in the least bit stealthy. Wyatt’s girls could have taken them.” She raised her eyes to the wriggling bodies. “The girls are toddlers, and they would have killed you both.” There was contempt in her voice and no mercy. She had none for them.

Trap was silent, staring at the two men who had helped to change the course of his life. He didn’t say a word to them because he had nothing to say. His uncles cursed and demanded, but as time stretched out and he continued to remain silent, their fear began to mount to terror – so much so that it was tangible.