Free Longest Night by Kara Braden

favor to Preston.
    What favor could be so great that a woman like Cecily—a woman who treasured her privacy and isolation—would accept a houseguest not for a few days but for a few months ? Nothing short of a life saved.
    Preston must have sent his security troops in to rescue the hostages, including Cecily.
    But why wasn’t she broken? Why wasn’t she tearing herself apart from the inside, after all she’d endured? Living here in the wild, without a support system in place, she shouldn’t have survived a year, especially not in a house full of guns. At the very least, she should have fallen prey to alcohol or tranquilizers, but so far he had yet to find more than a single bottle of whiskey, mostly untouched, and no drugs stronger than aspirin.
    He paced through the yard, looking up at the sky, but the stars held no answers. There were tens of thousands of them, far more than he’d ever seen in the Virginia countryside where he’d grown up. The sky was washed with shades of pale blue and silver where the stars blended their light into radiant bands. He found himself drawn to it each night after dinner and coffee.
    He listened as the rhythmic clatter of her typing, attenuated by the thick window, stopped. A moment later, the door creaked open. “Everything all right?” she asked, right on schedule. Twenty minutes in the cold, and she automatically grew concerned for him, but she never actually came out from under the shelter of the porch.
    Only when she did her before-bed walk-around did she actually leave the doorstep to circle around the house. Ian had watched her moving through the darkness with certain, quiet footsteps as she checked the perimeter of the house, the shed where she kept the vehicles, and the fuel tanks some distance away. Not once on those checks did she look at the stars, though. Had she become blasé living here? How could she be so indifferent to a sight so remarkable and compelling that it even captivated him?
    For the past two nights, Ian had let the query draw him back inside. Now, though, he stood his ground and kept looking up at the sky. “It’s beautiful here.”
    Instead of taking the bait, she stayed by the door. “It is,” she agreed.
    He glanced back, noting how she seemed to stand to attention. Her shoulders were held stiffly squared, her chin upright. Her hands still hung casually at her sides, but the right was curled, fingertips just touching the holster she always wore or kept close at hand.
    â€œDo you know the constellations?” Ian asked. The logical response would be for her to come out beside him so she could accurately point out groupings of stars.
    â€œGot a book here somewhere. I’ll find it,” she said, disappearing back inside. So much for luring her out.
    â€œDamn,” Ian muttered and turned to follow.
    ***
    For as long as Cecily could remember, she’d had an active imagination. She’d grown up on Tolkien’s stories, from The Hobbit to the esoteric Silmarillion and almost-unknown Smith of Wootton Major . She’d read all of Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quintet, not just A Wrinkle in Time , and everything by Anne McCaffrey and Ursula K. Le Guin. Her most memorable birthday gift was the compiled Lord of the Rings saga, a single leather-bound volume with gold leaf and pages of foldout maps that were long since lost, having spent years taped to her bedroom walls.
    Now, though, the images in her head had gone stagnant and dark, the musical Elvish language degenerating into harsh Arabic tones, clipped and bloody. She pressed her hands against her eyes, elbows braced to either side of her typewriter, and tried to see through the sandstorm to the tall blue-green forest with its golden wood tree houses in the world she’d created. She was off her timeline. She should have had a first draft finished already. Soon, the emails from her agent would start coming.
    Finally, she ripped the