The bell above the hardware store door chimed.

Alton walked in and threw the bloody canvas bag onto the front counter. The glass display case rattled.

Delmar Boggs, the store owner, nearly fell off his stool. He stared at the blood pooling on his clean counter. "I... I don't buy illegal pelts, Combs. Take it away!"

Alton didn't speak. He pulled out a skinning knife. His hands moved in a terrifying, fluid blur. In less than two minutes, he stripped a flawless, intact pelt from the massive carcass right in front of Boggs's horrified eyes.

The sheer violence and precision of the act broke Boggs's nerve. He scrambled to his safe, counted out five thousand dollars in cash, and shoved it across the counter.

Alton took the money. He bought heavy iron nails, a high-voltage electric fence kit, and a dozen cans of baked beans. He walked out.

The moment the heavy glass door closed behind him, the midday sun hit his face.

It was blindingly bright. A truck honked its horn down the street. Two women laughed loudly on the sidewalk.

The sudden barrage of noise and light slammed into Alton's brain. The adrenaline from the cougar kill rapidly faded, leaving a gaping hole in his nervous system.

Sensory overload hit him. The street spun. His lungs forgot how to work.

He stumbled away from the main street, his vision tunneling. He crashed into the dark, damp alleyway behind the town's private medical clinic.

Alton slammed his back against the mossy brick wall. He grabbed his own head, sliding down until he hit the wet pavement. Cold sweat poured down his face. The walls of the alley seemed to close in, crushing him, dragging him back to the suffocating water cell in the Middle East.

He was losing his mind. He was going to tear his own skin off.

Then, a sound pierced through the roaring in his ears.

It was a tiny, pathetic whimper. Like a dying kitten.

Alton's bloodshot eyes snapped open. His survival instinct overrode the panic. He pulled his knife and crawled toward the sound, moving like a wounded predator among the trash cans.

Next to a biohazard dumpster, he found a cardboard box. Inside was a filthy, torn blanket.

Alton used the tip of his knife to pull the blanket back.

A baby girl lay inside. Her skin was turning blue from the cold. Her breathing was terribly shallow.

Alton froze. He leaned his scarred, blood-streaked face closer to the box.

The baby stopped crying. She opened her eyes. She reached up with a tiny, freezing hand and wrapped her fingers tightly around Alton's thick, blood-stained index finger.

The physical touch sent a violent shockwave through Alton's chest. The roaring in his head vanished instantly. His heart skipped a beat. The demons in his brain went completely silent.

He carefully scooped her up. As the blanket fell away, his eyes locked onto her tiny arm.

There were three distinct, faded needle scars near her vein. Someone had injected her.

Pure, unadulterated rage ignited in Alton's chest. He ripped off his tactical jacket and wrapped the baby tightly against his bare, scarred chest, using his body heat to warm her.

He scanned the mud near the clinic's back door. He spotted a partial footprint. It was a custom Italian leather sole. No one in this trash town wore shoes like that.

He wasn't going to call the cops. Child Protective Services would let her die in the system.

Alton carried her back to the cabin. He mashed the canned beans into a soft paste and fed it to her with his finger.

When she was full, she fell asleep against his chest. Her tiny fist still gripped his shirt.

Alton stared at the fire. The void in his soul that had been empty for eleven years was suddenly filled with a heavy, undeniable anchor.

He named her Eden.

He pulled out his satellite phone and dialed a heavily encrypted number belonging to a dark web broker he had established ties with from the inside.

"I have the offshore account routing numbers of the corrupt warden at Blackgate," Alton said coldly. "I want a clean Social Security Number and a birth certificate for a baby girl. I need it in twenty-four hours."

The broker on the other end whistled low through the static. Trading high-level blackmail material for a simple fake SSN was a massive overpayment. But he greedily agreed without hesitation.

The next morning, the encrypted fax arrived at the post office. Eden was legally his daughter—there it was, in black and white, beyond dispute.

Alton locked the paper in a metal box. He looked at Eden blowing bubbles on the bed. He made a silent vow. If anyone ever tried to take her, he would slaughter them all.

Alton's entire existence shifted. The cabin was no longer a place to die; it was a place to protect.

He stripped off his shirt and went to work. He hauled massive, raw tree trunks from the woods, driving them deep into the dirt around the cabin. His muscles bulged and strained, working with the relentless efficiency of a machine.

He built a six-foot-tall, anti-peeping wooden fence. Then, he wired the high-voltage electric grid along the top. He carefully calibrated the voltage dial, setting it to a non-lethal shock level. He couldn't risk Eden accidentally touching it when she learned to walk.

Just as he was welding the final steel gate, Cletus's truck pulled up to the dirt road.

Cletus stepped out, followed by his sister-in-law, Tammy-Lynn. She wore skin-tight jeans and a low-cut top that barely contained her chest. She held a freshly baked apple pie. Her eyes hungrily devoured Alton's sweating, scarred torso.

"Brought you the final deed copies, Combs," Cletus coughed. He nudged Tammy-Lynn. "Tammy here wanted to welcome you properly."

Tammy-Lynn swayed her hips as she walked up to the fence. She pressed her chest against the wood.

"You got a body on you, mister," she purred, her voice dripping with cheap perfume and desperation.

Alton didn't look at her. He grabbed his power drill and drove a screw into the steel plate. The deafening screech of metal on metal completely drowned out her flirting.

Tammy-Lynn's smile faltered, but she didn't give up. She tried to slide the pie through a gap in the gate.

"Don't you get lonely out here all by yourself?" she cooed, lowering her neckline. "I could come in and help you... relax."

Alton stopped drilling. He slowly turned his head. His cold, dead eyes locked onto her heavily made-up face.

He walked toward the gate. He didn't reach for the pie. He reached for the red button on the wall box.

He pressed it.

Blue electricity crackled violently across the wire. A spark jumped and zapped Tammy-Lynn's fingers.

She shrieked in pain, leaping backward. The apple pie hit the mud and shattered.

Alton stared at the ruined food with disgust. "Get out."

Tammy-Lynn's face flushed dark red. "You ungrateful psycho!" she screamed, clutching her hand.

Cletus puffed his chest out. "You don't disrespect my family in this town, Combs! You're gonna regret that!"

Alton's hand dropped to his belt. In a fraction of a second, he drew his hunting knife and hurled it.

The heavy blade flew past Cletus's ear, slicing a few hairs off his head. It buried itself to the hilt in the front tire of the pickup truck.

The tire exploded with a deafening BANG.

Cletus and Tammy-Lynn screamed, dropping to the mud and covering their heads.

Alton walked to the gate and looked down at them. "Next time anyone comes within thirty feet of this fence, the knife goes through a throat, not rubber."

Cletus swallowed his own spit. He finally realized he wasn't dealing with a broken man. He was dealing with a monster. He grabbed Tammy-Lynn and scrambled into the crippled truck, driving away on the rim.

Alton yanked his knife out of the tire track and walked back inside.

A soft, distressed cry came from the bedroom. Eden was hungry.

Instantly, the terrifying killer aura vanished from Alton's body. He rushed to the kitchen, his rough hands moving with extreme care as he mixed warm water and formula.

He walked to the bed and gently pressed the bottle to Eden's lips. His eyes softened into warm pools of devotion.

Eden drank greedily. Her tiny hand reached up and wrapped tightly around his index finger.

"No one will ever hurt you," Alton whispered to her. "I'll build you a fortress—the strongest protection I can offer."

Miles away, Tammy-Lynn rubbed her burnt finger. Her eyes burned with venom. She picked up her phone and started calling the town gossips. She was going to find out what that psycho was hiding in that cabin.

A week later, Alton climbed into a beat-up Ford pickup he bought with the pelt money. He drove out of town to secure his commercial trucking license.

Tammy-Lynn watched from the tree line. The moment his taillights vanished, she dialed her phone.

Ten minutes later, Brenda and Darlene arrived. The three overweight, heavily perfumed women crept through the weeds toward Alton's fortress. They carried binoculars and a cheap digital camera.

Brenda looked at the humming electric wire and swallowed hard. "I don't know, Tammy. What if he electrocutes us?"

"Shut up, Brenda," Tammy-Lynn hissed. "He's definitely growing weed or cooking meth in there. If we get a picture, the sheriff will throw him out of town."

They circled the perimeter until Tammy-Lynn found a small gap at the bottom of the wooden fence, washed out by the rain.

She dropped to her knees in the mud, sticking her rear end in the air, and pressed her eye against the gap.

At first, the yard was quiet. Then, she saw a clothesline. Tiny, pink baby onesies fluttered in the wind.

Tammy-Lynn froze. A baby? Why would a serial killer have baby clothes?

Suddenly, a baby girl wearing a pink outfit crawled off the porch and onto the grass. It was Eden.

Tammy-Lynn gasped. She opened her mouth to tell the others.

Before she could speak, a massive shadow detached itself from the porch.

A fully grown mountain lion-the mate of the one Alton had killed-stepped into the sunlight. It was the size of a small cow.

Tammy-Lynn's lungs stopped working. Her brain short-circuited. She waited for the beast to rip the baby to shreds.

Instead, the cougar laid down on the grass. Eden giggled and grabbed a handful of the deadly predator's whiskers, pulling hard. The cougar just purred.

Then, the horror escalated. Eden reached under the cougar's belly and pulled out a thick, six-foot-long Western Diamondback rattlesnake.

The snake didn't strike. It wrapped itself affectionately around Eden's chubby arm while she laughed.

Tammy-Lynn's mind shattered. The sheer, unnatural terror of the scene broke her sanity. She let out a blood-curdling shriek, threw herself backward, and slammed her head hard against a rock. She passed out cold.

Brenda and Darlene jumped at the scream. They shoved Tammy-Lynn aside and peeked through the gap.

The cougar heard the noise. Its golden eyes snapped toward the fence.

It bared its massive fangs and let out a bone-shaking, deafening roar that vibrated the ground. The rattlesnake reared its head, its tail shaking violently in a chorus of death.

Brenda and Darlene stared straight into the jaws of hell.

Darlene's eyes rolled back. A warm puddle spread down her jeans as she wet herself, collapsing into the mud, twitching.

Brenda screamed, trying to run. Her foot caught a tree root. She face-planted into the dirt, her fake teeth flying out of her mouth.

Inside the fence, the chaos beyond the wire might as well have been in another world. Eden sat in her patch of dirt, clapping her small hands together at the muffled roars and shrieks that drifted through the trees—funny sounds, she thought, like the big kitty playing.

The sun had begun its slow descent, stretching shadows across the yard, when the low rumble of Alton's truck finally broke the stillness. He was home.

He stepped out and looked at the three women sprawled in the mud outside his fence.

He walked over to Brenda, who was groaning. He nudged her ribs with the steel toe of his boot.

Brenda opened her eyes. She saw Alton's cold, scarred face staring down at her. Thinking the devil himself had come for her soul, she let out a squeak and fainted again.

Alton sneered. He unlocked his gate and walked inside.

Eden immediately crawled toward him, babbling happily. The massive cougar rubbed its head against Alton's leg like a house cat. Alton picked his daughter up, completely ignoring the trash outside his walls.