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.

The seasons bled into years. The snow on the Appalachian peaks melted and froze again.

After the spying incident, rumors spread that Alton was a demon who controlled beasts with black magic. Even Agent Fletcher only watched the cabin through binoculars from the highway.

That was exactly what Alton wanted. Absolute isolation.

Eden grew up wild and brilliant. At two years old, she didn't use furniture to learn how to walk. She grabbed the tail of the massive cougar-now named Hunter-and pulled herself up on her chubby legs.

Alton built a brutal, military-grade obstacle course in the yard to burn off his own adrenaline. It became Eden's playground.

By age three, she could low-crawl under barbed wire with the flawless, fluid motion of a seasoned infantryman. The rattlesnake, Venom, became her personal alarm system. If a stranger got within a hundred yards, the snake rattled.

One night, a massive thunderstorm hit the valley.

The booming thunder sounded exactly like mortar fire. Alton's PTSD triggered violently. He huddled in the dark corner of the cabin, sweating, shaking, his finger resting on the trigger of a loaded shotgun. His eyes were wild, lost in the desert of his past.

Three-year-old Eden climbed out of her bed. She wasn't scared of the thunder, and she wasn't scared of the killer in the corner.

She walked up to Alton on bare feet. Her tiny hands reached out and pried his rigid, white-knuckled fingers off the shotgun barrel.

She pushed the gun away and pressed her warm, soft forehead against his freezing, sweating brow.

"Dada," she mumbled, her voice firm and clear.

The word hit Alton's brain like a defibrillator. The hallucination shattered. He dropped the gun, wrapped his massive arms around her tiny body, and buried his face in her neck, sobbing silently.

After that night, the phantom sounds of warfare still came, but they no longer owned him. The memory of Eden's small hand in his became an unbreakable anchor in the storm, a reason to fight his way back to shore. She couldn't cure the broken wiring in his brain, but she gave him a weapon to fight his own mind. Eden owned his soul.

To secure her future, Alton put his plan into motion. He bought a fleet of heavy dump trucks and started a cheap gravel transport business. It was a perfect front. Under the cover of hauling gravel, his crews dug deep into the toxic shale land, extracting high-grade rare-earth minerals.

He smuggled the ore across state lines to a shell corporation. Millions of untraceable dollars began flooding into his offshore accounts.

By age five, Eden was a terrifying prodigy.

Alton took her into the deep woods. He handed her a military combat knife. Without flinching, she expertly skinned a dead rabbit, her face splattered with blood, her eyes calm and focused.

But Alton knew she couldn't just be a savage. She had elite blood in her veins.

He used the dark web to order the entire curriculum of an Ivy League preparatory academy. The books filled half the cabin.

Every night, the man who could snap a neck with two fingers put on reading glasses. He stumbled through Shakespeare and basic calculus, teaching her everything.

Eden's memory was photographic. She would sit on the porch, absentmindedly petting the cougar, while flawlessly reciting sonnets.

When Eden was six, Cletus's fat, bullying son, Gus, stood near the fence and shot a bird with a slingshot.

Eden scaled the ten-foot wooden wall like a ghost. She dropped silently into the dirt right behind Gus.

She didn't punch him. She just stared at him with her father's dead, wolf-like eyes. In her right hand, she held a small, razor-sharp whittling knife, calmly and methodically shaving perfect ribbons of wood off a pine branch. Scrape. Scrape. The sheer, unnatural focus in her movements was far more terrifying than any verbal threat.

Gus took one look at her eyes, wet his pants, and ran screaming down the road.

Alton leaned against the porch pillar. He smiled proudly.

He tossed Eden a piece of imported dark chocolate. "Good job. You neutralized the threat without leaving physical evidence."

Eden caught it, peeled the foil, and shoved half into Alton's mouth. They smiled at each other.

But Alton looked at the road. He knew the fortress couldn't hold her forever. She needed to learn how to hunt in the human world.