PROLOGUE
RHYS
Whitewater Junction, Alaska
Three Years Ago
The call comes in at 2:47 a.m., dispatcher's voice tight.
"Sheriff, we've got a vehicle accident on Mountain Pass Road. Single vehicle off the embankment." A pause, then quieter: "You need to get up there."
I'm already moving, feet hitting the cold floor as I reach for my boots and clothes. Emma's side of the bed is empty—she took the late shift at the hospital in Palmer and won't be home until morning.
"Copy. En route."
The roads are slick with black ice, treacherous even for someone who's driven these mountains his whole life. My grandfather wore this badge. My father wore it. Now me. Three generations of Blackwaters keeping this town safe, and tonight the mountain feels wrong in my bones.
Mountain Pass Road snakes along the ridge, a narrow strip of asphalt with a guardrail that's seen better decades and a drop-off that doesn't forgive mistakes. I take the curves faster than I should, emergency lights painting the snow in red and blue.
Then I see it.
My truck skids to a stop. The guardrail is twisted like gnarled branches snapped in a storm. Fresh gouges in the asphalt catch my headlights—black streaks leading straight to the gap in the rail.
No.
My chest tightens. Something cold crawls up my spine that has nothing to do with the January wind.
I know this road. Know every curve, every dangerous spot. And I know what kind of car leaves tracks this narrow in fresh snow.
Please. Not her. Anyone but her.
But even as I'm thinking it, praying it, I'm moving toward the edge. My boots crunch through ice. The drop-off opens up below me, and there—maybe thirty feet down the embankment—a Subaru rests on its roof against a boulder.
Blue. Emma's shade of blue.
The headlights are still burning into the snow.
The world stops.
Everything slows—my heartbeat, my breath, the way my hands shake as I grab the radio. "Dispatch, ETA on medical?"
"Ten minutes out, Sheriff."
Ten minutes. Emma might not have ten minutes.
The rappelling gear is always in my truck. Always. Because this is Alaska, and mountain roads eat cars like candy, and I've pulled bodies from wrecks more times than I want to count.
Never thought I'd be pulling my wife.
The descent takes seconds that feel like hours. Snow and rock under my boots, the rope burning through my gloves. The Subaru's roof is caved in on the driver's side, metal crumpled like tinfoil. I drop the last few feet and hit the ground running.
"Emma!"
No answer.
The driver's door is jammed. I wrench it open with strength born from panic, and there she is. Hanging upside down in the seatbelt, blonde hair matted with blood, face too pale in the emergency lights filtering down from the road.
"Emma, baby, I'm here. I've got you."
