He stepped into the storm and slammed the door shut behind him.The wind swallowed the sound instantly.The sudden absence of him left the cabin too quiet, too empty, the silence pressing close around me like the walls themselves had shifted.The fire crackled softly, the clock ticked on the wall, and the storm battered every surface with a savage determination that refused to be ignored.
Maybe this was my one chance.Maybe my only one.
My eyes swept the cabin, cataloging everything the way I’d learned to do over the past three days.The knives in the kitchen were out of reach.The weapons cabinet was locked and the key stayed on Gabriel.The fireplace poker was too far and too heavy to lift quietly.But the broken mirror—yes.Two nights ago a shutter tore loose and knocked it from the wall.Gabriel swept up most of the glass but missed some, and I’d watched one shard slide under a supply box.
The ropes at my wrists had just enough give now—barely an inch, maybe less.Enough to hurt, not enough to slip free.But maybe enough for this.
I braced my bound legs and pushed against the floor, inching the chair backward.The scrape of wood dragged across wood sounded too loud in the suffocating quiet, and I froze, listening hard for footsteps returning through the storm.Nothing.Just wind and the deep groans of the timbers fighting to hold.
I pushed again.And again.Every inch felt like a mile.Every scrape of the chair legs sent fresh pain through my wrists, rope biting into damaged skin and drawing new blood that soaked into already filthy gauze.My back ached from the strain, my shoulders trembled with effort, sweat trickled down my spine despite the cold.
Six feet.Four.Two.
The glass shard glinted faintly in the firelight under the box.I leaned as far as the ropes allowed, extending my fingers until pain shivered up my arms.My fingertips brushed it once, twice, before they finally hooked around it and dragged it toward me.The edge sliced immediately into my palm—sharp, brutal—but pain had stopped registering as something to avoid.
I twisted the shard until the sharpest point bit into the rope at my right wrist.The angle was wrong and the movement small, barely anything at all, but the glass sawed slowly through individual fibers.Every breath felt like borrowed time.Every second Gabriel stayed outside felt impossible and fragile and precious.I kept going.And going.And going.The ropes frayed, threads separating one by one until suddenly the angle shifted and I could pull my hand out.
Freedom hit hard enough to make me dizzy.My wrist throbbed violently beneath the blood-soaked bandage, but I forced my shaking fingers to transfer the glass to the freed hand and start on the other side.It went faster this time.More threads snapped, and then both hands were free.
I sat still for a moment, stunned by the absence of resistance, staring at wrists that felt too light, too exposed, too mine.Then I bent forward, fighting vertigo, and cut through the ropes around my ankles.The last rope parted and I stood on legs that refused to cooperate.I grabbed for the chair, steadying myself while the room swayed and the blood rushed painfully back into my muscles.
The door was twenty feet away.Salvation or hypothermia—or both—in twenty feet.
I moved carefully around the weak floorboard Gabriel always avoided, my hand trailing over the table to steady myself.The fire warmed my face, the blanket slipped from my shoulders, but I didn’t stop to retrieve it.The closer I got to the door, the more certain I became that I wouldn’t survive in the storm.But staying meant waiting for Gabriel to decide whether I lived or died.If I was going to die, I wanted the decision to be mine.
My fingers curled around the handle.The metal felt like dry ice against the torn skin of my palm.I pulled.
The wind exploded inside the cabin, snow blasting against my face so hard it stung.Freezing air punched the breath out of my lungs.White swallowed everything—sky, ground, distance.There was no path.No direction.Just a violent, endless storm.
For one terrifying second I froze, instinct screaming that stepping outside was suicide, that I would collapse and disappear under the snow in minutes.Then the image of my father’s body on the hardwood floor flashed behind my eyes.My mother.My brother.The Christmas tree lights still glowing as their blood dried.
I stepped into the storm.
The wind slammed into me hard enough to knock me sideways.Snow swirled so thick I couldn’t see my own hands.The cold cut straight through skin and muscle like knives.I braced myself against the doorway and pushed forward anyway, forcing my legs to move, forcing my body into a world determined to kill anything foolish enough to stand in it.
For the first time in days, I wasn’t tied down, wasn’t trapped in a cabin with the man who’d taken everything from me.
For the first time in days, I was making my own choice.
And if the storm swallowed me whole, at least I wouldn’t die in that chair.
At least I would die trying.
The cold hit me like something conscious and malicious, a predator with teeth and patience.In the first breath it slipped through my clothes, in the second it found my skin, and by the third it was burrowing toward bone with ruthless focus.I’d expected freezing temperatures—I’d seen Gabriel layer up every time he stepped outside—but expectation and reality weren’t the same.This wasn’t discomfort.This was annihilation.
Snow slammed into my face hard enough to sting, the wind driving the flakes so fast they felt like needles against exposed skin.I tried to look around and saw nothing but white.Above, below, sideways—just a washed-out world with no horizon.When I turned to find the cabin, it was already gone, swallowed by the storm as if I’d imagined it.The blizzard didn’t just hide things.It erased them.
Standing still meant dying, so I moved.The snow swallowed my legs past the knees, each step a full-body effort that stole more strength than I could spare.My jeans soaked through instantly, the wet fabric clinging to my skin like ice-water compresses.The muscles in my calves and thighs clenched against the cold, spasming from overuse and shock, but I kept going because stopping wasn’t an option.Forward was the only direction that didn’t include surrender.
A sudden gust knocked me sideways and I fell to my hands, the snow biting the cuts in my palms with burning sharpness before numbness took over completely.I shoved myself upright again, oriented toward nothing, and walked.I couldn’t see the sky to track the sun.Couldn’t follow my footprints because the storm devoured them as fast as I made them.I had no sense of distance.No sense of direction.Just movement for the sake of survival.
My hair froze against my cheeks, strands stiff and heavy with ice.My lungs burned with every breath, the air so cold it felt like inhaling knives.I pulled my collar up over my mouth and nose but it didn’t matter—the cold slipped through every gap in my clothes, found every weakness, and filled me from the inside out.
I don’t know how long I walked.Maybe two minutes.Maybe ten.My body stopped being a thing I controlled and became something I dragged, step after step, until sensation faded from my toes, then my feet, then everything below my knees.I knew what that meant.Hypothermia.The quiet beginning of the end.Biology class had warned us about the stages but lectures didn’t make you strong enough to stop them.
My legs buckled without warning and I slammed against something solid—a tree trunk half buried in snow.I gripped the rough bark and tried to think.Which way was I going?Was it the direction I meant to go?Did direction even matter when there was no civilization out here, no houses, no roads, nothing but forest and storm and cold that wanted me dead?
Go back.The thought surfaced through the thickening fog in my head.Turn around.Find the cabin.Fire.Warmth.Shelter.
