The first bullet shattered the window.
Glass exploded inward in a glittering storm that caught the firelight before scattering across the floor, and I dropped behind the overturned table without conscious thought, the movement pure muscle memory.Heavy oak thudded under the impact of the first rounds, each hit punching through the wood inches from my skull.The noise hammered through the cabin—gunfire layered in overlapping bursts, not the clean cinematic sound most people imagined, but an ugly rolling thunder that swallowed everything else and turned time into fragments of light, noise, and instinct.
Cold air tore in through the shattered windows, biting my face until my skin went numb, snow riding the wind and swirling into the cabin like something alive.The temperature dropped so fast my breath fogged in front of me, dissolving in seconds.I tracked the rhythm of the shots—automatic fire from outside, staggered but coordinated, patterns drilled into the men coming for us the same way Victor had drilled them into me.They were suppressing first, probing entry points second, waiting for opportunity third.Textbook assault, and we were on the wrong side of it.
I shifted position, rifle raised, and fired two controlled shots through the highest gap in the shutters where I’d seen the first muzzle flash.The .308 kicked hard and someone screamed outside, a short brutal sound that cut off mid-breath.Snow muffled bodies, always did.The silence that followed told me everything—one down, multiples left, no time to register anything except the next threat.
The door jolted in its frame under impact—battering ram or shoulder, didn’t matter which.I pivoted, put three rounds through the center of the door at the height of a man rushing blind.The pounding stopped instantly.I didn’t wait to look.I rolled to the next point of cover before return fire tracked me, boots grinding over glass that now covered the floor like ice.
“Mia!Left window—twelve o’clock.”I didn’t take my eyes off the right side of the cabin as I shouted it.I didn’t need to.I trusted she’d hear me, and she did.She swung toward the broken window, weapon raised exactly the way I’d shown her, the Glock steady in both hands despite the tremor running through her shoulders.
Her shots came fast—three in a row, explosive in the confined space.I saw the shape of a man jerk backward in the snow, half in and half out of the shattered frame, then vanish from view.The noise of her breathing hit me next—shallow, sharp, shock bleeding into adrenaline.She had killed someone.Her first kill was something I should have prepared her for, should have helped her process, but there was no space for anything except survival.
A shadow moved behind me—silent, wrong, too close.I spun and caught sight of a hitman already inside the cabin, weapon raised, angle perfect to put a round through the back of my skull.I saw the gun, saw his gloved finger tighten, saw nothing else that mattered.Then three shots rang out—not mine.The impact staggered him backward, chest blooming red, weapon falling before his body hit the floor with a wet finality that always sounded the same no matter the location or season.
I turned toward her and found Mia standing over the table, arms locked out, gun still aimed at where the man had been.Steam rose from her breath, from the blood on the floor, from the muzzle of the Glock.Her hands shook violently but she didn’t drop the weapon.She had acted faster than I could have turned.She had saved my life.Her eyes met mine across the wreckage, and everything happening around us—the blizzard forcing its way inside, the gunfire outside, the cold burrowing into our bones—fell away in that one locked stare.
The expression on her face wrecked something in me.She looked shocked and numb and impossibly determined all at once.She wasn’t broken.She wasn’t retreating.She’d crossed the line between trying to survive and fighting to survive, and she had done it to protect me.I opened my mouth, not even sure what I meant to say—gratitude, apology, something human I shouldn’t have allowed myself to feel—but another window blew inward and instinct yanked me back into motion before a word left my mouth.
I fired at the next muzzle flash, and a shape crumpled in the snow outside.I reloaded by feel, shells hitting the floor and rolling under debris, and did another mental count of attackers based on movement, fire angles, and footsteps just audible under the ongoing storm.One inside dead.One outside dead by my rifle.One downed by Mia.One still firing from the right flank.Possibly two.Victor hadn’t pushed yet.He would come last, when my ammunition was low and he could take the shot himself.
I registered Mia lowering the gun to her chest, her grip loosening just enough to prove how hard she’d been holding it.She stared at the corpse between us like she was trying to process the transition from man to body, from hunter to threat neutralized at her hand.I saw it happen in real time—the realization that she’d saved me, not accidentally and not blindly, but deliberately.She had chosen my life over a stranger’s with full awareness of the price.
She should have been collapsing under the weight of that decision.She didn’t.She swallowed hard, raised the Glock again with unsteady strength, and shifted to cover the broken back entrance as though she’d been doing this her whole life instead of for less than ten minutes.The fear was still there—anyone could see that—but she didn’t let it control her.She controlled it.That distinction mattered.It changed something fundamental about the next ten minutes, and maybe the next ten years.
There would be time later—if later existed—to unravel what she’d done and what it meant for both of us.Time to understand why the sight of her standing over a corpse with shaking hands made my chest tighten in a way that had nothing to do with tactics.But for now, survival came first.Everything else waited.
Outside, someone shouted an order through the wind.Footsteps repositioned.Muzzle flashes strobed through the snow.Victor was calling the next play.The fight wasn’t over—not even close.Mia and I stood in the wreckage of the cabin, surrounded by broken glass and swirling snow and the bodies of men who had come to kill us, and I knew beyond doubt what mattered most going forward.
If they wanted to get to her, they would have to kill me first.
And I intended to make damn sure that didn’t happen.
Mia had killed for me.The thought forced its way through the tactical noise running in my head—angles, cover, ammunition, breach points—all the processing I needed to stay alive.It cut straight through everything, sharp and intrusive, but I couldn’t let myself feel the weight of it.Not while gunmen still moved outside the shattered windows, not while this assault was ongoing.So I shoved it down, buried it with every other emotion that had no place in a firefight, and let instinct dictate the next move.
Two new silhouettes breached simultaneously—one through the splintered front door, one through the side window.I fired on the first before he could raise his weapon, two center-mass shots that knocked him backward and turned his body into a barricade across the doorframe.Good.Every obstacle bought seconds.The second breach was cleaner—professional entry roll, weapon already up, firing as he landed.Rounds tore into the wall inches from my head.I dropped flat, returned fire from the ground, and the bullet found his throat.He collapsed in a spray that painted the wall behind him, and I rolled immediately, knowing they’d shoot where they’d last seen a muzzle flash instead of where I had moved.
The cabin was being chewed apart one board at a time.Chairs shredded into splinters, curtains torn away, glass crunching under every step.Snow pushed farther indoors with every gust, and the fire behind us hissed as flakes landed in the embers.The cold bit harder with every window lost, frost blooming on exposed metal surfaces.Mia’s voice cut through the chaos, tight with fear but controlled.“How many?”I didn’t know.I told her to keep her head down and moved again, reloading behind the overturned table by feel—magazine out, fresh magazine in, chamber a round.A motion I’d repeated ten thousand times until it became the closest thing to prayer the family ever taught me.
Another breach attempt—different cadence, more cautious now.They’d realized we weren’t going down the way they’d expected and were adjusting their tactics.They weren’t random muscle.These were trained hitters who’d come expecting an execution and were now settling into an actual fight.I caught motion outside the front window and fired, hitting someone but not fatally—the scream was too sharp, too alert.Blood dotted the snow like a trail, and he retreated to cover before I could finish the job.
Then everything stopped.
Gunfire cut out instantly, leaving only the scream of the storm and the crackle of the fire behind us.My ears rang from the sustained noise, and the phantom echo of gunshots wove through the silence, but I stayed locked in position.They weren’t gone.Trained men didn’t retreat after losing four in close quarters.This pause was strategy, not surrender.
“Gabriel.”The voice from outside froze the air in my lungs.Victor Calibrese.I’d known he’d be here—had felt him in the engines, in the precision of the assault, in the way the first wave pushed and then adapted.But hearing him speak, calm and certain and almost disappointed, hit harder than any round fired tonight.“I know you can hear me, boy.”
Mia watched me from behind the table, eyes wide and alert, gun still in her hands.She didn’t understand the layers in his voice, but I did.Victor was offering what he framed as mercy—a clean death if I surrendered.He wanted me to walk out for it, pretended this was a negotiation, but I knew the truth.Victor never left witnesses, and he never left loose ends.If I stepped outside, Mia would die first, then I would die second, and the family would erase us without blinking.
Victor walked into the cabin entrance, stepping over the corpse I’d dropped there, boots leaving bloody prints on the ruined floor.Firelight hit the familiar lines of his face—scarred temple, granite jaw, eyes that never stopped calculating.He looked older than the man who’d trained me, or maybe I was just seeing him clearly for the first time.His gun hung at his side, not aimed, but ready to come up in less than half a heartbeat.
“You were my best student,” he said, and the pain in his voice was somehow worse than anger.“I taught you everything.Shaped you into what you are.And you threw it away for a girl whose family we ordered eliminated.”I rose slowly, rifle trained on his chest, and told him she hadn’t been part of the job.He gave the simplest answer the mafia world lived by: nobody was innocent, collateral damage wasn’t tragedy, cleanup was duty.The hardest part was hearing the truth in his voice—he believed every word.
When I said I was done with the job, he answered the way every man in the crime world eventually does: no one was done until Victor declared it or the grave did.He asked me to put the gun down.Told me not to make it harder than it had to be.I refused, and disappointment drained from his expression the way warmth drains from the body after death—fast, irreversible, final.His features rearranged into the professional mask he wore when violence was the only language left.
He moved.
I fired first.
