I stop in my tracks, cold slicing through every uncovered inch of skin.
“What?”
“Don’t stop looking. Not until you find her.”
I breathe once through the terror lodged in my chest. “Never.”
The line crackles. I hear her inhale on a sob—
Then the call drops.I stare at the screen—the blank, merciless screen—as the storm swallows what little signal remained.
“Ava?” I try once. Twice. But it’s useless. The phone is nothing but dead weight now.
I shove it into my pocket and keep moving, faster, heavier. The wind beats against me like it’s trying to wrestle me to the ground. Snow blinds from every direction, erasing edges, smothering distance.
Think like Violet.
Fourteen. Reckless in that impossible hope that youth can outrun nature. Boots too light. Jacket zipped sloppy. Backpack bouncing like she’s just popping down the road for sugar—not stepping into a storm that wants to eat her alive.
“Violet!” I shout, but the storm steals her name, swallowing it without a trace.
My breath saws in and out, steam burning from my lungs. I push harder, legs pumping through drifts already climbing past my shins.
I force my eyes open against the sting, scanning every blur of white and dark.
The mountain groans—that deep, dangerous sound Ava warned me about—the kind that says the snowpack is shifting. Thinking. Preparing.
The flakes grow heavier, the wind screaming louder.
I call her name again, voice raw, throat frozen.
“VIOLET!”
Nothing answers but the storm.
My heart races, matching my stride. For every second she’s out here, the cold is taking pieces of her—fingers first, then skin, then bone, then breath.
I can’t think about Emily—how I couldn’t save her.
Not again. Not a second time.
I surge forward, every step a vow.
“Violet!” I shout again, voice crashing through the storm.
No answer. But I keep going.
Because mothers are made to wait. And I am built to search.
Chapter Thirty
Ava
I pace the cabin—back and forth, back and forth, wearing grooves into the wood because if I stop moving, I will shatter. I keep replaying Jax’s voice over and over, the last thing the storm allowed me to hear:
“You’re a mother first.”
He said it like a lifeline. He said it like a command. He said it like he expected me to actually obey.
