It wasn’t a question. It was a command. A debt I was now carrying through the dark.
“I am”
She studied my face for a long second, looking for the lie. She didn't find one, but she didn't find peace either. She just nodded once. “Okay.”
That faith sat heavy in my marrow now as I turned us down another unmarked track, the brush scraping against the doors like fingernails.
“You sure about this one?” Holtasked.
“Yeah,” I said, my pulse beginning to thrum with a sick, instinctive rhythm. “Ray mentioned an old hunting cabin out this way once. It’s off the tax maps, buried in the timber. Nobody uses it anymore.”
“Nobody sane,” Holt muttered.
The headlights swept over broken fence posts and a rusted gate hanging open on one hinge like a broken jaw. The land dipped into a hollow, then rose again, the road barely visible beneath overgrown, yellowed grass. The air felt different here. It was colder, thicker, smelling of stagnant water and things that died in the shade.
I felt it before I saw it. That wrongness. That prickle along my spine that told me we were no longer alone in the woods. The trees seemed to lean inward, whispering.
Out of nowhere, I hit the brakes, the truck skidding slightly.
“What is it?” Holt asked. I leaned forward without a word, squinting into the void, and killed the lights.
“You serious? We won't see a foot in front of us.”
“Good.”
The world dropped into a terrifying, absolute darkness, broken only by the faint, ghostly glow of the dash and the cold, uncaring stars overhead. My eyes adjusted slowly. The silhouettes of the trees emerged, jagged and sharp.
“There,” I whispered, pointing through the windshield.
Holt followed my gaze. A faint flicker of light glowed ahead, low and unsteady, half-hidden by a screen of dying pines. It wasn't a fire; it was the sickly, orange light of a fire through a grime-covered window.
“Campfire,” he murmured.
“No. It’s inside,” I said. “It’s trouble.”
I opened the door, and the hinge let out a faint groan that felt like a betrayal. I grabbed my rifle and stepped out, my boots crunching softly on the gravel. The night air was biting,smelling of damp earth and something sour, the scent of a place that had seen too much shadow. I motioned for Holt to stay put, to be my backup in the dark, then I started forward.
Every step felt like walking toward a cliff edge. I kept low, moving with the slow, agonizing precision of a man walking through a minefield. The cabin emerged from the dark like a wound in the land. The boards were warped and grey with age, looking like the skin of a leper.
And there, parked crooked near the tree line, was the vehicle that made my blood turn to ice.
Her truck.
My pulse slammed so hard it felt like it would burst the vessels in my neck. I crouched behind a fallen, moss-covered log, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs. I forced myself to breathe. In. Out. Don't let the rage blind you. Think.
Voices drifted through the thin, rotting walls of the cabin.
A man’s voice. It was calm. Horrifyingly controlled. It was the voice of a man who believed he was doing something righteous.
And then, hers.
God, her voice. It was raw, stripped of its usual warmth, sounding like it had been shredded by hours of screaming or silence.
I closed my eyes for half a second, praying to a God I hadn't spoken to in years. When I opened them, the cabin was still there. The orange light was still flickering. This wasn’t a nightmare I could wake up from. This was the reality I had to survive.
I edged closer through the wet grass, keeping low and slow, through the wet grass, staying in the deep shadows cast by the pines until I was close enough to hear the individual words, their breathing, the creak of a chair.
“You don’t get to decide when I eat,” Tessa said. It was asnarl, but I could hear the exhaustion under it, the way her voice wavered on the edges. “I’m not a child, Colin. I’m not your project.”
