First packet: the bathtub. Second: the bedroom floor. Third: taped to the leg of the dining table near the back door—I use a strip of electrical tape from the junk drawer I memorized on day one.
If Ivan Kova's team is outside looking through thermal scopes, the cabin reads as occupied in every room. Multiple bodies. Heat moving through the structure.
Ghosts. Decoys.
Digital architecture, translated into the physical world.
I crawl back to the main room. Kade has overturned the heavy oak table and barricaded himself behind it, rifle resting on top, aimed at the front door.
"Position," he orders. "Loft. You cover the back. Kitchen window, bedroom window—anything that comes through from that side, you end it."
"Okay."
I move up the short flight of stairs to the loft. It overlooks the main room and gives a clear sightline down the back hallway. I drop onto my stomach, the shotgun stock pressed into my shoulder. Cold wood against my cheek.
Cheek weld. Sight alignment. Lean in.
And we wait.
Time loses its shape.
Five minutes or fifty—impossible to tell. The cabin breathes and creaks. A branch drags across the roof like nails across slate. Every shadow looks like a man. Every rustle is a boot step.
My eyes strain against the dark. Muscles cramp. The bruise on my shoulder pulses, anticipating the recoil.
Then I hear it.
Scritch.
Faint. Coming from the back bedroom.
I stop breathing.
Scritch. Click.
Glass being cut. Not a breaching charge. Not the front door. A probe—a scout attempting quiet entry while the main force pins Kade at the front.
"Kade." Below a whisper. "Back bedroom."
"I can't leave the front." Just as quiet. "If I move, they breach the main door. Can you see it?"
I inch forward.
The bedroom door is open. A shadow detaches from the window frame.
Darker than the darkness around it. A silhouette. It moves with fluid, inhuman grace—stepping over the sill and onto the floor like something that has done this a hundred times. No hesitation. No wasted motion.
He's inside.
Panic flares—hot, blinding, animal. I'm a coder. I type. I don't do this. I've never?—
The glint of metal in the shadow's hand stops the thought cold.
A knife. Long, serrated blade.
He's not here to negotiate. He's here to cut throats in the dark and disappear, the way Ivan Kova's people always disappear, and Kade is five feet below me with his back exposed?—
You are your last line of defense.
