CHAPTER 46
Wyatt reachedRefuge Cove and parked beside the house.
He, Kori, and Thunder climbed out into the cold.
The side door opened before they reached it. Caleb stood in the frame, one hand on the door. His eyes immediately went to Wyatt.
“You’re later than I expected,” Caleb said.
“Had a detour.”
“I don’t like the sound of that.” Caleb’s eyes moved to Kori then back to Wyatt. He stepped aside to let them in.
The mudroom was warm. The smell of coffee reached him immediately—recent coffee, not the remnants of an earlier pot. Caleb had been up waiting.
Wyatt heard voices from the kitchen. Millie’s low and quick. Naomi’s steadier. Max’s rumble underneath both of them. They must have all caught wind of what was happening, and they’d been waiting.
Wyatt waited until he was in the kitchen with a cup of coffee in hand before starting. With everyone gathered around, he gave him the short version.
The compound empty and rigged. The explosion. Two officers down. The truck on the highway.
Then he told them about the snowstorm.
They had forty-eight hours to enact some sort of plan.
Maybe less now.
He couldn’t help but feel time was running out.
Kori sat on the edge of her bed and listened to the house settle around her.
The murmur of voices from the kitchen had faded twenty minutes ago. A door had closed somewhere down the hall. The dogs had stopped moving—or she didn’t hear the clicking of their paws, at least.
It appeared everyone had gone to sleep.
She should too.
She knew that. Her body had been telling her that for hours. There was an insistent heaviness behind her eyes. Her thoughts kept losing their edges and blurring together.
Yet she was still alert.
She lay back on the quilt and stared at the ceiling.
Her mind immediately filled with things she didn’t want to see.
The woman they’d found with scarred wrists and ankles. The orange glow in the forest. The truck pulling alongside them on the highway.
She sat back up again.
She couldn’t sleep. Not yet. So she might as well be productive.
Kori grabbed her laptop from her bag and settled back against the headboard. The only light in the room came from the screen, pale and cool against the darkness.
She found the folder of trail camera files she’d saved from Mackenzie’s laptop and opened it.
There were more videos than she remembered. Dozens of them, sorted by date and time, going back seven months.
The earliest ones were short—ten, fifteen seconds of empty trail. The wind moving through branches. Nothing.
