She shouldn’t be here.
My heart stutters, adrenaline spiking. Nothing about her actions says she’s leaving.
Neither do the words she sometimes speaks out of nowhere. As if she’s carrying on a conversation with the mountains or the trees.
And the way she says my name. It sounds like a judgment, unyielding, final.
Dark clouds build overhead, the forest silent, waiting. Then, a distant boom, a rippling of webbed light spreads sideways across the horizon.
The storm rolls over me the same way the past always does—sudden, violent, impossible to outrun. Another crash, then the rain starts. Heavy and relentless, like the sky itself finally giving in.
I scramble down the hidden path, shrouded in trees, moving fast. Gravel and dirt billow, my feet sliding down the steep cuts already transforming into muddy waterfalls.
I have to see this. And I have to hear what she says next.
“Sergeant Rhys Ward!”
And just like that, the life I built up here stops feeling untouchable.
Chapter
Four
SLOANE
Ishould’ve noticed where I parked.
No tracks. No signs anyone used this road regularly. And nothing anchoring the rust-colored dirt to the mountainside.
Rain crashes from the sky in impossible torrents. Thunder and lightning follow, furious.
Great claps boom through the foundations of the small cabin. Then, angry threads of white light rip across the heavens.
I jump despite myself, clutching my chest. Everything seems angrier, more final at seventy-six hundred feet, like nature’s enraged I’m up here.
But the tempest has nothing on the emotions raging inside me. I’m standing in the cabin of the only man left with answers—the man responsible for what happened that day.
To know he’s close enough to hear this storm too.
He has to be.
And I’m patient enough to wait him out, no matter how long it takes. Because after years of research—of asking questions no one can answer, of turning over every stone—he’s all that’s left.
Boom!
My hands shake as thunder explodes overhead. More artillery than weather. This place might be beautiful. But it’s also self-punishment.
Nature, raw and unforgiving. Maybe that’s what brought Rhys Ward up here. The search for a beautiful purgatory.
Lightning branches across the sky like glowing spiderwebs. And that’s when I see it, from the corner of my eye.
A red torrent building toward the silhouette of the Jeep.
“Oh, God!”
I can’t pull my gaze away for a tense moment. Can’t believe what I’m seeing. The ground is washing out beneath the Jeep faster than my brain can process it.
Will the cabin be next?
