"Then we walk." Santi steps past me. He takes the lead this time, breaking the fresh snow with his long legs, creating a trench for me to follow. He doesn't look back. He simply expects me to keep up.
I watch his back for a second, a sharp spike of irritation mixing with grudging respect. He took the hardest physical job—breaking the trail—without asking for permission or praise.
I step into his footprints.
We walk for an hour. The silence between us is dense, broken only by the crunch of snow and the ragged sound of my own breathing. The incline gets steeper. My thigh muscles burn. The air is so thin it feels like swallowing razor blades.
Santi never slows down. He marches like a machine, plowing through drifts that reach his waist.
I keep my eyes locked on his back. I focus on pushing forward.
Then, he stops abruptly.
I crash into his back, my face smacking against the solid ridge of his shoulder blade. I stumble backward, swearing quietly. "Why did you stop?"
He doesn't answer. He is staring at the snow just ahead of us.
I step out from behind him and look past him.
The trench he is cutting through the snow intersects with another set of tracks. Large, deep depressions in the powder, trailing off toward the tree line on our right. They are fresh. The edges of the prints haven't started to blur yet.
Wolves. A pack of them. And based on the spacing and depth of the prints, they’re massive.
The wind suddenly shifts, blowing straight into our faces. The storm front is accelerating. The temperature drops another five degrees. A low, haunting howl echoes off the canyon walls, bouncing off the rocks until it seems to come from all directions at once.
Santi turns his head slowly. He looks down at me. His gaze is calm. He reaches under his torn coat and pulls a matte-black Glock from a shoulder holster I didn’t know he was wearing, the threaded barrel fitted with a compact suppressor.
"Change of plans, Reese," he says, the cold wind whipping the words from his mouth.
I stare at the gun. A Shadow's weapon, stark and lethal against the pristine snow.
The mountain just raised the stakes.
4
Santi
Metal clickscold and sharp in the freezing air. The slide of the Glock locks into place. My finger rests indexed along the frame, ready but disciplined. The mountain ridge feels still beneath the brutal, shrieking wind tearing through the ancient pines.
Massive depressions mar the pristine snow directly in our path. The tracks are fresh. Three inches across, deep claws biting into the icy crust. Gray wolves. A hunting pack. The edges of the prints are still crumbling, which means the beasts are close. They are tracking the scent of blood from the pilot's head wound. They are hunting us.
Reese stands still behind me. Her heat radiates against my spine through the layers of my overcoat. She remains perfectly silent. Her competence is a weight, pressing into the darkest, most violently guarded corners of my mind. For twenty years, I existed in a state of silent observation. Dominic carried the rage of our parents' murders. Matteo carried the grief in his kitchen. Dante carried the trauma in his violent fists. I carried nothing. I simply watched.
Now, staring at the fresh wolf tracks in the snow, the stillness fractures.
Possession locks my spine rigid.
This stubborn, magnificent woman refuses to break. I will put a round through every skull in this forest before a single claw reaches her.
"Step exactly in my footprints," I command. My voice is a low, jagged rasp. It does not sound like the controlled Santi Costa who boarded her helicopter yesterday. It sounds like a man stripped of his humanity.
"I copy," Reese says. No trembling. Just pure survival instinct.
The sky above us turns the color of bruised iron. The secondary storm front Dominic's meteorologists warned about is hitting earlier than predicted. The wind doubles in a single gust. A wall of blinding white snow slams into the mountain, erasing the horizon, the trees, everything beyond the immediate perimeter. The temperature drops fifteen degrees in a matter of minutes. The air becomes a physical weapon, slicing through exposed skin like shards.
We cannot reach the abandoned ranger station today. The ten-mile trek is a death sentence in this whiteout. We need immediate cover.
I pivot. My body automatically angles to shield her from the brunt of the gale. The blizzard lashes at my face, but I barely register the sting. Every sense I have is locked on Reese. The boundary between us is dissolving into nothing.
