Professional. Organized. These were the words that kept surfacing in her mind. This wasn’t someone who’d driven out from Irma on a weekend with a rifle and bad judgment. This was organized. Systematic. They were killing whatever carried value and processing it in the field and moving it out.
Jack moved beside her, his mouth by her ear. “We need to leave.”
Steph turned her head slightly toward him, her mouth close to his. He was right. She’d hoped to recognize the men, but every second they remained here, the more risk they took.
One of the men stopped working and moved to the edge of the fire, hands on his hips and head tilted to the side, his face in profile as he checked the pelt rack. No...that wasn’t right. He wasn’t looking at the pelts. He was looking at something beyond the rack.
At the snow. At the place where they had first been standing.
Their tracks.
The understanding of that landed in her stomach. They’d walked in using the snowmobile tracks. Their footprints were there, over the top. Clear and readable. Two sets of prints coming out of the meadow and stopping right about where they were standing.
She put her hand on Jack’s arm. A slow, deliberate pressure.
The man said something that caused the other two to stop what they were doing.
Her heart was loud in her ears. She focused on keeping her breathing slow and even, the way she did at mile sixty when everything wanted to spiral and the only thing that helped was controlling her breathing. In. Out. Slow.
The man who had spoken took a step toward the edge of the firelight, away from the pelts. Toward their prints. His rifle was still slung across his back, eyes on the snow.
She looked at the trees to their left. The dark between them was deep enough. Maybe, if they moved right now, low and slow, angling away from their own tracks rather than back along them, they could get away. It’d leave more tracks, but tracks that went somewhere other than directly to where they were standing.
It was the only thing she had.
She leaned toward Jack, her mouth close to his ear. “Left,” she breathed. “Now. Low.”
Chapter 16
Jack
Jack followed her into the dark and tried not to think about how much noise he was making.
Steph moved through the trees like she moved through everything else—with intention, placing each foot before committing her weight, reading the ground by feel as much as by the thin ambient light filtering through the canopy.
He was doing his best to match her, and his best was not good enough. Every step landed with a thud. His jacket brushed a branch, and the sound of it was enormous in the silence. His jaw clenched.
She didn’t look back. She trusted him to keep up and stay quiet, and he was failing at the second part.
He kept moving.
The men’s voices carried through the trees behind them. He couldn’t make out the words, only the tone. One voice sounded upset. Another stayed low, but there was something in it that almost sounded teasing, as if he were making fun of the one who was angry.
Jack had made a mistake. He understood that with the particular clarity that only arrived after it was too late to be useful.
They should’ve packed up the stoves and gone back to the road the moment they heard the snowmobile. Should’ve walked back to Silver Mane’s Lodge and driven to the nearest place with cell service and called the sheriff.That was the correct sequence of events for two people who had stumbled onto something that wasn’t their problem to solve.
Instead, he’d stood in that meadow and watched the lights move through the trees, and had done nothing to stop what happened next. He’d looked at Steph, and she’d looked at him, and they’d both made the same choice without saying it out loud, and that was on him as much as it was on her, but she was not the one who should’ve known better.
He was.
Jack spent years operating in environments that required reading risk correctly and acting on that reading before the situation compelled action. That was what the biathlon demanded—assessment and decision under pressure, the target identified, the shot taken based on information rather than impulse.
He’d thrown all of that away for curiosity and something he wasn’t going to name right now.
And not for the first time. Years ago, he’d made a similar mistake. Let something matter more than it should have in a moment that required clear thinking. He knew where that led. He’d been living with the fallout for years, and he’d promised himself he wouldn’t do it again.
But here he was, moving through the dark trees of the park in the middle of the night because he hadn’t kept Steph out of something she never should’ve been in.
