“That's the job,” I agree, and mean it more ways than he knows yet.
“Stay sharp, Colt. Something about this already smells bigger than a body in the snow.” He pauses. “You good? You sound wound tighter than usual.”
I look at Nora again, the rise and fall of her breathing steady under the wool, that split lip already starting to darken at the edge. “I'm good. Just don't like finding boot prints forty yards from a woman who's already running from something with a gun.”
“Fair.” Another pause, shorter. “We'll figure out who she saw and what it's connected to. In the meantime, keep the door locked and the traps set. You know how, better than the rest of us put together.”
“Already ahead of you there.”
We wrap it with a few more lines about check-in times and what counts as an emergency versus what doesn't, and then I set the phone back on the mantel and stand there a second longer than the conversation requires, turning the print over in my head. One set of boots. One long look at smoke that isn't supposed to be there. Gone before he committed to anything.
Could be nothing.
I've stayed alive this long by not betting on could-be-nothing.
I go back out and set more than I would on an ordinary night — the small ones along the threshold first, jaws light enough to snap on a boot without taking a foot off at the ankle, positioned where fresh snow will cover them clean inside the hour. Then two more out past the tree line where that print sat, staked and hidden, tuned to rattle loud enough to wake me through a wall if anything bigger than a fox comes through that gap again. My hands know this work without needing my head in it, which leaves my head free to run the same loop it's been running since I found that track: somebody stood here. Somebody looked at my cabin and thought about it.
Whoever it was, they'll have to come back through weather that's actively trying to erase every trace of the mountain by morning. That buys me time. Doesn't buy me certainty.
I finish, stamping snow off my boots at the door, and bar it behind me with the iron I forged myself last summer, the kind of lock that doesn't care how determined a man on the other side of it happens to be.
Tomorrow I'll hike down and bury what's left of her car deeper in the drift, break up any tire marks the storm hasn't alreadyswallowed. Make sure that dirt road looks like it hasn't seen a living soul in a week.
I pull the heavy chair up beside the bed and sit, elbows on my knees, watching her sleep in the low orange wash off the coals. She doesn't know yet how much of tonight I'm keeping from her —not to lie, just to let her get one full night's rest before the world gets heavier again. That's a mercy I can give her. It might be the only one, before this is finished.
It's been a long time since anyone slept under this roof besides me. Six years, near enough, since I built this place specifically so nobody would have a reason to. Easier that way, I told myself. Fewer people to worry about losing. My father taught me that lesson without meaning to —how a mountain can take everything from a man and leave him standing anyway, hollowed out and calling it strength. I spent a long time thinking that was the only kind of strong worth being.
I look at her now, curled small under furs I cut and cured myself, breathing easier than she has all night, and something in that old, careful arithmetic doesn't add up the same way it used to.
I'm still turning it over when I hear it — faint, almost lost under the wind, gone almost as soon as it registers. An engine. Far off, down toward the road, there and then not there, swallowed by distance or storm or both.
I go still, every sense I own tuned outward instead of in. Long seconds pass. Nothing follows it. No second sound, no headlights ghosting through the trees, nothing but wind driving snow against the window same as it's been doing for hours.
Could be a plow. Could be nothing.
I sit with my hand resting near the rifle propped against the wall anyway, and I don't take my eyes off the door again for a long while.
The mountain keeps most of its secrets. Tonight I intend to keep this one better than it keeps any of them.
5
Nora
I jolt awake with a gasp, heart slamming against my bruised ribs hard enough to hurt. In the dream, the men from the snow were bursting through the cabin door, guns raised, faces twisted. I sit up too fast and the room spins, log walls and firelight swimming together. Pain flares sharp through my side. My head throbs hard enough that stars dance behind my eyes. For one terrifying second I don't know where I am. The blankets feel wrong. The bed is too big. This isn't my apartment. This isn't safe.
Strong hands catch my shoulders before I can tip off the mattress. “Easy, darlin'. You're safe. I've got you.”
Colt. His voice cuts straight through the panic, rough and low. His face comes into focus above me, his eyes finding mine in the dying firelight, his beard catching what's left of the glow. The cabin. The wreck. The murder. It all comes rushing back in a cold wave, and I sink against the pillows with a shaky breath, my ribs reminding me to move slower next time.
“I had a bad dream,” I whisper, my voice small in the space between us. “They were coming. Right through the door.”
He doesn't pull away. He stays right there, one big hand resting on my shoulder like he can hold the fear off with just that. “They're not getting in here. Not tonight. Not ever, if I have anything to say about it.”
The line should sound like something out of one of my own cartoon strips about overprotective mountain men, all bluster and no bite. Coming from him it just sounds true. I look up at him in the low light and something in my chest pulls tight. He's still fully dressed, sitting vigil in the chair he'd pulled close to the bed. The one bed. His bed. I'm in it, wrapped in his blankets and his flannel shirt, and the realization heats my cheeks even with the fear still sitting heavy in my stomach.
“Will you hold me?” The question slips out before I can stop it, my voice cracking. “I'm still so scared. Just until I fall back asleep.”
He doesn't hesitate. He stands, kicks off his boots, and slides into the bed beside me, the mattress dipping under his weight. He pulls me in careful of my ribs, one arm wrapping around me so my head rests against his chest. He's warm and solid against me, all broad shoulders and slow heartbeat under my ear, and I fit there in a way that should feel strange and instead feels like the safest thing that's happened to me all day. His hand moves down my back over the blankets, easy and sure.
