Afon
She sleeps.
I don't.
At some point, she went limp against my chest, the last tremor dying out like the aftershock of an earthquake. Her breathing evened into a slow, shallow rhythm, and I felt the exact moment she let go.
From then on, she twitched periodically. Her lips moved like she wanted to speak, but nothing more than a breathy sigh emerged. Wolf has his head on her lap and his eyes on me, one brow raised in that way of his that seems to say, Well. Here we are.
Here we are indeed. In-fucking-deed.
The fire has burned down to a low bed of coals, pulsing orange and gold.
I should get up and feed it, but that would mean moving, and moving would mean waking her, and I've seen enough tonight to know that what this woman needs more than warmth is rest. So I stay where I am, back against the couch, legs stretched out, Caroline pulled tight against my chest, and I let her have whatever peace she can steal from the dark.
Meanwhile, I'm thinking about the logging camp.
Not the men who inhabited it—they're taken care of, at least for now.
The heavy one and the kid with the gold chain won't be walking anywhere for a while, and Buzzcut's wrist is going to need surgical repair if he wants to hold anything heavier than a spoon again. The ones outside are even worse off.
None of it bothers me. The violence itself never has. It's what comes before and after the violence that eats you alive. The decision to do it, and then the silence when it's done. The in-between part? That's just fucking physics, plain and simple.
No, what I'm thinking about is the snowmobile.
It was a Polaris 850 Patriot. Black, maybe two years old, aftermarket exhaust, studded track for mountain terrain. There are a thousand just like it all throughout the Catskills.
But it's eating at me nonetheless—because I've seen that exact configuration before.
Not at the camp. Before.
Years before.
There's a windowless room in my memory that I keep locked. Inside that room is a stretch of road outside Saratoga Springs on a November night twenty years ago, and a woman in a blue dress behind the wheel of a Subaru that had already rolled twice before it came to rest against a guardrail.
Inside that room also is the sound of an engine retreating into the trees—not a car engine, because a car would have left tire marks on the asphalt and the police found none.
What they did find were chewed-up tracks in the frozen mud shoulder.
A snowmobile, they said. Probably some kids joyriding. Probably unrelated.
Probably unrelated. I still can't fucking believe they said that.
I told the police they were wrong. That the snowmobile had run my wife off the road, that she'd swerved to avoid it and lost control, that this was not a goddamn accident.
They nodded and wrote down everything they said.
Sorry for your loss, Mr. Satyrin, they said—and then they closed the case six weeks later.
No evidence of foul play. Black ice and bad luck.
But neither of those things explain why I walked away without a scratch, while Yelena didn't walk away at all.
I buried my wife on a Saturday and started drinking on a Sunday. I did that every night for months. By the time I surfaced from the bottom of the bottle, the trail was frozen colder than the ground they'd put her in.
But I never stopped looking.
You don't stop looking. Not for something like that. You can't. It lodges in you like shrapnel, a fragment too deep to extract, and every time you move wrong or breathe wrong or live wrong, you feel it wriggle.
For twenty years, I've felt it wriggle. I kept my eyes open the whole time. The looking became its own kind of addiction—quieter than the bottle, but just as destructive. It never led anywhere, though.
Until now.
Sitting in this cabin with this woman asleep in my arms, I'm staring at the ceiling and wondering why now of all times is the moment that my past has returned.
The men at the logging camp weren't random.
They were organized, funded, purposeful.
They had vehicles and generators and a boss.
Drug runners, I'm certain. Probably meth or fentanyl.
The Catskills have been crawling with these outfits for years—small teams running distribution routes through the mountains, using logging roads and old railroad grades to move product between upstate labs and the city.
I knew that. It's part of why I chose the cabin I did: it's remote enough that the drug runners and I could coexist without crossing paths, a predator-to-predator understanding. Stay off my land and I stay off yours.
That arrangement, apparently, has expired.
The snowmobile itself isn't proof of anything. It could be me deluding myself. But I know it isn't. I don't believe in fucking coincidences. And some things are too neatly arranged to be an accident.
Twenty years ago, Yelena died on a back road outside Saratoga Springs.
Four days ago, someone snuck up to my cabin and disabled my trail camera.
This morning, two men grabbed Caroline off a bench in Pike Hollow and drove her to a logging camp full of drug runners who knew my name and my history, and were waiting for a boss who wanted to know what I'd told her.
That boss is on his way. And whoever he is, he didn't stumble onto my mountain by accident.
He came looking for me.
The same way I've been looking for whoever killed Yelena.
Because it's them. I'm almost sure of it now. Maybe not the same individuals—twenty years is a long time and men in this line of work don't tend to age gracefully—but the same machinery. The motherfuckers that ran my wife off the road are back.
I close my eyes. The room in my mind rattles on its hinges. Something within it is howling.
As if she can hear the wails, Caroline murmurs and turns her face deeper into my chest. Her breath is warm through the wool of my sweater. I drop my chin to the top of her head and hold her tighter.
She came up this mountain looking for answers about her father. Instead, she found me in all my bloody, gory messiness. I threw her out, and they grabbed her, and if I'd been even a few minutes slower on my guilt trip back down—
I don't finish the thought. Certain calculations, once completed, cannot be uncompleted, and I need to stay operational.
The fire's last coal winks out. The cabin goes fully dark except for the faint blue glow of moonlight through the curtains. I sit in that darkness and hold her while I wait for morning. Not that I need that long to reach my decision. I already know what we have to do, for better or worse.
When dawn breaks…
We're leaving this cabin and we're not coming back.
Dawn is a slow affair.
I watch it seep through the curtain—first a dull gray, then a sickly amber, then the cold white of a mountain morning.
My legs went numb hours ago and my lower back is a solid block of cement.
But Caroline is still asleep, Wolf is still draped across her lap, and neither of them has moved, so neither have I.
Finally, I have no choice but to wake her.
"Caroline."
She stiffens. Her hands fist in my sweater and her breathing goes ragged for a few seconds before she opens her eyes and remembers where she is.
"It's me," I reassure her. "You're in the cabin. You're safe."
She blinks up at my face. "What time is it?" she mumbles.
"Early. But we need to move."
That wakes her the rest of the way. She pulls back, which puts her face about six inches from mine, close enough for me to see the crust of dried tears on her cheeks and the bruise purpling along her jaw where someone hit her. My jaw tightens.
"Move where?"
"There's a place further up the mountain. It's an old mining hut, about four miles north and a thousand feet higher. It's off every map I've ever seen, and the trail to it hasn't been maintained in fifty years."
"Why can't we stay here?"
I consider lying to her. Old habit, comfortable as a worn boot. But this woman has earned the truth.
Or at least enough of it to keep her alive.
"Because the men from that camp know where this cabin is. The one driving the truck that came back last night saw us leave on the snowmobile. He'll regroup. He'll come here. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow, but it's coming."
She absorbs that in silence. Then she nods once, firm, and pushes herself off my chest with both hands. The sudden absence of her weight against me is disorienting. I feel lighter and heavier at the same time, if that makes any sense.
It doesn't, of course. Nothing about any of this does.
"How's the ankle?" I ask.
"Awful. But functional."
"That'll have to do."
I'm on my feet and moving before the stiffness in my joints can talk me out of it.
The years are heavy this morning. Forty doesn't sound old until you've spent the night on a hardwood floor with your back against a couch after fighting six men and riding a snowmobile through the dark at fifty miles an hour. My knees are louder than ever.
I start packing. Not much—this isn't a vacation.
I pull a canvas duffel from under the bed and fill it with essentials: ammunition for the Remington, the folding knife, a first-aid kit, as many cans of beans as I can fit, a bag of Wolf's kibble, matches, a tarp, the wool blanket.
I roll the sleeping bag and strap it to the outside of the duffel.
From a tin box in the kitchen, I take the rest of my cash—it's not much, maybe four hundred dollars—and divide it between my jacket pockets.
Caroline watches me from the couch, hugging herself against the cold. "Can I help?"
"Fill the canteens." I nod toward two aluminum canteens hanging on hooks by the sink. "There's a water jug under the counter."
She does it without argument, which tells me the events of yesterday have already begun to do psychic damage that may never heal. She moves carefully on her bad ankle, but she moves, and she doesn't complain.
I'm pulling the photograph off the nightstand and tucking it into my breast pocket—next to the folded granola bar wrapper—when Wolf goes rigid.
His ears flatten. His hackles rise in a stiff ridge from his neck to his tail. A low, unending growl builds deep in his chest, the same rumble he produced two days ago when he heard the motor sound through the cabin walls.
Caroline freezes by the sink. Her eyes find mine.
I hold up a hand. Don't move.
I lunge to the window and peel back the curtain with one finger. The clearing is still murky with dawn, shadows pooling under the birches. I scan left to right, systematic, with hunter's eyes.
There.
Southeast tree line.
Movement.
Two figures, dark against the snow, moving in a low crouch along the edge of the clearing. They're a hundred yards out and closing. Behind them, deeper in the trees, I catch the dull flash of a third figure.
Wolf's growl intensifies. I drop the curtain.
"Time's up," I say. "We go now."
Caroline doesn't ask questions. She grabs the canteens and stuffs them in the duffel while I sling the Remington over my shoulder and shove my feet into my boots without lacing them. I grab the duffel from her.
"Back door. Stay behind me."
The cabin's rear exit opens onto the woodpile and, beyond it, the snowmobile I parked there last night. I left the key in the ignition because I am not an optimist by nature and I expected this exact scenario.
The morning air is so cold it hurts. Autumn is long gone—winter sank her teeth into this mountain and she is not letting go anytime soon.
I set Caroline on the seat first, then the duffel behind her.
Wolf needs no instruction. He launches himself onto the rear cargo rack with the sureness of a dog who has done this before, bracing his paws wide, tail low.
I throw a leg over and turn the key.
The engine catches on the first try. The Polaris's roar shatters the morning silence, which means the men in the trees now know exactly where we are. I don't have the luxury of caring about that anymore.
"Hold on," I order for the second time.
Caroline's arms lock around my waist. I pin the throttle.
We tear out of the clearing heading north, the snowmobile's track biting into the snow and spitting a rooster tail behind us. The trail is narrow and overgrown, more memory than path, but I ran it last night in full dark and I can do it again in the gray light with my eyes half shut.
The first shot cracks behind us as we hit the tree line. It snaps through branches somewhere to our right. Wide, but not wide enough for comfort. A second follows, closer, and I hear it hiss past at a pitch that tells me it's a rifle round, not a pistol.
These are not the same sloppy shooters from the logging camp.
Someone has upgraded the personnel.
I lean into a hard left turn around a granite outcrop. Caroline's grip tightens until I can feel her knuckles digging into my ribs. Wolf adjusts his weight behind us, brave and certain.
A third shot finds something.
Me, to be specific.
The impact is a hot, bright line across my left side, just above the hip.
It's only a graze—the bullet kissed the skin and kept going.
But that doesn't stop the pain. There's searing heat, followed by a wetness seeping into the waistband of my jeans.
At least the muscles underneath still work and the bones are intact.
I don't flinch.
I don't slow down.
And I sure as hell don't tell Caroline.
The trail climbs. The snowmobile's engine screams as the grade steepens, the track clawing for purchase on the icy ground. Trees close in on both sides. Behind us, the shots have stopped, which means we're out of range or they've lost line of sight. Either works.
We climb higher into the mountain, away from the cabin, the logging camp, Pine Hollow, and every piece of infrastructure that connects this wilderness to the civilized world.
The air thins. The trees change from birch to spruce. The snow deepens.
I keep one hand on the throttle and press the other against my left side, where the blood is warm and steady against my palm.
It'll keep. Everything keeps, until it doesn't.