13. Emilia
EMILIA
The word "burning" hasn't even finished leaving his mouth before he's moving.
He tears the blanket off the bed. Not the thin one we've been sharing.
The heavy one. The emergency one he packed at the bottom of his rucksack, the silvered fire blanket that crinkles like aluminum foil when he shakes it open.
He wraps it around me twice, tucking it under my chin, swaddling me like I'm something fragile that needs packaging for transport.
His hands are fast and rough and precise.
Smoke curls up between the floorboards. Thin grey fingers of it, reaching.
I can hear it now. A low, wet crackling beneath us. Not the friendly pop and hiss of the cast-iron stove. This is hungry. This sound has teeth.
"Window. Back wall. Now."
Justice grabs the rucksack with one hand and the shotgun with the other and crosses the cabin in two strides.
The back window is small. Maybe two feet square.
He boarded it shut six hours ago with a plank of pine and four heavy nails.
He drops the rucksack, reverses the shotgun, and drives the butt stock into the boards.
The first hit cracks the plank down the center. The second blows it outward into the snow. Glass shatters. Freezing air floods in and the cabin draws a massive breath and the smoke behind us surges upward, black now, thick, rolling across the ceiling in a wave that swallows the lamplight whole.
I can't see. My eyes are streaming. The chemical stench claws down my throat and I double over coughing and then Justice's hands are on me, lifting me, and I'm being shoved headfirst through the broken window frame.
Glass tears through the fire blanket. I feel it snag but not cut skin.
Snow hits my face. My palms sink into two feet of fresh powder and the cold is so absolute, so total, that for one disoriented second I think I've been thrown into water.
I flail, kicking free of the window frame, and tumble sideways into a drift that comes up past my ribs.
Behind me the window frame groans. Justice is too big for it.
I hear the wood splinter, hear him grunt, hear something in the wall give way as he forces his shoulders through a gap built for someone half his width.
He lands beside me, already on his feet, the rucksack over one shoulder and the shotgun in his hand.
The front of the cabin is gone.
I can see it from here. Orange light paints the snow in flickering bands between the tree trunks.
The porch where I sat this morning watching the storm break is a wall of flame.
The fire eats along the roofline with a sound like tearing fabric, sparks spiraling upward into the black sky where they mix with snowflakes and die.
Everything we built in those two days. The little domestic rhythm. The meals rationed out on tin plates. The sketchbook open on the table with a fresh drawing of my face that he started when he thought I was sleeping. Burning.
Justice doesn't look back.
His hand closes around my upper arm and he hauls me to my feet and we are moving. Not walking. Running. Or the closest thing to running you can do in thigh-deep snow on a forty-degree slope in the dark with smoke in your lungs and no trail.
I can't breathe. The blanket tangles in my legs and the cold has already found the gap at my collar and my feet in his oversized wool socks are soaked through in three steps.
Justice breaks trail ahead of me, plowing through the drifts with his body, creating a narrow corridor of packed snow for me to stumble through.
Trees close around us. Pines, heavy with snow, their lowest branches forming a canopy that blocks the firelight. The world shrinks to the sound of his breathing and the crunch of his boots and the wild hammering of my own heart.
He stops. Turns. Grabs me by both shoulders and pushes me down behind a massive fallen log. Crouches beside me. Listens.
Voices. Distant. Carrying on the thin mountain air with unnatural clarity.
Two of them. Maybe three. Men shouting to each other near the cabin.
I can't make out the words but I recognize the tone.
Professional. Coordinated. These aren't amateurs with a grudge.
These are my father's operators, methodical, patient, paid extremely well to drag me back to a life that was never mine.
Justice's hand covers my mouth. Not rough. Firm. His lips press against my ear and his breath is hot.
"Don't move. Don't speak."
I nod against his palm.
He pulls the blanket tighter around me. Tucks me into the shadow of the fallen log like he's tucking me into bed. His eyes scan the ridge above us, calculating, mapping terrain in the dark with the ease of someone who has walked all of this mountain a thousand times.
The glow from the burning cabin paints his face in copper and shadow. His jaw is set. His eyes are ice.
He checks the shotgun. Chambers a round. The sound is a solid, metallic clack that carries its own promise.
He doesn't look afraid. He looks like a man who just witnessed someone burn down his home, and who intends to make that a very expensive mistake.
He holds up a closed fist.
I freeze. One foot raised mid-step, hovering above the snow like a deer caught in headlights.
The muscles in my thigh scream. I hold the position anyway because in the last twenty minutes I have learned that when Justice Spanks makes a fist, you become a statue.
You become part of the mountain. You stop breathing if you have to.
He cocks his head. Listening to something I can't hear.
We've been moving along the ridgeline for what feels like an hour but is probably fifteen minutes.
He's kept us just below the crest, using the spine of rock and the thick stands of pine as cover while we circle west, away from the burning cabin and the access trail the PIs would have used to reach it.
The snow is shallower here where the wind has scoured the ridge, and the footing changes every few yards from powder to ice to bare granite slick with frozen runoff.
Justice navigates it like a hallway in his own house.
His fist opens. Two fingers. He points left, then draws his hand down in a slow, deliberate motion.
Drop. Go left. Stay low.
I sink to my knees behind a cluster of young pines, their branches so heavy with snow they form a natural curtain. The blanket has become my second skin. I pull it over my head and become a silver lump against white ground.
Through a gap in the branches I see him working.
He moves without sound. That's the part that still shocks me.
A man his size, six-foot-five and built like something assembled from bridge cables and oak, should not be able to flow between trees like smoke.
But he does. His boots find the rock beneath the snow.
His weight distributes across his feet in a way that seems practiced, deliberate, each step placed with the same precision he uses to seat a wrench on a bolt.
He disappears behind a boulder.
The silence becomes enormous. The fire is a distant orange glow now, flickering through the trees below and to our right. Occasionally a gust of wind brings the smell of it. Pine resin and old wood and something chemical, the accelerant they used. The stench sits in my sinuses and won't leave.
A branch snaps. Not where Justice went. Below. Forty yards down the slope.
I shove my face into the snow and observe through the pine needles.
A shape moves between the trees. Man-shaped.
Dark jacket, dark pants, a headlamp switched off but still strapped to his forehead.
He carries a rifle at low ready, the muzzle sweeping in small arcs as he picks his way up the slope.
His footwork is confident but wrong. I can see it even with my zero tactical experience.
He's stepping on the snow instead of through it, each boot punching a hole that makes a distinct compressed crunch.
He sounds like a drum compared to Justice.
A second shape trails fifteen yards behind the first. Bigger.
Moving with the same confident wrongness.
City shoes on mountain snow. These men know buildings.
Stairwells. Underground parking garages with smooth concrete floors.
They do not know this ridge. They do not know the way the wind deposits snow in deceptive overhangs above hollow pockets, or the way a granite shelf can end in a vertical drop hidden by a drift that looks like solid ground.
Justice knows.
I see what he's doing now. He's led us along the ridgeline to a specific point.
I couldn't understand why he kept circling west instead of just going straight up and over the top, putting distance between us and the fire.
But from my hiding spot I can see the terrain opening up below.
The slope steepens dramatically here. The trees thin out where an old rockslide stripped the mountainside bare, and the exposed granite funnels down into a narrow ravine choked with deadfall and ice.
He's herded them.
The first PI keeps climbing, angling toward my position.
My pulse spikes. I can hear his breathing now, labored, visible in ragged clouds.
He's maybe twenty yards out. I clutch the gun Justice pressed into my hands before he left, my finger alongside the barrel the way he showed me. Not on the trigger. Alongside.
A sound. Faint. A pebble skipping across rock, somewhere to the right and above.
The first PI snaps toward it. The second one does too. Both of them reorienting, drawn by the noise like fish following a lure.
They move right. Down the steepening slope. Toward the ravine.
Another sound. Deliberate. A branch scraping against bark. Coming from the trees just above the rockslide. Drawing them further.
The first PI steps onto what looks like a solid snow bank at the exposed granite.
His foot goes through.