14. Justice #2
Her jaw tightens. She processes it. Six miles through deep snow in the dark with the temperature dropping and a wounded man and no shelter. Any other woman from her world would crumble. Emilia pulls the blanket tighter around her shoulders and lifts her chin.
"Then we better start walking."
I grunt. Adjust the pack straps. And turn us west into the black trees, leaving the burning cabin and her father's hired wolves behind us in the dark.
Six miles in deep snow takes four hours when one of you is bleeding and the other is wearing boots that could fit two of her feet inside each one.
Emilia doesn't complain. Not once. She stumbles on a buried root and gets back up. She slides on a frozen switchback and catches herself on a pine branch that scrapes her palms raw and she just wraps her hands tighter in the fire blanket and keeps walking.
Ninety minutes. Maybe less.
I bring up the pace.
The mining track is overgrown but navigable, a scar cut into the mountain sixty years ago by men who pulled silver out of these rocks and left nothing behind but rotting timber frames and rusted rail spikes.
I know every switchback, every washout, every collapsed section where the trail drops away into nothing.
I've hiked this track in every season, every condition, every hour of darkness.
The mountain talks to me through the soles of my boots and I listen.
Emilia stops talking around mile three. Bad sign. Her shivering intensifies, becomes rhythmic, mechanical. Her body running its last available program to generate heat.
I don't ask permission. I drop the pack, scoop her up, and put her over my shoulder. She makes a small sound of protest that dies against my back. Her fingers curl into my jacket and hold on.
The bullet wound in my deltoid screams with every step. I ignore it. Compartmentalize. File it in the same place I put hunger, cold, fatigue, and every other physical sensation that tries to interfere with the job. The job is getting her warm. Everything else is noise.
Mile four. Mile five. The trees thin and the slope gentles and I can smell the valley now, pine resin and frozen earth giving way to wood smoke from distant chimneys. The Forest Service road appears as a pale ribbon in the darkness, plowed recently, gravel showing through patches of compacted snow.
My truck is where I left it. Parked in a pullout a quarter mile from where the mining track meets the road.
Backup plan. Always have a backup plan. I popped the hood and disconnected the battery before we hiked up to the hunting cabin three days ago, a precaution against anyone trying to hotwire it or plant a tracker.
The reconnection takes forty seconds with numb fingers.
The engine turns over on the first try because I maintain my machines and my machines don't fail me.
I put Emilia in the passenger seat and crank the heat to maximum.
She's pale. Lips edging toward blue. I strip the wet fire blanket off her and replace it with the wool emergency blanket from behind the seat, wrapping it around her twice, tucking it under her chin. Her eyes find mine in the dark cab.
"Thank you."
I close her door and drive.
The A-frame appears through the trees twenty minutes later. Gate intact. No tire tracks in the fresh snow on the road. The cameras show green on my backup tablet, all sensors reading clean. Nobody's been here since we left.
I carry her inside. Get the woodstove loaded and lit.
Fill the kettle. Strip her out of the wet clothes and into dry ones from my dresser, another flannel, another pair of wool socks, a thermal undershirt that hangs on her like a dress.
She sits on my bed with her hands around a mug of hot water because I haven't made the tea yet, just need to get something warm into her now.
The bullet wound I deal with in the bathroom.
Hydrogen peroxide from the first aid kit burns like battery acid going in.
I pack it with gauze, wrap it tight with an ACE bandage, and pop four ibuprofen dry.
The bleeding has mostly stopped. It'll scar ugly and I'll lose some range of motion for a few weeks but the arm works and that's what matters.
When I come back to the bedroom, Emilia is asleep. Sitting upright with the mug still in her hands. I take it from her, ease her down onto the pillow, and pull the heavy quilt up.
Two sets of hired men in four days. The first pair just asking questions around town. The second pair with suppressors and accelerant and the training to use both. Each wave more aggressive than the last. Each wave getting closer.
The math is simple. Her father has resources.
Unlimited resources, from what she's told me.
Private security firms on retainer. Legal teams that can pull property records and run background checks and track down secondary addresses in rural counties where people don't ask questions.
I tied two of his men to trees tonight and torched the evidence and called in an anonymous tip, and all of that buys us days. Maybe a week.
Then the next wave comes. Better equipped. More numerous. With a warrant or a writ or some legal fabrication cooked up by attorneys who bill four figures an hour.
I can fight. I can hide. I can fortify and evade and survive in these mountains longer than any city contractor they send after us. But I can't do it forever. Not with her. Not when every confrontation puts her six inches from a bullet hole in a tree trunk.
The fire pops in the stove. Emilia shifts in her sleep, pulling the quilt tighter, and the bruises on her catch the orange light.
I've been reacting. Defensive positions, evasion routes, perimeter alarms. Playing their game on my terrain. But terrain advantages erode when the enemy can keep throwing bodies at the problem indefinitely.
The source. Cut the problem at the source.
I stand. Pull the heavy canvas duffel from the top shelf of the closet.
Start packing. Clean clothes. Cash from the lockbox under the floorboards, nine thousand in hundreds, just under the reporting threshold.
The Glock 19 with three full magazines. Charger cables.
A paper map of Southern California that I bought five years ago and never thought I'd use.
The zipper sounds loud in the quiet cabin.
Emilia's eyes open. She blinks at me, at the duffel, at the gun sitting on the folded clothes. Sleep clears from her face and something sharper replaces it. Recognition. She pushes herself up on one elbow.
"What are you doing?"
I look at her. This small, impossible woman who told me she loved me four hours ago in a cabin that no longer exists. Who walked six miles through a blizzard without a single word of complaint. Who deserves a life where she doesn't wake up wondering which night is the last one.
Running won't fix this. Hiding won't fix this. Only one thing fixes this.
"We have to go to LA."