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.
He snapped a twig.
The sound cracked through the silence like a gunshot. He winced and stopped moving. Steph stopped, too, both of them still, not breathing.
The voices from the camp shifted.
He heard the change before he could make out the words. The tone of it, the way the conversation moved to something with an edge to it. Then the words started carrying.
“ —somebody out there. I’m telling you.”
The second voice, still dismissive but the teasing tone now gone, said, “You’re hearing things. There’s nothing out there.”
“I heard something.”
“It’s the wind. It’s the trees. Pick up the other end of this.”
A pause. Then there was a third voice, flat and certain. “Turn on the spotlight. See what you see.”
A spotlight.
Jack understood immediately how bad this was.
Depending on the type of light and how powerful it was, the entire place could be lit up like a city.
There were trees between them and the camp, but they were still too close.
And their tracks were back there in the snow, two sets of prints coming out of the meadow and cutting left into the trees, legible as a map to anyone with enough light to read them.
Steph grabbed his arm.
He felt her shift before he understood what she was doing, and then she was moving left again, faster now, no longer careful about sound, and he went with her because he didn’t have a better idea.
She was angling toward a dense tangle of low-growth brush and deadfall where the trees crowded close and the canopy came down nearly to the snow.
Steph pushed through the outer edge of it and pulled him in behind her. They went down, both of them dropping low without discussion, pressing into the brush and the snow and the cold dark of it.
The area lit up.
It happened fast. A beam of white light swept out from the camp, wide and powerful, the kind of light that didn’t leave shadows where shadows ought to be. It crossed the tree line and moved through the trees and swept the open snow between the timber and the camp.
He could see their tracks from here. He could see them clearly in the light, the two sets of prints coming out of the meadow, the point where they’d stopped, the place where they’d moved left into the trees.
The light swept across them, and he held completely still, keeping his breathing controlled by sheer effort of will.
Beside him, Steph was motionless. He couldn’t hear her breathing at all.
The light moved. It tracked along the tree line, slow and methodical, the kind of search pattern used by someone who knew what they were doing.
It was going to hit the brush. He could see the angle of it and where it was going, and there was nothing to do but stay down and stay still and hope the brush was enough.
“Nothing,” the dismissive voice said again, closer now.
“Keep it on the trees,” the flat voice said.
The beam swept back. It crossed the snow again, slower this time, and Jack watched it move across the footprints and stop.
His chest tightened.
The beam held on the prints as Jack counted the seconds.
“Could be deer. Elk,” the dismissive voice said, but with less certainty in it now.
“It’s not elk.”
“Sure, it is. We’ve got work to do. Let’s get back at it.”
Jack was well aware of the pistol against his chest but also understood he couldn’t risk the noise his zipper would make to get to it.
He was even more aware that three men with rifles and a spotlight against two people hiding in brush was not a problem his pistol could solve.
He kept his hands where they were and watched the beam through the tangle of branches.
“Wind and animals,” the dismissive voice said. “We’re burning time.”
The light held on the prints.
He thought about Steph. About the fact that she was here because he’d driven out from Irma and staged a coincidence and walked her into the wilderness for reasons that had nothing to do with training.
He believed deep down that if she were alone, she never would’ve taken a chance like this. She would’ve seen the lights and known she needed to get back to the lodge.
The beam moved.
It swept back toward the camp slowly, dragging across the snow and the tree line, and he tracked it until it was pointed away from them and the dark came back.
The voices dropped again, too low to carry.
He let out a slow breath and looked at Steph in the dark beside him.
She was looking back at him. Her face was unreadable in the darkness, but she was steady. Whatever she was feeling, she had it controlled.
Pure Steph.