Chapter 7
SIERRA
Two days snowed in with a man who barely speaks, and somehow the silence is louder than any interrogation room I've ever sat in.
The storm rages outside Chris's shelter, wind screaming across the mountain like it's trying to tear the world apart.
We exist in a bubble of warmth and forced proximity.
The fire crackles, smoke dispersing up along the rock overhang in lazy curls.
Beyond the tarp walls, snow falls so thick I can't see more than five feet into the whiteout.
Chris moves through his routine like clockwork. Tends the fire, checks his perimeter alarms every two hours despite the conditions, melts snow for water in a battered pot. He works with military precision, every motion economical and practiced. Wastes nothing—not energy, not words, not space.
I help where I can. Split kindling with his hatchet, organize the gear he brings in from outside checks, boil water for the instant coffee that tastes like dirt but warms from the inside out. Mostly, though, I watch. Study the way he moves, catalog the small tells he can't quite hide.
He favors his left side when he lifts wood.
Winces when the temperature drops and old injuries stiffen in the cold.
The scars are visible on his hands and his forearms from wounds that never healed quite right.
When he sheds his outer layers to dry them by the fire, I see more—a patchwork of damage across his torso, evidence of a life lived on the edge of survival.
This man should be dead. The fact that he's not is luck, sheer stubborn will, or both.
"You stare at people like that in your other life?" Chris asks without looking up from the wood he's arranging.
Heat crawls up my neck. "Analyst habit. Observation is part of the job."
"Observing or cataloging?"
"Both." No point lying. He knows what I'm doing. "You move like someone who's been hurt badly and never got proper treatment."
"That's because I was and I didn't." He adds another log to the fire. Sparks shoot up, bright against the dim interior. "Medical attention leaves paper trails. Paper trails get people killed."
The bluntness of it hits hard. He's not being dramatic or self-pitying. Just stating facts, the same way he'd report the weather or the condition of the trail.
"How bad?" I ask.
"Bad enough that I probably should have died.
" He settles back against the rock wall, coffee cup in hand.
“Head injury from slamming into trees as I escaped.
Left me seeing double for days. Ribs broken or cracked from the gunshot wound, couldn't breathe right for weeks.
Treated it myself with a camping first aid kit and what I could steal from unmanned ranger stations. "
My stomach turns. "Chris—"
"I'm still here. That's what matters." He drinks his coffee, gaze fixed on the fire. "Pain reminds you you're alive. Scars remind you what happens when you trust the wrong people."
His words carry weight I recognize—the kind that comes from betrayal, from watching people you trust turn into the reason your friends die. He's talking about whoever fed information to the killers, whoever set us up.
I want to push, to ask more, to extract details the way I would with any other witness.
But Chris isn't a witness. He's a man barely holding himself together in a mountain shelter while a storm tries to bury us both.
So I don't push. I drink my terrible coffee and listen to the wind howl and wonder how long we can maintain this careful distance before one of us breaks.
The first night passes slowly. We take turns sleeping, an unspoken agreement that someone needs to stay alert.
When it's my watch, I feed the fire and listen to Chris breathe—deep and steady, but never fully relaxed even in sleep.
When it's his watch, I drift in and out, aware of his presence like a shadow in the darkness.
Day two brings more of the same. The storm shows no signs of breaking. Chris checks his supplies, calculates how long we can sustain this if conditions don't improve. He doesn't share the math, but I read the tension in his shoulders.
"We're not going to starve," he says, reading my expression. "I've got enough for a week if we're smart about it."
"And if the storm lasts longer than that?"
"Then we get creative." He pulls out a coil of wire, starts checking his snare traps near the shelter entrance. "The mountain always provides if you know where to look."
I watch him work, the deft movements of his hands as he examines each wire for damage or weakness. He's done this before, probably dozens of times. Survival isn't theory for Chris—it's daily practice, the difference between living and dying.
"You could teach a masterclass in this," I say.
"In what? Hiding from people who want you dead?" His mouth quirks, almost a smile. "Limited market for that skill set."
"I don't know. I've met plenty of people who could use it."
The almost-smile fades. "Yeah. I bet you have."
He's thinking about my work and the places I've been. War zones and corruption, trafficking rings and government conspiracies. The dark places where people like us go looking for truth, knowing what it costs.
Night falls early this time of year, darkness swallowing what little light filters through the storm.
Chris builds up the fire against the dropping temperature.
I burrow deeper into my thermal blanket, exhaustion pulling at my bones despite doing almost nothing all day.
The cold saps energy faster than any physical labor.
I drift off sometime after dinner—freeze-dried camping food reconstituted with hot water, surprisingly edible when you're hungry enough. Sleep comes hard and shallow, disturbed by wind and the occasional crack of ice breaking somewhere in the distance.
When I wake, the fire has burned low. Chris sits beside it, shirtless, working at his left shoulder with a grimace. Even in the dim light, angry red spreads from an old wound, heat radiating from infected tissue.
I'm on my feet before conscious thought kicks in.
"Let me see that."
Chris jerks back, reaching for his shirt. "It's fine."
"It's infected. Don't insult my intelligence." I crouch beside him, close enough to see the damage clearly. Old shrapnel wound, poorly healed, now red and swollen with fresh infection. "How long has it been like this?"
"Week. Maybe two." He won't meet my eyes. "Old injury. It flares up sometimes. Goes away on its own."
"Except this time it's not going away." I scan his gear, spot the first aid kit. "You have antibiotics?"
"Used the last of them months ago."
Of course he did. Because survival up here means eventually running out of everything, even the things that keep you alive.
I grab the kit anyway, pull out antiseptic, clean gauze, tape.
"Sierra—"
"You want to lose the arm or just let me clean it?"
He stares at me for a long moment, jaw working. Then he exhales hard and turns, presenting his shoulder. Surrender, reluctant but necessary.
I work by firelight, hands steady despite the way my heart pounds. The wound needs to be cleaned, drained, treated with whatever we have available. It's not ideal—not even close—but it's better than doing nothing and watching sepsis set in.
The antiseptic stings. Chris goes rigid under my touch, breath hissing through his teeth, but he doesn't pull away.
He hasn't been touched by another person in almost a year.
The awareness of that lives in every tense muscle, every careful inch of distance he tries to maintain even while surrendering to necessity.
"You've done this before," he says through gritted teeth.
"More times than I want to count." I dab carefully around the worst of the inflammation. My hands move on autopilot, muscle memory taking over. "Hurt like hell, but I didn't die. That's the bar we're measuring success by."
Chris makes a sound that might be a laugh. "Low bar."
"Only one that matters at this moment."
His skin is hot under my fingers, fever building in the infected tissue. I press gently around the wound, checking for abscesses. He tenses, every muscle going taut, but stays still. Trust, or maybe just recognition that he's out of options.
It's been almost a year since another person touched him. I feel the weight of that in the way he holds himself, the careful distance he maintains even while letting me work. Physical contact is a vulnerability he can't afford, a reminder of everything he's lost.
But right now, in this moment, he's letting me in.
I clean the wound as best I can, apply antibiotic ointment that's probably expired but better than nothing, bandage it with clean gauze. The whole time, neither of us speaks. The only sounds are the crackle of fire, the howl of wind, the unsteady rhythm of our breathing in the small space.
When I finish, I sit back. "That should help. But you need real antibiotics. This is going to keep coming back until it's properly treated."
"Add it to the list of things I need." Chris pulls his shirt back on, movements stiff. "Right under 'a life where I'm not hiding from people who want me dead.'"
The bitterness in his voice cuts deep. He's young—thirty-four—and already he's living like a man at the end of his rope. No future, no hope, just survival one day at a time.
"There has to be a way out of this," I say.
"If there is, I haven't found it." He stares at the flames. "The network's too big, too connected. I go public, I'm dead within a week. Stay hidden, eventually they find me anyway. There's no good option."
"What if we expose them first? Build a case so airtight they can't retaliate without proving our point?"
"With what evidence? Everything Joel, Tate, and I might have found is gone. Destroyed or disappeared. It's my word against theirs, and I'm a dead federal agent. I don't exactly have credibility."