CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
They stood at the place where the trail split, and the darkness around them was the darkness of the northern backcountry in March—absolute, immense, a blackness so complete it felt less like the absence of light than the presence of something else.
The stars overhead were hard and white, scattered across a sky that had cleared after the afternoon’s snowfall, and the cold had settled in with the bone-deep authority of a temperature that would not relent until morning.
“Good luck,” Isla said. The words were insufficient for what she meant, but the backcountry didn’t reward sentiment, and Marshall would understand what lived beneath them.
“You too.” His voice was steady. He adjusted the strap of his pack and checked the radio clipped to his chest—a quick, practiced motion, the kind of habit built in the field rather than the classroom. “Radio check every thirty minutes?”
“Every thirty. If you miss one, I’m coming to find you.”
A nod. A pause that contained all the things neither of them would say—the acknowledgment of risk, the unspoken contract between two people about to walk in opposite directions into something dangerous—and then Marshall turned southeast and his headlamp swung away from her and the darkness swallowed him in pieces.
First his legs, then his torso, then the bright point of light bobbing through the trees, and then nothing.
Just the sound of his boots in the snow, diminishing, and then that too was gone.
Isla stood alone at the junction.
She let the silence settle around her the way she’d learned to let silences settle in this place—not fighting it, just allowing the enormity of the landscape to press against her until her breathing slowed to match its rhythm.
The wilderness was not hostile. It was indifferent.
The cold didn’t want to kill you any more than the snow wanted to bury you.
They simply existed, ungoverned, and whether you survived them was a question of preparation and judgment and the kind of stubbornness that refused to let the world’s indifference become an excuse for surrender.
She started north.
The trail to the Stony River corridor was a two-mile hike through dense forest, the path buried under three feet of fresh snow that the afternoon system had laid down with the silent thoroughness of a painter applying gesso to canvas.
Her snowshoes bit into the surface with each step, the familiar crunch-and-settle rhythm that had become the metronome of this case—every crime scene approached on snowshoes, every clearing entered one careful step at a time.
No one knew they were out here. That was the part that sat in her chest like a stone she’d chosen to swallow.
The case had been reassigned; Walker and Harris from Minneapolis would arrive tomorrow with fresh eyes and clean hands and the confidence of agents who hadn’t spent three days standing in snowfields with the dead.
Technically, Isla and Marshall had no business being in the backcountry tonight.
Technically, they were off the case. Technically, what they were doing could end careers.
Captain Shaw knew. Isla had called him specifically, had laid out the plan with the careful precision of someone building an argument she might one day need to defend.
He’d agreed to be in the air at first light.
He’d also agreed, at Isla’s request, not to fly anywhere near the Stony River or Split Rock corridors tonight.
No rotors. No searchlights. Nothing to spook the killer into flight the way the helicopter had spooked him at the Munger trail scene, sending him running through his own design with the desperate abandon of an artist watching his masterpiece burn.
Tonight the backcountry would be quiet. Tonight the killer would believe he was alone.
Isla moved through the forest with a steady pace, her headlamp dimmed to its lowest setting, just enough to keep the trail visible without broadcasting her position.
The spruce pressed close on both sides, branches heavy with snow, creating a tunnel effect that concentrated the cold and the silence until both felt almost physical, things she was pushing through rather than simply enduring.
She thought about Sullivan.
Not deliberately—not the way she sometimes chose to, sitting beside his hospital bed with her hand on his and the monitors beeping their steady, insufficient assurance.
This was the involuntary kind that arrived when the risk she was taking brought everything she still had to lose into sharp, unbearable focus.
James would be out here with her if he could.
She knew this the way she knew the sun would rise over the lake in the morning—not because he would have agreed with the plan, because he probably wouldn’t have, but because James Sullivan’s concept of partnership did not include the option of letting your partner walk into danger alone.
He would have argued. Would have stood in the bullpen with his arms crossed and his deep-set blue eyes carrying that blend of concern and stubbornness she’d come to rely on.
And then he would have grabbed his pack and fallen into step beside her, because arguing and following were not mutually exclusive in James Sullivan’s world.
But James was in a hospital bed. The ventilator breathed for him.
The monitors tracked vital signs that meant life without consciousness.
And the note in Isla’s pocket—creased soft from handling, his handwriting pressed into the fibers—was the last thing he’d written before Brune’s attack, and some nights she unfolded it and felt the distance between the man who’d written those words and the still figure in the hospital close like a fist around something she couldn’t name.
She kept walking. The trail narrowed where a fallen birch had collapsed under its burden of snow, and she climbed over it with the careful efficiency of a woman who had been navigating these woods for long enough to read the obstacles before they reached her.
The forest smelled of spruce resin and cold—the scent of the northern backcountry in winter, clean and sharp, like breathing through glass.
Channing would have her badge for this. Isla knew it with a clarity that was almost comforting in its certainty.
Kate had reassigned the case and told them to go home, and instead Isla had recruited her temporary partner—a four-year agent, a man she was supposed to be mentoring, not leading into unauthorized backcountry operations—and driven into the wilderness to bait a serial killer.
There was no framing that made it acceptable.
If this went wrong, Kate wouldn’t just remove her from the case. Kate would remove her from the Bureau.
But the killer was out here. She felt it the way she’d felt it at the docks those long nights searching for Brune.
Fresh snow. A clear night. The backcountry emptied by the advisory.
And a man with an unfinished design burning in his mind like an open wound, a compulsion that would drive him into the cold because incompletion was the one thing he could not tolerate.
She couldn’t cover this much ground alone.
That was the hard truth she’d swallowed when she’d asked Marshall to come.
Two corridors, separated by dozens of miles, each containing multiple viable sites.
She needed his eyes on Split Rock while hers were on the Stony River.
Needed his radio check every thirty minutes telling her he was alive, the way she needed the sound of the monitors in James’s hospital room telling her the same insufficient thing.
The trail crested a ridge and descended into the valley.
The forest thickened, the air grew stiller, the cold deepened, and the silence took on the quality of a held breath.
The Stony River corridor. Shaw had described it from memory: bluffs on both sides, meadows in the valley floor, wind barely touching the snow.
Isla dimmed her headlamp further and unsnapped the retention strap on her holster.
The Glock was where it always was, the grip cold through her glove.
The radio on her chest was set to the frequency she and Marshall had agreed on—no dispatch, no base, just the two of them and the static between their voices.
She walked deeper into the valley, and the darkness held her the way it held everything—completely, without judgment, without mercy.