8. Santi
Santi
Snow blinds the world. The wind howls with the fury of a dying animal, ripping through the jagged pines and tearing at my coat.
I stand at the edge of the tree line, thirty yards from the Blackwood Ranger Station.
My primary Glock is steady in my right hand, unsuppressed—the suppressed weapon is inside with Reese where it belongs.
The metal is freezing. I do not care. The cold does not touch me anymore.
The long frost that encased my veins, the emotional flatline that defined my existence since my parents died, is gone.
Shattered. Incinerated. Replaced by a roaring inferno.
Yellow eyes flash in the swirling white dark. Low, guttural growls roll through the frozen earth beneath my boots. The wolf pack circles. They are hungry. They are desperate. They smell blood and vulnerability. They smell the woman inside that cabin.
They cannot have her.
I rack the slide of the Glock. The metallic clack is sharp, slicing through the roar of the blizzard.
A massive timber wolf steps out from behind a snow-draped boulder.
The alpha. His gray coat is thick with ice.
His jaw hangs open, saliva freezing on his black lips.
He locks eyes with me. He calculates the threat.
He thinks I am prey. He thinks the storm has weakened me.
He is wrong. I am the most dangerous thing on this mountain.
I raise the weapon. I do not hesitate. I pull the trigger.
The sharp crack of the unsuppressed pistol slices through the wind. The hollow-point round hits the snow inches from the alpha's front paws, spraying ice into his face. He flinches. The instinct of survival kicks in. He turns, bounding back into the blinding snow. The pack scatters with him.
I step backward, keeping my weapon raised until the last shadow disappears. Violence is the only language this world understands. It is the only language I have ever truly spoken.
Long ago, the hospital hallway. I was the silent one then. I am the silent one still.
I stopped living that night. I simply existed. I cataloged threats. I ran operations. I charted the enemy's moves. I became a machine powered by vengeance and duty.
Then she brought a dying helicopter down in the mountains, stepped out of the wreckage with blood on her face, and told me to get to work.
Reese.
My chest tightens at the thought of her name.
A brutal vice grips my ribs. I turn back toward the cabin.
The rough-hewn logs are barely visible through the whiteout conditions.
Yellow light flickers in the small, frosted window.
She is inside. She is safe. I will burn the sky black before I let anything touch her.
I trudge through the waist-deep drifts. My mind shifts, calculating the variables of our survival. The extraction team. The Bellanti lead. The thread I was hunting before the sky fell out from under us. The blind trust connected to a war that started long before Reese ever boarded that helicopter.
I analyze the timeline. The intelligence file moved when it should not have moved. The access trail was narrow enough to matter and dangerous enough to wait.
The logs do not lie. Someone with access moved through the wrong corridor at the wrong time.
I will tear the truth out of the compound servers the second I return.
But right now, the ghost signatory means nothing.
The war in Chicago means nothing. The only thing that matters is the woman waiting for me on the other side of this wooden door.
I step onto the covered porch. I stamp the snow from my boots. I knock once. Twice. I hear the crossbar lift on the other side. The timber door sairframe inward.
The heat hits me first. The woodstove in the corner is roaring, radiating a fierce, dry warmth that immediately begins to thaw the ice in my beard.
I step inside. I push the door shut behind me.
The iron latch drops with a final clanking sound.
The storm is muted instantly. The silence of the room rushes in to fill the void.
Reese stands near the center of the room.
She holds my suppressed spare Glock in her right hand.
Her grip is textbook perfect. Finger off the trigger, resting on the frame.
Muzzle pointed down at a forty-five-degree angle.
Stance wide and balanced. She is wearing her pilot's jacket, unzipped over her sweater.
Her dark hair falls in messy waves around her pale face.
The bandage on her forehead is stained with a small bloom of dried blood.
She is bruised. She is exhausted. She is the most magnificent woman I have ever witnessed.
The scent of the storm and grease still clings to us.
Her scent drifts across the small space.
It wraps around my throat. It sinks into my skin.
The mixture of mechanical grit and wild, untamed nature.
It is her. It is mine. My lungs expand, drawing her deep into my chest. Possessiveness snarls inside my head.
I want to cross the floorboards. I want to take the weapon from her hands.
I want to press her against the log wall, bury my face in her neck, and mark every inch of her skin until she forgets her own name.
I stay where I am.
She watches me. Her eyes are sharp. They catalog the snow on my coat.
They drop to the Glock in my hand. They rise back to my face.
She does not ask what I did to the wolves.
She reads the snow on my coat, the steady hand on my Glock, and the absence of blood.
She knows I scared them off. She knows I would have done worse if the alpha had taken one more step.
She accepts the violence in me with a terrifying ease.
She stares directly at the monster. She simply stares back at it.
"Perimeter is secure," I say. My voice is gravel. Rough. Raw.
"Good." Reese does not lower the weapon.
She tilts her chin toward the wooden desk against the far wall.
The ham radio sits there, a chaotic mess of dials, wires, and a microphone.
The solar array indicator light glows a steady green.
"The battery is holding a charge. The antenna on the roof survived the wind gusts. It’s functional. "
I nod. I cross the room, moving slowly. I do not want to startle her, though I know she does not startle easily.
I place my Glock on the edge of the desk.
I strip off my snow-caked gloves and toss them onto a nearby chair.
I unbutton my coat, shedding the frozen layer, leaving me in my thermal shirt. T
I sit in the wooden chair in front of the radio. I reach for the dials.
I need a direct line. The encrypted ping I sent earlier was a beacon. A flare in the dark. Now I need voice contact. I need logistics. I need to know how much time I have before my world crashes into hers.
I tune the frequency. I bypass the standard emergency channels. I spin the dial past the ranger broadcasts and the commercial aviation bands. I find the dead zone. The static hiss. The frequency my family owns. I flip the encryption toggle. The light turns red. The line is secure.
I pick up the heavy black microphone. I press the transmission button.
"Echo actual. This is shadow actual. Over."
Static crackles through the small speaker. Five seconds pass. Ten. Then, the static breaks.
"Shadow actual. Stand by for command."
The operator's voice is clinical. Flat. I release the button and wait.
The tension in the cabin spikes. I can feel Reese watching my back.
I can feel her stare pressing between my shoulder blades.
She is listening. She is piecing together the puzzle of who I really am.
The ledger she found. The hollow-point rounds.
The encrypted comms. The mafia reality stripping away the civilian lie.
The speaker hisses again. A new voice cuts through the noise.
"Santi."
Dominic.
My brother. The Don. His voice presses through the room. Absolute authority. Cold, calculated power. It demands submission from everyone who hears it. I do not submit. I am his shadow, but I am my own violent sovereign.
"Location is secure," I say into the mic. "Blackwood Ranger Station. Sector four, grid nine. Ten miles north of the crash site."
"The beacon signature is locked." Dominic's voice is devoid of relief. Costa men do not celebrate survival. We merely expect it. "What is your physical status?"
"Unharmed. Armed. Supplied for three days."
"The pilot."
Dominic does not ask if she survived. He asks about the asset. The variable.
I turn my head. I look at Reese over my shoulder. She stands still. Her knuckles whiten on the grip of the Glock. She hears the tone of his voice. She understands what Dominic is.
"She survived," I say.
"Extraction window is the first break in the storm," Dominic states. "The secondary weather front is a severe blizzard. The wind shear is tearing the trees apart. Choppers cannot fly in this. The mountain is isolated."
"Make them fly."
"I have three tactical teams staging at the border of the national park," Dominic continues, ignoring my demand.
He operates on logic. He operates on strategy.
"They have heavily modified snowcats and a fleet of snowmobiles.
They begin the ascent the second the wind drops below fifty miles per hour.
Bird in the air at the first dawn the ceiling lifts. No sooner."
A dawn window. A long night alone in this cabin before the violence of Chicago bleeds onto this mountain.
"Understood," I say.
"Santi." Dominic pauses. The silence hums through the speaker.
It is a dangerous sound. When my brother pauses, people die.
"The ghost signatory thread. The intel you were chasing before the flight went down.
The blind trust transferred three million dollars to a holding company in South America twelve hours ago.
The Bellanti family is moving assets. They know you were getting close. "