Chapter 32
Chapter Thirty-Two
Lyra
Their boots grind closer, slow and deliberate, crunching through the snow like they’re stepping on bones.
The sound crawls up my spine.
The Glock hangs useless in my hands, the slide locked back, the chamber nothing but an empty gasp.
I can’t breathe. I can’t think. I’m shaking so hard the barrel quivers even though it’s not pointed at anything anymore.
Remy lifeless body is face down in the snow behind me.
I can’t let myself look at him again. If I do, I won’t be able to move at all.
One of the men steps forward, rifle leveled at my chest.
The barrel looks enormous—like a tunnel, like a void that wants to swallow me whole.
Another man flanks right, cutting off the way to the trees. The one in front grins, teeth flashing white against the black of his balaclava.
“Hand it over, bitch.”
The words hit like a slap.
The same tone. Same cadence. Same ugly threat I heard in that alley.
My lungs seize, and I reflexively tighten my fingers around the useless gun.
“Mirror them, Allie. Always mirror. It buys you time.”
Stryker’s voice—his warning in my head—comes back out of nowhere, a brutal, unexpected lifeline.
I shift my stance just a fraction, mimicking the man in front of me—knees bent, shoulders angled, weight braced—as if I’m ready to fire even though I can’t. He falters, momentarily confused.
It works. God, it actually works. But only for a heartbeat.
“Toss the gun,” he snaps.
Oh my God. He doesn’t know it’s empty.
If I drop it, I’m nothing but prey.
His gaze sharpens. “Last chance.”
The wind cuts across the clearing, stinging my cheek.
My breath clouds in little panicked bursts, and the world is narrowing—closing in, closing down—when a sound rises behind the ridge. Faint at first. A distant growl. Then sharper. Louder.
An engine.
A snowmobile.
Dear God. Dare I hope?
The sound rolls closer, echoing around us.
The men hear it too.
Their heads jerk toward the tree line.
There’s a heartbeat of hesitation—
Then the world detonates.
The snowmobile bursts over the ridge like a beast unchained, engine screaming, plumes of white fog billowing behind it.
The rider leans low, black helmet, broad shoulders, dark jacket snapping in the wind. The silhouette hits me like a shockwave—
Stryker.
The relief is so violent, so painful—like my ribs might crack open from the force of it.
I don’t shout. I don’t move.
I can’t do anything at all except stare as terror and something dangerously close to hope collide inside me.
He’s barreling down the slope, straight at them.
Straight at me.
The men whirl, raising their rifles.
“Stryker—” I don’t know if I say it out loud.
My voice is gone, ripped away by the wind.
Around me, gunfire erupts. Flashes of orange spit from muzzles. The air shreds into shards of sound. Snow blooms upward in violent plumes.
A bullet hits the snowmobile’s windshield—glass fractures like a spiderweb—but he doesn’t slow. Not even a fraction.
At the last second, he pivots hard and throws himself off the snowmobile.
He hits the snow in a brutal roll, up on a knee in one fluid movement and opens fire.
It’s surgical.
Terrifying.
Beautiful, in the way lightning is beautiful when it hits too close.
One man goes down instantly—dropped by a single shot that snaps his body backward.
I crouch, desperate to avoid the hail of gunfire.
My heart slams against my ribs. My ears ring. The cold bites into the tear in my arm, the warmth of blood startling against the freezing wind.
The man who taunted me turns his gun back on me, but he’s too slow—Stryker sees him.
He fires again—precise, decisive.
The bad guy jerks, staggers, then crumples into the snow.
Another tries to flank him, sprinting low along the tree line.
Stryker turns and fires, missing by less than an inch, and the man dives behind a fallen log.
Then he bolts into the tree line and jumps on a snowmobile that I hadn’t noticed before and guns the throttle.
Snow settles like dust over the bodies.
The clearing goes still.
My vision tunnels, the edges pulsing black.
My breath catches, thin and sharp. The gun is still clutched in my shaking hands, but I couldn’t pull the trigger again even if it were loaded.
The rifle of my would-be assailant lies only a few feet from me.
Close. Reachable.
A surge of instinct overruns the terror, hot and sharp and primal.
Move, Lyra.
Dropping my gun, I throw myself forward, closing my fingers around the cold metal of his rifle.
Before I can even breathe, a muzzle flash ignites from the far side of the clearing. The gunman is half-hidden behind a drift, sighting down on Stryker’s back.
I don’t think.
Instead, I wrench the rifle up, aim it, and fire, acting on terror and muscle memory.
A scream tears across the clearing—sharp, startled—and the man collapses sideways into the snow, his rifle skidding from his grasp.
My chest heaves, my pulse a frantic drumbeat.
I’m not sure if I hit him clean or if the impact just knocked him off balance. I only know the shot was going to Stryker. And now it isn’t.
Then there’s sudden, awful silence.
This whole exchanged seemed to last a lifetime, but in reality, I’m sure not even two minutes have passed.
Stryker rises and turns toward me, his boots kicking up powder.
There’s movement, and he freezes, taking out the guy that I’d shot in the thigh. Then he continues toward me.
In that moment, I break completely, dropping the gun, my shoulders rolling forward as I sob.
When he nears me, he jerks his helmet off with one savage motion, and his eyes—God, his eyes—lock onto me. His gaze is wild. Terrified. Furious in a way that isn’t about anger at all but something deeper, darker, rawer.
I stumble toward him without meaning to—my body moving before my brain catches up—and then his arms are around me, pulling me into the solid reassurance of his hard chest and cradles the back of my head with one of his hands.
The world falls away.
I’m shaking violently.
A sob wrenches out of me—broken, helpless—and I press my face into him because I can’t bear the sight of Remy’s still form in the snow.
“I’m sorry,” I choke out. “I’m so—so sorry.”
His breath is hot against my ear, harsh from exertion, thick with fear. “Shh, sweetheart. I’ve got you. You’re okay.”
His voice breaks on the word okay.
He tightens his arms around me, like he’s trying to hold the pieces of me together.
Snow drifts down around us, soft and cruel, settling on the bodies, on the blood, on Remy, on everything.
I can barely breathe.
Barely think.
And the only thing I want to do is cling to him.
Stryker tucks his face against my temple. When he speaks, his whisper is low and fierce, breaking with emotion. “I thought I lost you.”
His breath is still warm against my ear when the noise hits us—a low, mechanical growl that climbs into a violent whir.
My heart lurches.
Stryker’s hands clamp hard around my waist, pulling me behind him as if shielding me from an enemy I can’t yet see.
The treetops erupt in a storm of spinning snow.
A helicopter bursts over the ridge, the downdraft kicking up a vicious halo of snow around the bodies, the wreckage—me.
I try to ask him who it is, but the wind from the rotor wash rips the words out of my mouth.
And when I catch the faint glint of black-and-gold on the fuselage—Hawkeye’s mark—I go cold all over.
Bad guys or Hawkeye… I don’t know which is worse. Not for me. Not after everything my father stole. Not after a lifetime of being told to run from both.
All I can do is watch as the machine drops lower, closer, grows louder.
Frantically I meet Stryker’s eyes.
My nightmare isn’t anywhere close to being over.