9. Emilia
EMILIA
One second I'm sleeping. Warm. Safer than I've ever been in my life, wrapped in a cocoon of flannel and heat and the solid, immovable wall of Justice's body.
The next second that body is gone.
Cold air floods the space where he was. I reach back, grasping at empty sheets, and my fingers close on nothing. My eyes snap open in the dark bedroom and my pulse is already hammering because some deep, lizard-brain part of me has already registered what woke him.
I hear it.
A low, grinding crunch. Rhythmic. Deliberate. Tires rolling over frozen gravel at a speed that says the driver doesn't want to be heard.
Justice is a shadow moving through the room.
No lights. No sound. Just the whisper of denim as he pulls on jeans and the quiet metallic click of a gun clearing its holster.
He grabs something from the top shelf of the closet.
A second weapon. Checks the chamber by feel alone.
Slides it into his waistband at the small of his back.
I sit up. The quilt falls away from my bare shoulders and the cold hits me like a slap.
"Stay in the loft. Windows face the gate. You'll have eyes on the road. Do not turn on a light. Do not make a sound."
"Justice—"
"Loft. Now."
He's gone. The bedroom door opens and closes without a single creak, which means he knows exactly which floorboards to avoid, which tells me he's rehearsed this scenario.
Planned for it. The realization should comfort me.
Instead it makes my blood run cold because it means he always expected someone would come.
I pull his flannel shirt off the bedpost and shove my arms through the sleeves. The hem hits my thighs. I don't bother with pants. My feet are bare and silent on the hardwood as I cross to the narrow ladder that leads to the sleeping loft above the main room.
The loft is small. A storage space, mostly. Old ammunition boxes stacked against the wall, a rolled sleeping bag, snowshoes hanging from a nail. But the window faces north, straight down the large mountain toward the road, and through the frost-laced glass I can see everything.
The gate sits two hundred yards below the cabin, a heavy steel barrier set between concrete posts that Justice poured himself. Beyond it, the single-lane gravel road switchbacks down through dense pine forest before connecting to the county highway three miles below.
A vehicle idles at the gate. Headlights off. Parking lights glowing amber in the dark.
Not a black SUV.
I lean my forehead to the frozen glass, straining to make out details. My breath fogs the window and I wipe it with my sleeve, heart slamming so hard I feel it in my temples.
A truck. White. Light bar on the roof.
Sheriff's department.
Relief and terror crash into each other. Relief because it's not my father's men. Terror because a sheriff asks questions. A sheriff files reports. A sheriff can be bought.
I spot Justice below. He's circled out the back of the cabin and emerged from the trees to the east, approaching the gate from the side rather than straight down the road.
Flanking the vehicle so the driver can't see him approach in the mirrors.
Even in the dark I can read the tactical calculation in every step, the way he keeps his right hand loose at his side, close to the weapon at his back.
The driver's door opens. A man steps out. Shorter than Justice. Wider in the middle. He wears a tan jacket with a star-shaped badge catching the faint glow of his own parking lights. He adjusts a hat on his head and stamps his boots against the cold, looking up toward the cabin.
Justice reaches the gate. The sheriff startles. Takes a step back. Even from two hundred yards away I can see the way his body language shifts when he registers Justice's size, the way he squares up and hooks his thumbs in his belt to compensate.
Their voices carry in fragments. The mountain is silent at 3 AM. Sound travels clean through frozen air.
"...sedan down on forty-seven..." The sheriff's words reach me in broken pieces. "...registered to a cash sale in Reno...abandoned..."
My stomach drops.
The car. The beat-up sedan I bought with crumpled hundreds at a lot outside Reno where the salesman didn't ask for ID. They found it.
Justice leans against the gatepost. Arms folded. I know that posture. Relaxed. Bored. A man dragged from sleep by a pointless interruption on his own property. He says something I can't hear. Low. Brief.
The sheriff gestures up toward the cabin. Justice shakes his head. Slow. The universal body language of a man who has nothing to hide and resents the implication.
More fragments drift up. "...just checking on residents...weather advisory..."
Justice uncrosses his arms. Points down the steep mountain. Says something else. Two sentences, maybe three. His hands stay visible, loose, unthreatening. The posture of a man cooperating just enough to end the conversation.
The sheriff nods. Looks past Justice toward the cabin one more time.
I step back from the glass. Press myself flat against the wall. Hold my breath.
Seconds stretch into hours.
Then the amber parking lights swing in a wide arc as the truck reverses, turns, and begins the slow crawl back down the switchbacks. The engine sound fades. Swallowed by pine and snow and distance.
I don't move from the wall until the front door opens below me.
I descend the ladder on shaking legs. Justice stands in the dark kitchen, one hand braced against the counter, the other still resting on the gun at his back. He hasn't turned on a light. The only illumination comes from the tablet down, its screen casting his face in pale blue.
His jaw works. Grinding. I've learned to read the tension in that jaw like a weather gauge. Right now it says storm.
"What did he want?"
"Your car." He pulls the gun from his waistband and sets it down. Controlled. Precise. "They found the sedan on forty-seven. Sheriff was doing a wellness check on properties along the pass."
"He believed you?"
"Doesn't matter what he believed." Justice swipes through the tablet’s camera feeds. Front gate. Tree line. The road below. All empty. All dark. "He's not dirty. That's worse."
I wrap my arms around myself, his flannel shirt doing nothing against the cold radiating from the A-frame's walls. The fire in the main room has burned down to embers. Neither of us moves to rebuild it.
"I don't understand. If he's not working for my father?—"
"He's doing his job. That's the problem.
" Justice zooms in on a feed I haven't seen before.
A camera mounted low, almost at ground level, pointed at a trailhead marker.
"Your father's investigators are working the system.
They report an abandoned vehicle tied to a missing person.
Sheriff has to follow up. Check every property along the route. Log the visits."
The blood drains from my face. "Log them."
"Name and address. Filed with the county."
"So they'll know exactly which properties the sheriff visited."
Justice looks at me. Those cold blue eyes aren't cold right now. They're calculating. Running numbers I can't see, mapping routes I've never traveled, weighing options against each other with the mechanical precision of a man who fixes engines because they follow rules that make sense.
"They'll pull the report. Match it against properties on this road. Process of elimination." He sets the tablet down. "Could be days. Could be tomorrow."
The floor tilts. I lean onto the counter.
"Then I need to?—"
"Don't." One word. Low. Final. "Don't finish that sentence."
I close my mouth.
Justice turns away from me and opens a cabinet above the refrigerator.
Not a food cabinet. This one is narrow, deep, and packed with gear.
He pulls out a military-grade backpack, already loaded.
Sets it on the floor. Opens a second cabinet and removes a rolled tarp, a bundle of paracord, a first aid kit sealed in a waterproof bag.
He moves through the cabin with terrifying efficiency, pulling supplies from hidden caches I never noticed.
Behind the false panel in the hallway closet.
Under the floorboard beside the woodstove.
Inside the hollowed-out base of the gun safe.
Every hiding spot reveals another piece of a plan he built long before I showed up on his mountain.
"What are you doing?"
"Packing."
"I can see that. Where are we going?"
He stops. His back is to me. Shoulders filling the hallway, blocking the light from the tablet screen. He's so large that when he stands in certain parts of this cabin, the space stops existing around him. He is the space.
"There's a cabin." He pulls a heavy canvas duffel from the closet and drops it on the floor with a thud that shakes the boards. "Above the ridge. Mile and a half north. Straight up."
"A cabin."
"Hunting blind. Built it five years ago. No permits. No address. No power line running to it. Doesn't exist on any map, any county record, any satellite image worth a damn because the tree canopy is sixty feet thick."
He turns and walks past me back to the kitchen.
Opens the freezer and starts transferring wrapped cuts of venison into a cooler bag.
His movements are sharp. Angry. Not at me.
At the situation. At the fact that his fortress, his perimeter, his mountain has been catalogued in a sheriff's log and handed to the enemy on a bureaucratic platter.
"We leave before dawn. They'll watch the main road, the highway access, the trailhead at mile marker twelve. They won't notice the ridge because nobody climbs the ridge in January. The grade is forty-five degrees in places and there's no trail."
"I don't have shoes."
He pauses. His eyes drop to my bare feet on the cold hardwood. Something shifts in his face. The hard tactical mask cracks for half a second and underneath it I see the same look he gave me last night by the fire. The look that said he would burn the world to keep me warm.