12. Justice
JUSTICE
Iknow that tone. Professional. Bored. A man who gets paid whether the job goes clean or dirty and doesn't much care which. I've dealt with repo agents, bail jumpers, skip tracers. They all talk the same. Flat affect. Business cadence. Like they're reading a menu.
But this one knows my name.
My fingers close around the rifle stock. Cold wood. Solid weight. The world narrows to geometry. Door. Window. Walls. Entry points. Kill zones. The cabin has one door and two boarded windows. Good for defense. Bad for retreat.
"Spanks. You hearing me? We've got thermal optics on the ridge. Your cast-iron stove is pumping heat out that chimney pipe like a beacon. Wasn't even hard."
Thermal imaging. The chimney pipe punching through the metal roof, pumping hundred-degree heat into the freezing air. I was careful about light, careful about tracks, but I had to light a fire to keep her from freezing to death. Technology. The one thing my mountain can't hide us from.
Emilia stands frozen behind me. I can hear her breathing. Shallow. Fast. The panic breathing of a woman who knows exactly what that voice represents.
"Justice."
My name in her mouth. Soft and fractured.
I retrieve the rifle off the wall mount. Check the chamber. Round seated. Safety off. I grab the box of .308 cartridges from the shelf above the stove and dump them into my jacket pocket. They click together like teeth.
The radio crackles again.
"Be reasonable. Her father just wants her home. Nobody needs to get hurt up here. You're a mechanic, not a soldier. Send the girl down the trail and we drive away. You go back to your quiet little life."
I grasp the radio. The plastic shell is cold in my palm.
"Go to hell."
Then I squeeze. The casing cracks. Circuit board splinters. I keep squeezing until components bite into my skin and the thing is nothing but broken plastic and copper wire. I drop the pieces on the floor and grind them under my boot heel.
Emilia flinches at the sound.
"How many."
Not a question. A demand to myself. I cross to the south-facing window and press my eye to the gap between the boards.
Snow. Dense. Driving sideways. Visibility maybe thirty feet.
The trees are a gray smear. No movement.
No headlamps. They're not up here. Not yet.
The radio signal could bounce off the ridges.
They could be at the base of the trail. Could be at my A-frame.
Could be anywhere within a two-mile radius with the right equipment.
But they know the location. That's what matters.
I run the math. The storm is still hammering.
Four to five feet of accumulation on the trail since we hiked up.
No vehicle makes it up that grade in these conditions.
Snowshoes, maybe. Experienced winter hikers with GPS and cold weather gear.
If these PIs are LA boys in tactical pants and North Face jackets, the mountain will eat them alive before they clear the first switchback.
If they're not LA boys. If her father hired local talent or ex-military with winter training.
Different math.
I move. Cabinet above the bunk. Padlocked.
Key on the nail behind the stove pipe. I unlock it and pull down the tactical bag I stashed here two winters ago.
Inside: a Glock 19, three loaded magazines, a fixed-blade knife, night vision monoculars, paracord, a signal flare kit, and a thermal emergency blanket.
I lay everything on the bunk in a row. Muscle memory. Each item in its place. Each item with a purpose.
"Are they coming up?"
Emilia's is steadier than she should be. I look at her. She stands with her back against the far wall, wearing my flannel shirt and wool socks and nothing about her belongs in this situation. Nothing about her belongs anywhere near violence or cold or the things I'm now preparing to do.
"Storm's too heavy. Not tonight."
"But when it breaks."
Not a question from her either. She understands.
"When it breaks."
I strap the knife sheath to my belt. Holster the Glock at my hip. Sling the rifle.
I check the stove. Enough wood for twelve hours. I wedge the door shut with the iron boot scraper and stack the two heaviest supply crates against it. Not enough to stop a breach. Enough to slow one down and give me two seconds of warning.
The window gaps get stuffed with rags to kill any light bleed. I bank the stove fire low. Just enough heat to keep her alive without throwing a visible glow through the boards.
Then I scoot the chair out, facing the door, and sit down with the rifle across my knees.
Emilia gazes at all of this without speaking.
"Come here."
She crosses the small space and stands in front of me. I take her hand. Her fingers are ice cold and trembling.
"Nobody touches you."
Her eyes fill. She nods.
I release her hand. I face the door.
The storm howls.
I wait.
Hours pass in silence.
The storm doesn't quit. If anything, it gets meaner.
Wind shrieks through gaps in the log walls.
The temperature drops hard enough that frost crystals form on the nail heads poking through the ceiling boards.
They grow in the dim orange glow from the stove.
Tiny geometric structures. Perfect. Indifferent to the chaos below them.
Emilia sleeps on the bunk. I made her. Stood over her until she lay down, pulled the blankets high, and closed her eyes. She fought it for maybe ten minutes. Then exhaustion won.
Good. She needs the rest. What's coming next won't allow for any.
I use the quiet hours to work. The cabin becomes a different thing under my hands. Not shelter anymore. Weapon.
I take the spare ax handle from behind the stove and wedge it horizontally across the door as a secondary brace.
I hammer two bent nails through it into the frame with the butt of my knife.
Anyone hits that door now, they're breaking through solid oak braced by iron and hardwood.
Buys me five seconds minimum. Eternity in a gunfight.
The north window is the weak point. The boards are old. Dry rot at the edges. I reinforce them with the flat lid from the supply crate, screwing it in with the hand drill from the tool kit. Not pretty. Functional.
I run paracord from the door handle to an empty tin can filled with loose .308 cartridges. Trip alarm. Crude but effective. Same setup on the north window frame. Anyone touches either entry point, brass rattles against tin.
The night vision monocular goes on the shelf by the south window where I can grab it in one motion. Flare kit on the table. Glock and spare magazines on the chair seat where I've been sitting.
Then I prep her position.
The cabin has one feature I chose it for, years ago.
Behind the bunk, the back wall has a crawl space.
Three feet deep, four feet wide, dug into the hillside when the original builder needed root cellar storage.
The opening sits behind a false panel of pine planking that looks like wall.
I move the panel away. The space is tight and dark and smells like cold earth.
I line it with the thermal blanket, silver side up. Stuff a wool blanket in after it. Water canteen. Protein bars. The flare gun with two cartridges.
Then I wake her.
"Emilia."
Her eyes open fast. Alert. No confusion. She's sleeping like prey now. One ear always listening.
"Need to show you something."
She follows me to the back wall. I show her the crawl space. Show her how the panel slides back into place from the inside, the finger groove cut into the wood. Show her the flare. Where the trigger is. How to load a cartridge.
"If someone comes through that door who isn't me.
You get in here. Panel closed. You stay silent.
You stay invisible. If they find this space, you put the flare into their face from point blank and you run north.
North takes you down to the old fire road.
Follow it east until you hit the state highway. "
She holds the gun in both hands. It looks huge against her small palms.
"What if you don't come back?"
"I'll come back."
"Justice."
"I'll come back."
She sets the flare down on the bunk. Looks up at me.
The stove light catches the edges of her face and her jaw is set and her eyes are wet and she said she loves me three hours ago and I never answered.
The words got lodged between bone and the part of me that stopped trusting words a long time ago.
But I look at her now. Standing barefoot on rough pine floorboards. Swimming in my flannel shirt. Hair tangled. Lips bitten raw from stress.
I don't answer with words.
I cross the space between us in one stride and my hands find her jaw and I tilt her face up and I kiss her like I'm going to war. Because I am.
She makes a sound against my mouth. Not a whimper. Not a gasp. Something deeper. Recognition. Her hands fist in my shirt and she pulls me down to her and there's nothing gentle about it. Nothing careful.
The backs of her knees hit the bunk frame and I press her down onto the mattress, covering her with my body. She arches up into me, all of her soft body finding every hard plane of mine. The blankets bunch underneath her. The bunk groans.
I slide back just enough to look at her face. Flushed. Open. Wanting.
"Tell me again."
She knows what I'm asking.
"I love you."
I bury my face in her neck and breathe her in and my hands find the hem of the shirt and push it up over her ribs and her skin is so warm beneath the fabric it burns.
"Again."
"I love you, Justice."
I slide the shirt over her head. She lies bare beneath me in the amber glow and I have never in my life seen anything I wanted to protect and consume in equal measure the way I want her.
I lower my mouth to the hollow of her throat and taste her pulse.
Her pulse drums against my tongue. Rapid. Alive. Mine.
I pull her off the bunk and she wraps her legs around me. She is feather light. I carry her across the cabin in three strides and press her back against the heavy oak door. The ax handle brace digs into the wood beside her hip. The tin can alarm rattles once and goes still.
Her bare shoulders hit the cold planking and she gasps. The contrast. My heat against her front, the frozen door against her spine. I pin her there with my hips and she grips my shoulders hard enough that her nails cut through my shirt.
"Don't let go."
She shakes her head. Not a chance.
I brace one arm against the door above her head.
The other finds the curve of her waist, slides down over her hip, hooks under her thigh.
She's still wearing my wool socks and nothing else and the sight of her like this, bare and flushed against the rough wood of my door, breaks something fundamental in my wiring.
I take her mouth. Hard. She opens for me and I swallow the sound she makes and it goes straight through my spine like voltage. Her fingers rake up the back of my neck into my hair and she pulls and the sharp bright pain of it makes my vision blur.
I get my belt open. The knife sheath clatters against the door and drops.
The Glock holster follows. I kick them aside without looking because the only thing that exists right now is the heat between her thighs pressed against my stomach and the way she's breathing my name between kisses like a prayer she just invented.
"Justice. Please."
That word in her mouth. Please. Like I could deny her anything. Like I have ever been able to deny her anything from the moment she grabbed my jacket on that frozen road and looked up at me with those terrified eyes.
I shift my grip. Both hands under her thighs now, spreading her open, holding her pinned against the door with nothing but my body and brute strength. She wraps tighter around.
I push into her.
She throws her head back against the oak and the door shudders in its frame and her mouth falls open and no sound comes out. Just breath. Just heat.
I hold still. Buried. The entire world compressed to the place where our bodies connect. She's so tight around me it borders on pain and I slide my forehead against her collarbone and breathe through it because if I move right now it's going to be over before it starts.
Her hand finds my jaw. Lifts my face. Her eyes lock onto mine and they're glazed and dark and wide and she whispers it again.
"I love you."
I move.
The door groans with every thrust. The crate I stacked against it scrapes an inch across the floor.
The tin can alarm sings a metallic rhythm.
None of it registers as anything except background percussion to the sounds she's making, which are wrecking me, which are rebuilding me, which are rewriting every cold and silent year I spent in these mountains alone.
I grip her hip with one hand and brace the door with the other and I drive into her like I'm trying to fuse us into one thing.
She clings to me. Nails in my back. Teeth on my shoulder through my shirt.
Her spine bows off the wood and she cries out and the sound echoes off the log walls and fills the tiny cabin and I want it carved into every surface of this place forever.
"Look at me."
Her eyes find mine. Wet. Wild. Trusting.
"You're mine."
"Yes."
"Say it."
"I'm yours."
I feel her tighten around me, the first wave of it, her thighs shaking against my ribs, and I hold her gaze and refuse to let her look away. She shatters with her eyes on mine. The sound she makes is guttural and broken and beautiful and it rips the last shred of my control apart.
I bury myself to the hilt. Hold there. Pulse into her with a groan that scrapes my throat raw. Her arms lock around my neck and she holds me through it, her lips against my temple, murmuring my name over and over while the cabin spins and the world outside ceases to be a place that matters.
We stay pinned against the door. She's in my arms. My face pressed into the curve of her neck. Both of us breathing like we sprinted up the ridge. My legs are shaking. I'd stand here holding her until the mountain crumbled under my boots.
She presses a kiss to the hinge of my jaw. I feel her smile against my skin.
I breathe in.
And stop.
Something wrong in the air. Under the woodsmoke from the stove. Under the smell of her skin and the mineral tang of sweat. Something chemical. Bitter. Wrong.
I breathe again. Deeper.
Accelerant. Kerosene or diesel. The acrid bite of petroleum combustion seeping up between the pine floorboards.
I angle back from her. Set her down. Her feet barely touch the floor before I'm on my knees, palm flat against the boards.
Hot.
The wood is hot.
I look up at her. Her face shifts from soft and open to blank terror in the space of a heartbeat because she reads it in my expression before I say a single word.
"They're burning us out."