2. What the Whiskey Started
Chapter two
What the Whiskey Started
Dawn came to Black Pine like a blade being drawn, slow, cold, and sharp enough to cut.
Jace woke to the sound of Canyon's fist hitting his cabin door three times, precise and unhurried, a knock that expected obedience.
Grey light filtered through the window. The air inside the cabin was frigid, his breath visible in thin plumes, and his body ached from a night spent on a mattress that had all the give of packed earth.
He pulled on thermals, laced his boots, and stepped outside into a morning that smelled of frost and pine sap and the faintest undercurrent of something animal, musk, maybe, or the ghost of something that had passed close during the night.
The ground near his cabin was disturbed.
Boot prints? No. Too wide, too deep, with a spacing that suggested something four-legged and large.
Jace stared at the tracks for a long moment, his breath fogging in the still air, then forced himself to look away.
The group assembled at the lodge in various states of consciousness.
Theo looked immaculate despite the early hour, his technical gear pristine, his jaw set like the wilderness was a competition he intended to win.
Reed moved with the unhurried ease of someone who'd learned decades ago that mornings were for observation, not performance.
Milo clutched a tin cup of coffee with both hands and stared at the treeline like it owed him money.
Canyon stood at the edge of the clearing with a pack on his back that looked like it weighed nothing, though Jace could see the straps biting into shoulders thick with muscle.
He wore a dark henley with the sleeves pushed to his elbows despite the cold, those scarred forearms exposed again, the pale skin almost luminous in the grey dawn light, and heavy boots that showed years of hard use.
He didn't greet them. He looked at each man in turn, that acquisitive gaze cataloguing fitness, fear, and fault lines, and then he turned and walked toward the trees.
"Move," he said over his shoulder. "We're burning daylight."
***
The trail, if it could be called that, was a barely visible thread of compressed earth winding through old-growth pines so massive their trunks were wider than Jace's armspan.
The canopy overhead was dense enough to turn morning into perpetual twilight, and the air beneath the trees was different from the air in the clearing: thicker, colder, saturated with the smell of decomposing needles and wet stone and the sweet-rot of fallen timber being slowly digested by the forest floor.
Jace's boots sank into the soft earth with each step, the sound muffled and organic, and the silence between footfalls was so complete he could hear his own blood moving.
Canyon set a pace that was deliberately punishing.
Not quite a jog, but relentless, uphill, always uphill, through terrain that switched between loose scree and root-tangled earth with no warning.
Within the first hour, Milo was gasping, Theo was sweating through his technical fabrics, and Reed had settled into a grinding endurance that spoke to a younger man's discipline buried under an older man's body.
Jace fell into the middle, his legs burning, his lungs working, his mind finally, blessedly, empty of everything except the next step and the next breath.
It was the first time in six months his brain had shut up.
Canyon moved through the forest like water through rock, fluid, inevitable, finding the path of least resistance without appearing to look for it.
He never checked a compass. He never consulted a map.
He navigated by some internal architecture that Jace couldn't read, and occasionally he would stop, tilt his head at an angle that exposed the long column of his throat, and listen to something the rest of them couldn't hear.
These pauses lasted three seconds, maybe four, and during them Canyon's entire body went so still he didn't appear to breathe.
He's listening to the forest, Jace thought during the third such pause, watching the way Canyon's nostrils flared slightly, the way his eyes narrowed to focused slits. No, he's listening to something in the forest. Something specific.
"Water break," Canyon said, dropping his pack. "Ten minutes. Then we continue to the lake. We're camping there tonight."
"Tonight?" Milo's voice pitched upward. "I thought, the cabins—"
"You thought wrong. The mountain doesn't care about your comfort zone, Milo.
Neither do I." Canyon's tone wasn't cruel.
It was factual, delivered with the same emotional temperature as a weather report.
"You're here to be broken down before you can be built back up.
That process doesn't happen inside four walls. "
Theo dropped his pack and sat on a boulder with the aggressive nonchalance of a man determined to look unbothered. "Fine by me. I've done worse than sleep outside. Spring break in Cabo, '22. Slept on a beach after—" He stopped, registering Canyon's complete indifference, and let the story die.
Jace found a flat rock and sat, pulling water from his pack.
His thighs were screaming. His shoulders ached under the pack straps.
But beneath the physical protest, something else was happening—a slow, reluctant loosening, like scar tissue being stretched for the first time.
The mountain was enormous and indifferent and it did not care about his divorce or his empty apartment or the way he'd stopped being able to look at himself in the mirror without seeing a man who'd failed at the most basic human enterprise.
And in the absence of caring, Jace found something that felt almost like relief.
Canyon appeared beside him without sound.
One moment Jace was alone on his rock; the next, Canyon was there, close enough that Jace could smell him, pine and woodsmoke and something underneath that was darker, almost metallic, like blood mixed with cold stone.
The scent hit Jace's hindbrain before his conscious mind could process it, and his body responded with a flush of heat that started in his chest and dropped straight to his groin, his cock thickening in his hiking pants with a suddenness that made him shift his weight to hide it.
"You went quiet on the climb," Canyon said, without preamble. "Stayed quiet for an hour."
"Isn't that the point?" Jace said, keeping his voice level. "Commune with nature? Find my inner peace?"
"The others went quiet because they were suffering.
" Canyon's gaze was fixed on the lake below, but Jace had the unsettling conviction that every particle of the man's attention was directed at him.
"You went quiet because you stopped thinking.
That's different. Most people come here dragging their noise behind them like chains.
You dropped yours in the first mile." A pause. "That's unusual."
Jace didn't know what to do with that. The observation was too accurate, too intimate, like Canyon had reached inside his skull and read the architecture of his thoughts. "Maybe I didn't have that much noise to begin with."
"No." Canyon turned his head, and those pale eyes hit Jace with a force that felt physical, a gust of wind he couldn't brace against. "You had plenty.
I could smell it on you yesterday. Grief, anger, self-recrimination, they have distinct scents.
Yours were layered so thick I could have tracked you blindfolded.
" He paused. "But today they're quieter.
The mountain is already working on you."
I could smell it. The phrase snagged in Jace's mind like a fishhook, pulling at something that didn't want to surface. Normal people didn't talk about smelling emotions. Normal people didn't describe grief as something with a scent profile.
"You always psychoanalyze your clients on day two?" Jace asked, deflecting.
"Stay behind after dinner tomorrow." Canyon rose, shouldering his pack in one motion. "There's something you need to see."
He walked away without waiting for an answer, leaving Jace sitting on his rock with a racing pulse and the distinct impression that he'd just been read like a page in a book Canyon had been studying for a very long time.
***
They reached the lake by mid-afternoon and made camp in a clearing on the eastern shore where the pines thinned enough to let the sky in.
Canyon directed them to pitch tents in a loose circle around a fire pit he constructed with the efficiency of someone who'd done it ten thousand times, stones placed with geometric precision, kindling shaved from deadfall with a knife that appeared in his hand and disappeared again so quickly Jace couldn't track where he kept it.
The fire caught on the first strike of flint, as if the spark was afraid not to obey.
Tents went up. The sun dropped low, painting the lake in oranges and golds that deepened to reds as the light thickened.
Canyon vanished into the woods—"scouting," he said, which seemed to mean something different from what it meant in any survival manual Jace had read, leaving the four men alone around the fire as darkness pooled between the trees like rising water.
Theo cracked open a flask of whiskey he'd smuggled past the gear check, passing it with a conspiratorial grin.
The liquor burned going down, cheap and sharp, and loosened the group's tension like a wrench on an over-tightened bolt.
Reed accepted the flask with dignified appreciation.
Milo took a swallow and coughed so hard his eyes watered.
Jace drank and felt the warmth spread through his chest, blunting the edges of the day's exhaustion.