Chapter 15
Fifteen
Silas
I force the heat from the kiss down, letting the soldier in me take over as I bank my body away from Ava to hide the screen.
My mind clicks into the tactical reality: we are deep in the pocket of the valley. Cell reception here is a ghost—it haunts the perimeter but rarely finds the center.
I look at the screen. The texts aren't just erratic; they are bunched into rapid-fire clusters.
16:04. 16:05. 16:05. They hit the network all at once, the moment the signal caught the cabin's thin air.
"How often do you usually hear from him?" I ask, keeping my voice calm.
Ava swallows. "Daily."
My fist curls at my side. Every day. Every morning, she wakes up and checks her phone before she lets herself draw a full breath.
Every evening, she double-checks the locks, her entire life being slowly compressed by the noise of his obsession.
He moved into her life without asking and made himself impossible to evict.
I swipe through the queue, sending them to Delilah one by one, then delete them. I pause at the voicemail icons.
"You have two voice messages," I say, glancing back at her. Her face is pale, caught in the flickering amber light of the dying fire. "Alright if I screen them?"
"Be my guest."
I hit dial, pressing the phone to my ear. The first is a routine update from the care home. I relay it to Ava, then listen to the next message. The second the message begins, every muscle in my body coils tight.
I'm beginning to think you don't appreciate everything I've done for you, Doc. It's time you had a reminder of what your life would be like without me.
I listen to it once. Then again. The cadence, the control, the unhurried confidence—it’s the voice of a man who hasn't once considered the possibility that he won't get what he wants.
I look at Ava. She’s watching me the way I’ve seen her read a chart, her eyes darting across my features, scanning for the flicker that tells her whether this is survivable. I give her nothing. I can’t afford to.
I lower the phone, the screen still dark. There are two ways to read this. Only one I pray is right.
If this is merely a backlog—a digital dam finally breaking under the atmospheric pressure of the storm—it means he sent them hours ago or scheduled them, unaware that we were ever in this blind spot until the signal finally punched through.
But if it isn't a backlog...
"Silas?" she whispers, her voice barely rising above the wind howling at the eaves. "How is he sending messages if he’s in jail?"
I turn to face her, careful not to let the tremor in my own heartbeat bleed into my posture. "That’s what I’m going to find out," I say, my voice steady as stone.
It’s the truth, but it’s a pointed one—the kind that serves as a lifeline if I’m right, or a noose if I’ve underestimated the man on the other end of the line.
Ava
Silas’s call to Caleb is short, a sharp exchange of tactical directives.
He keeps his voice low, angled toward the shadows.
I catch fragments despite myself: Forward it.
Full trace. Yes, the property too. A long pause, and his jaw tightens.
I don’t care what it takes. Get another detective on this. Forward the texts to him.
He ends the call and sets the phone on the heavy oak table between us, a cold anchor on the wood. "Delilah has the audio," he says, his voice flat. "They'll run it through voice analysis, track the carrier routing.”
He turns to the window, scanning the tree line with methodical left to right, near to far, unhurried.
The wind outside is a physical force, rattling the glass in its frame, clawing at the cabin like an unseen hand.
He pulls on his coat, the fabric rasping in the quiet.
“I hate leaving you, but I need to check on the generator again.”
He picks up the spare weapon from the table and passes it to me. “Keep it on you at all times.”
This time, I take it without argument. My fingers curl around the grip, the cold steel a comfort now.
He pauses at the door, hand on the iron frame, and looks back once. It’s not just a glance; it’s an inventory, as if he’s committing the shadows across my face to memory. Then the latch clicks, the door groans against the storm, and my protector is gone again.
The cabin settles, the logs shifting under the wind, and I’m left with the dancing orange light of the hearth and the weight of everything he didn’t say.
Silas
I step off the porch, and a wall of ice immediately seals against my face, needles of frozen sleet stinging the exposed skin.
My lungs seize as I draw in the sub-zero air, the scent of pine and ozone heavy in the storm.
I pause, motionless, letting my senses expand into the dark.
I listen for the cadence of the wind, searching for a rhythm that doesn't belong—a crunch of snow, a shift in the timber, a presence other than my own. There’s nothing but the relentless moan of the gale.
I force myself toward the shed; the frozen ground beneath my boots is like walking on glass. My muscles are a roadmap of aches, the deep, thrumming fatigue of days without real sleep making the world swim at the edges of my vision. I blink hard, rubbing at my grit-filled eyes, but the blur remains.
Inside the shed, I drop the toolbox, my hands shaking just enough to betray me. I drop to my knees, wrench in hand, and lean over the generator.
I don't have time for this. Every second the power is out, the cabin is vulnerable.
As I work, my mind rebels, dragging me back to the cabin. Ava.
Think. If Reagan attended those charity events before the clinic, he was hunting long before she ever knew his name.
If he’s trained—if he has that kind of discipline—he wouldn't have just stumbled onto her.
He would have mapped her. He would have stood in her foyer, smiled at her guests, and memorized the blind spots in her security while she poured him a drink.
I finish with the spark plug housing, my hands numb, and move to the voltage regulator.
My thoughts fracture, splitting down the middle.
One half of my brain is back at her estate, measuring the tension of the perimeter fence, counting the seconds it would take to bypass the garage sensors; the other half is back in the Cascades, the phantom weight of a rifle still pressing into my shoulder, the smell of damp pine needles and cordite rising to meet me.
I stop, my breath hitching as it leaves my lungs in a thick, white plume. I close my eyes, my forehead resting against the cold casing of the engine.
"Father," I whisper, the words barely audible over the howl of the storm. "I don't have the margin for mistakes. Give me what I lack."
I breathe out an Amen, the word ghosting into the darkness. I tighten my grip on the wrench, shifting my angle.
I squint. Sure I’m seeing something that can’t be true.
The governor linkage isn’t sitting right.
I lean closer, my breath hitching in my chest. The metal is dull, coated in a fine layer of frost, but the adjustment screw is exposed.
It has been backed off—just enough. It’s a clean, deliberate turn.
Not enough to stop the engine immediately, but enough to starve it under load, ensuring it would die the moment the system demanded power.
A tremor of pure, freezing clarity rips through my exhaustion.
Behind me, the shed door creaks—then shuts with a quiet, deliberate click.
I suck in a breath.
Instinct takes over. I don't look back. I dive, my shoulder hitting the frozen dirt, just as the air behind me shrieks.
Lead punches through the thick oak of the door, carving irregular holes exactly where my chest had been a heartbeat before.
Ava
I freeze, every muscle turning to ice. I strain to hear, waiting for the sound again—a snap, a thud, a voice—but the wind only howls through the eaves in hollow whistles.
Nothing. But my body refuses to settle. My nervous system is screaming, firing the same frantic signals I see on a monitor when a patient’s heart slips into its final chaotic rhythm.
Dread pools in my stomach, cold and heavy. My breathing is shallow, trapped high in my lungs, my shoulders aching from holding them still. Everything in me knows that sound wasn’t the wind. It had weight.
My mind churns through the worst possibilities, a clinical triage of catastrophe.
What if he slipped? A concussion, a subdural hematoma—you look fine, you feel fine, then the brain swells, and you’re gone.
My imagination is a cruel master. I can see the hemorrhage, the herniation, the quiet stop of a heart I’ve come to rely on more than my own.
Stop. Think. But I can’t. I know exactly how fast a life can bleed out. I know the anatomy of failure, and I can’t unknow it.
My hands shake so violently that the weapon feels slick. My chest tightens, a crushing pressure that reminds me of the moment a patient’s pupils fix and dilate, locked on a darkness I can’t reach. The air in the room feels like I’m breathing in a vacuum.
I can’t feel my fingers.
I start reciting scripture, the words disjointed, a desperate rhythm against the rising panic.
“The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life...” I swallow hard, my throat raw.
I tighten my grip on the gun, squeezing my eyes shut.
“When I am afraid, I put my trust in You.”
The thump at the door isn’t the sound I expected. It’s distinct. The pattern Silas set.
Relief crashes over me so fast it leaves me lightheaded. I exhale, the sound almost a sob, and shift my weight toward the door.
“Ava, hurry, I’m hurt,” his voice comes from the porch, strained and thin through the wood.
My heart stutters. I drop the weapon onto the couch, desperate to reach him—to help, to be the doctor I was trained to be. I move as fast as my ruined ankle allows, hopping, stumbling, dragging myself to the latch.