Chapter 15 #2
I throw the door open, and a wall of sub-zero wind slams into the room, blinding me with sleet. Silas is hunched over, clutching his side, head bowed as if standing itself is a battle.
“What happened?” I reach for him, my hands already moving to assess the damage.
He doesn’t speak. He shuffles across the threshold, boots heavy on the floorboards, and pushes the door shut against the storm. He stands there a beat, his back to me, before slowly lifting his face.
The breath leaves me in a sharp hiss.
It isn’t Silas.
Silas
The world narrows to the wet, copper tang of blood and the splintered grain of the oak doorframe. I push up off the dirt floor, my arm a traitor; it nearly gives out, the bone beneath the muscle grinding against broken glass.
I clamp my hand over my upper arm, forcing the heat back into the shredded meat. I wait for the second volley. The rush of boots through the snow.
Nothing comes.
Just the wind scraping against the siding and the rhythmic tap of snow against the roof.
I tear the fabric of my sleeve with my teeth, shove it against the hole, and cinch it tight with my belt. I work in the gaps between the gusts of wind, straining for any sound. The silence is worse than the gunfire; it’s expectant.
I knot the wrap one-handed and hold still. My pulse is a hammer against my eardrums. If he’s moving, he’s moving toward her.
I check the signal on my cell. Nothing—not even a bar. I need that sat phone. Gritting my teeth, I shrug out of my jacket with my good hand, the movement sending a fresh wave of nausea washing over me.
I flex my fingers. Fire shoots up my arm, a white-hot spike that makes my vision swim. But my grip holds.
I crouch and move toward the door. I stay low, keeping my back to the wall, avoiding the center of the frame.
I reach out, my fingers brushing the wood, testing the tension. It’s solid—far more solid than it should be. It’s not just locked; it’s braced.
My breath hitches. I step back, sweat freezing on my forehead. Any attempt to force it will cost me blood I can’t afford to lose.
I map the room. Pegboard. Workbench. Hammer. Flathead. Pry bar.
The door might be solid, but the frame is pine. I step to the hinge side and drop to one knee, my breath coming in short, shallow hitches.
I wedge the flathead beneath the lip of the top hinge pin and tap it with the hammer. Metal rings sharp in the enclosed space. I freeze. Nothing. I hit it again, harder.
The pin shifts. Pain flares up my arm, a blinding, electric roar. The pin inches upward. Blood drips from my elbow, drumming onto the dirt. One more strike. The top hinge loosens with a dull pop.
I catch the door with my shoulder before it sags and move to the middle. The weight of the door shifts into my hands, and I feel it immediately—a shift my body recognizes before my brain catches up.
Tension.
A thin line runs from the inner brace, disappearing into the drift just beyond the threshold. Almost invisible. I follow the angle down and find it half-buried in the snow—rectangular, curved, deliberate.
Claymore mine. Directional and deadly.
My stomach turns over. My arm is screaming. The wound has soaked through the belt and the shirt, and my grip is failing. I need both hands for this, but I only trust one. I breathe through it. Slow. The way they taught me. Pain is just information. It doesn't get a vote.
My pulse doesn't spike. It narrows. He planned for force. He didn't plan for patience.
I ease the door back toward me—millimeter by millimeter—keeping the line slack. I feel every micro-shift in tension through fingers slick with blood. The door settles against the dirt floor, the line held loose.
I slide along the interior wall, keeping low, staying outside the kill arc. The cold hits my face as I clear the frame.
No blast. No light. Just the wind.
I don't breathe again until both boots are in the snow.
Ava
Every synapse in my brain fires at once and produces nothing—no sound, no action, just a total systemic shutdown, the kind I've only ever read about in trauma literature and never understood until this exact moment.
My brain knows what it's looking at. My body has simply refused to accept the information.
He’s dressed in heavy, mud-streaked camouflage gear, stiff with frozen slush and pine needles.
The scent of the wilderness—damp earth, resin, and the metallic tang of something darker—floods the cabin, overpowering the smell of the fire.
Strapped across his chest is a bulky nylon harness, crisscrossed with straps and pouches that hold tools of a trade I don't want to name.
The smile he gives me is patient. Comfortable. The smile of a man who has never once doubted how this ends.
"See what happens when I’m not around," he says. “You get hurt.”
He moves before I can process it, hand closing around my arm, and the touch of him turns my stomach inside out. He steers me back toward the sofa, leaving rust-colored stains on my sweater. My stomach twists as my brain matches them to the dried smears in the creases of his knuckles.
I’ve seen enough of it to know what it is.
Blood.
My heart hammers against my ribs, a frantic, trapped bird. Find the thumb. Rotate. Break free. Silas’s voice echoes in the back of my skull, steady and professional.
I don't wait. I let my weight drop and whip my wrist toward the gap in his grip, snapping my arm over and down just like we practiced. For a split second, I feel the pressure give. I feel the ghost of a chance.
But he doesn't let go.
Instead of my arm slipping free, his hand shifts with a fluid, terrifying speed. He doesn't fight my movement; he follows it, sliding his grip higher up my forearm before I can pull away. He catches my momentum and twists, turning my own force into a lever that jerks me off balance.
Suddenly, my arm isn’t mine anymore. He wrenches it upward behind my back, forcing my shoulder into an angle it wasn't meant to hold. A white-hot spike of pain shoots through my chest, pinning me forward.
“Silas taught you that, didn’t he?” he whispers, his breath hot and smelling of winter air. His voice is conversational, almost disappointed. “The thumb-release. It’s a good move, Doc. Fundamental.”
He shoves me down toward the cushions, his weight following me, keeping my arm locked in that agonizing upward stretch. “But fundamentals only work on amateurs,” he murmurs, his face inches from mine.
I pull back as far as I can. "What did you do to Silas?"
It doesn't come out as a question. I don't have the breath for one.
He releases me and holds his hands up, squinting at them, then swings his gaze back to me, his eyes roaming over my face with an intrusive, sickening intimacy as he picks up the gun Silas gave me and tucks it away.
He taps his finger on his chin. “What did I do? I took him out of the picture.” He looks around the cabin. “It’s a good thing, too, Doc. You’re far too trusting.”
My eyes drift to the table where the satellite phone sits charging—a mindless, flickering hope that I can reach out to Caleb. My body shifts on its own, a small, involuntary movement toward the edge of the cushion.
He doesn't lunge. He doesn't even seem to exert himself. He just reaches out—an almost lazy, fluid extension—and the phone is gone. He bats it away, sending it skittering across the floorboards and into the shadows.
He waggles his finger at me. “Invitation only. And the guest list doesn’t include anyone I don’t approve of.”
Approve of.
Silas is dead.
The thought lands like a diagnosis I already knew was coming but couldn't say out loud until now.
All that blood. My chest cavity feels like it's collapsing inward, like something structural has given way, and I know this feeling.
I have felt it before in rooms with families who needed me to hold myself together.
I can’t breathe.
He’s watching me process it the way someone watches a movie they've already seen. Unhurried. Certain of every scene.
My hands are trembling. I press them flat against my thighs so he can't see. My fear is the thing he came here for, and I will not give him every piece of it.
He settles back into the chair like a man who has just sat down to his favorite meal.
"Do you have any idea," he says, "how long I've been waiting for you to just stop?"
He says it almost tenderly.
"Always somewhere to be. Always someone who needs you." He tilts his head. "Did you ever once stop and think about what I needed, Ava?"
"I've watched you run yourself into the ground for people who don't deserve five minutes of you." His eyes move over me slowly, proprietorially, the way you look at something you already consider yours. "And now look. No phone. No signal. Nowhere to be. No way out."
He smiles.
"Just us."
I grind the words out past my parched mouth. "Where. Is. Silas."
I don't know why I ask. Clinical reflex. The same part of me that keeps requesting observations when the answer is already written in the scan.
Emotion moves across his face. There and gone in a second.
"You know," he says pleasantly, "I don’t like to be the one to tell you this."
He leans forward, elbows on his knees, and looks at me the way you look at something you own and are very patient with.
"But Silas doesn’t know what’s best for you.”
The fire pops, and I don't flinch, and I count that as the only victory available to me right now.
"But now he’s gone," he says. "I can tell you the truth about him."
“What truth?”
His face brightens, almost manically. “That he brought you up here for all the wrong reasons, Doc.”
He claims the kitchen with a casual ease that makes my skin crawl. Cupboards open; a mug clinks; a match flares. He moves through the shadows of the cabin like he’s lived here for years, turning my sanctuary into his territory.
Moments later, he comes back with two cups and sets one in front of me.
"You should drink something. You're in shock. He’s hurt you. He trapped you up here. But everything is going to be okay. I’m here now."
I stare at the steaming mug.
"Doc." Gentle. Reproachful. The voice you'd use with someone being unnecessarily difficult. "I made it the way you like it."
The way you like it.
He was in my house. He knows how I take my tea. He knows things about me I've never told anyone, things I didn't even know I'd revealed.
I look at the steaming cup of tea.
He could have put anything in it.
He could have put nothing in it.
He sits back down, wraps both hands around his mug, and looks at the fire with the quiet contentment of a man with nowhere else to be.
"You're going to drink that."
Not a threat. An inevitability.
I pick up the mug. He settles deeper into the chair. Crosses his ankle over his knee. A man without a single urgent thing in the world.
"You're going to be angry for a while," he says. Reasonable. Measured. Like he's already mapped the stages. "That's fine. I expected that."
He takes a long sip from his mug and looks around the cabin like he's appraising it.
"Romantic," he says. “Hope you have candles?”
He drifts to the window with a grace that feels like an insult. He stands there, his silhouette blending into the glass, watching the dark as if he’s simply waiting for the rest of his kingdom to arrive.
"You know what I kept thinking, all those months?" He doesn't turn around. "I kept thinking, if I could just get her attention, she’d understand."
He turns. Looks at me across the room with something that in another life, on another face, might have looked like longing.
“And here we are, Doc."
He smiles. And it’s so utterly charming, it’s like watching Lucifer take on human form.
"I finally have all of your attention."