Chapter 16
Sixteen
Silas
Two hundred and fifty meters.
I’ve covered worse, but usually without a hole in my arm and a target on my spine.
The ground between the shed and the garage is a flat, open killing field.
Snow falls in fat flakes that hiss against the frozen crust—heavy enough to blur the tree line, but not dense enough to hide a man.
Anyone watching from the cabin windows would see a dark shape against the white.
The itch between my shoulder blades is the only thing I can’t account for.
I go low and steady. Not fast—fast is noise, the kind of mistake that only gets made once.
My boots sink into the drift with a rhythmic crunch that sounds like the crush of gravel in a fresh grave.
Eyes forward. Don’t look at the cabin windows glowing pale to the left.
Looking makes me a target. Looking makes it real.
Whatever’s happening on the other side of the glass gets filed in the dark place where I keep the things I’ll deal with later.
My arm is bleeding through the wrap. I feel the liquid heat—warm against the air, a steady leak. A countdown in the snow.
The garage wall emerges from the spindrift like a tombstone. I press my back to the rough wood and hold my breath until my lungs burn. I listen for anything that doesn’t belong—the click of a safety, the creak of a floorboard, the exhale of someone waiting.
Just the wind.
I slip inside and pull the door behind me. I stand still, letting my eyes adjust to the smell of grease and cold iron. Both phones are a no-go. No bars. No signal. No way to contact Caleb.
Plan B.
I move toward it carefully, one-handed, compensating. My dominant arm has stopped being useful and started being a liability. I reach the machine, a heavy shadow in the corner. I rest my good hand on the cold steel of the hood and close my eyes.
She’s in that cabin.
I don’t know what he wants, how long he’s been watching, planning, how far he’ll go. But I know the kind of man who sets a claymore behind a door. I know that kind of patience—the cold, predatory kind that doesn’t mind the wait.
I turn the key one position. The click is a hammer strike.
I wait for the glow plug light. The machine ticks in the frost. My arm throbs in time with my pulse, reaching my jaw.
I shift my weight, boots slicking in a small puddle forming at my feet.
The door is still a gray rectangle of falling snow.
Nothing moving.
The light blinks ready. An amber eye in the dark.
Don’t start it yet. The second I turn this engine over, the world explodes. The roar will carry across the clearing. He’ll hear it.
I’m ready to move the millisecond the pistons fire. No hesitation. The only advantage left is that he thinks I’m already dealt with.
I check the throttle with my good hand. Find the brake. Run through it once. Twice. A drop of blood hits the concrete with a faint tap.
It doesn’t matter. What matters is the thirty seconds between ignition and exit.
Thirty seconds.
I can wait thirty seconds.
I just don’t know if she has that long.
Ava
I adjust my position on the sofa. Unhurried. Natural. Like someone getting comfortable for a lengthy chat. But my palms are slick against the cushion, and the firelight feels suddenly too bright, exposing every tremor I’m trying to hide.
The satellite phone sits eight feet away. Nine, possibly. A black plastic stone on the floor.
"How long have you been inside my house?"
A flicker crosses his expression. Satisfaction—the smugness of a predator who’s finally been noticed.
"Just over a month." He sips from his mug. My mug. The one Silas handed me this morning. "Your security system could use an upgrade."
My insides hollow out. The tea he forced me to drink turns to acid in my throat.
"He wrecked everything," he says with something like regret. "I had a plan," he waves the mug vaguely, the ceramic clinking against his ring, "I wanted to maintain proximity until the time was right."
The words maintain proximity, crawl down my spine like a line of ice.
"So…" His lips curl upward. "How is your mother? She really didn’t look well when I saw her last.”
The floor seems to tilt. The sturdy log walls of the cabin feel like they’re closing in, exhaling the scent of damp wool and his breath.
His smile returns, gentler now. "We should deliver yellow roses to her. She loves them."
My lungs seize. “You have no right to talk about my mother,” I say. My voice is a thin wire, vibrating with a terror I can't suppress. “You are not a part of my life.”
He tilts his head. “No? You talked about me once.”
“I have never—”
“Not directly.” He shrugs slightly. “But it was close.”
A cold sweat breaks across my ribs.
“You were sitting in your car outside Greenfield,” he continues conversationally. “Three Thursdays ago. Crying. You stayed there a while before you drove home.”
The memory hits like a punch to the solar plexus. I had been crying. I remember the rhythmic thwack of the wipers and the feeling of absolute, safe isolation. But he was there. Watching me break down through the glass.
“You said you were tired of doing everything alone,” he says quietly. He smiles, gentle and certain. “I knew then you were ready for me to move in.”
“That wasn’t about you.” The words are a frantic defense, a desperate attempt to take back my privacy. Outside the care home, asking God for help. And he was there. Listening in on a conversation meant for Heaven.
He smiles faintly. “You thought it wasn’t.”
He's unhinged. This isn’t a debate. No reasoning applies. No conversational path leads to comprehension. We occupy different realities. In his mind, I wanted him to find me.
“What do you think is going to happen now, Reagan?”
He looks almost relieved I’ve asked him. “Now, you won’t have to do everything alone anymore,” he says gently. The words settle in my stomach like lead. “No more people pulling at you. No more hired security telling you where to go. No big house to maintain.”
A pause. The heavy silence of the snow outside makes the cabin feel as if we’re being buried alive.
“I’ve taken care of it all.”
Cold spreads through my chest. “What do you mean you’ve taken care of it?”
He studies me as if deciding how much I’m ready to hear. “All those things that keep pulling you away,” he says quietly. “Your job. Your house. People making demands on you.”
His expression softens. “I fixed the problem.”
The blood drains from my face, leaving my skin feeling tight and waxen. “What have you done?”
He smiles again. Gentle. Certain. “I made sure no one would take you away from me again.”
My pulse hammers in my throat, a frantic, trapped rhythm.
“You think cutting me off from everyone is going to make me want you in my life?” I lean forward, anger finally lashing through the paralysis. “I will never want you anywhere near me.”
His gentleness doesn't just fade; it vanishes. He moves faster than my eyes can track—a blur of motion that ends with his fingers clamped around my jaw. He doesn't strike me, but the pressure is agonizing, forcing my head back until the tendons in my neck feel like they’re going to snap.
He leans in, his face inches from mine, the smell of the cold storm still clinging to his jacket. His eyes are flat, devoid of the warmth he was faking only seconds ago.
"Gratitude, Ava," he whispers, the words vibrating against my skin. "I’m the only one who takes care of you. The only one who knows what you need."
He increases the pressure, his thumb digging into the bone beneath my ear until a white-hot spark of pain shoots through my skull. Then, just as abruptly, he releases me, shoving my head back toward the cushions.
His gaze lingers on my face. “Take off your glasses. I like it when you wear your contacts.”
I shake my head. “I didn’t…”
He smiles again and reaches into his pocket, withdrawing them. “See, Doc? I think of everything.”
I take them from his outstretched hands, swallowing as my fingers fumble. Does he really think I can—
A harsh mechanical sputter tears through the thought. Remote, dampened by snowfall and walls, yet unmistakable.
An engine.
Oh, dear Lord, is that Silas? Please, Lord, please, let him be alive!
Reagan doesn’t react, he doesn’t curse, he merely takes a seat across from me, one ankle resting on his knee, studying me the way a chess player studies a board.
"Well," he murmurs as his hand moves toward the weapon beneath his jacket, the leather of his holster creaking in the sudden, sharp stillness. "This is most inconvenient. Either he’s crazy enough to risk a blizzard to escape, or he’s trying to lure me out.”
His eyes settle on me. “Which is it, Doc? Is he a coward or a cowboy?”
I square my shoulders. “Neither. He’s a gentleman and a warrior.”
Anger flickers across his face, and he makes the sound of a buzzer. “Wrong answer. Who is he exactly? He’s trained. I want to know how well before I go check. And think real careful about lying to me.”
I don’t get a chance to lie. I’ve barely breathed when the windows rattle and the floorboards tremble beneath my feet.
My hands go to the armrests before I understand why. An enormous roar slams into the cabin. Reagan is already at the window before I can even process what happened.
“Ouch. Looks like he crashed and burned,” he says, looking over his shoulder at me and smiling. “Though I do hate uncertainty.”
He crosses the room before I can speak. The smile doesn’t leave his face.
"Up."
It's soft. Almost polite.
His hand closes around my arm—not hard enough to bruise, just firm enough that resistance would be pointless—and he steers me to Silas’s bedroom.
He opens the bedroom door and looks inside like he's checking a hotel room for comfort.
"This'll do." He positions me in the center of the room and steps back and looks at me the way you look at something you've arranged to your satisfaction.
"I won't be long," he says.
"And Doc." He pauses in the doorway, one hand on the frame. "I'd hate for you to do something that changes the mood when I get back."
The door closes, and I hear something being dragged to block the door. I don't move until I’m sure I’ve heard the front door close again.
When I’m sure enough, I drag myself to the window using the bunk frame, one-handed, taking my weight through my arms, and I press my forehead against the cold glass, and I look out.
I wish I hadn't.
Through the snow, the sky to the east is the wrong color.
Orange. Deep and rolling and alive in a way the snow can't quite swallow, no matter how hard it tries.
A column of black smoke climbs above the tree line and just hangs there, enormous and patient, lit from underneath by something that is still burning.
If he was trying to go for help and hit a tree, or worse, There’s no way Silas could have survived an accident like that.
Panic closes my throat as I hobble to the bottom bunk and fold into myself, arms wrapped around my ribs.
Think, Ava. Think.
Silas Hightower doesn’t leave things to chance. He plans. He brought weapons with him, and this is a hunting cabin. And he didn’t just pick this room on a whim.
All of the times, of all the places, strangely, it’s not a still, quiet voice I hear penetrate my thoughts.
It’s Delilah’s.
Telling me to go full Sarah Connor.