Chapter Twenty-Seven
Jax
Snow has a sound.
People mistake it for silence, but that’s the lie nature tells anyone who’s not listening. Snow murmurs beneath the surface—whispering in tiny fractures and shifting weight—warning those who learned too late that it intends to bury everything it touches.
The storm was supposed to take its time: a slow creep of clouds, a gentle build toward violence. Instead, it’s here now. Teeth bared. Already hungry.
I close my eyes for half a second, letting my forehead rest against the window frame, telling myself that this is just another storm. Just another winter tantrum from a mountain that has tried to kill me more than once.
Except the unease in my chest isn’t about the weather.
Through the swirling white, headlights flicker—a vehicle grinding its way up the narrow road that clings to the mountain’s spine. Wrong size. Wrong speed. Wrong confidence. This road is a threat, even on clear days. Only locals trust it, and even they respect it the way others respect graveyards.
I step closer, breath fogging the glass.
The beam of headlights cuts across a face — just long enough to recognize the shape of a jaw I never wanted to see again.
Not a local. Not a skier. Not a lost tourist.
A scavenger.
I know that look. I know that posture. I know the way his eyes search for lives to pick apart.
Paparazzi.
I can still hear his voice in hospital hallways asking me how it felt to “lose everything.” Like the pain was a quote he could slap under a photo for clicks.
His smile when I couldn’t answer… his smile when Emily’s mother collapsed beside me…
I thought the avalanche buried him with the rest of that world.
But he is here.
The car edges toward a bend in the road—the curve where the mountain decides gravity is optional. Where the snowpack above waits for a vibration, a whisper, a breath, and then collapses.
Instinctively, my hand presses harder to the window.
If he’s already this high… he isn’t lost. He isn’t stuck.
He came looking.
Not for Jax—the nobody who chops wood and installs security cameras he pretends aren’t advanced enough to raise suspicion.
He came for Jackson Hale.
The golden boy. The billionaire. The tragedy. The dead man.
How did he track me here? Who talked? What did I miss?
I drag in a breath that tastes like fear and memory—both equally poisonous.
Headlights vanish again, swallowed whole by storm.
I step back before nausea makes my knees buckle. I glance around the cabin, suddenly aware of how small it is—how close everything is—how this place is more than wood and insulation now.
This cabin holds laughter. Violet’s drawings. Ava’s humming at the stove. It feels like home.
A home I don’t deserve. A home I have no idea how to keep.
If that man drags Jackson Hale back into daylight… there will be no home.
Not here. Not anywhere.
Ava. Violet.
What if they’re out there?
Walking. Driving. Hurrying against the storm.
I grab my phone, hands clumsy with adrenaline. My pulse makes it hard to hit the right letters.
Before I can type a single word… the phone rings.
Sharp. Sudden. Cutting through wind and panic.
Ava’s name lights up the screen.
My breath stops. Completely.
For a beat—one long, terrible beat—I just stare. Every nightmare I’ve spent years outrunning claws up my throat.
I swipe to answer, voice rough, already fraying.
“Ava?”
Static hisses. Her breathing—ragged, panicked.
A tremor shakes the air between us.