4. Colt
Colt
She's finally started to settle in the chair, blankets pooled loose around her, but I watch her eyes cut to the door every time the wind finds a new way to complain against the logs, and I know that chair isn't going to give her what she needs tonight.
Hard wood. Every creak in this cabin telegraphed straight into a body that's already primed to expect the worst. She needs something that doesn't creak when a person shifts their weight.
I push up out of my seat. “Come on, darlin'. Bed'll treat you better than that chair will.”
She looks up, and there's still enough fear banked behind her eyes to put a small ache low in my chest, the kind I haven't felt in longer than I want to think about.
I don't give her room to argue — she doesn't look like she's got the energy for it anyway — just slide one arm under her knees and the other behind her back and lift her clear of the chair in one motion.
She makes a small sound, more surprise than protest, and her hand fists in my shirt on reflex before she catches herself and lets it go slack again.
She's lighter than she looks and heavier than nothing, all soft weight settling into the crook of my arm like it was built for exactly this.
I carry her across the cabin to the bed — pine frame, thick furs, built with my own hands one winter when I decided a man ought to have somewhere better than a cot to sleep through six months of snow.
Nobody's used it for anything but sleeping.
Until tonight, nobody's used it at all but me.
I lay her down slow, careful of the ribs, and she sinks into the bedding with an exhale that goes straight through me like it had somewhere specific to land. I draw the blankets up and tuck them firm along her sides.
“Rest,” I tell her. “I've got the door. I've got you. Nothing's getting through either one tonight.”
Her eyes are already losing the fight against sleep, lashes dropping heavy, but she nods like she believes me, or wants to.
I smooth the blanket at her shoulder, my knuckles catching bare skin where her sleeve's ridden up, and something in me settles into place the way a trap does when the jaws lock — quiet, certain, done deciding.
She's in my bed. That's not a small thing to a man who's slept alone in it on purpose for six years running.
I don't examine that thought too hard tonight. There's work to do first.
I pull my coat back on and step outside before I make the call, because a man doesn't report a situation secure until he's actually confirmed it is one.
The wind's picked up since I carried her in, driving snow sideways hard enough to sting any skin left uncovered.
I walk the perimeter the way I've walked it a thousand times, boots finding the packed line under the fresh powder without needing to look for it, eyes doing the real work — scanning tree line, scanning snowbank, scanning for anything that doesn't belong to weather or wildlife.
Halfway around, I find it.
A print. Half-filled already, edges softening under the new snow, but the tread's wrong for anything that walks on four legs, and it's wrong for mine too — bigger stride, a heavier boot than what I've got on, coming up from the direction of the road and stopping dead about forty yards out from the cabin before doubling back the way it came.
Somebody stood right here. Recent enough the storm hasn't buried it yet.
Recent enough it could've been an hour ago.
Could've been while I had my back turned, carrying her through the trees.
I crouch and study it longer than the cold has any patience for, running through what I know about tracking men instead of animals — the two skills aren't as far apart as most people assume.
Whoever left this wasn't in a hurry. Didn't come charging.
Came slow, careful, the way a person moves when they're not sure yet whether they want to be caught doing it.
Scouting. That's my best read. Somebody came up far enough to get a look at smoke rising from a chimney that isn't supposed to have anyone home in it this week, and then thought better of finishing the walk.
I don't like any version of that story.
I finish the loop anyway, calm on the outside because panic doesn't track anything worth tracking, and I don't find a second print anywhere close.
One man. One pass. Gone before the snow closed the door behind him.
Could be nothing — a hunter who got turned around, curious about the smoke, spooked by something and left. Could be exactly what it looks like.
I go back inside anyway with my jaw tighter than it was when I walked out.
Nora's asleep, or close enough to it that her breathing's gone slow and even under the blankets.
I keep my voice down and grab the satellite phone off the mantel, dialing Mason from memory.
He picks up on the second ring, background noise on his end suggesting he's nowhere near off the clock either.
“Colt. Miss us already? You're supposed to be a ghost this week.”
“Had an incident.” I keep it flat, professional, the way the job trained into me a long time before the mountain did.
“Woman crashed her car a quarter mile from my place.
Witnessed a murder right before she went off the road — two men, dark coats, armed, one victim down in the snow.
I pulled her out of the wreck. She's banged up.
Ribs, head, split lip. Wrapped what I could with what's on hand.”
Mason's whistle carries clean through the line.
“Course you did. Man can't even take a week off without a woman crashing into his life, and I mean that literally.” A beat, and then the humor drops out of his voice, replaced with the tone he uses when he's already working the problem. “She see faces? Plates? Anything?”
“Not much yet. She's still shaking too hard to get details straight.
I'll get more once she's steadier.” I glance at the bed, at the shape of her under the blankets, small and still.
“There's something else. Did a perimeter check before I called you. Found a print about forty yards out. One set. Came up from the road, stood a while, went back the way it came.”
The silence on his end lasts a beat longer than I like.
“You thinking they tracked her up the mountain already?”
“Don't know yet. Storm's covering most of it fast, so I can't read it much further than that.
Could be nothing. Could be somebody confirming which cabin the smoke's coming from.” I keep my voice level even though the thought sits in my gut like a stone.
“Run the storm reports. If it's socked in as bad as they're saying, nobody's driving up here tonight regardless of who wants to.
But I want eyes on this the second the roads clear.
And get Jax started quiet on any mafia types cycling through Timber Creek lately — vacationers, new faces, anybody who doesn't fit the town.
This doesn't smell like two guys who got into it over a poker debt.”
“Copy that.” I hear him moving, a chair scraping somewhere on his end, papers shifting. “I'll get it started tonight even with the storm. You sit tight up there and keep her breathing. That's the job till the roads open.”
“That's the job,” I agree, and mean it more ways than he knows yet.
“Stay sharp, Colt. Something about this already smells bigger than a body in the snow.” He pauses. “You good? You sound wound tighter than usual.”
I look at Nora again, the rise and fall of her breathing steady under the wool, that split lip already starting to darken at the edge. “I'm good. Just don't like finding boot prints forty yards from a woman who's already running from something with a gun.”
“Fair.” Another pause, shorter. “We'll figure out who she saw and what it's connected to. In the meantime, keep the door locked and the traps set. You know how, better than the rest of us put together.”
“Already ahead of you there.”
We wrap it with a few more lines about check-in times and what counts as an emergency versus what doesn't, and then I set the phone back on the mantel and stand there a second longer than the conversation requires, turning the print over in my head.
One set of boots. One long look at smoke that isn't supposed to be there. Gone before he committed to anything.
Could be nothing.
I've stayed alive this long by not betting on could-be-nothing.
I go back out and set more than I would on an ordinary night — the small ones along the threshold first, jaws light enough to snap on a boot without taking a foot off at the ankle, positioned where fresh snow will cover them clean inside the hour.
Then two more out past the tree line where that print sat, staked and hidden, tuned to rattle loud enough to wake me through a wall if anything bigger than a fox comes through that gap again.
My hands know this work without needing my head in it, which leaves my head free to run the same loop it's been running since I found that track: somebody stood here.
Somebody looked at my cabin and thought about it.
Whoever it was, they'll have to come back through weather that's actively trying to erase every trace of the mountain by morning. That buys me time. Doesn't buy me certainty.
I finish, stamping snow off my boots at the door, and bar it behind me with the iron I forged myself last summer, the kind of lock that doesn't care how determined a man on the other side of it happens to be.
Tomorrow I'll hike down and bury what's left of her car deeper in the drift, break up any tire marks the storm hasn't already swallowed. Make sure that dirt road looks like it hasn't seen a living soul in a week.
I pull the heavy chair up beside the bed and sit, elbows on my knees, watching her sleep in the low orange wash off the coals.
She doesn't know yet how much of tonight I'm keeping from her —not to lie, just to let her get one full night's rest before the world gets heavier again.
That's a mercy I can give her. It might be the only one, before this is finished.
It's been a long time since anyone slept under this roof besides me.
Six years, near enough, since I built this place specifically so nobody would have a reason to.
Easier that way, I told myself. Fewer people to worry about losing.
My father taught me that lesson without meaning to —how a mountain can take everything from a man and leave him standing anyway, hollowed out and calling it strength.
I spent a long time thinking that was the only kind of strong worth being.
I look at her now, curled small under furs I cut and cured myself, breathing easier than she has all night, and something in that old, careful arithmetic doesn't add up the same way it used to.
I'm still turning it over when I hear it — faint, almost lost under the wind, gone almost as soon as it registers. An engine. Far off, down toward the road, there and then not there, swallowed by distance or storm or both.
I go still, every sense I own tuned outward instead of in. Long seconds pass. Nothing follows it. No second sound, no headlights ghosting through the trees, nothing but wind driving snow against the window same as it's been doing for hours.
Could be a plow. Could be nothing.
I sit with my hand resting near the rifle propped against the wall anyway, and I don't take my eyes off the door again for a long while.
The mountain keeps most of its secrets. Tonight I intend to keep this one better than it keeps any of them.