Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
VIVIAN
Day five in the wilderness, and I'm starting to understand why people become hermits.
There's something about the silence up here that gets under your skin.
Not the oppressive silence of an empty apartment or the artificial silence of noise-canceling headphones.
This is a living silence, filled with wind through pine needles and distant bird calls and the creak of trees settling into cold.
It's the kind of silence that makes you hear your own thoughts clearly for the first time in years.
I'm not sure I like what I'm hearing.
Deck has me on a brutal training schedule.
Up at six for a perimeter run. Breakfast. Firearms practice.
Lunch. Hand-to-hand drills. Dinner. Security briefings.
Sleep. Repeat. My body aches in places I didn't know could ache, and I've developed calluses on my palms from the Glock that would horrify my manicurist.
But I'm getting stronger. Faster. More confident in my ability to defend myself if everything goes wrong.
Today, Deck decided to switch things up.
"Tracking," he announces over breakfast. "You need to learn to read terrain."
"I'm a federal prosecutor, not a park ranger."
"You're a potential target in wilderness terrain. If you have to run, you need to know how to move without leaving a trail, and how to follow one if necessary."
So now I'm crouched in the underbrush behind the cabin, staring at a patch of dirt that apparently contains information I should be able to interpret.
"What do you see?" Deck is beside me, close enough that I can feel his body heat cutting through the morning chill.
"Dirt. Some leaves. A rock."
"Look again. What disturbed the leaves? What direction are the pine needles pointing? Is there moisture under that rock that suggests it was recently moved?"
I squint at the ground. After a moment, I start to see patterns.
"The leaves are pushed to the side. Something moved through here heading..." I trace the pattern with my finger. "That way. Toward the stream."
"Good. What kind of something?"
"How would I know that?"
"The depth of the impression. The spacing. The way the vegetation is broken." He points to a spot I missed entirely. "Deer. Probably a doe, based on the size of the track. Moving at a walk, not running."
"You got all that from some bent leaves?"
"I got all that from paying attention." He stands, offering me a hand up. "Everything leaves a trace. Animals. Humans. Weather. The key is learning to read the story the ground is telling you."
His hand is warm and rough around mine. He pulls me to my feet, and for a moment we're standing too close, my chest nearly brushing his, his green eyes looking down into mine.
I should step back. Create distance. Remember that he's my bodyguard and this is a professional relationship.
I stay exactly where I am.
"Where did you get that?" I hear myself ask. "The scar."
I'm looking at the thin line that disappears into his hairline above his left ear.
His expression shutters. "Kandahar."
"The ambush?"
"Shrapnel. Piece of a car door. Missed my eye by about an inch."
"You were lucky."
"Six people under my command died that night. Lucky isn't the word I'd use."
He releases my hand and steps back, the moment broken.
I want to kick myself for bringing up something painful, but I also can't help cataloging every piece of information he gives me.
It's who I am. I build cases from fragments, construct narratives from evidence.
Deck Cross is a case I'm actively working on, even if the only verdict I'm seeking is understanding.
"Show me more." I gesture at the forest around us. "What else should I be seeing?"
He leads me deeper into the trees, pointing out details I would have walked right past. Broken twigs. Disturbed soil. The subtle differences between natural patterns and human interference.
"Someone walked through here recently." He crouches beside a barely visible impression in a muddy patch. "Boot print. Size eleven or twelve. Heavy tread, probably tactical."
My blood runs cold. "Someone was here? Near the cabin?"
"Relax. It's mine. From yesterday's perimeter check." He glances up at me. "I'm testing you. Making sure you can tell the difference between a threat and normal activity."
"That's not funny."
"It's not supposed to be funny. It's supposed to make you vigilant." He rises, brushing dirt from his knees. "Fear is useful when it's directed. Panic gets you killed. Learn to tell the difference."
"I know the difference." The sharpness in my voice surprises us both. "I've been living with fear for six weeks. I know exactly how to channel it."
He studies me for a long moment, those green eyes seeing more than I want them to. "What happened? After the second attempt. You said you killed the man with a lamp. What else?"
I don't want to talk about it. I've given my statement to the marshals a dozen times, recited the facts until they lost all meaning. But Deck's quiet intensity pulls the words out anyway.
"I was staying at a safe house in Sacramento. Fourth-floor apartment, federal marshals on rotation downstairs. I couldn't sleep. I never can anymore. So I was in the kitchen making tea when I heard something at the front door. Carver was on rotation. He should have been watching the door."
I wrap my arms around myself, suddenly cold despite the morning sun filtering through the trees.
"I keep thinking about Carver's face when I told him I was turning in early.
He looked... relieved. But I brushed it off.
The marshals should have stopped him. Later, we found out one of them had been compromised.
Let the guy right past security in exchange for two hundred thousand dollars.
" I laugh, hollow. "That's what my life is worth, apparently. Two hundred thousand."
"Go on."
"I grabbed the first thing I could find.
This marble lamp from the entryway table.
Heavy, ugly thing. I hid behind the door to the bedroom and waited.
" My hands are shaking. I shove them into my pockets.
"He came through with a suppressed pistol.
Professional. Quiet. He cleared the rooms like he'd done it a hundred times.
When he got to the bedroom, I just... reacted. "
I can still feel the impact. The sickening crunch of marble against skull. The way his body crumpled.
"I hit him three times. The first one dropped him. The second and third were..." I swallow hard. "I wanted to make sure he stayed down."
"You did what you had to do."
"I killed a man, Deck. I've sent people to prison for exactly what I did."
"You defended yourself against someone who came to murder you. That's not the same thing, and you know it." He steps closer, and his voice softens. "You survived. That's what matters."
"I keep seeing his face. When I close my eyes. When I try to sleep." The confession comes out barely above a whisper. "Is that normal? To see them?"
"Yes." No hesitation. No platitudes. Just acknowledgment. "It gets easier to carry. Not lighter. Just easier to carry."
"Does it ever go away?"
"No." He holds my gaze. "But you learn to live with it. Make it part of who you are without letting it consume you."
We stand there in the forest, two people bound by violence we never asked for. Recognition. Understanding. The particular intimacy of shared trauma.
I want to touch him. Want to reach out and bridge the distance between us, feel the solid warmth of his body grounding me. The urge is so strong my fingers twitch at my sides.
"We should head back." His voice has gone rough. "You need lunch before afternoon training."
The moment fractures. He turns and starts walking toward the cabin, and I follow, my heart hammering for reasons that have nothing to do with fear.
That afternoon, he teaches me how to move silently through terrain.
It sounds simple. Walk without making noise. But there's an art to it that involves foot placement and weight distribution and breath control. After an hour of practice, my thighs are burning and I've managed to not snap a twig exactly four times.
"You're improving." Deck moves beside me like a ghost, his footsteps completely silent despite his size. It's both impressive and deeply annoying.
"I'm dying. There's a difference."
"Pain is information. It tells you you're pushing your limits." He stops at a fallen log and gestures for me to sit. "Rest. Hydrate."
I collapse onto the log with zero grace, grabbing the water bottle he hands me. We're in a small clearing about half a mile from the cabin, surrounded by towering pines that block most of the weak December sunlight.
"Can I ask you something?" I take a long drink, watching him over the rim of the bottle.
"You've been asking me things all day."
"Something personal."
His jaw tightens almost imperceptibly. "What?"
"Why Guardian Peak? After Kandahar, you could have done anything. Private security in some city, consulting, training. Why build something new out here in the middle of nowhere?"
He's quiet for a long moment, staring into the trees.
"After my discharge, I couldn't be around people.
The noise. The crowds. Everyone moving and talking and living like the world made sense.
" He shifts his weight, and I notice how his hand automatically goes to his side where I know he carries a concealed weapon.
"I drove until I couldn't drive anymore.
Ended up here. The mountains felt right.
Quiet. Defensible. Far from anything that could hurt me. "
"And the others? Your team?"
"Found them over the next few years. Mace tracked me down about eighteen months after I left.
Said he couldn't go back to normal life either.
Wolfe was next. Then the others, one by one.
" His voice warms slightly. "We built this company together.
Gave ourselves a mission when we didn't have one anymore. "
"Protecting people."