Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
SADIE
Day two in Wolfe's cabin, and I'm going stir crazy.
Not because of him. He's been surprisingly easy to share space with for a man who barely speaks.
He cooks, he cleans, he does mysterious mountain man tasks that involve a lot of staring out windows and checking equipment.
And he lets me ramble without once telling me to shut up, which puts him ahead of literally every boyfriend I've ever had.
No, I'm going stir crazy because I can't do anything.
My ankle is better but still tender. I can hobble around the cabin without too much pain, but anything more ambitious is out of the question. No hiking. No exploring. No filming content for the five hundred thousand followers who are probably wondering if I fell off a cliff.
Which, technically, I almost did.
"I need to do something." I announce this to Wolfe's back. He's at the counter, doing something with a knife and a piece of wood that I think might be whittling. "My brain is going to eat itself if I just sit here."
He doesn't turn around. "What do you want to do?"
"I don't know. Something useful. I feel like a lump."
"You're recovering from hypothermia."
"I recovered from hypothermia yesterday. Today I'm just bored."
He sets down the knife and turns to face me. Those gray eyes scan me like he's assessing a tactical situation.
"Can you stand?"
"Yes."
"For how long?"
"I don't know. A while? Why?"
He crosses to the fireplace and gestures at the stack of wood beside it. "This needs to be reorganized. Bigger logs on the bottom, kindling on top, arranged by size so I can grab what I need without looking."
I stare at the woodpile. "You want me to organize your wood?"
"You said you wanted something useful."
"I meant like... I don't know. Helping with lunch or folding laundry or something normal."
"Firewood is normal. It's also important. If the fire dies in the middle of the night and I have to waste time sorting through logs, we lose heat." He shrugs. "But if you'd rather just sit there."
He's challenging me. I can see it in the slight lift of his eyebrow, the almost imperceptible twitch at the corner of his mouth.
"Fine." I throw off the quilt and limp over to the woodpile. "I'll organize your firewood. But I'm doing it my way."
"There's a wrong way to stack wood?"
"There's a Sadie way to stack wood. It involves color coordination and aesthetic principles."
He makes that grunt-sound that I'm starting to realize is his version of a laugh. "I'll make lunch."
We work in parallel for the next hour. Me sorting logs by size and then rearranging them into what I consider a visually pleasing gradient, him doing something with canned goods and dried herbs that smells incredible.
The silence between us is comfortable. Easy.
I don't feel the need to fill it with chatter, which is weird because I always feel that need.
"Done." I step back to admire my handiwork. The woodpile now flows from large dark logs at the bottom to pale kindling at the top, with the medium pieces arranged in a neat diagonal pattern in the middle. "It's a work of art."
Wolfe appears beside me, two steaming bowls in his hands. He studies the woodpile for a long moment.
"It's... different."
"It's beautiful. Admit it. You've never seen such an attractive woodpile in your life."
"I've never thought about whether a woodpile was attractive."
"That's because you have no appreciation for aesthetics." I take one of the bowls from him. Some kind of stew, thick with vegetables and meat. "But that's okay. I have enough appreciation for both of us."
We settle on the couch to eat. The stew is incredible, rich and warming, and I make a sound that's probably inappropriate.
"God, this is good. Where did you learn to cook like this?"
"Taught myself. MREs get old after a few years."
"MREs?"
"Meals Ready to Eat. Military rations."
"Ah." I take another bite, savoring it. "Well, you definitely upgraded. This is restaurant quality."
He doesn't respond, but I catch a flicker of something in his expression. Pleasure, maybe. Or embarrassment. Hard to tell with him.
We eat in silence for a while. The fire crackles. Wind howls outside. I'm hyperaware of how close he is on the couch, his thigh almost touching mine, the heat of his body radiating through the space between us.
"Can I show you something?" I set down my empty bowl and reach for my phone. The battery is back to full thanks to his charger, even if there's no signal. "I want you to understand what I do. Since you're stuck with me and everything."
He nods, setting his own bowl aside.
I open my camera roll and start scrolling through my content. Hiking shots, sunrise timelapses, videos of me scaling rock faces and crossing rope bridges and standing on mountain peaks with my arms spread wide.
"This is what I do. Adventure content. I go places and document them and try to make other people feel like they could do it too.
" I pause on a video of me rappelling down a cliff face, grinning at the camera despite the obvious terror in my eyes.
"This was in Utah last year. I was so scared I almost threw up, but you can't tell in the final cut. "
Wolfe takes the phone from me, studying the video intently. "You did this alone?"
"Had a guide. But the filming was solo. I usually work alone."
"That seems dangerous."
"It can be. But it's also freeing, you know? Just me and the mountain and whatever I can capture with my camera." I lean closer to point at the screen. "Scroll right. There's more."
He scrolls. I watch his face as he takes in image after image of my life the places I've been, the things I've done, the person I present to the world. His expression doesn't change much, but his eyes are sharp, cataloging every detail.
Then he pauses on a photo I forgot was there.
Derek and me, six months ago. Before everything fell apart. We're at a winery in Napa, and he's got his arm around me, and I'm smiling at the camera with the kind of desperate happiness that I now recognize as denial.
"That's him." My voice comes out flatter than I intended. "Derek. My ex."
Wolfe studies the photo. "He looks..."
"Charming? Handsome? Like the kind of guy who'd never hurt anyone?"
"Like he's performing."
I blink. "What?"
"His smile. It doesn't reach his eyes. He's looking at the camera, not at you." Wolfe hands the phone back to me. "He wanted people to see him with you. Didn't actually want to be with you."
I stare at the photo with new eyes. He's right. Derek is angled toward the camera, his smile wide and practiced, his arm around me more like a display than an embrace. I'm leaning into him, but he's not leaning back.
How did I never notice that?
"You see a lot." My voice is quiet.
"It's what I was trained for." He's watching me now instead of the phone. "Reading people. Understanding motivations. Identifying threats."
"Is that what Derek is? A threat?"
The question comes out before I can stop it. I'm not even sure why I asked. Derek's a jerk, not a threat. He's probably too busy with his new fiancée to even think about me.
Wolfe is quiet for a long moment. "I don't know yet."
"What does that mean?"
"It means I don't have enough information." He takes the phone from me again, scrolling through my camera roll with a different kind of attention now. "Your comments. You mentioned something yesterday about feeling like someone was always watching. Did you take any screenshots."
"I did, they should be coming up soon, if you keep scrolling right. They probably meant nothing. It was just random ones that felt too specific. Like they knew things they shouldn't know."
He keeps scrolling, pausing occasionally to read. His jaw tightens.
"What?" I lean over to look. "What is it?"
"This account." He shows me the screen. "SunriseWatcher_23. They've commented on almost every post for the past three months. The language is possessive. 'Looking beautiful as always.' 'I see you've been busy.' 'You should be more careful hiking alone.'"
I feel cold despite the fire. "That's just a dedicated follower. I have lots of those."
"This one knows your locations before you post them." He scrolls to a comment from two weeks ago, on a photo I posted from a trailhead in Arizona. 'I knew you'd end up here eventually. Our spot.'
"That's creepy but it doesn't mean anything. People guess where I'm going based on patterns."
"Your patterns are random. You said so yourself. You chose this trip to Nevada on impulse after Derek's engagement." He locks the phone and sets it aside. "This person isn't guessing. They're tracking."
My heart is beating too fast. "You think it's Derek? Using a fake account?"
"I think it's possible. I think he didn't handle the breakup well, and the engagement seems designed to provoke a reaction from you, and forty-seven calls in one night is not the behavior of someone who's moved on."
"But he's engaged. He has a new girlfriend."
"Having a new girlfriend doesn't mean he's stopped obsessing over you."
I want to argue. Want to explain all the reasons this is ridiculous and paranoid and impossible. But the words won't come, because somewhere deep in my gut, I know he's right.
Something has felt off for months. The comments I brushed aside. The feeling of being watched. The way Derek's engagement announcement felt less like closure and more like a provocation.
"What do I do?" My voice sounds small.
"Nothing yet. I need more information before we do anything." He stands and crosses to the radio on the counter. "I'll have my team run a trace on the account. See if we can confirm who's behind it."
"And if it is Derek?"
He looks back at me, and the expression on his face makes my breath catch. Cold. Deadly. The kind of look that reminds me exactly what he used to do for a living.
"Then we deal with him."
He keys the mic and starts talking in a low voice, using words I don't fully understand. Tactical jargon, maybe. I pull the quilt around myself and stare into the fire, trying to process everything.
Derek might be stalking me. My controlling ex-boyfriend who called me forty-seven times in one night might have spent the last three months tracking my every move, hiding behind a fake account, watching and waiting for something.
And I'm snowed in on a mountain with a man who kills people for a living.
A week ago, this whole scenario would have terrified me. But when Wolfe finishes his radio call and turns back to me, I don't feel terrified. For the first time in months, maybe years, I feel completely safe.
"Mace is on it." Wolfe settles back onto the couch, closer than before. "He'll have answers by tomorrow."
"And until then?"
"Until then, we wait." He pauses. "And you tell me everything about Derek. Everything you remember, no matter how small. I need to understand who he is."
So I tell him.
The whole story this time, not just the highlights.
How Derek pursued me relentlessly when we first met, showing up at events where I was speaking, sending flowers to my apartment, sweeping me off my feet with grand romantic gestures.
How the possessiveness started small and escalated slowly.
How he isolated me from friends, criticized my work, made me feel like I needed him to survive.
Wolfe listens without interrupting. His eyes never leave my face. When I finally run out of words, throat raw from talking, he reaches over and takes my hand.
Just holds it. Doesn't say anything. Doesn't need to.
The fire crackles. The storm rages outside. And I sit in the warmth of his cabin, my hand in his, feeling like maybe I crashed into exactly the right place after all.