Chapter 13
chapter thirteen
Trenton
The truck bounces down the narrow mountain road, headlights cutting through the darkness. I glance in the side mirror, watching the cabin grow smaller behind us until it's just a pinprick of light in the vast darkness.
"Stop," I tell Matthew.
He pulls over at a switchback, the engine idling as I roll down my window. The cold air rushes in, making my eyes water. I stare back up the mountain where the cabin sits nestled among the trees.
Carter stands on the porch, his massive frame silhouetted against the cabin light.
Even from this distance, I can see him raise his hand in a gesture of reassurance.
Beside him, Morgan's father Isaac crosses his arms, his posture relaxed but alert.
Retired SEAL. The man has killed more enemies than I've had hot meals.
Kane stands at the edge of the porch, scanning the tree line with the practiced eye of someone who's done this a thousand times before.
They'll protect them. I know this. Isaac and Kane, between them, have enough combat experience to handle a small army. Carter might be younger, but his MMA background makes him deadly in close quarters. And Sydney, she's inside with Morgan's mom, another layer of protection.
But knowing all this doesn't make it easier to drive away.
Matthew's hand falls on my shoulder. "They're in good hands."
"I know." The words come out hoarse. "Doesn't mean I like leaving them."
I watch Carter move across the porch, his pacing methodical and thorough. He catches sight of our headlights and raises his hand again. Not waving goodbye. Waving us on. Telling us to go do what needs to be done.
I force myself to face forward. "Let's move."
Matthew puts the truck in gear and we continue down the mountain, each turn taking us farther from Morgan and Charlie. The pain of it sits in my chest like a physical weight.
"We find Harris," I say, more to myself than Matthew. "We end this. Then we go home."
"Home," Matthew echoes. The word sounds different when he says it. Not like a place. Like a person. Like Morgan. Like Charlie.
I think about Charlie asleep in that strange bed, her unicorn clutched to her chest. I think about Morgan watching us drive away, her face pale but determined. I think about the deer head on our porch. The note. The threat.
My hands curl into fists on my thighs.
"We'll make it right," Matthew says quietly. "For all of them."
For the women Harris killed. For the families he destroyed. And for Morgan and Charlie, who deserve a life without looking over their shoulders.
The road flattens out as we reach the valley. Matthew increases our speed, the truck eating up the miles between us and the Pinewood Motel. Somewhere out there, Harris is waiting. Planning. Thinking he's still in control.
He's about to learn what happens when you threaten the Devil Souls' family.
I pull out my phone and text Greyson: En route to Pinewood. Update?
His reply comes quickly: Room 12 still active. No sign of Harris. Team in position watching.
I show the message to Matthew, who nods once. "He'll come back eventually. Or he won't."
"He'll come back," I say with certainty. "Men like him always do. They can't help themselves."
I think about Morgan's face as we left. The way she stood tall despite her fear, putting on a brave face for Charlie. The woman has more courage than most men I've known.
"We find Harris," I repeat, my voice hardening. "We end this. Then we go home."
Matthew nods, his eyes fixed on the dark road ahead. "Home."
The word hangs between us as we drive through the night, leaving the safety of the mountains behind for the hunt that awaits us in the valley below.
The Pinewood Motel sits off Route 9 like something that forgot to die when the highway moved west. We park a quarter mile down the road and approach on foot, the gravel crunching quietly under our boots. The neon sign flickers "VACANCY" in sickly pink light, one letter completely dark.
"You see them?" I ask, scanning the tree line across the parking lot.
Matthew nods toward a dark SUV near the dumpster. "That's Greyson's. Zach and Mason are inside."
We slip around the back of the building, staying in shadow. Room 12 sits at the far end, its curtains drawn but a thin line of light visible in the middle. I press my ear to the door. Nothing. No TV, no movement.
"He's not in there," I whisper.
Matthew checks his phone. "Zach says no one's been in or out for the last two hours."
I try the handle. Locked. I glance at Matthew, who's already pulling a slim case from his jacket. He works the lock with practiced precision, the mechanism clicking open in under thirty seconds.
The room smells like stale cigarettes and industrial cleaner. A single duffel bag sits on the bed, zipped closed. The nightstand holds an empty beer bottle and a phone charger with no phone attached.
"He left the bag," Matthew notes, moving to check the bathroom. Empty.
I unzip the duffel. Clothes, a hunting knife, a map of the area with several locations circled in red, including our house. And our cabin.
"Shit." The word leaves my lips before I can stop it.
Matthew moves to my side, looking at the map. "He knows about the cabin."
"Knew," I correct, already pulling out my phone. "Before we even left."
I'm dialing Carter when Matthew's hand grips my arm. "Wait. If we call now, we'll spook Harris. He could be watching."
I force myself to think. Harris left this here on purpose. He wants us to find it. He wants us to react.
"We text instead," I decide. "No voice, no signal that anything's changed."
I type quickly: Harris knows cabin location. Map confirms. Maintain current protocol. No outward changes. Over.
Carter's reply comes in under ten seconds: Copy. Perimeter secure. No signs of approach. Over.
I stare at his words longer than I need to. No signs of approach. Not no threat. Not all clear. Carter's too careful of that. He knows the difference between absence of evidence and evidence of absence.
Matthew reads the exchange over my shoulder. His jaw tightens. I can feel him working through it the same way I am, the same way we've worked through a hundred situations in a hundred dark rooms quietly, methodically, without wasting breath on things that don't need to be said.
"So this is his game," he says finally. Low. Controlled. "He wanted us to leave."
"He wanted us to come here." I look down at the map still spread across the bed, the red circles, the cabin marked like a target. "He knew we'd find this. In fact, he left it for us to find."
The room feels different now. Not like a place Harris abandoned, but like a place Harris built. A stage. Every detail was placed deliberately. The empty beer bottle, the charger with no phone, the bag with just enough inside to tell us exactly what he wanted us to know.
He's not coming back to this room. He never planned to.
Matthew is already at the door, his hand on his weapon. "We need to go."
I take one more look at the map and note other locations circled in red besides our house.
I photograph it with my phone, zooming in enough so that the grid lines are legible, close enough that I can read the small handwritten notes in the margins.
Harris's handwriting is precise. Neat. The handwriting of someone who plans.
Then I follow Matthew out.
Outside, the parking lot is still and empty.
The neon sign throws its sick pink light across the asphalt.
I scan the perimeter automatically: the dumpster, the tree line, the dark gap between the motel office and the ice machine.
Nothing moves. But the back of my neck is doing the thing it does, the thing it's been doing since Kandahar, the thing that kept me alive through three deployments.
Someone has been here recently. Not Harris, but someone watching Harris. Or watching for us.
I don't say it out loud. I file it and I move.
We get back to the truck in under two minutes. Matthew has his tablet out before his door is fully closed, satellite imagery loading in pale blue squares across the screen. He zooms in on the terrain around the cabin, his finger tracing the topography.
"Three approaches," he says. "The road. The creek bed to the south." He pauses. "The ridge to the east."
I pull up the photo of the map on my phone and hold it next to his tablet. The third circled location, the one that isn't our house, isn't the state forest, sits northeast of the cabin, near the old quarry. A mile and a half of ridgeline between them.
"He knows that terrain," I say. It's not a question. The way those circles were drawn, they are not approximations, not guesses. It's from someone who'd walked that ground.
"He's been up there already." Matthew's voice is flat. "Scouting."
I think about the deer head on our porch.
The clean cut. The note. Your time is running out.
He wasn't just sending a message. He was buying himself time.
Time to move into position while we reacted, while we packed up and drove into the mountains and felt safe because we had guns and numbers and men with experience.
While we did exactly what he needed us to do.
My phone is already in my hand. I start composing a text to Carter, careful, indirect, nothing that changes the visible pattern of behavior at the cabin. If Harris is watching, any deviation tells him the game has shifted.
East ridge. Quarry approach. Eyes up.
I hit send and watch the screen. The truck is running now, Matthew already pulling out of the lot, no headlights until we're past the motel's sight line.
Three seconds. Five. Ten.
Carter's reply comes through: Understood.
Matthew glances at the screen, then back at the road. His hands are steady on the wheel. His face is the one he gets when we're past the planning stage and into the work where everything is narrowed down, and everything is stripped away except the next step and the step after that.
"How long to the ridge from the quarry?" he asks.
I'm already calculating. "Forty minutes on foot if he moves fast. Less if he knows the shortcuts."
"Does he know the shortcuts?"
I think about the map. The notes in the margins. The circled locations that weren't guesses.
"Yeah," I say. "He knows the shortcuts."
Matthew presses the accelerator down and the truck surges forward into the dark.