Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
The cabin was exactly what Alyssa would have expected from Mack. Spare. Functional. Military-neat in a way that went beyond habit into something that resembled control.
A kitchen with clean counters and a coffee maker that had definitely been put to use. A living area with a couch, a chair, and a fireplace someone had laid but not lit. No throw pillows. No artwork on the walls. No photographs anywhere.
Alyssa stood in the middle of it, dripping melted snow onto the hardwood floor, and did what she always did when she needed to understand something.
She studied her environment.
He’d always gravitated to slate blue, like a November sky right before snow. Now he and this interior were darker, heavier.
Everything in the cabin was chosen for purpose, nothing for comfort.
The furniture was good but impersonal, the kind of pieces you bought because you needed somewhere to sit, not because you wanted a home.
There were books on a shelf—military history, tactical manuals, one battered paperback with a broken spine she couldn’t read from this spot.
That one, at least, had been read for pleasure.
It was the portrait of a man who had stopped letting himself want things.
She knew whose fault that was.
You’re fine, Bennett, she told herself. You’re alive, you’re semi-warm, and the guilt spiral is not helpful right now. Save it for when you’re not dripping on the man’s floor.
Mack moved through the space behind her like she wasn’t there. She tracked him in her peripheral vision the same way she used to track him across crowded rooms. He checked the window locks, tested the deadbolt on the front door, and pulled out his phone, scanning something she couldn’t see.
His suit jacket was gone, tossed somewhere between the door and the kitchen, and his dress shirt was untucked, the sleeves rolled to the elbows. The scar on his left hand caught the lamplight.
She looked away.
On the kitchen counter, beside the coffee maker, sat two quarters. He’d emptied his pockets when he came in. She recognized them—the worn gleam of them, the way they sat slightly overlapping—familiar as a fingerprint.
She’d given him those quarters. His grandfather’s, re-engraved with their initials and their first date, pressed into his palm before his first deployment as a Scout Sniper. Bring them home to me, she’d said.
He had. And then she’d sent him away a few years later.
She turned her back to the counter.
“Here.” Mack appeared at her elbow—she’d always been in awe of how quietly he moved for a man his size—and held out a folded stack of clothing. Dark gray sweatpants, a navy henley. “Bathroom’s down the hall. You can get out of the wet dress.”
“Thank you,” she said automatically.
Old Alyssa—she heard it in her voice, the reflexive compliance, the smooth social response. Take the clothes. Say thank you. Make yourself easy.
She took the clothes. But she didn’t move.
“You said Blake was working for them.” She kept her voice level. “I want to know what that means.”
Mack was already turning away. “Change first.”
“I’m asking you a question.”
“And I’ll answer it.” He crossed to the window again—she was starting to suspect he’d check it every five minutes until dawn—and looked out at the wall of white beyond the glass. “After you change. You’re soaking wet, and it’s sub-fifty degrees in here until the heat kicks in.”
“I’m fine.”
He turned and looked at her for the first time since they’d gotten out of the car—those dark blue eyes doing the thing she’d forgotten about, the thing where he assessed a situation so thoroughly you felt like a problem being solved.
“Your hands are shaking, Lyss.”
She looked down. They were. Had been since they’d fled the party. The small tremors were unmistakable now that she was standing still. She squeezed her bag tighter.
Fine. He had a point. “I want answers when I come back,” she said and walked down the hall to the bathroom before he could respond.
She locked the door and stood with her back against it for ten full seconds, breathing. Her bag slid to the floor next to her still-cold feet.
Okay, she told herself. Okay. Take stock.
She was alive. She was warm, or getting there.
She was in a cabin in the middle of a Montana blizzard with her ex-fiancé, being hunted by a drug cartel that apparently included her brother.
Her hands wouldn’t stop shaking, and there was a warning pressure building behind her right eye that she was refusing to acknowledge.
Completely fine. Totally manageable.
She peeled off the wet dress with fingers that fumbled on the zipper, changed into Mack’s clothes, and tried not to think about the fact that the shirt smelled like him—cedar and the same soap he’d always used. Some things, apparently, didn’t change.
She washed her hands and willed them to stop shaking. It helped, marginally. Then she opened her bag—miracle of miracles, she’d kept hold of it through the entire disaster—and found her pocket sketchbook and a charcoal pencil wedged beside her migraine meds and her phone.
She looked at the medication. Then at her phone.
Jenna first. She dialed. It rang four times and rolled to voicemail. Her best friend’s voice filled her ear, bright and warm and so achingly normal that Alyssa’s throat tightened without warning.
“Hey, it’s Jenna! Leave me something fun!”
“Jen.” She kept her voice quiet, steady—Mack would hear if she wasn’t careful, and she didn’t want him to hear this.
She didn’t want to explain it. “It’s me.
Something happened tonight—I’m okay, I’m safe, but I might not be home for a day or two.
Don’t worry. I’ll explain everything when I can.
Just...” She paused. “Lock the apartment door. Okay? Love you.”
She hung up and stared at herself in the mirror.
She looked terrible. Mascara was smudged under her eyes, her hair half-fallen from the updo she’d spent forty minutes constructing that afternoon. She was pale enough that the scar through her eyebrow faded against her skin.
Mack’s clothes swallowed her. She looked young and scared, and nothing like the independent, self-sufficient woman she’d been constructing, piece by piece, over the past few months.
Great job, Bennett. Very convincing.
She slid down to the floor with her back to the tub and opened the sketchbook.
She didn’t plan what she was going to draw. Her hand moved before her mind could direct it—it usually did in moments like this. Processing through the pencil and thinking through the image.
The room came first. The study. The table, the men arranged around it.
She drew in quick, economical strokes, the way she’d learned to sketch during courtroom sessions when speed mattered more than perfection.
The one man’s cold eyes. Another’s rigid posture.
They’d both been in fancy suits—the cartel leaders?
The huge guy with the neck tattoos standing against the wall who’d come after her. Then Blake.
Her pencil stopped.
Blake, in a navy suit, was seated at the right hand of the cartel leader with cold eyes.
As if he’d belonged there.
His face—the face she knew better than almost any face in the world—had worn an expression she’d never seen on him before. Not the golden-boy smile. A calculated, careful, and almost unrecognizable expression.
She’d been sketching people her whole life. She’d learned early that a face told the truth even when the person wearing it didn’t. She noticed the micro-expressions, the tells, the things people thought they were hiding.
She hadn’t let herself see them in Blake. Not for years.
The pencil remained still against the page. Her fingers started trembling again, and she closed the sketchbook.
The migraine was there when she came out of the bathroom—not full force yet, just a shimmer at the edge of her vision, a tightening behind her right eye that she recognized and did not welcome.
She ignored it with the focused determination of someone who had been ignoring inconvenient things her entire life and pressed her fingertips briefly to the scar above her eyebrow before she caught herself.
Blake had given it to her during a climbing incident. She dropped her hand.
Mack was on a satellite phone when she entered the kitchen.
He’d made coffee and the aroma was comforting.
He held up one finger without looking at her—wait—and she would have objected to being managed except that his voice was doing that low clipped thing that meant the conversation was serious.
The person on the other end had his full attention.
“Confirmed,” he said. “Civilian witness. No prior knowledge of the operation.” A pause.
He spoke with the efficiency he used with people he respected.
Not a subordinate—an equal, maybe. Or a friend.
“I understand that, but the roads are—” Another pause, longer.
“Tell them to stand down until morning. I’ll check in at zero-six-hundred. ”
He ended the call.
“Your employer?” she asked, setting her sketchbook on the table.
“Yes.”
“Did you tell them what happened?”
A nod. “The FBI wants to debrief you when the roads clear.” He poured a mug of coffee and slid it across the counter to her. Black. “There’ll be questions about what you saw.”
She wrapped her hands around the mug—the warmth was immediate and necessary—and noticed that his own cup sat on the counter, already going lukewarm, untouched.
Old Alyssa would have offered to microwave it for him. New Alyssa did not.
Small victory.
She sat at the table, and after a moment, he sat across from her. The silence between them was a cavern. It had weight and texture, awkwardness. The grief of a future that no longer existed.
She opened her sketchbook to a blank page to give her hands something to do. It wasn’t until the shape was half-finished that she realized what it was.