Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Mia
Three days. That was how long I’d been trapped in this cabin with Gabriel, long enough for the pain in my wrists to become something I could map without looking.
The raw patches where the rope tore at my skin.
The deep bruises that shifted from purple to yellow.
The throbbing tenderness beneath the bandages he changed each night before tying me up again every morning.
He thought loosening the ropes at night was mercy.
Maybe it was, technically. But mercy from your captor was still captivity, and every time I heard the scrape of rope tightening at my wrists I hated him all over again, hated myself for depending on even the smallest consideration from the man who’d destroyed my life.
The storm had been savage when we arrived, but sometime between yesterday and today it became something else—relentless, predatory, intent on swallowing this cabin whole.
I’d woken to timbers groaning under the force of the wind, to snow sneaking in through cracks I hadn’t noticed before, to the kind of cold that ignored blankets and fire and burrowed straight into bone.
The shutters were nearly buried. The dim leakage of daylight through their seams had gone from gray to almost nonexistent, like the world outside had decided to erase us under layers of white.
Gabriel had been pacing since morning, sharp movements and irritation threaded through everything he did.
He checked the shutters again and again, adjusted the bolt, studied the walls with the intensity of someone listening for structural failure.
The storm unsettled him more than anything else I’d seen—it rattled his control, and that detail lodged itself in my mind like a filed weapon.
Anything that shook him was worth remembering.
He grabbed his jacket with short, clipped motions, shoving his arms into the sleeves like the fabric had personally offended him. “I need to check the perimeter,” he said, not looking at me. “Make sure nothing’s compromised.”
The words triggered a spark of panic I fought hard to hide. “In this weather?”
“Won’t take long.” His hand was already on the bolt. “Don’t do anything stupid while I’m gone.”
He stepped into the storm and slammed the door shut behind him.
The wind swallowed the sound instantly. The sudden absence of him left the cabin too quiet, too empty, the silence pressing close around me like the walls themselves had shifted.
The fire crackled softly, the clock ticked on the wall, and the storm battered every surface with a savage determination that refused to be ignored.
Maybe this was my one chance. Maybe my only one.
My eyes swept the cabin, cataloging everything the way I’d learned to do over the past three days.
The knives in the kitchen were out of reach.
The weapons cabinet was locked and the key stayed on Gabriel.
The fireplace poker was too far and too heavy to lift quietly.
But the broken mirror—yes. Two nights ago a shutter tore loose and knocked it from the wall.
Gabriel swept up most of the glass but missed some, and I’d watched one shard slide under a supply box.
The ropes at my wrists had just enough give now—barely an inch, maybe less. Enough to hurt, not enough to slip free. But maybe enough for this.
I braced my bound legs and pushed against the floor, inching the chair backward.
The scrape of wood dragged across wood sounded too loud in the suffocating quiet, and I froze, listening hard for footsteps returning through the storm.
Nothing. Just wind and the deep groans of the timbers fighting to hold.
I pushed again. And again. Every inch felt like a mile.
Every scrape of the chair legs sent fresh pain through my wrists, rope biting into damaged skin and drawing new blood that soaked into already filthy gauze.
My back ached from the strain, my shoulders trembled with effort, sweat trickled down my spine despite the cold.
Six feet. Four. Two.
The glass shard glinted faintly in the firelight under the box.
I leaned as far as the ropes allowed, extending my fingers until pain shivered up my arms. My fingertips brushed it once, twice, before they finally hooked around it and dragged it toward me.
The edge sliced immediately into my palm—sharp, brutal—but pain had stopped registering as something to avoid.
I twisted the shard until the sharpest point bit into the rope at my right wrist. The angle was wrong and the movement small, barely anything at all, but the glass sawed slowly through individual fibers.
Every breath felt like borrowed time. Every second Gabriel stayed outside felt impossible and fragile and precious.
I kept going. And going. And going. The ropes frayed, threads separating one by one until suddenly the angle shifted and I could pull my hand out.
Freedom hit hard enough to make me dizzy. My wrist throbbed violently beneath the blood-soaked bandage, but I forced my shaking fingers to transfer the glass to the freed hand and start on the other side. It went faster this time. More threads snapped, and then both hands were free.
I sat still for a moment, stunned by the absence of resistance, staring at wrists that felt too light, too exposed, too mine.
Then I bent forward, fighting vertigo, and cut through the ropes around my ankles.
The last rope parted and I stood on legs that refused to cooperate.
I grabbed for the chair, steadying myself while the room swayed and the blood rushed painfully back into my muscles.
The door was twenty feet away. Salvation or hypothermia—or both—in twenty feet.
I moved carefully around the weak floorboard Gabriel always avoided, my hand trailing over the table to steady myself.
The fire warmed my face, the blanket slipped from my shoulders, but I didn’t stop to retrieve it.
The closer I got to the door, the more certain I became that I wouldn’t survive in the storm.
But staying meant waiting for Gabriel to decide whether I lived or died.
If I was going to die, I wanted the decision to be mine.
My fingers curled around the handle. The metal felt like dry ice against the torn skin of my palm. I pulled.
The wind exploded inside the cabin, snow blasting against my face so hard it stung. Freezing air punched the breath out of my lungs. White swallowed everything—sky, ground, distance. There was no path. No direction. Just a violent, endless storm.
For one terrifying second I froze, instinct screaming that stepping outside was suicide, that I would collapse and disappear under the snow in minutes.
Then the image of my father’s body on the hardwood floor flashed behind my eyes.
My mother. My brother. The Christmas tree lights still glowing as their blood dried.
I stepped into the storm.
The wind slammed into me hard enough to knock me sideways.
Snow swirled so thick I couldn’t see my own hands.
The cold cut straight through skin and muscle like knives.
I braced myself against the doorway and pushed forward anyway, forcing my legs to move, forcing my body into a world determined to kill anything foolish enough to stand in it.
For the first time in days, I wasn’t tied down, wasn’t trapped in a cabin with the man who’d taken everything from me.
For the first time in days, I was making my own choice.
And if the storm swallowed me whole, at least I wouldn’t die in that chair.
At least I would die trying.
The cold hit me like something conscious and malicious, a predator with teeth and patience.
In the first breath it slipped through my clothes, in the second it found my skin, and by the third it was burrowing toward bone with ruthless focus.
I’d expected freezing temperatures—I’d seen Gabriel layer up every time he stepped outside—but expectation and reality weren’t the same.
This wasn’t discomfort. This was annihilation.
Snow slammed into my face hard enough to sting, the wind driving the flakes so fast they felt like needles against exposed skin.
I tried to look around and saw nothing but white.
Above, below, sideways—just a washed-out world with no horizon.
When I turned to find the cabin, it was already gone, swallowed by the storm as if I’d imagined it.
The blizzard didn’t just hide things. It erased them.
Standing still meant dying, so I moved. The snow swallowed my legs past the knees, each step a full-body effort that stole more strength than I could spare.
My jeans soaked through instantly, the wet fabric clinging to my skin like ice-water compresses.
The muscles in my calves and thighs clenched against the cold, spasming from overuse and shock, but I kept going because stopping wasn’t an option.
Forward was the only direction that didn’t include surrender.
A sudden gust knocked me sideways and I fell to my hands, the snow biting the cuts in my palms with burning sharpness before numbness took over completely.
I shoved myself upright again, oriented toward nothing, and walked.
I couldn’t see the sky to track the sun.
Couldn’t follow my footprints because the storm devoured them as fast as I made them.
I had no sense of distance. No sense of direction. Just movement for the sake of survival.
My hair froze against my cheeks, strands stiff and heavy with ice.
My lungs burned with every breath, the air so cold it felt like inhaling knives.
I pulled my collar up over my mouth and nose but it didn’t matter—the cold slipped through every gap in my clothes, found every weakness, and filled me from the inside out.