Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
Gabe
The sound cut through wind and snow like a blade—mechanical, rhythmic, too controlled to belong to nature.
Snowmobiles. More than one. The engines were still distant but growing louder, pushing through the storm with determined momentum.
My hand froze on the zipper of the duffel I’d been packing, every muscle locking into stillness the way Victor had spent years training my body to respond to danger.
For three full seconds I didn’t breathe, didn’t blink, didn’t move.
Just listened. The engines swelled by a fraction—close enough that instinct did the math my brain didn’t need to. They’d found us.
Mia hadn’t heard it yet. She was across the room folding the blanket we’d slept under, smoothing the edges like small order might hold back the chaos closing in on us.
She looked calm in that moment—hair messy from sleep, expression soft, movements unhurried—and the contrast between that softness and the violence heading straight for us hit me with unexpected force.
In another life, in a world where I’d been allowed to grow up human instead of forged into a weapon, I could have walked toward her instead of what I was about to walk into.
“Gabe?” Her voice shifted when she saw my posture. She wasn’t reacting to the sound she hadn’t heard yet. She was reacting to me—the absolute stillness, the readiness, the danger she’d learned to read the same way I read threats. “What is it?”
“They’re here.” The words didn’t carry emotion. They didn’t have room for any. I moved before she could respond—already flipping to the mode that had kept me alive for twenty years. “Five minutes at most.”
Fear flashed across her face but she didn’t freeze.
She set down the blanket and waited for direction.
I felt something twist in my chest at her steadiness.
Five days ago she’d been a student who had never held a weapon.
Yesterday she had killed a man to save my life.
Today she didn’t hesitate when I told her death was walking toward us.
I crossed to the far wall and grabbed the elk mount by the antler.
It came off with the bracket, revealing the weapons cache behind it: three pistols, extra magazines, a combat knife.
I grabbed two pistols and handed one to Mia.
Her grip trembled when she closed her hand around it. “You’ve never fired before.”
“No,” she said, but her voice was steady. “Tell me how.”
I positioned myself behind her, adjusting her stance and her grip, guiding her aim with movements that mirrored training I’d received for far worse tasks.
It shouldn’t have been this intimate, not after last night, not after what we’d shared on that cot while the world outside tried to disappear us under snow.
But survival didn’t care about emotional boundaries.
I forced myself to teach, not touch. “Both hands. Firm but not tense. Don’t yank.
Squeeze. Trigger pull is five pounds. You pull, it fires. No safety. You understand?”
“Yes.” She raised the weapon again. Her form was rough but determined.
The engines were louder now. Victor would be on the lead machine—he always took point on close-contact elimination work.
I moved to the window and scanned through a small gap in the shutters.
Nothing visible yet, but the storm hid everything until it was nearly on top of you.
I could feel them more than see them—predators closing in.
I dragged the table to the doorway and flipped it, bracing it into a shooting barricade.
Chairs followed. The packs went behind the cover; if we lasted long enough to run, we needed everything in reach.
“Get behind the table,” I told Mia. “Anyone except me comes through that door, you shoot center mass until they stop moving.”
She took position without argument, crouched low, weapon trained on the entrance. The sight of her there—cold, determined, prepared to kill—should have hardened me. Instead it carved something open. I didn’t have time to look at what that something was.
I loaded the Winchester and took position near the window.
The engines cut suddenly. Silence hit the cabin like pressure, broken only by wind and the sharp sound of my own breathing.
I could hear them moving in the snow outside—three, maybe four, spreading out to surround the cabin with practiced precision.
Victor had taught me that formation. Now I would face it from the wrong side of the equation.
“Gabe.” Mia didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t have to. “I need you to hear me.”
I looked across the cabin. She was framed by the dying fire, gun steady, eyes locked on mine with a clarity that felt like it hit bone. She wasn’t asking a question. She wasn’t doubting. She was giving me something she thought might be the last thing she ever said. “If we don’t—”
“We will.” I couldn’t let her finish. Couldn’t let her shape her last words around death. “You shoot straight, you stay down, and we make it.”
But she didn’t look away. “Even knowing everything, I’m glad you found me that night.”
It hit harder than it should have. Harder than a bullet.
There was no time to answer, no time to pull her up and tell her what that meant, no time for anything except violence.
I moved to the door, pressed my back against the wall, rifle raised.
Through the shutters I saw the first beam of a headlamp sweep across the snow.
Victor was close enough now that I could picture his face—expression neutral, focus absolute, already imagining the report he’d give when this was over.
The engines cut out completely. Footsteps crunched through snow. Four figures taking position. Victor would want to be first through the door. Would want to pull the trigger himself.
“Thirty seconds,” I said to Mia. “Remember your training.”
“I remember,” she answered, and her voice was steady.
The cabin creaked under the weight of snow on the roof. Wind pushed ice through the shutter seams. The fire gave one final crackle.
The first bullet shattered the window.
Glass exploded inward in a glittering storm that caught the firelight before scattering across the floor, and I dropped behind the overturned table without conscious thought, the movement pure muscle memory.
Heavy oak thudded under the impact of the first rounds, each hit punching through the wood inches from my skull.
The noise hammered through the cabin—gunfire layered in overlapping bursts, not the clean cinematic sound most people imagined, but an ugly rolling thunder that swallowed everything else and turned time into fragments of light, noise, and instinct.
Cold air tore in through the shattered windows, biting my face until my skin went numb, snow riding the wind and swirling into the cabin like something alive.
The temperature dropped so fast my breath fogged in front of me, dissolving in seconds.
I tracked the rhythm of the shots—automatic fire from outside, staggered but coordinated, patterns drilled into the men coming for us the same way Victor had drilled them into me.
They were suppressing first, probing entry points second, waiting for opportunity third.
Textbook assault, and we were on the wrong side of it.
I shifted position, rifle raised, and fired two controlled shots through the highest gap in the shutters where I’d seen the first muzzle flash.
The .308 kicked hard and someone screamed outside, a short brutal sound that cut off mid-breath.
Snow muffled bodies, always did. The silence that followed told me everything—one down, multiples left, no time to register anything except the next threat.
The door jolted in its frame under impact—battering ram or shoulder, didn’t matter which.
I pivoted, put three rounds through the center of the door at the height of a man rushing blind.
The pounding stopped instantly. I didn’t wait to look.
I rolled to the next point of cover before return fire tracked me, boots grinding over glass that now covered the floor like ice.
“Mia! Left window—twelve o’clock.” I didn’t take my eyes off the right side of the cabin as I shouted it.
I didn’t need to. I trusted she’d hear me, and she did.
She swung toward the broken window, weapon raised exactly the way I’d shown her, the Glock steady in both hands despite the tremor running through her shoulders.
Her shots came fast—three in a row, explosive in the confined space.
I saw the shape of a man jerk backward in the snow, half in and half out of the shattered frame, then vanish from view.
The noise of her breathing hit me next—shallow, sharp, shock bleeding into adrenaline.
She had killed someone. Her first kill was something I should have prepared her for, should have helped her process, but there was no space for anything except survival.
A shadow moved behind me—silent, wrong, too close.
I spun and caught sight of a hitman already inside the cabin, weapon raised, angle perfect to put a round through the back of my skull.
I saw the gun, saw his gloved finger tighten, saw nothing else that mattered.
Then three shots rang out—not mine. The impact staggered him backward, chest blooming red, weapon falling before his body hit the floor with a wet finality that always sounded the same no matter the location or season.