The Blizzard Between Us (Gothic Tales #9)

CHAPTER 1

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Clara Vance came out of the data center through a service door that should have opened onto darkness and snow.

Instead, it opened onto headlights.

Three black SUVs sat crooked across the delivery lane, engines running, beams white against the storm. For half a second the world seemed too bright to be real. Snow lashed sideways through the light.

Exhaust crawled low over the ground. Beyond the chain-link fence, the mountain road vanished into a wall of moving white.

Her earpiece crackled once.

“Package status?” Greer asked.

Clara flattened herself against the concrete wall and held her breath.

The encrypted drive pressed cold and hard beneath the inner lining of her coat, where she had cut the seam open in the server room with a broken rack key and stitched it shut with wire from a discarded badge clip. It was ugly work.

It would hold.

The blood under her left ribs might not.

She looked down only once. The dark spread through her thermal shirt and into the waistband of her black field pants. The slice was lower than her lungs, higher than anything she wanted to test by running.

Every breath dragged against it.

“Clara,” Greer said, sharper now. “Do you have Vale's archive?”

That was what he had called it when he hired her. A stolen archive. Proof that Rian Vale, founder of Vale Dominion Security, had been blackmailing corporate clients and burying whistleblowers in private databases.

Clara had taken the contract because the source packet looked clean, the money was absurd, and the brief named three people who had vanished after filing internal complaints.

She had believed she was recovering evidence.

Then she had reached the locked partition in the server cage and found her own name embedded in the retrieval authorization.

Clara Vance: disposable courier. Asset termination upon transfer.

Greer had not meant for her to read that line. He had meant for her to steal the drive, walk out the service door, hand it over, and die before she understood who had written the script.

A man stepped out of the nearest SUV.

Clara killed her earpiece with her thumb and slid it into the snow at her boot. One crunch of plastic beneath her heel ended Greer's voice.

The man by the SUV lifted one hand to his ear. He was broad through the shoulders, face hidden by a hood and storm mask. Not local security.

Not police. His rifle stayed pointed at the ground, which meant he expected her to be useful for at least another minute.

“Ms. Vance,” he called. “Come out where we can see your hands.”

The polite voice chilled her more than the wind.

Clara's laptop bag banged against her hip as she eased backward along the wall.

The service alley ran toward a loading bay on the west side, then a drainage culvert beyond the fence if the map she had studied was accurate.

The facility had been built to survive blizzards, hackers, and angry shareholders.

It had not been built by people who expected a bleeding contractor to crawl through a half-frozen culvert with a stolen drive in her coat.

That gave her a chance.

She moved when the wind hit hard enough to blind the headlights. Boots slipped. Her side tore hot.

She pressed a fist to the wound and ran anyway, low and uneven, past a stack of iced pallets and a dumpster chained to a bollard. A shout went up behind her. A bullet snapped into the brick above her head.

So much for useful.

She threw herself around the loading bay. The laptop bag struck the corner of a steel stair rail. Something inside cracked, a small expensive sound that made her stomach twist. She kept moving.

The culvert grate was where it should have been, half buried under plowed snow. Clara dropped to one knee, teeth clamped against a sound she refused to make, and dug with both gloved hands. Ice packed under her nails.

Blood warmed her palm and cooled at once. Behind her, engines revved.

“South corner!” someone shouted.

Clara jammed the broken rack key into the latch and threw her weight against it. The grate gave with a shriek. She shoved the laptop bag through first, then crawled after it into black concrete and frozen runoff.

For twenty feet she was only breath, pain, and the scrape of her elbows. Water soaked through one sleeve. The world behind her became boots and lights fractured by the grate.

She dragged herself forward, boot toes slipping against algae-slick concrete, until the culvert dipped beneath the fence and opened to the drainage slope beyond.

She slid out on her stomach into snow.

The mountain tried to erase her immediately.

Wind slammed loose hair across her face. The data center lights disappeared behind the ridge line, then flashed again as the storm shifted. Clara got one boot under her, then the other.

The slope angled toward a maintenance pullout below the facility. Her rental waited there if no one had found it.

No one had found it because no sane person would have parked behind a salt shed in a storm warning.

She stumbled to the driver's door, shoved her frozen hand into her pocket, and nearly dropped the keys. Her fingers had gone clumsy. The fob chirped once.

She slid behind the wheel with a sound that was too close to a sob and threw the laptop bag onto the passenger floor.

Her phone had six percent battery and no service.

Of course.

The rental's dashboard lit up with warnings. Low temperature. Tire pressure.

Icy road. Clara laughed once, breathless and mean.

“Thank you,” she told it. “I had missed the obvious.”

The engine turned over on the third try. She backed out without lights until the salt shed hid her from the facility road. Then she turned downhill.

The map in her head had two routes. Main road east, which Greer's men would cover. Forest access north, narrow, bad, and possibly blocked, but it crossed a ridge before dropping toward a private lodge network owned by Vale Dominion.

The brief had marked it as Rian Vale's emergency retreat.

Do not approach the lodge under any circumstance, the contract had said.

Clara had taken that as tactical advice twelve hours ago.

Now it looked like proof built around a lie.

The access road climbed through timber that bent under the storm. Snow struck the windshield so hard the wipers smeared more than cleared. Her left hand gripped the wheel.

Her right stayed pressed to her side. Heat blasted from the vents, useless against the cold soaked into her bones.

Her phone buzzed against the console.

One bar appeared, then died.

A text from Greer loaded halfway.

TRANSFER POINT CHANGED. STOP VEHICLE. AWAIT RECOVERY.

Recovery. She almost missed the curve because her vision tunneled with anger.

She had built a career on recovering what other people buried: corrupted drives, locked phones, fraud trails hidden under layers of corporate language. She was good because she did not panic when systems failed. She looked for the rule underneath the damage.

Tonight the rule was simple. Greer needed the drive. Greer wanted her dead.

Rian Vale was the man she had been sent to rob, but the evidence on that server had named her as prey before Vale could possibly know she was coming.

Enemy did not mean simple. Ally did not mean safe.

Survival came first.

The tires slid.

Clara corrected too late. The rental fishtailed, kissed the snowbank, then slammed sideways with a crunch that punched the air from her lungs. The world spun white, black, white.

Metal shrieked. The seat belt caught her across the chest and drove pain through her ribs so violently her hands opened.

The car stopped nose-down in a ditch.

For a while, Clara could not make herself breathe.

The engine ticked. Wind battered the doors. Somewhere under the dashboard, a warning chimed with cheerful persistence.

She tasted copper.

Move.

Her body did not care for the instruction.

Move now.

She fumbled the seat belt loose and nearly passed out when it snapped away from her wound. The driver's door would not open. She climbed toward the passenger side, dragging the laptop bag by its strap.

The bag caught beneath the glove compartment. She yanked. Plastic cracked.

The laptop inside gave another wounded rattle.

“Sorry,” she whispered, because pain had made her sentimental about machines.

The passenger door opened six inches before snow stopped it. Clara shoved with her shoulder, then her boot. Cold swallowed her.

The road had disappeared. Her tire tracks were already softening under fresh fall. Behind her, no headlights yet, but that meant nothing.

The men from the data center had vehicles built for this. She had a dead phone, a broken laptop, and a body making bad calculations about blood loss.

She pulled the phone out anyway.

Two percent. No service.

She turned it off. If she found signal, she would need one chance, not a glowing rectangle dying in her hand.

The drive remained in her coat lining. She touched the seam through the outer fabric, felt the hard sliver beneath the blood-stiff insulation, and began walking.

The forest access road rose for what felt like miles. It was probably less than one. Clara counted steps until counting became dangerous, then counted breaths instead.

Every few minutes, she stopped behind a tree and listened for engines. The storm gave her nothing but the creak of ice-weighted branches and the scrape of her own breath.

Her boots sank. Her side burned. Then burned less, which was worse.

She needed shelter. Heat. A way to keep pressure on the wound.

A door that did not belong to Greer.

The lodge appeared as a shape first, black angles against a darker ridge. Then the storm thinned for three heartbeats, and she saw timber walls, a steep roof heavy with snow, and one square of amber light low on the far side.

Rian Vale's lodge.

Clara stopped in the road.

Her contract had painted him as a monster with polished shoes and private prisons. Her stolen files had painted Greer as the man holding the knife behind her back. Either way, the cold did not care.

The cold had no agenda except finishing what the ambush had started.

She took one step toward the light.

Then another.

Halfway across the buried drive, her knees hit the snow. She caught herself on one hand, breath scraping, vision pulsing dark at the edges. The lodge light blurred into two lights, then one again.

She got up because dying in Rian Vale's driveway would be an insultingly poor use of spite.

The front steps were slick under her gloves. She left one red smear on the rail. At the door, she lifted her fist and found she did not have the strength to knock hard enough.

So Clara Vance, who had broken into locked servers in three countries and made corporate liars sweat for a living, leaned her forehead against the door of the man she had been sent to ruin and let her weight fall into it.

The door held.

The light behind the glass moved.

The access road had no shoulder left.

Snow had filled the ditches and softened the tree line until every turn looked borrowed from the one before it.

Clara kept one gloved hand against the trunks whenever the wind shoved her sideways, using bark, rock, and the occasional buried reflector post to prove the road still existed under her boots.

The storm did not fall so much as attack from every direction at once, needling through the torn edge of her coat and packing itself into the collar where her breath had made damp places.

She stopped beside a leaning fir and listened.

No engines.

That should have helped. It did not. Absence was not safety.

Absence was a gap in data.

She pulled the dead phone from her pocket anyway, thumbed the power button, and watched the black screen stay black. Good. Bad.

A dead phone could not betray her position. A dead phone could not call Mara, either, and Clara wanted Mara's sharp voice in her ear with a sudden, childish force that made her angrier than the pain.

“Later,” she told the phone, and tucked it under the inner layer against her body to preserve whatever charge remained.

The laptop bag dragged at her right shoulder. Each step made something cracked inside it shift with a dry rattle. If the internal storage had survived the crash, it would need warmth, stable power, and time.

Three luxuries she did not have. The stolen drive in her coat lining needed something else: a witness who was not Greer, a chain of custody Greer could not write over, a place where cold and panic would not make her desperate enough to hand it to the first armed man who smiled.

Rian Vale's lodge had been marked in the brief as a hazard.

No direct approach. No contact. No entry.

She had read the warning twelve hours ago and heard professional caution. Now she heard Greer shaping her route away from the only person who might be able to prove the archive had been salted before she ever touched it.

Clara laughed under her breath. It came out ragged and vanished into the storm.

“Fine,” she said. “New rule.”

Rules were how she stayed alive when fear tried to take over. Do not go downhill toward Greer's transfer point. Do not use the main road.

Do not open the drive in the field. Do not let blood loss make decisions. Do not mistake enemy for ally, or ally for owner.

She pressed both palms against the wound until the heat of it throbbed through the bandage she had made from a cut strip of thermal shirt. The pressure brought the world back into sharper lines. Tree.

Road. Wind. Her own breath scraping shallow through her teeth.

Ahead, a utility pole leaned over the access cut, its line disappearing into white. Private power. Buried backup would have a marker farther up, maybe a service drive, maybe a plowed break if the lodge had storm staff or machines.

Vale Dominion would not build an emergency retreat without redundancies. Men like Rian Vale trusted systems more than mercy.

Systems she could read.

Mercy she would test later.

Clara pushed off the tree and followed the line upward. Ten steps. Twenty.

At thirty, her vision narrowed again, but the road underfoot changed from loose snow over gravel to packed drive beneath new fall. Someone maintained this stretch. Someone expected to survive weather that should have emptied the mountain.

She lifted her head, tasting smoke beneath the cold for one impossible second.

Clara tried to reach for the knife at her boot, missed, and slid down onto the snow-dusted threshold as the lock turned above her.