Chapter 14
Snow had worked its way down the back of Sarah’s collar.
She barely noticed.
Hudson was on top of her.
Every inch of him was controlled as he braced on his arms to keep his weight off her while still covering her.
His breath brushed warm against her cheek in the freezing air, too close to ignore, while his heartbeat thudded steadily through the layers between them.
Her brain cataloged every point of contact with the same ruthless precision it should have been applying to the ridge.
She wished it hadn’t.
His shoulder blocked her view, his head already turning past hers, searching for the threat.
For a fraction of a second, their eyes met. His smoky blue. Dark at the edges. She blinked, as if that might reset the distance.
“You okay?”
“Fine.” She shrugged against his body, firming her grip on her handgun, then twisted out from under him. She rolled and came up on her elbows, sightline clear, gun up. “He’s not shooting.”
Hudson’s eyes never left the tree line. “No.”
“He’s waiting for us to break cover.” She’d spent a career reading exactly this. “No third shot. He wants us to run somewhere he can see.”
“Or he’s already moving.” Hudson’s gaze swept the ridge once, twice. “Repositioning while we’re pinned down arguing about it.”
“We’re not arguing.”
“We’re about to.”
He wasn’t wrong. But an animal certainty had taken hold: the longer they stayed flat in the snow, the more ground whoever was up there gained. She started to push up onto her feet.
His hand closed around her sleeve. “Thirty seconds.”
“Why?”
“Trust me.”
“I hate it when men say that.”
“He’s watching for movement. Give him thirty seconds of nothing and he starts to wonder if he hit something he didn’t mean to.”
“I’m not lying here while he gets away.”
“I know.” Something showed in his face that wasn’t quite a smile, even now. “Give me thirty seconds. Then fight me.”
She held his eyes for one full breath, weighing it, and then she stayed down.
The wait stretched.
She counted his breathing without meaning to, the measured rise and fall of his chest a foot from her own.
Her body matched it because it was the only steady thing in a world tilted sideways.
She deliberately changed her count, putting an inch of distance between whatever that had been and whatever came next.
Her hands shook with adrenaline that had nowhere left to go now that the immediate danger had gone still. She pressed her palm flatter against the grip of her gun and willed the shaking to stop.
“Time,” he said.
His eyes swept the ridge one last time. The drifted snow below the crest. As if he expected the mountain to give something away.
Then he nodded. “Now.”
His hand fisted in the heavy fabric between her shoulder blades and hauled her into a crouch. By the time she found her footing, he’d already shifted himself between her and the ridge. His hand dropped away immediately.
The mouth of the avalanche gully was sixty yards away. They reached it in tandem, the terrain rising around them until the ridge disappeared from view.
Hudson never looked at her while they ran. His attention remained locked on the ridge above, scanning it with the same intensity as a tracker reading fresh snow.
Whatever he was looking for, she couldn’t see it.
Finally out of sight, Sarah’s legs burned, cold air dragging sharp into her lungs. They didn’t speak again until the gully bent north and the ridge disappeared entirely behind a shoulder of rock.
“We’re not running,” Sarah said, catching her breath against the stone. “We’re going up.”
Hudson looked at her. “You want to find where he was.”
“I want to know who he was.” She straightened, pointed with her chin at the higher ground, the long spine of rock that ran up toward where the muzzle flash had come from. “That’s the only position with a clean line to the cabin door. I’d put money on it.”
Hudson glanced toward the ridge, then back to her. “You already worked the angle.”
“Yeah.”
He gestured toward the climb. “Lead on.”
He fell in behind her without another word.
Sarah picked her way up the rock, using the scrub spruce for balance where the snow had iced over the stone. Behind her, Hudson drew measured breaths. There it was again. The careful breathing she’d noticed on the boat. Whatever it was, he was hiding it well, just not all the time.
The climb steepened for the last twenty yards. Sarah planted a gloved hand against the rock and pulled herself over the lip of the ridge.
Nothing.
Just wind, scattered saplings and snow stretched white across the shelf beyond.
“Wait.” His hand clamped her shoulder. He wasn’t looking at the ridge anymore. He was studying the snow.
“What’s wrong?”
He pointed to a stretch of snow a few feet ahead. At first, she saw nothing. Just wind-packed drifts and exposed rock.
Then it clicked. One section lay flatter than the rest. Compressed.
Hudson crouched without disturbing it. “He backed out over his own footprints.”
Sarah stepped around behind him, careful now, seeing what he’d seen. The disturbed snow ran in a long, narrow rectangle tucked behind the shelter of the rocks, protected from the worst of the wind.
Someone had lain here.
Hudson pointed to the uphill end. “Prone here.”
He slowly turned his head back toward where they’d come from, following the shooter’s view. Sarah lifted her head and followed the sightline.
He wasn’t just investigating the scene. He was standing inside someone else’s plan. The cabin sat below them across the frozen lake, insignificant against the white. From here the front door wasn’t just visible.
It was perfect.
“Snow’s compressed in two evenly spaced spots.” Sarah crouched beside the marks, her fingers hovering over them.
“Bipod.” Hudson’s eyes narrowed. “Legs set, weapon stable. He wasn’t improvising a rest off a rock. He brought the right gear and knew exactly how to use it.”
“And he arrived before we did.” Sarah studied the depth of the body impression, the faint crust where his warmth had melted the snow and allowed it to refreeze. “He was here for a while. This wasn’t someone who got lucky finding us. The position was prepared in advance.”
She rocked back on her heels and let the thought land. What the hell was going on here?
“He knew exactly where we’d stop.” Hudson’s eyes tracked down to the cabin below. “This was never chance.”
Cold cinched around Sarah’s ribs as she pushed to standing and scanned the ledge.
Casings.
She found them three feet to the right of the prone position, ejected clean and left without ceremony. She photographed them where they lay, then picked one up by the rim with her gloved fingers.
“Not what most hunters around here carry for moose,” she said. “And nobody lies up on a ridge watching a fishing cabin for deer.”
Hudson took it and held it up to the light as if he was fitting one piece of a larger picture into place. “Six-five Creedmoor.”
“Creedmoor?”
“Flat-shooting. Good ballistic performance at a distance. Popular with precision shooters.” He rotated it, examining the headstamp. “The casing alone doesn’t prove anything. The firing position, the bipod, and two rounds landing that close from this distance do.”
He handed it back to her. “This wasn’t some amateur throwing rounds near us to make noise. Whoever fired could have ended it and chose not to.”
A message, then. A warning delivered by a man patient and skilled enough to ensure either of them would be dead if that had been his intention.
Sarah looked back down the slope at the cabin, small and pale against the white.
The ride in. The search. Hudson making her laugh. The two of them walking out of the cabin together. All of it watched through a scope and then the shooter had opened fire.
Sarah closed her hand around the casing until the brass bit through her glove.
Whoever this was hadn’t just been watching Cord.
He’d been waiting for them.