Chapter 8 The Upper Cabin
Liza POV
Three weeks into my new job, the weather turned ugly an hour before anyone expected it.
I was halfway through securing the upper mountain when the wind shifted north and the temperature dropped so fast my radio crackled with Kristen’s voice before I’d even registered the change. “All patrol, upper mountain closing. Get your people down. Storm’s ahead of the forecast.”
My time spent on West Valley’s slopes had taught me to trust Kristen’s calls.
I keyed my radio and told her I’d lock down the upper warming cabin and follow.
The cabin sat at the end of a service road where snow collected in ordinary weather, and someone needed to check the stove damper, secure the generator shed, and bring the avalanche kit inside before whatever was coming buried it all under fresh snow.
By the time I pulled the lodge truck up to the cabin, the sky had gone from gray to a heavy blue-black.
Wind hit the pines and sent clumps of snow dropping from the branches, and the service road behind me was filling in with each gust. I could still see the track marks from the last patrol truck under my own, but both sets were softening at the edges.
I worked fast. Brought the avalanche kit and the backup medical pack inside.
Checked the stove and damped it down so the fire would burn itself out after I left.
The cabin was small and functional: a broad plank table, a rug that had seen better decades, bunks along one wall, and a radio on the table next to a coil of rope and a weather chart someone had tacked to the wall with electrical tape.
The generator sat in a shed around the back.
I latched the shed door against the drifts and let the generator run so the radio stayed live, though I could hear it laboring under the cold.
I radioed Kristen. “Cabin’s secured. Road’s drifting. I’ll start down in five.”
Static. Then her voice, broken by interference. “Copy. Be advised, we’ve got reports of branches down on the lower service road. Plow’s en route but they’re dealing with the main access first. You might want to move.”
I looked out the window. The wind was driving snow sideways now, and I could hear something crack in the tree line, a branch giving way under the weight of the snow.
The service road was a narrow cut through dense timber, and if branches were already coming down on the lower section, driving it blind in a whiteout was a good way to end up pinned under a fallen pine with nobody knowing where I was.
“I’ll assess the road and advise,” I said. Patrol language for I’m going to look at it and decide whether I’d be an idiot to drive it.
I pulled on my outer shell and stepped onto the cabin’s small porch.
The wind shoved me back a step. Snow stung my face and I squinted into the white, trying to read the tree line.
A hundred yards down the service road, a spruce had dropped a limb the size of my leg across the track.
I could probably get past it, but it had come down since I drove up, and the trees above it were still bowing under new snow.
I went back inside, shut the door against the wind, and radioed Kristen again. “Upper service road is compromised. I’ve got debris and zero visibility. I’m staying put until the plow clears it or conditions improve.”
“Copy. You’ve got supplies?”
“Enough.”
“Sit tight. I’ll update Zeller.”
The radio went quiet. I stood in the middle of the warming cabin and listened to the gusts strike it as I told myself this was fine.
I’d spent worse nights on mountains. This cabin had a stove, bunks, water, and enough emergency rations to keep me alive for days if it came to that.
It wouldn’t. The plow would clear the road by morning, and I’d drive down in daylight like a reasonable person.
I had the stove opened back up and was feeding it a log when I heard an engine.
The sound was too close to be the plow. Headlights cut through the white, and a dark truck pushed up the service road through the drifts and stopped outside the cabin. The engine died. The door opened.
Dominic stepped out carrying a five-gallon fuel can in each hand, snow already collecting on his shoulders and in his dark hair. He saw the light in the cabin window and changed course toward the porch, setting each boot firmly despite the wind.
I opened the door. His scent hit me before the cold did, and my wolf rose to meet it. Ever since the bond had been confirmed, every time he got close, my body reacted like the first time.
“Generator fuel,” he said, setting the cans on the porch. Snow clung to his beard. “Zeller radioed that you were staying. The upper cabin’s been running low.”
“You drove up here in this?”
“Road was passable twenty minutes ago.” He looked past me into the trees, where another branch cracked and fell with a muffled thud. “It’s not passable now.”
I stepped aside and let him in.
Dominic checked the radio, confirmed with Kristen that the plow was prioritizing the main resort access and wouldn’t reach the upper service road until morning, then carried the fuel cans around to the shed and topped off the generator.
When he came back inside, he looked the place over and took stock.
“Stove’s good,” he said. “Generator’s full, but it’s working hard to keep the lights and radio going. There’s enough wood stacked outside to last the night.”
“I know. I checked.”
The corner of his mouth moved. “I know you did.”
We settled in. There was nothing else to do. Wind rattled the windows and slipped through every gap in the cabin’s joints. The stove’s heat reached only halfway across the room. I pulled two emergency blankets from the supply shelf and tossed one onto the table.
This was new territory. Weeks of careful distance, of shared glances across lodge tables and brief conversations where we both said less than we meant.
Shane had been a buffer without meaning to be.
His easy presence filled the silences that might have become dangerous.
But Shane was at the garage, and the plow wasn’t coming, and the cabin was very small.
Dominic sat in the chair by the stove and I took the bench across the table from him, and for a while we just listened to the storm.
“I thought it would feel different,” he said.
I looked at him. He was watching the stove, not me. The firelight moved across his face and caught the crooked angle of his broken nose.
“The bond,” he said. “I expected it to feel like certainty. Like the stories. You meet your mate and you know, and everything after that is simple.”
“And it’s not.”
“No.” He turned his head and met my eyes.
“It’s not simple because you’ve already been through this once, and the first Alpha the Goddess matched you with used the bond to make a public statement about what he wanted his Luna to look like.
I’m not going to be another man who decides what you are before you’ve had a chance to show him. ”
“Everett didn’t see me,” I said. “He assessed me. There’s a difference.”
Dominic’s jaw tightened at the name. He didn’t ask about Everett.
“I walked away from my cabin, my locker, six seasons of gear I’d bought with my own money. My truck. My place on patrol, with the insignia I’d earned.” I ticked off the losses on my fingers. “Every routine I’d built for myself since I was old enough to work.”
“That’s a lot.”
“It is. And I’d do it again tomorrow.”
He looked at me. I held his gaze and let him see that I meant it.
“How’d you break your nose?” I asked.
The question surprised him. He touched the bridge of it, a reflex, the way someone touches an old injury they usually forget. “Boundary dispute. Four years ago. A rogue came through the river corridor in January and I got between him and a family hiking the snowshoe trail.”
“Human family?”
“Two parents and a kid in a carrier backpack. They never knew what happened behind them.”
“You fought a rogue to protect humans who didn’t even know they were in danger.”
“That’s the job.”
I studied him. The broken nose, the dark beard, the heavy hands resting on his knees. He ran a pack, managed a resort, maintained a boundary, and carried enough weight to crush a smaller man, and he did all of it without ever once raising his voice to make sure people noticed.
“How does a man with that much on him have so little use for an audience?” I asked.
He thought about it. I liked that he thought about it instead of reaching for something easy.
“An audience needs managing,” he said. “I’d rather manage the mountain.”
The stove popped. Wind shoved against the north wall and snow hissed across the windows. Outside, the storm was doing its best to erase the service road entirely, and inside, the cabin felt like the only warm room left in the world.
“Shane says you were reckless when you were younger,” I said.
“Shane says a lot of things.”
“Were you?”
“I was twenty-two and I thought being Alpha meant being the first one into everything. Fights, storms, bad decisions. I broke two ribs, broke a snowmobile in half trying to jump a drainage ditch that was wider than I thought.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m thirty-two and I know the pack needs me standing, not recovering.”
I smiled. “So you got boring.”
“Careful.” His voice was low, and his eyes held mine with something that wasn’t boring at all. “I said I stopped being reckless. I didn’t say I stopped wanting things.”
The generator coughed.
We both heard the stutter in its hum beneath the storm noise. The lights flickered, held, and then the generator coughed again and died. The cabin went dark except for the orange glow of the stove.
“Shit,” I said.
Dominic was already on his feet. “Tank’s full, so the fuel line might have iced. I’ll check it.”
“I’ll hold the light.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Dominic. I’m a ski patroller. I’ve fixed generators in worse than this. Give me the headlamp and let’s go.”
He looked at me in the firelight, and whatever he saw made him nod.
The generator shed was ten feet from the cabin’s back wall, and in that ten feet the wind tried to knock us both off our feet.
Snow drove into my face and packed into the collar of my jacket.
Dominic got the shed door open and I squeezed in beside him, aiming the headlamp at the small engine while he crouched and ran his hands along the fuel line.
The shed was barely big enough for the generator and one person.
With two of us, we were pressed together from shoulder to hip.
His coat was wet and cold on the outside and radiating heat underneath, and his scent filled the tiny space until I couldn’t breathe without tasting it. The pull cinched around my ribs.
“There,” he said. His voice was rougher than usual. “Ice in the fuel filter. Hand me the wrench from the bracket.”
I found it and passed it to him. Our fingers touched. The mate bond kicked through my palm and up my arm, and his hand stilled on the wrench for a full second before he turned back to the generator.
I kept the light close while he cleared the filter and reconnected the fuel line.
He was careful with the wrench, precise despite the cold, and I watched his hands work the way I’d watched him drive, the way I’d watched him eat, the way I’d watched him stand in a doorway and fill it without trying.
His hands were large, the knuckles scarred, and his grip stayed sure on the small fittings.
“Keep the snow off the exhaust vent,” he said. I swept it clear with my glove while he primed the fuel line and pulled the starter cord. The generator caught on the third pull and settled into an even hum. The lights inside the cabin came back on, visible through the small shed window.
“Good,” he said, and stood, and we were face to face in the cramped shed with our breath clouding between us and the storm hammering the metal roof.
His eyes were dark and intent. The mate scent was so strong in the enclosed space that I could barely think. His pulse beat in the hollow of his throat. Mine pounded just as hard. The bond pressed hot beneath my skin, insistent enough to make speech difficult.
He didn’t move. His chest rose and fell.
I looked at his mouth. Then I looked at his eyes again and saw that he’d noticed.
“We should go back inside,” I said.
“Yeah.” His voice had dropped to something I felt in my sternum. “We should.”
We went back inside.
The cabin felt smaller now. The stove had done its work while we were gone, and the warmth hit us both as I shut the door against the wind. Snow was packed into my collar, melting against my neck, and my outer shell was soaked through from the trip to the shed.
I peeled off the wet jacket and hung it on the hook by the stove.
Unzipped my fleece and hung that too, because it was damp from collar to hem and I’d learned a long time ago that wet layers in a cold cabin were worse than fewer layers beside a hot stove.
That left me in my base layer, a fitted long-sleeved shirt that was dry against my skin and showed more of my body than anything Dominic had seen me in.
I turned around. He’d stopped by the table with his coat still on and hadn’t moved. His eyes tracked from my face to my shoulders to the way the fabric sat against my waist, and then back to my face. He didn’t hide it. He didn’t pretend he wasn’t looking.
His control showed in the set of his jaw, the tendons standing out in his neck, and the way his fingers curled once before he forced them open. Want darkened his eyes, but he held his ground.
I stood by the stove and let the heat soak into my back as I looked at the man the Moon Goddess had given me.
I thought of his scarred hands on the frozen fuel line, his silence, and the attention he gave me whenever I talked about the mountain.
His words came back to me: I didn’t say I stopped wanting things.
He’d driven up a closing mountain road in a whiteout because the cabin’s generator was running low and I was in it.
To Dominic, I was someone worth driving into a storm for.
The bond pulled taut between us, warm and demanding. The storm pressed against the walls. The stove crackled. The Goddess had matched us, but fate alone wasn’t enough. If I crossed the room, it would be because I chose to.
I wanted Dominic Salvi, and I was done being careful about it.