7. Ryker #2
"Quarter mile east. Their trajectory didn't point this way. They were heading for the ridge, probably moving through to the back side of the mountain. Could be hunters. Could be Forest Service. Could be hikers who didn't get the weather memo."
"Could someone be looking for me?"
She says it flat. No drama. No tremor. A fact placed on the counter between us. She isn't asking me to tell her it's not true. She's testing whether I'll respect her enough to admit that it might be.
"Yeah," I say. "Could be that too."
She nods. The neutral expression holds, but underneath it I can see the work it's costing her. The muscles along her jaw tightening. Her hands flat on the counter, fingers spread. Bracing.
"What do we do?"
We. She said we. Not what do you do. Not what should I do. We. The word lands in the center of my chest.
"For now, nothing changes. The cabin's position is defensible.
Good sight lines from the windows, single approach from the south, and the storm is about to seal us back in.
When the weather breaks for real, I'll do a wider sweep.
In the meantime, I adjust the protocol. I check the perimeter twice a day instead of once.
I keep a weapon accessible at all times, which you should know about.
There's a rifle by the door and a sidearm in the holster on the coat hook.
If something happens and I'm not here, the sidearm is a SIG Sauer P320.
Magazine release is on the left side. You pull the slide back to chamber a round.
Safety is on the trigger. You squeeze, it fires. "
"You're teaching me to use a gun."
"I'm telling you where it is and how it works. What you do with that information is up to you."
She looks at me for a long moment. I hold the look because I owe her that. The direct, unedited version of who I am and what I think the situation requires. No softening. No managed information. Just the truth.
"Ryker." Her voice is quiet but it has a quality I haven't heard before. Something that sounds less like fear and more like resolve. "Thank you for telling me."
"You deserved to know."
"That's not why I'm thanking you." She picks up the book but doesn't open it.
Holds it against her chest with both arms. "I'm thanking you because you could have not told me.
You could have decided it was better for me not to know, and you probably could have made a good argument for it, and I would have believed you because believing you is easier than not believing you.
But you told me anyway. Because you think I can handle it. "
"I think you survived eight days alone in the mountains on berries and willpower. I think you can handle a pair of tracks in the snow."
Something shifts in her face. The neutral cracks. Not into fear but into something warmer. She looks at me like I am a specific person, not a function, and the specific person is someone she has decided to trust not because she has to but because she wants to.
I add a log to the fire. I check the locks on both doors. I lean the rifle against the wall beside my side of the couch instead of by the front door, where I can reach it without standing.
The satellite phone buzzes on the table. I pick it up and step onto the porch, pulling the door closed behind me. The cold wraps around me as I hold the phone to my ear.
"Got some things for you," Mason says. No greeting. "First, the weather. System's finally showing signs of movement. NOAA says forty-eight to seventy-two hours before the main body clears your elevation. You'll get a real window by day seven or eight."
"Good. What else?"
"We ran Zoe Parker through everything. Social Security, DMV, IRS, credit bureaus, law enforcement databases, medical records.
Here's what I've got. Zoe Marie Parker. Twenty-three.
Born in Cedar Falls, Idaho. Parents Michael and Diane Parker, both deceased.
Father died of a heart attack when she was nineteen.
Mother died eleven months later of complications from pneumonia.
Zoe was the only child. She inherited the house, sold it six months later, and moved to Timber Creek.
Got the job at the diner through a walk-in application about two years ago. "
"Emergency contacts?"
"That's the part I called about. There aren't any.
No emergency contacts on her employment file or her lease application.
No next of kin registered anywhere. We checked her phone records.
She made an average of four calls a week.
Three of them were to the diner. The fourth rotated between a dentist's office, a veterinary clinic she volunteered at on Saturdays, and a library's automated renewal line. "
He lets that settle.
"Nobody filed a missing persons report, Ryker. Not one. She vanished and not a single person noticed she was gone. Greta reported a no-show employee after four missed shifts, but it went into the system as voluntary abandonment of employment. Nobody investigated."
I grip the porch railing. The wood is icy under my palm.
No emergency contacts. No one to call. A woman so alone that she could be swallowed by a trafficking operation and the only ripple she left was a no-show report at a diner.
"The veterinary clinic," I say. "On Saturdays."
"Volunteer position. Every Saturday morning for about a year. The clinic manager said she was quiet, showed up on time, good with the animals. When she stopped coming, he assumed she'd moved. He didn't follow up."
"Wow," I breathe out.
"There's more. We ran Tyler through the Timber Creek angle.
No one by that name has a documented address or employment record in the area.
But Greta told the sheriff's deputy that Zoe had been seeing a man in the weeks before she disappeared.
Greta only saw him once, briefly, through the pass-through window. No last name."
"Time of day?"
"Late afternoon. Close to the end of Zoe's shift."
"Ryker. I need a straight answer. The tracks you reported. Two sets, heading north toward the ridge. Have you seen anything since?"
"Negative. Storm closed back in before I could do a follow-up sweep. No activity around the cabin perimeter. But I can't rule out movement on the far side of the ridge during whiteout conditions."
Mason sucks in a deep breath and lets it out slowly. "I'm moving the timeline up. Jax and Kane staged in Timber Creek as soon as the roads allow. When that storm breaks, I want boots on the ground within hours, not days. In the meantime, you watch those trees."
"I watch the trees every day, Mason."
"I know you do. Watch them harder."
The line goes dead. The storm has the signal again. I stand on the porch for a long minute.
I go back inside. The fire’s burned down to a deep orange glow. Zoe’s fallen asleep in the chair by the counter, the book open on her lap.
I sit in my chair. I pull the sketchbook from the drawer under the table and a pencil.
Instead of finishing the landscape I started last week, I turn to a new page and draw her hand.
The one resting on the quilt, fingers curled loosely, the knuckles still scraped from eight days of gripping and holding on.
I draw the shape of her fingers and the shadows between them and the way the firelight catches the ridges of her knuckles.
I draw the edge of the quilt where it meets her wrist and the sleeve of my flannel shirt hanging past her palm, too big for her.
It takes a while. When it's finished I look at what I've made. Just a hand. But it belongs to a woman who had no one, who was taken by a man who saw the aloneness and used it, who ran into the mountains because even death by exposure felt safer than one more locked door.
A woman who now, for whatever the word is worth, has someone.
I close the sketchbook. I put the pencil down. I feed the fire and check the locks and lean the rifle against the wall and stretch out on the couch with one boot on and my sidearm within reach.
The wind screams. Zoe sleeps. And somewhere in the dark, the sketch of her hand waits in the closed book like a secret I've told myself I’m not yet ready to say out loud.