Veteran of Hollow Peak (Hollow Peak Mountain Men #13)

Chapter 1

Sullivan

The cabin makes the same three sounds it’s made every morning for forty-one days.

The kettle hisses. The wood in the stove ticks as the heat finds it. A pine branch scrapes the back wall in the wind. I count them like a man checking the perimeter.

Three sounds.

Safe and predictable.

That’s how I know I’m alone.

I pour the coffee black into the blue mug Henry Sutton pressed into my hand the morning I left Havenstone. He didn’t say, “Be careful.” He didn’t say, “Come back.” He said, “If you want it, the program’s still there.”

Then he handed me the mug like a man passing a knife handle-first. The mug is the only thing in this cabin with my name on it.

The logs atop the woodpile lean to the left. The woodpile leans to the left. It wasn't like that last night.

I set the mug down and step outside. The cold bites through the floorboards and into the soles of my boots.

Second row, third log. It’s slipped forward enough to catch my eye.

I push it back, my palm flat against the rough grain.

The line straightens.

I linger for longer than necessary.

Then I go back inside.

I take the coffee to the front window and stand there the way I stand everywhere now, with my back to a wall and the door in my line of sight.

Old habit. The kind that survives discharge papers, forty-one mornings, and a long drive across two state lines.

The kind I learned the day my friend bled out at my feet.

Below me, the valley is the color of a bruise that hasn’t decided whether it’s healing.

San Juan Mountains. Hollow Peak, Colorado. A town you reach by switchbacks and white knuckles, three thousand people stitched into the granite like a town pretending it isn’t a secret.

I came up here for a man named Marlon Ennis. The trail crossed the county line three weeks before I did, and by the time I’d walked the lumberyard, the lodge, and the back booth of the Switchback Café for two cinnamon rolls’ worth of small talk, I knew it.

Cold trail.

Long gone.

Four nights ago, I called Henry from the truck and gave him the report in the way the Suttons have learned to take it from me—short sentences, no decorations.

Trail’s dead. Staying through the thaw.

Henry didn’t ask why. He just said, “Stay as long as you need.”

That’s the thing about the Suttons. They give a man rope without making him explain how much he plans to use.

The why was simple enough. Havenridge had four hundred acres and twenty good people on it, and not one of them deserved to be near me until I’d put the worst of it down for good. The cabin gave me quiet by the gallon. I planned to keep drinking it until something in me went still again.

The coffee is still too hot. I set the mug on the windowsill to let it cool when a flash of movement stirs at the edge of the trees.

Gray. Low. Watching.

It’s the same dog as yesterday. And the day before.

It doesn’t approach. Smart animal.

I break off a piece of bread and step onto the porch. The dog freezes. I toss the bread halfway between us—neither too close nor too far—and go back inside.

When I look outside again, the bread is gone.

The wind picks up. The pine branch scrapes the wall. Once. Twice. And on the third scrape, the cabin makes a fourth sound—a low, mechanical groan from the road below, working uphill in low gear.

I don’t move toward the front door. I move to the side window because the side window has the angle on the switchback, and forty-one mornings of boredom have turned this cabin into a position I read like a map.

A mid-sized box truck. The kind a person rents when they have just enough belongings to avoid hiring movers. White. Mud-flecked. No company logo. The driver appears as a small shape behind glass as the truck grinds its way up the access road.

My free hand finds the windowsill and stays there.

The cabin below mine has been empty since I got here.

Boarded windows. Sagging porch. A “PRIVATE PROPERTY” sign that the elements have been chewing on for a year.

I checked it twice on day one out of courtesy, found nothing inside but mouse shit and a torn-up phone book, and crossed it off the list.

The truck slows at the bend, finds the dirt drive, and turns in.

Apparently, someone has remembered they own it.

Lord.

I take a long pull of coffee and watch the truck park crooked in front of the place. The driver’s door opens. A small blonde woman drops down, lands in the snow, and makes a sound I can hear from up here that I’m pretty sure is a laugh.

A laugh. At the dilapidated cabin.

She tilts her head back and takes the place in: the rotted porch, the splintered front step, the boarded window, the chimney that lists west like a man who’s had too much whiskey. Gloved hands on her hips, she says something to the empty air I can’t hear but can read in the lines of her body.

It looks suspiciously like, “Well, hello.”

She’s wearing a coat the color of butter.

Soft. Bright. Wrong against all this white and quiet.

Wrong for a place like this. Wrong for a man like me.

I lower the coffee. The blue mug taps the windowsill.

The cabin makes its three sounds: the kettle, the stove, and the pine branch. I count them as I always do, but the count comes out wrong because she is the count now. Somewhere beneath my breastbone, something that shouldn’t be capable of going quiet has gone silent.

I don’t move. I am very still.

I stand at this window for a long time, watching her unload.

She’s not big. She’s not fast. She moves like she’s pacing herself for a long day, going in and out of the truck, hauling in a kitchen chair, a basket of yarn, a houseplant, and a thing that looks suspiciously like a stand mixer wrapped in a beach towel.

A stand mixer. At a cabin without water.

My eyes do what they always do. Hands. Vehicle. Exits. The list runs without my permission, the way it runs in airports and gas stations and any room with more than one door. The list keeps coming up empty. No threat. No threat. No threat. And still, I can’t stop looking.

Her boot skids on the ice.

The box in her arms tips, and she goes with it—knee, hip, a yelp that carries up the ridge clean and bright.

I take a step toward my door before I know I’ve taken it. Boot on the floorboard. Mug still in my hand. Coffee sloshing over the rim onto my knuckles. I don’t feel it until later, when I’m trying to remember how I got from the side window to within reach of my coat.

She’s already up. Brushing snow off her thighs and laughing at herself, the same laugh as before, only louder this time.

My hand comes off the door.

Dropping the chair on the porch, she dusts her hands on her thighs and looks up at the slope. Straight up the ridge. At my cabin.

She doesn’t know my windows are dark. She doesn’t know I’m three feet away from the glass with a mug in my hand and a heart that has stopped doing what it should.

She doesn’t know men like me don’t get neighbors.

We get distance. And silence. People we love get hurt if we forget that.

She lifts a gloved hand and waves.

I don’t wave back.

I step away from the window like a man stepping back from a tripwire.

“No,” I say to the empty cabin. To the kettle. To the coffee. To Henry, four hundred miles away at Havenridge Ranch. “No, no, no.”

The cabin makes its three sounds.

Then it makes a fourth: a soft, distant, unmistakable singing carried up the slope on the wind, the song of a woman who doesn’t know anybody is close enough to hear.

I can’t make out the song. It’s an old tune. Cheerful. The kind of tune a person hums while they sweep.

It slides under my skin like it’s looking for a place to stay.

I close my eyes and press my forehead against the cold pane.

Sure, I had a mission, but on a deeper level, I came up here because it’s quiet. Safe.

Being alone is the only way I know how to keep people safe.

The last time I forgot that, someone paid the price.

I don’t go toward soft things anymore.

I don’t go toward trouble.

And that woman, laughing at a broken cabin like it’s something worth loving, looks exactly like both.

And I tell myself the lie I know I’m going to lose.

I tell myself I will not go down there.