Page 21 of Ghost of Talon Mountain
"You don't get it." He faces me again, and the pain in his eyes is raw. Unguarded. "The second I step back into the light, people I care about die. That's not theory. That's what happens when you fight an enemy that has people on the inside. They don't just kill you. They kill everyone you love first, make you watch, then kill you."
"They're already dying," I counter, quieter now. "Hiding doesn't stop that. It just means you're not there when it happens."
The words land. He flinches like I struck him. His hand tightens on the rifle, knuckles white in the dimness.
Chris stares at me, jaw tight, eyes haunted. The wind howls outside, rattling the windows.
He mutters, "Storm's coming. You can't stay here tonight."
I blink. "What?"
"That generator's not getting fixed until morning, and without the generator the wood stove’s fan won’t blow the heat properly. You’ll freeze in under two hours. You'll be hypothermic by midnight." He moves toward the door, pauses. "Pack what you need. Five minutes."
"Leave for where?"
He doesn't answer immediately. Just stands there, outlined against the door, and I realize what he's offering. What he's about to do.
"Your camp," I say slowly. "You're taking me to your camp."
The place he's kept hidden for nearly a year. The one place that's kept him alive and off the grid. And he's about to show it to me because I'm more dangerous frozen than alive.
I look at his face. No bluff. Just calculation.
"Five minutes," he repeats. "Or I leave you here and you take your chances with the cold."
I grab my pack and shove the laptop and as many supplies as I can put my hands on inside, followed by Nate's files. My fingers are numb on the straps, but the data's secure. Whatever I thought I knew about this assignment just changed. Chris isn't just protecting his secret anymore.
He's protecting me with it.
6
CHRIS
Taking her to my shelter is a mistake but leaving her here to die is a bigger one.
The wind tears at my jacket as I lead Sierra into the backcountry, away from the compromised cabin and whoever thought sabotage was a good way to send a message. Snow drives sideways, turning the world into a white wall that swallows the beam of my headlamp after three feet. I know these trails blind, but Sierra doesn't. Every few minutes I have to stop, turn back, make sure she's still upright and moving.
She's tough. Keeps pace better than I expected, doesn't whine about the cold or the distance. But I catch things she can't hide—the hitch in her breathing when the trail steepens, the way she favors her left leg after twenty minutes, the tremor in her hands when she grabs a tree trunk for balance. City conditioning meets mountain altitude, and physics doesn't care how determined you are. Still, she doesn't ask to stop. Grits her teeth and keeps moving.
That determination makes this whole damn thing harder.
Every instinct I've honed over the past year screams at me to turn around, to send her back, to vanish into the mountains like I should have done the moment I saw movement at that cabin.But the sabotage changes everything. Someone knows she's here. Someone's escalating. And if they're willing to cut a gas line on a night when temperatures will drop below zero, they're willing to do worse.
I can't walk away from that. Not again.
Forty minutes in, the trail narrows to a ledge barely two feet wide. Rock face on one side, a drop-off on the other that disappears into darkness and swirling snow. I've done this traverse a hundred times, know exactly where to place each foot, which handholds are solid and which will crumble under pressure.
"Stay close," I tell Sierra, raising my voice over the wind. "Don't look down. Just follow exactly where I step."
She nods, face pale in the reflected light. Smart enough not to waste breath on questions.
I move across first, testing each foothold even though I know them by heart. Conditions change in winter—ice forms in cracks, snow creates false surfaces, what was solid in August can kill you in December. Halfway across, I hear Sierra's breathing spike, the scrape of her boot finding purchase. Don't turn around. If she sees me watching, she'll know how bad this is.
She makes it across. Exhales hard when she reaches solid ground.
"Good," I say, because it is. Because most people would have frozen up on that ledge, and we've got a long way to go.
We push higher. The terrain gets rougher, the wind more vicious. My ribs ache with every breath, and old injuries I've learned to ignore flare back to life. Behind me, Sierra stumbles. If I turn around, if I see her struggling, some buried piece of me that still remembers being human might make me do something stupid like offer to carry her pack.
