Page 40 of Snowed In with Three Mountain Men

But for the last day or so, since we’ve laid down these spikes, there’s been nothing. No sound or sign from anyone trying to get into or out of the forest. Which should be a good thing—silence, at least, means nobody is on the hunt for Charli. But I find it hard to believe that this man would give up so easily, especially after everything Charli has told us about him and his father…

Suddenly, something catches my attention. It takes me a second to register it, after so much quiet, but it’s an engine. A car engine. Heading up toward me—must be coming through from the nearest town, though I can’t imagine why anyone would bother with making their way down here unless they were looking for something specific.

Or someone.

I reach for the knife I’ve stashed in the holster at my side. No guns. Too loud. Can’t attract more attention than we need to. We have them locked up at the cabin, but the last thing I want is to pull firearms into it. We need whoever comes up here alive—need them for information, as much as we can get about the man they’re working for and everything he has planned for us.

Sure enough, the purr of the engine draws in closer and closer, until finally, the sunlight bounces off the hood of a car emerging over the hill. I pull back into the tree line, making certain they can’t see me. And then it hits me. This car, it’s the same one that drove by when we were moving Charli’s crashed vehicle a few weeks ago. Whoever this is, they’ve come back to follow up on what they saw…

But they’re not going to have much of a chance to get any closer. I grit my teeth in the second before they hit the spike trap, and an explosion of deafening pops bursts into the air as the tires break and split, the car skidding to the left and nearly sliding straight into a ditch by the side of the road.

“Shit!” A man’s voice cuts through the air, accompanied by the hissing of the tires losing pressure. He springs out of the vehicle and drops down to his haunches to inspect the damage, muttering more curses under his breath as he does so. Before he has a chance to lift his head and look around to see who caused this harm to his car, I’m on him, cutting silently through the trees and emerging out onto the road.

“What the fuck—” he exclaims, and he scrabbles at his side for a gun as he sees me approaching. I don’t give him a chance to pull it out, knocking it beneath the car with a kick before he can even get to his feet.

I might have spent most of my time in the SEALs in comms, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t have plenty of training of my own in how to handle conflict. I grab the man’s arm and twist it up his back, pinning him to the ground, but before I can plant my knee on his back to keep him there, he squirms loose and dives toward the car where I kicked his gun.

“Get the fuck away from me!” he yells, his hands scrabbling at the frigid tarmac as he tries to grab hold of the weapon. I pull my knife and drop down in front of him, grabbing him by the collar and yanking him toward me so he’s got no choice but to look me in the eye. Pressing the blade to his throat, I see the blood drain from his face as he realizes just how much trouble he’s in, his body going limp in my grasp.

“Give it up,” I order him. “You’re coming with me.”

“Who the fuck are you?” he asks, though his voice is weak—he knows he’s not going to walk away from this with a win, no matter how much he wants to. Does he have a tracker on him? Maybe. I reach into his pockets, keeping the knife pressed to his throat, and pull out a phone, tossing it to the ground beneath the car. I can come back and get it later, maybe dispose of it somewhere far away so they’ll go looking for it there—if they don’t already know what’s happened to him by then.

I flash him a grin.

“Oh, you’ll find out,” I tell him, and I reach into my pocket to pull out the walkie-talkie. “Dax, Callum? Come meet me at the west entrance. I have someone you’ll want to see.”

19

DAX

I shake out my fist,the cold, metallic scent of blood heavy in the air as the would-be attacker lolls in the chair he’s tied to.

“You okay?” Callum asks me, his voice low. I nod quickly. Last thing I want is for him to go worrying about me. I’m fine. This part, the part where I beat the shit out of this guy, I can handle. It’s everything else that I have a hard time with.

“You ready to talk yet?” Chuck demands, grabbing the man by the back of the head, yanking him upright by his hair and forcing him to look into his eyes. The man’s gaze is distant, as though he’s somewhere else entirely—or at least, he wants to be.

“I don’t have anything to say to you,” he spits back. “Where the fuck am I? Who are you?”

“You start talking to us, and we’ll start talking to you,” Chuck replies. “Who sent you up here? James?”

The man draws his gaze away from Chuck once more, but I can tell we’ve hit a sore spot. He might not want to admit it, but that fucker is the exact reason he’s up here in the mountains—locked up in our storage shed, with Charli at a safe distance inthe cabin, getting the shit kicked out of him until he hands over the information we need.

“You don’t need to protect him,” Callum presses him. “We know what kind of guy he is. Tell us what you know, and we’ll let you go. No hard feelings.”

The man spits out a mouthful of blood and lets out a sharp, mirthless laugh.

“You really expect me to believe that?” he demands. I flex my hand again at the sound of his sharp words. I don’t appreciate his attitude, especially not knowing that he came here to find Charli.

“I expect you to figure out what’s good for you, and fast,” Chuck snarls back. “James isn’t here to protect you. And even if he was—you really think he would give a damn about what happened to one of his lackeys?”

He shoves the man’s head down again, and he rocks on the chair, unable to steady himself as his hands are bound behind his back. Callum is pacing back and forth next to the door, and Chuck runs a hand through his hair, clearly not sure how to handle this.

But I know. Out of the three of us, I’m the one who saw the most action. I know how to get this information out of him. They’ve been too kind to him so far, and that’s the last thing you want for a motherfucker like this. You need to break them.

Or at least show that you’re prepared to destroy them, if that’s what it takes.

I stride toward him and grab the knife at my side. It’s a hunting blade, one that I usually only make use of when I’m skinning animals for food, but right now I’m ready to tear the skin fromhis bones if I have to. I press the sharp edge into his cheek, and he lets out a groan of pain—so exhausted from all the hurt he can barely keep himself upright.

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