Page 27 of Mountain Storm
"You're going to write down everything you know. Names. Files. Drop sites. Then you're going to stay real quiet until I decide what happens next. Unless you think I should've slit your throat already. Keep in mind I didn't. That should tell you something. I want you awake. I want you to feel every second. I want you to understand exactly what line you crossed when they dragged her into this. Fear teaches better than death ever could, and I intend for both of you to learn before I decide how deep this lesson goes."
Weber opens his mouth. I slam the hilt of my knife against his jaw. He falls back, momentarily stunned with a dribble of blood leaking from his mouth. Brenner watches without moving.
"Still a good shot?" I ask.
He nods once.
"Still got your gear?"
"Outside."
I stare at him for a beat too long, weighing the risk. Letting him anywhere near weapons again should feel like returning venom to a serpent, but I want him squirming. I want him useful. And I want him knowing exactly who's pulling his strings now.
"One wrong move," I say, voice low. "And I'll finish what I should have in the Kush. You're going to help me find out who sent you and everything else I need to know. Or you'll never make it off this mountain."
Weber lunges, wild desperation in his eyes. I twist, drive the knife home, feel him crumple. I drag his body outside and let the snowdrift swallow it.
I bind Brenner's hands and drag him to the woodshed. The Toyo stove hums with heat—he won't freeze. I wrap Weber's body in tarps and pack it in snow. When spring comes, someone else can deal with the mess.
I step back into the storm. Cold slices through me, but my blood runs colder. They thought they could hunt me. They were wrong.
11
CARYN
The silence is worse than the storm. It settles over the cabin like wet wool, dense and clinging, muffling even the creak of the logs as they contract in the cold.
It presses in from every direction, thick and suffocating, a velvet vice squeezing the air from my lungs. The silence hums with tension, stretched taut across my skin, vibrating with something unseen and waiting just beyond reach. It crowds against my ears like water rising in a tank, every second stretched until it cuts thin and sharp, daring me to breathe.
Then it changes. The quiet fractures with a grunt, the heavy thud of something slamming into wood, reminders that whatever is happening on the other side of the door hasn’t ended. I press closer to the warped bathroom window, but the storm and darkness smear everything into shadows. The log walls drink in sound, turning the violence into muffled echoes that crawl under my skin. I can’t see it, but I feel it—like heat pressing against glass, insistent and inescapable.
Metal clicks, steel scraping wood. A weapon readied, discarded, or poised. The sound knifes through the silence, threading through the cabin like a warning. Or maybe it’s onlymy pulse, hammering too loud, too fast, reminding me I’m caught in the middle of something I shouldn’t want but can’t turn from.
Someone knocked. Zeb sent me here, then opened the door. Now there’s blood in the quiet. I can’t watch, but I can taste the inevitability of it.
My breath ghosts sharp and uneven. The cabin isn’t cold, yet I shiver, clutching the blanket like it’s armor. Not from fear. Not exactly. This is darker, heavier—the kind of dread that coils low in the belly, sharp enough to hurt, intoxicating enough to crave.
The quiet gnaws at me, a hollow pulse I can’t shake. The floor creaks beneath deliberate weight, each step unhurried, savoring the approach. Boot leather grinds against wood, dragging menace closer until it waits outside the bathroom door. The silence that follows isn’t empty—it swells, thick and weighted, swollen with promise.
The bolt across the door is solid, but safety is a lie. When Zeb moves, he does it with the inevitability of a storm, calm and unrelenting, a force that bends everything around him. The air tilts with his presence, every surface bending toward him. There’s the feral grace of a predator in his stride, and beneath it, the heat of something far more dangerous. Each step feels like a claim, each breath a reminder: I’m not safe from him, and I don’t want to be.
It reminds me of the low build of thunder before a strike: slow, deliberate, and saturated with threat. It feels like the space itself bends around him, as if even the walls shrink back. He doesn’t knock. Doesn’t ask. He steps forward with the certainty of a wolf taking ground, no pause, no apology, his presence swallowing the space as if it was always his.
“Caryn.”
My name lands low and quiet, almost intimate. It roots me in place. I can’t move. The door handle turns and I let it. Let him.
Zeb steps inside, blood spattered across his forearms and the collar of his shirt, and something inside me twists. Not just fear. Revulsion prickles along my skin, cold and sharp, but it tangles with fascination, too. With the way he moves, the way the blood doesn’t seem to weigh on him. My pulse skitters as I watch him, every instinct screaming danger while something deeper stirs in a place I refuse to name. The line between horror and hunger thins, blurring until I can't tell whether it's revulsion tightening my chest or heat pooling deep inside me. The violence still clings to him, but it's the control—the sheer command in the way he moves—that twists inside me, equal parts warning and lure.
What kind of woman watches a man covered in blood and aches to know how that same power would feel with his hands on her skin? Blood, dark and tacky, paints the skin in broken patches that glint dully under the low light, clinging to him like war paint applied by violence itself. His eyes are a different kind of storm, void of rage or heat, just a cold, unsettling calm that warns of something deeper. Something icy. Calculated. Leashed fury beneath still water.
I should ask if he’s hurt. I should be afraid. I should run.
Instead, I breathe, even though my chest feels like it might cave in under the weight of everything I've just seen and heard. I force the air in slowly, trying to ignore the bitter taste of confusion and the heat still smoldering inside me. How do I reconcile this hunger with the blood on his hands?
“You going to tell me what that was?” I ask, voice thin but steady. “Or do I get the silent treatment again?”
His mouth tightens. “Handled.”
