Page 1 of Sentinel of Talon Mountain (Men of Talon Mountain #3)

WREN

F ive Years Earlier

The snow swallowed my scream. It tore from my throat, raw and desperate, but the icy wind stole it away before it could carry.

The heavy hush of falling snow smothered it completely, as if the mountain refused to bear witness.

I’d trained for avalanches, studied flow patterns, practiced dig-outs until my arms went numb—but nothing prepares you for the moment the mountain decides who lives and who doesn’t.

I clawed through the whiteout, lungs burning, fingers numb inside soaked gloves. My heartbeat slammed in my ears, a metallic tang of fear on my tongue. Wind sliced like a blade across the narrow strip of exposed skin between my goggles and hood.

I couldn’t see more than a few feet, but I knew exactly where he’d gone under. One second, Mason had been tethered right behind me.

“You still with me?” he had shouted minutes earlier, his voice muffled by the storm.

The next, the mountain cracked open and swallowed him whole.

The rope between us snapped taut, then went slack with a sickening whip, the sudden emptiness hitting my chest like a hammer blow.

My knees threatened to buckle, nausea rolling through me as I fought to dig toward where the tether vanished.

“Mason!” I had yelled into the whiteout, my voice breaking.

For a second, I thought I heard him call back. Thought I saw his hand just beyond the drift. But it was only the wind playing tricks, and snow moving where it shouldn't.

The rescue took hours. Recovery took days.

What followed demanded something deeper.

Something that never appeared in the reports.

Guilt settled into my bones and refused to let go.

I carried it like a weighted shroud, tight, unyielding, and impossible to cast off.

Even in sleep, I felt the snap of the rope, heard the thunder of breaking snow, saw Mason vanish into a blur of white I could never reach in time.

The incident review cleared me. Unavoidable avalanche, they said. No error. No fault. Mason’s wife didn’t see it that way. The first message arrived a week later—seven words, cold as ice, each one cutting deeper than the last.

You were supposed to bring him home.

The words might as well have been a knife to the ribs—short, brutal, and impossible to ignore. I could almost hear the venom in her voice as if the message had been spoken aloud instead of typed on a screen.

The messages started cold. Then biting. Then personal.

Harassment, but subtle enough to avoid legal traction.

I could’ve fought back. Filed charges. More than once I typed a reply, hands trembling with fury—I did everything I could—only to delete it letter by letter until the screen was blank again.

I didn’t want a war. I wanted to disappear. Because no matter how many people said it wasn’t my fault, I knew better. I was the one holding the rope.

I didn’t tell my older brother Caleb. Didn’t tell anyone.

I resigned from Denali Search and Rescue, sold most of what I owned, and bought a remote cabin in Talon Mountain—sight unseen, five miles outside Glacier Hollow.

Each mile I drove away from civilization felt like peeling away a layer of skin I no longer needed.

No neighbors. No expectations. No noise.

The drive south from Denali felt endless, the horizon stretching wide and empty under a winter sky the color of steel. Snow-crusted pines flanked the narrow highway, their shadows slipping over my windshield in long, silent fingers.

With each passing mile marker, I left more of my old life behind: my team, my reputation, the constant reminders of failure.

The heater rattled against the cold, my duffel and a box of mismatched dishes sliding in the back seat.

I passed no one for hours, only the occasional raven lifting off the road as my tires pressed through fresh drifts.

When the mountain range that contained Talon Mountain finally rose on the horizon, jagged and unyielding, something in my chest loosened. Locals called it beautiful but merciless, a place that chewed up the careless and kept its secrets under ice.

Even its name carried weight in Alaska—spoken with reverence in survival circles, fear in backwoods bars. People whispered that it didn’t just test your limits; it found your weaknesses and exposed them to the wind.

Caleb’s voice echoed in my memory: ‘ That place will eat you alive, Wren.’ It wasn’t hope I felt. Not yet. But it was distance, and for now, that was enough.

The first time I stepped inside, the roof was leaking, the water heater groaned, and the whole place smelled like wet dust and pine rot. Caleb would’ve had opinions—none of them good. I was done explaining myself.

I dropped my pack on the dusty floor, leaned against the door, and let the silence wrap around me like armor.

The wood creaked softly in the cold, my breath fogged in the dim light, and for the first time in years, the silence felt like safety.

Silence didn’t argue, didn’t accuse. It didn’t ask me to explain myself. It just let me be.

It may not have been much, but it was home.

NATE

Anchorage, Alaska

Present Day

“I guess this is it,” I say, setting my badge on the captain’s desk. It lands with a soft clink that feels louder than it should.

He leans back in his chair, eyes narrowing as if weighing my resolve. “You sure about this, Barrett? Ten more years and you could retire from the city.”

“Not the ten I want to spend in Anchorage,” I tell him. I needed a place without ghosts in uniform. Without the echo of sirens or the faces I couldn’t save. “There’s a job waiting in Talon Mountain. Feels like the right time to take it.”

He gives me the standard handshake, the boilerplate thank-you-for-your-service, but there’s a flicker in his eyes—he knows I’m not just walking away from a job. I’m walking toward something else.

The paperwork is done in minutes, and then it’s just me, my truck, and the road. The coastal highway south is slick with salt spray, the ocean a restless, steel-gray expanse on my right.

One of the guys from the unit leans in the doorway as I’m leaving, grinning. “Bet you’ll miss the city lights.”

Bet I won’t. City lights never showed me anything worth staying for.

By the time I reach the outskirts of Glacier Hollow, the sun’s low, bleeding gold into the choppy waves.

My new place—a weathered stone cottage tucked against the trees—sits on a bluff where the gulls wheel and the surf crashes far below.

It’s small, but the porch faces the sea, and the air here tastes clean.

Inside, it’s bare bones: two chairs, a table, and an antique bed I had delivered still wrapped in plastic. I drop my duffel, stand in the middle of the room, and listen to the wind batter the eaves.

“This isn’t retirement,” I tell the empty space. “It’s a reset.” Reset or reckoning—either way, something’s waiting on that mountain. I can feel it.

Tomorrow, I start with the Wildlife Protection Division. Tonight, I let the sound of the ocean fill the empty spaces and tell myself I made the right call.

Her name drifts up before I can stop it—Wren Knox. Caleb’s little sister. Formerly with Denali SAR. Avalanche survivor.

We worked a joint op last winter, when an organ poaching ring reached into Glacier Hollow. She was one of the first to spot the pattern no one else wanted to see, one of the first to say it out loud. Cold, methodical, too calm for the amount of blood we saw.

I remember thinking she moved like the mountain itself—quiet until she wasn’t, steady until she struck.

Her reports regarding her last rescue on Denali had read like the map of a crime scene: clean, clinical, stripped down to the bone.

But it was the silence between the lines that stuck with me.

Like she’d buried something deep and didn’t want anyone digging it up.