Page 18 of Sentinel of Talon Mountain (Men of Talon Mountain #3)

NATE

W e pull on clothes in tense silence, the warmth of the bedroom clinging to our skin while the chill seeps back into the room.

My shirt drags over skin where her mouth marked me, heat pressed into fabric like a secret I do not intend to forget.

Wren moves with deliberate stiffness, shoulders tight and jaw locked, as if she is strapping plates of armor over soft places one buckle at a time, sealing herself behind metal she forged in silence.

She shivers when she finds her jacket. I catch her wrists lightly before she turns away.

“You good?” I ask, quiet and steady.

She hesitates just long enough to make the answer ring false. “Fine. Just cold.” The words sound like hammered metal marching into place. For an instant her eyes give her away. There is a flicker of fear, maybe doubt, a flash that would vanish if I blinked. Then the mask returns.

I do not let go. I tug her a little closer, my knuckles slipping against the bare strip of skin between her waistband and sweater. Her breath stutters, quick and involuntary, before she jerks her jacket closed and seals the opening along with the moment.

We finish dressing without speaking. I refuse to let her drift.

Every step I keep close enough that the air between us stays charged.

She bends for her boots. I step in, my hand skimming her hip to remind her I am not giving ground.

She tips her head up, lips parting like she might argue, but I shake mine.

“No. You are not building false distance between us right now,” I tell her. My voice is low, controlled, the kind of tone that does not need volume to end a discussion.

Her jaw tightens. She nods once reluctantly, the kind of movement that costs pride. Her fingers twitch, then curl into her palms. With Wren, even a nod is a concession.

We layer up. Our shoulders brush as we move.

When we step outside, the cold hits like a clean blade.

Breath turns white in the dark between us.

Boots bite into crusted snow. The night presses close, thick with tree shadow and quiet that is not gentle.

We fall into the same stride without planning it and cross the clearing toward the shed.

The air tastes of iron and frost. The trees hem us in.

Snow crunches under our weight with that hollow sound that belongs only to deep winter.

Wren’s attention fixes on the door ahead.

The shed is an old toolshed with a poured slab floor and a door I reinforced last fall.

I check the padlock, then the hinge pins, then the window latch.

Everything holds. I pull the door open and a thin ribbon of warmer air slips past from the Toyo stove heater.

The man waits where we left him. He’s sitting on a milk crate with his wrists and ankles bolted to a pipe against the back wall.

The nylon ties on his wrists have cut reddened lines into his skin.

I gave him a blanket earlier to keep him above hypothermia, not for comfort, and the corners of it are already wet from melt tracked in on our boots.

His head lolls forward. When I grip his shoulder and shake him once, hard, a ragged groan reaches up from somewhere low in his chest.

“Sit up,” I say. My voice goes flat, the way it does when objective replaces anger. “You have one chance to make this easy.”

His eyes open slowly. Bloodshot. Mean because he wants me to believe he has something left to threaten me with.

Panic leaks through anyway, thin as water through a seam.

I have seen that look in villages and safe houses, in windowless rooms where a generator stutters and then catches again. The setting changes. The look does not.

Wren stays behind my right shoulder with her arms crossed and chin high. She is steady, and her gaze is surgical. I do not need to turn to feel it. She is slicing every movement down to motive. She has earned the right. This man and his friends wanted to do her harm.

I tap open the satphone and call Zeke. He answers on the first ring.

“Talk.”

“Got one breathing,” I say. “Need pickup. Quiet transport. Your people.”

“You got it. Thirty out, maybe less.” He does not waste time with questions. That is why he is my first call.

“Copy.” I kill the line and pocket the phone. I crouch until my eyes are level with the prisoner’s.

His eyes cut sideways. “Lady who posted the first money was legit. Wire came from an insurance payout, clean as a church check.”

I feel Wren clock that detail. Insurance means access, not just grief. “If you want to leave this mountain with a pulse, you keep talking.”

He licks cracked lips. His fingers flex microscopically against the nylon ties, testing. He finds no give. His chin lifts in something that wants to be bravado.

“You don’t know what you stepped into,” he rasps.

“Then explain it,” I say.

His gaze slides past me toward Wren. The left corner of his mouth tugs upward as if he has located the leverage in the room. The expression dies when I fist his collar and pull him forward until the crate creaks.

“Eyes on me,” I tell him. “If your thoughts touch her again, I will take that idea out of your head and tear away everything it is attached to until there is nothing left.”

I pat him down while Wren circles the shed. In the inside pocket of his jacket I find a burner phone wrapped in waxed paper, battery taped off. The home screen shows a single app with a balance in small white numbers. Escrow, not cash.

Wren returns with a hard case she pulled from a snow hollow. Inside is a suppressor with a half-filed serial. Not half enough. “Eight-seven-one-KC,” she reads, then looks at me. “Bulk order numbers tend to leave a trail.”

The phone pings once, a dead drop text that never loads:

Delivery window ends at first light.

The text thread includes a pin labeled Split Rock and a second pin marked Batch Two.

Whoever paid for this thought in deliveries, not in people.

That thought makes my stomach turn. The prior transfer is linked to a handle that is more corporate than personal.

Black Current Ops. The widow lit the fuse. A broker and a firm kept it burning.

Wren’s breath catches. She does not move away. I can feel her focus locked in, a heat at my back that holds me steady.

The man coughs. He wants it to pass for a laugh. It doesn’t.

“There is a bounty,” he says. “Not pocket change. First money came from a woman with insurance funds. After that, the job lived on a board that contractors use. A broker took a cut. A company called Black Current handled vetting.”

Nate’s jaw tightens. We both know what that means. The widow started the fire, but a black ops contractor carried the torch.

“If you take me off the board,” the man continued, “someone else will step up. They will not quit. The money is too good.”

The words drop like a stone into my gut, settling heavy and cold, sinking until the weight presses against my ribs like a warning.

This is not a random scrape on the wrong road.

Not a spur of the moment gamble from men who get brave on whiskey.

It is deliberate. It is funded. Someone with reach wants her gone.

“Who posted it?” I ask. “Where?”

He bares his teeth in something that wants to be a smile. “You think they hand us a return address. We are contractors. You know how that works. There are places you go if you want to buy a job. You pay to see the details. You get a window. You take the shot.”

“Channels,” I say. “What channels.”

“Old ones. New ones,” he says. “Some that live in the dark where you pay in crypto and some that move in rooms you only enter if someone vouches for you. You know the type. All I know is it is not local. She is marked.”

I shove him back on the crate and straighten.

My hands want to finish it now, end the threat in front of me and worry about the rest later.

That urge is simple. It is also the one that gets people killed when the real danger sits three moves away.

I breathe once through the center of my chest and let the urge pass.

I look at Wren. “You heard him.”

Her chin lifts. “I did. And I am not running.”

Her voice is even. The vow inside it is not small.

I catch the way her mouth goes tight after the words land, the way the muscles along her jaw draw inward then hold.

She crosses her arms harder. Not just bracing.

Fortifying. I know the look. People wear it when they speak louder than they feel.

Admiration sparks hot in my chest for how she stands there anyway, furious and afraid and refusing to bend.

“Not running,” I say. “But you are not staying alone out here either. Till this is over you stay in my cottage. I can keep eyes on you there.”

“Excuse me,” she says.

“You want to breathe tomorrow, you do it under my watch.”

She steps in until we are nose to chest. Her eyes are glacial blue in the dim light. “I have survived five years without a former SEAL barking orders in my life. I take care of myself.”

I smooth the steel into my tone. “This is not pride. It is survival. There is a contract and professionals lining up to collect. Solitude and traps do not hold against the kind of money that draws the wrong men across state lines.”

Her eyes sharpen. For a long beat neither of us gives an inch. She blows out a breath through her nose, then shakes her head.

“You do not get it,” she says. “Moving in with you is not only losing quiet. It is giving up control. That is not something I hand over.”

“Then do not call it control,” I say. “Call it strategy. Call it stacking the odds in our favor. Because I will not stand here and watch you bleed just to prove a point. If it is not me on your porch, it will be Caleb, and you already know that truth.”