Page 19 of Sentinel of Talon Mountain (Men of Talon Mountain #3)

Her lips part. No words come out. The fury is still there because it keeps her upright.

Under it I catch something raw that looks like the first thread of trust, thin and bright.

My pulse kicks hard then steadies. The room feels narrower than it did a minute ago, not because of the walls but because the decision has started to close.

A distant chop builds under the branches, blades beating air into a low rhythm that reaches the shed a second before the wind does.

Snow whips in a sideways curtain, driven hard as the helicopter drops toward the clearing beyond the back line of spruce, rotors turning the night into a frenzy of white.

I shift, one hand on Wren’s lower back, and we move to the door as I hear boots hit the ground outside.

Zeke appears first in the doorway with his hood up and his goggles pushed to his hairline.

Travis is a step behind him with zip cuffs looped through two fingers and a transport blanket over his shoulder.

The wash from the rotors pushes a thin drift across the threshold and flakes catch in Wren’s hair.

I curl my fingers slightly against her back to steady her against the wind.

She does not lean in. She does not step away.

“Well, hell,” Zeke says when his eyes land on the prisoner. “You really went and gift wrapped him.”

“He talked,” I say. “There is a bounty. Wide net.”

Travis moves to the man and starts work without a word, checking ties, checking circulation, checking for hidden flex blades or wire.

He knows where to look. The man tries to talk and Travis shuts him up with a small squeeze under the jaw that keeps the tongue still.

Zeke’s eyes go from me to Wren and back again.

“You kept Caleb out of the loop,” he says, tone neutral.

“For now,” I say. “Until we have a name and a plan.”

Zeke does not argue. He never has to be the loudest voice to be the one that carries. He gives me a single nod and claps my shoulder once. “We have him. Get back inside. Save your heat.”

We step aside as they haul the prisoner up between them.

He tries to drag his feet and earns a knee that buckles him and a curt order to move.

The rotor wash rises as they cross the clearing.

The helicopter lifts into the black, a rising hammer that shakes loose snow from the branches and then fades as the trees swallow the sound.

The quiet that follows is not peace. It is the kind that comes before something breaks. The kind that tightens the wire just enough.

We cross back to the cottage. The door shuts with a low groan that the falling snow eats.

I throw the bolt. The wall heater ticks as it cycles.

Wren stands near the table with her palms braced on the edge, head bowed, hair falling forward.

The cut on my forearm from the earlier fight has started to sting as feeling returns, a straight line of heat under the skin.

I set the med kit on the table, flip the latches, and work.

She does not tell me to leave it. I do not ask permission.

I clean and tape, check for swelling, check the tendon glide, then rewrap.

When I look up, she is watching my hands the way she watched my grip on the prisoner.

There is a tiny furrow between her brows that smooths when I flex my fingers to show her it holds.

“You are in my cottage,” I say, stating a simple fact. “Caleb will call in the morning. He will ask where you are. He will expect to speak to you. We are not going to hide you from your own people, but we are going to control what anyone outside this mountain knows.”

She lifts her head. “This is more complicated than it seems.”

“I think the person with the wallet is not worried about who they ruin on the way to getting what they want,” I say.

“That person has resources and enough patience to turn reach into pressure. The only way to beat that is to deny them clean lines. We deny them location. We deny them schedule. We deny them confidence. We force them to spend money to chase ghosts and then we catch the man who collects.”

“And then what,” she asks. The question is steady and not rhetorical.

“Then we pull on the line he is holding,” I say. “And we see what moves.”

She studies me for a long second. There is no softness in it. There is assessment and a cold kind of alignment that has nothing to do with romance and everything to do with staying alive.

“You are going to hate how close I keep you,” I tell her.

“Probably,” she says, the word a thin edge between defiance and reluctant agreement, spoken like she already knows what it will cost her.

Her mouth tips, not into a smile, because that would be wrong here.

Something smaller. A movement that acknowledges a reality neither of us likes. “But I am not stupid.”

“No,” I say. “You’re not.”

I make coffee because heat matters and because the act of boiling water slows my hands.

Steam curls against the windowpane that looks out over the dark clearing.

The forest looks back the way it always does out here, with the patient attention of something that has been here longer than I have and will stay after I am gone.

I watch the tree line the way I always do when there is trouble under it, measuring angles and sight lines, thinking about what can move where and how fast.

“Tell me what you saw in his eyes,” Wren says. “When he looked at me.”

I turn from the window. “He thought you were leverage. That is good news. If you were only a target to him, he would have kept his eyes dead. Men who run on contract learn where not to look.”

She absorbs that without flinching. “But if the contract is real.”

“It is real,” I say.

“What would you do if it were you,” she asks. “If you were me.”

“Exactly this,” I say. “I would move into a hard point with someone who knows how to build a perimeter and I would pick the ground for the next fight.”

She nods. The kettle clicks off and I pour the water. We drink without speaking for a minute, and my body uses the heat the way a cold engine uses fuel.

“You are shaking,” I say after a while. Not accusation. Not pity. Observation.

“I am angry,” she says.

“Both can be true,” I say.

She sets the mug down carefully. “I am not used to handing over control.”

“I know,” I say. “You do not have to hand it over. You only have to share it.”

“That is worse,” she mutters. But her tone has changed. Less serrated, more tired around the edges. She blows out a slow breath and looks past me to the window. “How long do you think we have.”

“Until sunrise,” I say. “If they don’t know we moved him, they may try again before daylight. If they do, they’ll wait and look for a pattern.”

“So no sleep,” she says.

“Not for me. You take the bed. I’ll keep watch.”

She pauses at the doorway and says, “There was a GoFundMe after Mason died. It raised more than anyone expected.” The words scratch my throat.

“His in-laws had money before that, old timber money from the Lower 48, and there was money from the life insurance. I guess I never thought about what money can do when the people who have it are hurt and angry.”

I kill the overhead light, leave the lamp on the lowest setting, and stand where I can see both the front door and the window without being seen from the outside.

I run through the list in my head. Motion sensor.

Back latch. Secondary lock at the mudroom.

Trip line across the woodpile. Angles to the shed.

Zeke will be back in Glacier Hollow in under an hour and the prisoner will be inside a box that even men with knives in their socks cannot open.

Good. Not enough. I draw in a slow breath and let it out, and when the edges of the room stop whispering I know I have set the shape of the night.

When I finally lower into the chair, the wood creaks and then remembers me.

The heater ticks. The wind carries a few grains of ice against the window and they whisper down the glass on the outside.

Somewhere beyond the line of spruce, a branch cracks and then drops snow.

I wait for the echo that means weight on the ground.

It does not come. The night settles to its work.

Behind the half-closed door, Wren turns over once.

The sound is small and it hits me harder than the rotor wash did.

I sit there with my hands loose and my brain hot and think about the milk crate in the shed and the way the prisoner’s eyes slid toward Wren like gravity.

I think about who paid him to point those eyes in our direction.

I think about what it costs to put that much money into motion and how much more it will cost to stop it.

It is a fight I understand. Money against distance. Patience against pride. Reach against terrain. The first move landed here, in our clearing, because they thought we were soft. They were wrong.

Wren’s door opens a few inches. She does not speak. Neither do I. She stands there for two breaths and then steps into the room and crosses to the other chair. She sits with her feet curled under her and her eyes on the window.

“I will not sleep either,” she says.

“I did not ask you to,” I say.

We sit like that until the lamp hum becomes a sound I do not hear, until the lines of the table and the stove and the window settle into their places and stay there.

Outside, the forest holds. The mountain waits.

Somewhere out there, a man with a phone looks at a number that means he could buy a car outright if he put a bullet in the right place.

He weighs his odds. He thinks about the cold.

He thinks about the dark. He thinks about the fact that the last man who tried to collect is on a helicopter with his wrists tied and a blanket he does not deserve.

Good. Let him think.

Because if there is a contract on her life, then what we have done so far is nothing but the opening move, and every move after this gets more expensive.

Let them come and spend it. Let them make noise and leave footprints and show me what they value when their plan starts to loosen around the edges.

If they step into my clearing again, they will find a different night than the one they left.

They will find me awake. They will find her behind me, not because she needs hiding, but because that is where the sight line is cleanest. They will find that the mountain is not a thing you cross.

It is a thing that decides whether to let you pass.

And if they push again, I will burn every inch of ground they stand on, every path they try to walk, before I ever let them take her from me.