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

NATE

T he sound hits first—metal on wood, a precise ping that cuts through the dark.

Not wind, not settling timber. Wrong. Lights off.

I move without thinking: two steps to kill the glow, three to the window, shoulder shielding glass while I peel the curtain with two fingers.

Snow sifts sideways in the wind. Nothing moves.

“Down,” I tell Wren, voice low. She slides off the chair and into the blind angle by the table, hands steady around the mug like heat alone can anchor her. Good. She listens when survival is on the line. That’s more than most.

I crack the door and sweep the beam low beneath a hood. Another ping, lower step. Brass. I crouch, gloved fingers closing over the casing. Still warm.

“A .300 Blackout,” I murmur, identifying it as I bring it inside. The metal ticking as it cools on the table. Subsonic. Suppressed. Someone stood on my steps and wanted me to know it.

Her eyes meet mine. Neither of us says lucky. The word feels too flimsy, too small for what just happened—like calling a bullet grazing past your head a coincidence. I don’t believe in luck or coincidence out here.

“Gear up,” I say. “We make a west circle under the lip and check your ridge. Keep to my shoulder. If I say down, you drop.”

She bristles, chin angled. “I don’t need a babysitter.”

“You don’t have one.” I hand her a rifle, dry jacket, spare radio, and light—no questions, no apologies. “You have a point man.”

A heartbeat of a stare-down. Then she shrugs into the jacket, clips the radio to her vest like she was always going to, and checks the rifle then swings it up behind her shoulder. Stubborn, but trained. I pocket the casing, sling my own rifle over my back, and we step into the cold.

The wind scrapes hard at the eaves, then softens as we drop below the porch and make our way to the lip of the bluff.

I keep us in the dead ground, where the angle from the high ridge can’t reach.

She reads terrain like she wrote the damn manual—weight on edges over blue ice, breath even, every line tight.

Attraction rides shotgun with irritation.

She’s a puzzle that resists being solved, even as she keeps handing you the missing pieces.

“Talk,” I say as we move. “Give me your route, every deviation.”

“Started on Coulee Cut. Crossed the Krummholz ribbon to avoid the cornice. Used the deer path to swing back toward the trail.”

“You left a sign.”

“False sign.” Her voice is clipped. “You saw the triangle.”

“Couldn’t miss it.” I scan through thermal; the world flares in whites and gray ghosts. “Smart placement.”

“Thanks,” she says, acknowledging the compliment. The problem is I don't mean it to be a compliment, it's just a fact.

We angle into thicker trees. The thermal shows a faint heat smear on a knee-high log where someone recently leaned—fades quick in this cold, but not gone yet.

Six hundred yards from my porch. Whoever stood here did it minutes ago.

I lift a palm and Wren halts without even the faintest crunch of snow, unnervingly quiet.

Sometimes I forget this mountain has been home to her for years.

Like her brother, Caleb, she has the ability to move like a wraith.

“Two shooters,” I say quietly. “One spotter, one trigger. See the double stack?”

She peers, eyes narrowed. “That’s not Danner tread. Lug’s wrong for backcountry—tight chevrons, too shallow for grip, too clean for locals.”

“Not Danner,” I agree. Hex pattern, tight chevrons—contractor boots I’ve seen in Anchorage when private money wanted law with a looser leash. Organized people wear those when they want to be quiet and warm. Stealthy people hire those wearing them when they don’t want to be seen at all.

“Poachers?” she asks.

“Poachers don’t bring subsonic to make a point.

They bring it to avoid game wardens.” I toe the edge of a shallow snow blind carved behind a deadfall.

Clean. No brass catcher—pros with discipline police their mess.

So why leave brass behind? Not a mistake.

A calling card. We were here—and we could be again.

We work upslope in silence: I scan, she watches our six, smooth handoffs without wasted motion.

My trust sits medium to low. Fieldcraft like hers looks solid until the muzzle flashes.

I’ve seen cool hands go clumsy when the math turns lethal.

Her temperament is a lightning strike; mine’s the ground it needs.

At the shoulder of the ridge, I flatten behind a granite knob and bring the scope up.

The old survey cairn sits hunched in snow like a broken tooth.

Her line’s solid—shallow bowl, perfect lane across our clearing.

Clean angle. Too clean. Across the basin, a darker smudge where wind packs snow into a lip. That’s the perch I’d pick.

“Movement?” she whispers.

“Heat ghost only,” I say. “Whoever was here is gone.”

She exhales through her nose. Not relief. Confirmation of a thought she already had: patient shooter, deliberate bracketing. Alive by inches isn’t the same thing as safe.

I scan the area again. On the far side of the bowl, someone cached a foam mat to keep body heat off the snow.

No mat now, just a rectangle of a softer surface where the snow hasn’t refrozen.

Two sets of knee prints. One left dominant, one right.

Team of two. I whisper the count and watch her jaw lock.

“You don’t get two-person teams for petty poaching,” she says.

“No,” I say. “You get them for money.”

The organ ring that bubbled up last year liked contractors who didn’t ask questions. It’s a long bow to draw from a casing and a boot lug, but the string’s there.

“What are you thinking?” she asks, quiet.

“I’m thinking someone with resources wants you rattled. They put rounds close, then stepped on my porch to make sure I knew they’d been close. They want us burning daylight looking the wrong way. One eye on the ridge, one hand off the trigger.”

“Or they wanted us outside,” she says, eyes on the dark line of trees. “Away from the cabin.”

She’s right. I check the time. Twelve minutes since the ping. If they wanted to pull us off the house, they’d set a second team to the rear. I key the radio on a whisper. “Channel check.”

She taps twice. Clear.

We cut west, hugging the lip. Another sign: a torn edge of duct tape snagged on alder, adhesive fresh.

I take it with forceps and bag it. Tape matches the residue pattern I saw on a trail cam last winter on the outfitter case.

The recognition flickers—Wren Knox’s incident report from the Denali avalanche four years ago is still in my head, crisp and spare.

She catalogs like a pro— weather, wind, weight, and what she doesn’t say is as loud as what she does. Same writer, different night.

“Talk to me about your routes,” I say, eyes still working the slope. “How predictable are you?”

“I rotate. I don’t post. I don’t repeat on back-to-back days.”

“Good. But someone’s been watching long enough to build a profile.”

She’s quiet a beat. “I thought about that. Didn’t like where it led.”

“Then we verify or kill the thought.” I raise a palm.

She stops. The thermal flares white on a low shape near the next tree.

I angle us in. A small cube of black plastic sits half-buried at the base of a spruce—cheap trail cam, dark lens iced.

I pop it with a gloved knuckle. Card slot’s empty. Whoever set it pulled the footage.

Wren kneels, studying the bark. “Mount strap’s new,” she says. “No weathering. Less than a week.”

“Less than three days,” I counter, scraping a fingernail across a nick in the cambium. “Sap hasn’t sealed.”

“That’s not random,” she says.

“No,” I agree. “It’s a net.”

Snow whispers through branches. The valley inhales.

I don’t like staying still this long where someone else picked the ground.

We backtrack in an S, washing our prints where we can, cutting our sign where we can’t.

Her line is smart: she plants feet where I’d tell a rookie to plant.

She doesn’t need a keeper. She needs someone willing to take the first hit if it comes.

Halfway back to the cottage, the radio thuds twice against my vest—short, soft. Not a transmission. Vibration. The perimeter sensor I buried two weeks ago when the poacher pattern got bold. I stop dead.

“What?” she whispers.

“Rear sensor,” I say. “Back door.”

Her eyes flash. Not fear. Fury. “They doubled us.”

“Or they’re forcing the choice,” I say. “Chase or defend.”

“Defend,” she says immediately.

“Agreed.” I pivot us down a side cut that funnels to the cottage’s lee. We stay low, using the woodpile for cover, then slide to the corner where the sightline opens onto the back steps. Thermal bloom on the step—white smear, compact shape. Not a foot. Something metallic. Left behind on purpose.

“Trip bell,” I mutter. A little brass disc sits on the step where a boot heel would land; a loop of fishing line runs to the railing.

First ping. When I broke the light, I took the bait.

They rang the bell to pull us out—gauge response time, movement, discipline.

They’re not just watching. They’re studying. Good. Let them watch us watch them.

Wren’s breath fogs by my shoulder. “You going to tell me not to move?”

“I’m going to tell you to keep your head down while I give them something to think about.” I set the rifle, dial back the magnification, and put a warning round into a dead stump above the western tree line. Wood splinters. Snow drops from a branch. The echo claws around the bowl.

“Subtle,” she murmurs.

“They came to my house,” I say. “Subtle’s off the table.”

We hold our breath and count off a full sixty seconds, every tick dragging like a stone in my gut. Still nothing—no rustle, no flash of movement. Whoever’s out there has discipline, the kind of patience that means they know exactly what they’re doing.

“Inside,” I say finally. “We lock it down, pull feed from every sensor, and build the next move.”

She doesn’t argue. That says more than any answer would. She’s scared, sure—but it’s the sharpened kind. The kind that survives.

In the entry, I dump snow from my boots and hit the control box tucked under the shelf. Porch cam. Drive. Rear. The screens pop in grainy green. Nothing live. I roll back the last thirty minutes.

There, a glint on the rear camera. Not a figure, but the edge of a glove.

Someone had reached in from beneath the step and rapped the sensor housing with what looked like the end of a carbon arrow shaft.

They weren’t trying to damage it. They were probing, measuring.

Testing how far the sensor reached, how fast it reacted, how sensitive it really was.

Not vandalism. Not curiosity. That was a probe, trained hands testing reflexes and range.

“Organized. Professional,” I say. The word tastes like rust.

Wren stands beside me, arms folded tight across her ribs, reading like I do. “They wanted to take our measure.”

“They did.” I pull the casing from my pocket and set it next to the screen. “And they told us what to call them when we meet them again.”

“Stupid?” she suggests, mouth curving without humor.

“Patient,” I counter. “Which is worse.”

She tips her head. “What’s the next move, Barrett?”

“Two tracks,” I say. “One quiet: countersurveillance, pattern-break, tighten your routes. One loud: we bleed their time and money until they make a mistake.”

“Loud,” she says. “I like loud.”

“I know.” I key a message to Zeke MacAllister, the sheriff of Glacier Hollow and a good friend. No names, no locations, just a code that’ll bring him to a neutral drop with the gear I want. I promised her no calls to town. Zeke doesn’t count as town. He counts as teeth.

She watches my hands, then my face. “You read my Denali reports, didn’t you?”

Recognition isn’t just a vague feeling—it’s instant, precise, like a lock snapping open the second the right key slides into place.

“Years ago,” I say. “You write clean.”

Her throat works. “Then you know I don’t scare easy.”

“I know you don’t quit easy.” I meet her eyes. “Scaring’s healthy. Quitting gets you dead.”

Outside, the wind gathers and releases, a restless breath against the eaves. The house answers with a weary creak, like old bones shifting in sleep. Then the pressure changes—a subtle drop that slides under my skin, humming wrong in the marrow.

“Down,” I say, already moving.

The faint tick of settling glass shivers through the room as a red dot slides across the far wall, slow and deliberate, before fixing itself on the map I left sprawled across the table. The beam holds steady, unwavering, pulsing with menace like a predator’s eye locked on prey.

Wren freezes beside me, breath gone quiet. “That’s not from the ridge,” she whispers.

“No,” I say, sliding my rifle up under the sill, eyes on the window’s black pane. “That’s from the tree line behind the shed.”

The red dot wavers, blinking once, then vanishes—too fast, too clean. Not retreat. Just breath held. We’re still being watched.