Chapter 7
She hadn't asked if I brought trouble. She had stated it.
She knew what was in the trench at Raven Creek. She had known for six years. Maybe she had known since the night David Vance’s truck was pushed into the river.
I looked down at the filed chain link sitting on the workbench.
Why file the link?
If she wanted to give me five seconds to run, she could have simply left the door unbolted and thrown me a set of keys. But Silas and his three gunmen were already inside her house. They were in her parlor, their coats open, their twelve-gauges loaded.
If she had handed me an escape route in front of them, Silas would have put a load of buckshot through her back before I cleared the front walk.
She had to make them believe she was the one who cast me out.
She had to make Silas believe she was cold enough, loyal enough to the clan blood, to drive her own adopted son into their sights. She had counted down to give me the jump, yes—but why the cut link?
I picked the piece of brass up again, holding it close to my eye in the gray dusk.
The cut wasn't on the outside curve where tension would snap it.
It was on the inside collar. The link had been filed so that it would hold the heavy oak door against a casual shove, but if someone threw their full weight against the frame from the *inside*—if someone tried to kick the door open to pursue a man running across the yard—the brass would bind, jam in the iron track, and shear off at the bevel.
It wasn't an escape tool for me.
It was a delay mechanism for them.
She hadn't slammed the door to keep me out.
She had slammed it to lock Silas Redfern *in*.
The realization hit me with the force of an avalanche, knocking the wind from my lungs more completely than the frozen drift had done.
The buckshot that chewed through the door awning—that hadn't been Caleb firing over my head to scare me.
Caleb had fired through the panel because the door wouldn't open. Faith had dropped the chain, the filed link had jammed into the iron casing, and the killers had been trapped in her foyer for the forty seconds I needed to reach the hemlock line.
She hadn't sacrificed me to save her house.
She had bought me forty seconds with her life.
And now Silas was sitting in her parlor, at her desk, with a lever-action Winchester across his knees, waiting for the snowmobiles to report that the orphan was dead in the creek.
A sharp, metallic pop snapped through the radio in my pocket.
I grabbed the handheld, thumbing the volume wheel down to a bare whisper as I pressed the plastic speaker directly against my ear.
The tactical frequency was still open.
*“Base to mobile one,”* Silas’s voice crackled through the speaker. He was breathing hard, his tone edged with an irritation he hadn't shown five minutes ago. *“Caleb. Report.”*
Static hissed for three long seconds before Caleb’s voice answered, ragged and wet from the cold.
*“We’re at the timber bridge, Silas. Road’s empty. No sign of him on the road grade. Lyle’s setting up the high-beams on the decking now. If he comes out of the hemlocks, we’ll see him two hundred yards off.”*
*“He didn't come to the bridge,”* Silas said.
*“He has to come to the bridge!”* Caleb shouted back. *“The gorge is thirty yards wide from here to the falls! He can't fly, Silas!”*
*“He’s not at the bridge,”* Silas repeated, his voice dropping into a register that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up like quills. *“The woman lied.”*
A muffled scrape sounded behind Silas’s voice—the distinct sound of a chair being kicked backward across hardwood flooring, followed by a woman's sharp, stifled gasp.
*“Silas, don't—”* Faith’s voice, faint, distant from the microphone, choked with dust or blood.
*“You gave him the surveyor run, Faith,”* Silas said into the open radio, his voice chillingly calm. *“I found the second transit ledger under your pantry floorboards. The pages for the old splash dam are torn out.”*
The sound of an iron lever cycling a cartridge home clicked through the receiver.
*“Caleb,”* Silas commanded. *“Leave Lyle at the bridge. You take the Bravo sled and cut up the old logging flume toward the gorge overlook. Get above the splash dam. If the boy is on that pine log, drop the whole span into the rocks.”*
*“What about the woman?”* Caleb asked.
A pause hung over the frequency—long, heavy, suffocating.
*“The council met on this ten years ago, Caleb,”* Silas said softly. *“Blood covers blood, until the blood turns sour. She’s had her ten years. Pack the snow around the sills. When you’re done at the gorge, we burn the homestead.”*
The transmission cut out with a sharp squelch.
The silence that followed was total.
I stood in the center of the dark shanty, the canvas haversack in my fist, the yellow legal paper crumpled against my chest.
The frostbite in my fingers didn't matter. The torn ligament in my knee didn't throb anymore. The cold was still there, but it was outside of me now—a dead, harmless thing compared to the white-hot wire of fury uncoiling in my gut.
She was still alive.
Five miles down the valley, locked in her own parlor with Silas Redfern’s rifle at her skull, waiting for the smoke to start curling through the floorboards.
I looked at the brass link in my palm.
*North forty links to the hemlock root.* *Five seconds on the iron.* *Four on the cedar post.* *Don’t look back where the water breaks.* *Three chains down to the limestone sill.* *Run till the lung ice cracks the throat.* *Cross where the dead pine points the spoke.*
I slipped the notebook into my haversack, hauled the strap over my shoulder, and reached for the heavy iron survey pin on the floor.
The timber bridge was four miles by road.
The splash dam was one mile along the ridge.
If I crossed the spoke before Caleb reached the overlook, I wouldn't be running for the state highway anymore.
I kicked the shanty door open, stepped out into the howling white belly of the storm, and turned back toward the Redfern house.
The storm did not merely blow across the high ridge; it had teeth, an appetite, and weight.
The wind hit me the second I cleared the leeward lip of the hemlock grove. It came tearing straight down the throat of Black Creek gorge at fifty miles an hour, carrying shards of crust that stripped the skin from my cheekbones like wet sandpaper. The temperature had plunged past zero. Every inhale felt like drawing crushed glass into my chest, coating the back of my throat in a dry, burning frost that made each breath rattle against my breastbone.
I couldn’t run. With my right patella clicking in its swollen pocket and my boot laces frozen into solid cables of gray ice, running meant sliding off the rim into a six-hundred-foot drop of fractured limestone.
