PART 2 Vincent Turner was supposed to die alone in...

PART 2 Vincent Turner was supposed to die alone in the Colorado Rockies that night, bleeding into frozen ground after his own family betrayed him

PART 2

The tire tracks curved out from the black line of trees like a scar across the snow.

For several seconds, neither of us spoke.

The cabin seemed to shrink around me—the rough beams, the iron stove, the narrow bed where I lay half-wrapped in wool blankets. Outside, the storm had softened into a gray morning, the kind that made distance hard to judge and shapes easy to mistake. But the tracks were no mistake. They were fresh, too clean at the edges to have been left before dawn.

Elena stood beside the window with one hand still holding the curtain. Her knuckles had gone pale.

“How many roads lead here?” I asked.

Her eyes stayed on the trees. “One.”

“Then they found you.”

“No,” she said. “They found us.”

I forced myself upright despite the pain. It slammed through my ribs so sharply my breath caught, but I kept moving. Pain was information. Pain meant I was still alive.

Elena turned at once. “You shouldn’t move.”

“I shouldn’t have been shot either, but that didn’t stop anyone.”

She crossed the room and pressed a hand against my shoulder—not hard, but firm enough to remind me that my body had limits even if my pride didn’t. “Listen to me, Vincent. You lost blood. You have a fever. If you tear those stitches, you won’t be useful to yourself or anyone else.”

The word useful landed strangely. Not safe. Not brave. Useful.

I looked at her hand resting near the bandage beneath my shirt. Her fingers were steady, but there was tension in her wrist.

“You know what you’re doing,” I said.

“With wounds?” she asked.

“With fear.”

That made her look at me.

The air between us shifted, thinning into something more honest. Outside, the wind dragged loose snow from the roof and let it fall in a soft rush past the window.

Elena removed her hand. “There’s a cellar beneath the pantry. It’s not much, but it has supplies and a second exit through the old root tunnel. If whoever left those tracks comes closer, we leave.”

I watched her carefully. “You have a hidden exit?”

“I live alone in the mountains,” she said. “I’m not careless.”

No, she wasn’t. That much had become clear. The cabin might have looked plain at first glance, but now I saw the little details I’d missed—the heavy bar beside the front door, the curtain covering the side window hung low enough to block sightlines, the rifle above the fireplace cleaned and oiled, though positioned more like a warning than a decoration.

Elena Santos was not the simple mountain hermit I’d assumed.

A dull throb spread from my shoulder down my arm. I swallowed it and looked back at the tracks. “They won’t knock.”

“They might not know you’re inside.”

“If they followed blood, they know.”

“There was snow all night.”

“There was also Marcus.”

Her brow furrowed. “Your brother?”

“My older brother.”

The words came out flatter than I expected, as if they belonged to somebody else. Older brother sounded too ordinary. It belonged to childhood photographs and shared names on holiday cards. It didn’t fit the man who had stood over me in the snow with a gun in his hand, his face half-lit by headlights.

Elena waited, but she didn’t push.

That was another thing I wasn’t used to. People in my life collected information like ammunition. Every weakness was something to be stored, polished, and used at the right moment. Elena seemed to understand silence in a different way. She let it stand.

“My family owns Turner Consolidated,” I said after a moment. “Real estate, logistics, energy investments. A dozen other things with clean names and dirty histories.”

“I’ve heard of the company.”

“But not me.”

“No.”

I studied her face for a lie. I didn’t find one.

“My father built it,” I said. “Then he got sick. Marcus wanted control. I refused to hand it to him. Last night was supposed to be a private meeting at our family lodge.” I almost smiled, though there was nothing funny in it. “A reconciliation. That’s what he called it.”

Elena’s expression changed—not with surprise, but recognition. Like she knew that word, reconciliation, could be used as a knife.

“And the others?” she asked. “You said men you called brothers.”

“Not blood. Close enough once.” My jaw tightened. “Derek Hale. Simon Price. Men who owe everything to my family. Men I paid, protected, trusted.”

“And they left you.”

“Yes.”

She absorbed that quietly.

I expected pity. I hated pity. But what crossed her face wasn’t pity exactly. It was something more careful, more painful. Understanding without intrusion.

“You need to call the police,” she said.

I let out a rough laugh, then regretted it when my ribs answered. “With what phone?”

“I have a radio.”

“To reach who?”

“Ranger station, county dispatch if the weather clears.”

“If Marcus has people watching official channels, that call will tell him exactly where I am.”

Elena folded her arms. “And staying silent helps how?”

“It gives me time.”

“For what?”

“To think.”

She stared at me. “You were nearly dead six hours ago.”

“I do some of my best thinking under pressure.”

“That sounds like something said by a man who has survived too many things he shouldn’t have.”

For the first time since waking, I almost smiled for real.

Then a sound rolled through the cabin—low, distant, mechanical.

An engine.

Elena moved before I could. She crossed to the stove, turned the damper, and lowered the flame until the room dimmed. Then she reached for the rifle above the fireplace.

“You said no extreme conflict,” I muttered, more to myself than her.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

She glanced at me once, confused, then went to the pantry door. “Can you stand?”

“Yes.”

“You’re lying.”

“Yes.”

She almost laughed, but the sound caught before it became one. “Then lie on your feet.”

I swung my legs over the bed. The cabin tilted. Pain burst hot and white through my side, and for one humiliating second, I thought I would black out. Elena was there instantly, her arm under mine, her shoulder braced against my chest.

She was smaller than me, but strong. Not gym strength. Not vanity strength. The kind built by carrying firewood through snow and hauling water when pipes froze.

“Easy,” she said.

I hated needing help. I hated more that her help steadied me.

“Where’s the cellar?”

“This way.”

She guided me across the room. Every step was a negotiation with my body. The floorboards creaked under my weight despite my best effort. Outside, the engine grew louder, then cut off.

Silence rushed in.

Elena opened a narrow pantry door and moved aside sacks of flour and tins stacked on wooden shelves. Beneath a braided rug was a trapdoor with an iron ring. She lifted it, revealing steep wooden steps descending into darkness.

The smell of earth and cold vegetables rose up.

“Down,” she whispered.

I looked at the steps. “You first.”

“You can barely stand.”

“And you know the tunnel.”

She gave me a look that said arguing was a luxury we didn’t have, then started down. I followed slowly, one hand gripping the rail, the other pressed against my ribs. Halfway down, another sound reached us.

A knock.

Three calm taps against the front door.

Not pounding. Not shouting.

Just a polite knock, as if whoever stood outside had come to borrow sugar.

Elena froze below me.

A man’s voice called through the door. “Miss Santos? County rescue. We’re checking cabins after the storm.”

Her head tilted slightly.

I saw the answer in her face before she spoke. She didn’t believe it.

The knock came again.

“Miss Santos? We saw smoke. Need to make sure everyone’s all right.”

I leaned close enough to whisper. “Don’t answer.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

We reached the cellar floor. Elena lowered the trapdoor above us with careful slowness, leaving only a thin seam of light. We stood in a cramped space lined with shelves of jars, dried herbs, potatoes, and stacked crates. At the far wall, an old wooden door sat half-hidden behind burlap sacks.

The knocks stopped.

Then came the scrape of boots on the porch.

Elena’s face was unreadable in the dimness. She held the rifle angled toward the floor, finger outside the trigger guard.

A minute passed.

Two.

My heartbeat was too loud. I could feel it in the wound.

Then glass shattered upstairs.

Elena flinched, but she did not make a sound.

Footsteps entered the cabin.

One set, then another.

“Empty,” a man said.

I knew that voice.

Derek Hale.

My stomach tightened with something colder than fear. Derek had stood beside me at board meetings, at funerals, beside my father’s hospital bed. He had toasted my birthday last month with a glass of Macallan and a smile that reached nowhere near his eyes.

Another voice answered. “Check the bed.”

Simon.

Something overturned above us. A chair dragged. Cabinets opened and closed.

“He was here,” Derek said. “Blood on the blanket.”

Elena’s eyes flicked to mine.

I heard Simon swear under his breath. “Marcus said he couldn’t have made it this far.”

“Marcus says a lot of things.”

There was a pause.

Then Derek spoke lower. “Find the woman too.”

Elena’s expression did not change, but I felt her go still beside me.

Find the woman too.

Not question. Not warn.

Find.

Simon’s footsteps moved toward the pantry.

Elena lifted the rifle silently.

I shook my head.

Her eyes sharpened.

There was no time for debate. I reached out and touched two fingers to the old door behind her. Tunnel. We didn’t need to hold the cabin. We needed to disappear.

For half a second, she hesitated. Then she nodded.

As the pantry door opened above, Elena slipped behind the burlap sacks and eased the tunnel door inward. A narrow passage breathed cold air into the cellar. We moved through it, Elena first this time, me following with my teeth clenched so hard my jaw hurt.

The tunnel was low and cramped, supported by old beams dark with moisture. It sloped upward through frozen earth. My shoulder brushed the wall once and sent a burst of pain down my spine. I nearly made a sound, but Elena reached back in the dark and found my hand.

She didn’t squeeze it dramatically. She simply held on.

That was enough.

Behind us, a muffled shout came from the cabin.

“They’ve found the cellar,” I whispered.

“Keep moving.”

The tunnel ended at a wooden hatch covered in snow and pine needles. Elena pushed it open carefully. Pale light spilled in. We emerged in a thicket behind the cabin, near a slope that dropped toward a frozen creek.

The cabin sat twenty yards away, smoke thinning from its chimney. A black SUV was parked near the porch, the kind my people used when they wanted to look ordinary and expensive at the same time.

Elena closed the hatch and brushed loose snow over it.

“This way,” she said.

We moved along the creek bed, using the trees for cover. I could hear Derek shouting inside the cabin now. Anger sharpened his voice. Good. Angry men made mistakes.

After a few hundred yards, my vision began to narrow. The trees stretched tall and thin, their trunks bending strangely at the edges. Elena noticed before I said anything.

“Stop.”

“No.”

“Vincent.”

The sound of my name in her voice stopped me more effectively than command would have.

She guided me behind a boulder where the wind had swept the ground almost bare. “Sit.”

“I can keep going.”

“You can keep bleeding too.”

I looked down. Red had seeped through the bandage beneath my coat.

Elena set the rifle beside her and opened a small pouch she had grabbed from the cellar. “Hold still.”

Her hands moved quickly, cutting away the stained cloth, pressing clean gauze to the wound. I stared at the trees rather than at her face. There was something unsettling about being cared for by someone who had no reason to care.

“Why did you save me?” I asked.

She didn’t look up. “You were dying.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It is to most people.”

“I’m not most people.”

“I noticed.”

A gust of wind shook powder from the branches overhead. Fine snow scattered across her hair and shoulders, glittering briefly before melting.

I watched her work. “You didn’t ask what kind of man I am before dragging me home.”

“No.”

“That was reckless.”

“It was human.”

I had no reply to that.

Elena tied the bandage tight, and I grunted despite myself. “Sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be. Pain keeps me honest.”

“That must be exhausting.”

This time, the smile escaped before I could stop it.

She saw it. Something softened in her expression, but only for a moment. Then she packed the pouch and scanned the trees.

“There’s an old ranger cabin about two miles east,” she said. “Not on current maps. My father used to maintain trails out here. We can shelter there until nightfall.”

“You trust it?”

“I trust places more than people.”

“You keep saying things like that.”

“Maybe you keep hearing them.”

The answer cut closer than I expected.

We moved again, slower now. Elena knew how to travel through snow without leaving an obvious path, stepping on rock and exposed root when she could, cutting through patches of wind-scoured ground. She wasn’t merely hiding. She was erasing us.

I followed her through pines and gullies, across the frozen creek, past a ridge where the world opened for a moment into white peaks under a low iron sky. The beauty of it struck me with unreasonable force. I had owned houses with better views, glass walls looking over city lights, terraces above oceans. But those views had always felt like possessions.

This did not.

This was indifferent. Vast. Untouchable.

Maybe that was why Elena had come here.

By the time the ranger cabin appeared, I was walking on stubbornness alone. It sat tucked between fir trees, half buried in snow, its roof sagging under years of weather. Elena pried open the door with a rusted key from her pocket.

Inside, the air smelled of dust, cold ash, and old wood. There was a stove, a narrow table, two chairs, and a cot with a rolled blanket sealed in canvas. Elena checked the corners, then the small back window, then finally allowed herself to breathe.

“Sit down before you fall down.”

I sat.

She built a small fire with practiced efficiency, using dry kindling from a tin box and a match struck against the stove door. The flame caught slowly, then grew. Orange light moved over the walls, over Elena’s face, over the rifle propped within reach.

For a while, neither of us spoke.

It was strange how silence felt different with her. In my world, silence was a contest. Whoever broke it first lost. Here, silence was simply space.

She handed me water from a canteen. I drank too quickly and coughed, which made my ribs punish me.

“Elena,” I said when I could breathe again. “Derek said to find you too.”

“I heard.”

“Why would they care about you?”

“Because I helped you.”

“That’s one reason. It may not be the only one.”

She turned toward the fire. “You think everyone has a hidden motive.”

“I think hidden motives are usually the only ones that matter.”

“That’s a sad way to live.”

“It’s kept me alive.”

“Barely.”

I looked at her, and she looked back.

There it was again—that steadiness. She did not shrink from me. She did not admire me either. To Elena Santos, I was not a powerful man reduced. I was an injured stranger in a chair, asking questions because fear had trained him to.

“My father was a ranger,” she said at last. “My mother taught school in town. We lived in Denver after he died, then I moved here.”

“Why?”

Her mouth tightened. “Because people in Denver knew how to find me.”

I waited.

She pushed a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “Three years ago, I testified in a fraud case. Not a dramatic one. Not the kind that makes headlines for more than a day. Just numbers, signatures, money moved through accounts it shouldn’t have touched.”

Something in my chest went still.

“What company?” I asked.

She looked at me then.

“Turner Consolidated.”

The fire popped sharply in the stove.

For a moment, the room seemed to empty of air.

“You knew who I was,” I said.

“No.” She shook her head. “Not last night. Not when I found you. I knew the company name. I never met you. I never saw your face.”

“What fraud case?”

“Elena Santos versus no one important,” she said with a faint, humorless smile. “That’s what it felt like. I worked as an internal accounting analyst for a subcontractor connected to one of your logistics divisions. I found irregular transfers. Shell vendors. Inflated invoices. When I reported it, my manager told me to leave it alone. I didn’t.”

“And?”

“And the documents disappeared. My apartment was broken into. My mother started receiving calls at night. Someone cut the brake line on my car.” Her voice remained level, but her hands had curled around the tin cup she held. “The case collapsed before trial. My manager said I had misunderstood the files. The company settled with regulators without admitting anything. I left.”

The heat from the stove suddenly felt too warm.

“I didn’t know,” I said.

She laughed once, softly, without amusement. “Men like you never do.”

The words should have angered me. Once, they would have. I would have reminded her that my signature was not on every document, that a company with thousands of employees could hide corruption in layers, that I had enemies inside my own walls.

But my father’s voice rose in memory: A man at the top owns what happens beneath him, whether he admits it or not.

“I should have known,” I said.

Elena looked surprised.

I stared at the floorboards, at the dark lines where dirt had settled between them. “My father got sick around then. Marcus started handling divisions I didn’t watch closely enough. I told myself I was protecting the core business. I told myself a lot of things.”

The confession tasted bitter.

Elena said nothing.

I looked up. “Did Marcus know your name?”

“I assume so.”

“Then this isn’t coincidence.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t think it is.”

Outside, the wind moved through the firs, whispering against the cabin walls.

All this time, I had thought Marcus’s betrayal was about power. Control of the company. Board votes. Inheritance. But the tracks outside Elena’s cabin, Derek’s words, her connection to Turner Consolidated—those were threads from different corners tying into the same knot.

“What exactly did you find?” I asked.

“Enough to know money was being moved through emergency supply contracts after the Boulder floods. Funds meant for rebuilding. Roads, housing repairs, school transport. Some of it went where it should have. Some vanished.”

My hands curled slowly.

There were crimes men committed against rivals, and then there were crimes committed against people who would never know the names of those responsible. I had spent years justifying the first kind as business. The second had always disgusted me.

Perhaps because it was harder to dress up.

“Did you keep copies?” I asked.

Elena’s expression closed.

That was answer enough.

“Where are they?”

“Safe.”

“With someone?”

“Safe,” she repeated.

I leaned back, studying her. “That’s why you’re still alive.”

“That, and I’m good at disappearing.”

“Marcus doesn’t know where the copies are.”

“No.”

“But now he knows where you are.”

Her gaze dropped to the fire. “Maybe.”

The cabin creaked around us.

A strange, fragile understanding settled between us—not trust, not yet, but something shaped like it. She had saved me without knowing I was tied to the thing that ruined her life. I had woken in her cabin thinking she was a stranger, only to find she carried a piece of my family’s rot in her past.

Life had a cruel sense of architecture.

“We need proof,” I said.

“We?”

“You and I are apparently in the same storm.”

“That doesn’t make us partners.”

“No,” I said. “But the men hunting me are tied to the men who threatened you. And if your files show what Marcus did, they may be the only reason I survive long enough to stop him.”

Her eyes narrowed slightly. “Stop him how?”

I heard the question beneath the question. She wasn’t asking for strategy. She was asking what kind of man I would become once I had a weapon again.

I thought of the old version of myself. The one who would have answered without hesitation. Burn him. Break him. Take back what’s mine.

Those words rose easily.

I let them pass.

“With the truth,” I said instead. “And people who can’t be bought.”

She watched me for a long time. “Do you know any?”

“One,” I said. “Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“My father’s former attorney, Ruth Bell. She retired after Marcus pushed her out. She hated me when I was twenty-five, but she respected my father. If she’s still in Denver and not compromised, she’ll know what to do with evidence.”

“And if she is compromised?”

“Then we find out before handing her anything.”

Elena considered that. “There’s an old ham radio in a fire lookout station north of here. My father used it when storms took down lines. It can reach beyond the county frequencies if the antenna still works.”

“How far?”

“Far enough.”

“Can we get there tonight?”

“Not with you bleeding through bandages.”

I glanced down. She was right. Again.

That irritated me less than it should have.

Elena stood and moved to the small cupboard near the stove. She found two cans of soup, checked the dates, then opened them with a folding knife. “We rest until dusk. Then we move.”

I watched her pour the soup into a dented pot. “You’re very calm for someone whose home was invaded.”

“I’m not calm.”

“You look calm.”

“I learned a long time ago that panic is expensive.”

The phrase stayed with me.

As the soup warmed, fatigue crept over me in heavy layers. I fought it, but my body had begun to win arguments my mind refused to concede. Elena placed a bowl in my hands and sat opposite me at the narrow table. We ate in quiet.

The soup was thin and too salty. It was also the best thing I had tasted in years.

After a while, I said, “What happened to your mother?”

Elena’s spoon paused.

“She died two years ago,” she said. “Stroke. I was here when it happened. By the time a neighbor found her, it was too late.”

“I’m sorry.”

She nodded, accepting the words without leaning into them.

“Did you blame yourself?” I asked.

Her eyes lifted sharply.

I should not have asked. It was too direct, too personal. But the question had escaped because I knew the shape of the answer before she gave it.

“Yes,” she said after a moment. “Not because it was reasonable. Because grief doesn’t care what’s reasonable.”

I looked into my bowl. “My father died while I was in Singapore closing a deal he told me not to take.”

Elena’s expression softened. “You didn’t make it back?”

“Six hours too late.”

“I’m sorry.”

I nodded once.

The wind pressed against the cabin. The fire clicked and settled.

It struck me then, with uncomfortable clarity, that Elena and I had both come to the mountains carrying ghosts we pretended were practical choices. She called it peace. I called mine ambition. Neither of us had been entirely honest.

By late afternoon, the sky had darkened again. Clouds pressed low over the trees, and the cold sharpened. Elena checked my bandage, frowned, and changed it once more. Her fingers brushed my skin, careful and clinical, but the closeness felt different now.

Not romantic. Not yet. Something quieter.

Trust beginning at the edges.

“You need a better coat,” she said.

“I had one.”

“In your stolen truck?”

“Yes.”

She went to a trunk beneath the cot and pulled out a heavy brown jacket lined with shearling. “My father’s.”

I hesitated.

Elena noticed. “He won’t mind.”

The coat was old but well cared for. When I slipped it on, it smelled faintly of cedar and smoke. It didn’t fit perfectly across my shoulders, but it was warm.

“Thank you,” I said.

She looked away as if gratitude made her uncomfortable. “Don’t bleed on it too much.”

At dusk, we left the ranger cabin.

The world outside had turned blue and silver. Snow creaked beneath our boots. Elena moved ahead, rifle slung over one shoulder, her breath pale in the air. I followed, slower but steadier than before.

We climbed through dense forest toward the ridge. The fire lookout station, she explained, sat on a rocky rise beyond the old avalanche chute. The trail was no longer maintained, but she knew the way.

Of course she did.

An hour into the climb, we found the first sign that we were not alone.

A cigarette butt pressed into the snow beside a pine.

Elena crouched and touched it lightly. “Fresh.”

I scanned the trees. “Derek smokes.”

“So do many people.”

“Derek smokes imported Turkish cigarettes because he thinks ordinary habits are beneath him.”

She looked at the butt again. “Then he’s close.”

The forest seemed to listen.

We changed course, cutting away from the old trail and moving along a narrow ledge above the creek gorge. The footing was treacherous. Twice, Elena had to help me over fallen trees. Once, my boot slipped and she grabbed my arm so hard pain flashed behind my eyes.

“Sorry,” she whispered.

“Don’t be.”

Below us, water moved under ice with a low, hidden sound.

We reached the lookout station just after full dark.

It stood on stilts above the ridge, a square wooden room with windows on all sides and stairs wrapped in snow. The structure looked abandoned, but intact. Elena climbed first, testing each step. I followed slowly, gripping the rail.

Inside, the station was cold enough to see our breath. Old maps curled on the walls. A metal desk stood beneath the east window, and on it sat the ham radio beneath a canvas cover.

Elena removed the cover like unveiling something sacred.

“Please work,” she whispered.

She checked the battery, the connections, the antenna line running up through the ceiling. Her confidence faltered only once, when the first attempt produced nothing but static. She adjusted a dial, then another. Static crackled again, rose, broke, and steadied into a thin hiss.

“Good,” she said under her breath.

“You know how to use that?”

“My father taught me. I was twelve. I thought it was boring.”

“Children are poor judges of useful skills.”

She glanced back. “Were you ever a child?”

“Briefly. My family considered it a weakness.”

She almost smiled.

I gave her Ruth Bell’s emergency contact frequency, one I had not used in years. Ruth had insisted on outdated communication habits long after everyone else moved to encrypted phones. At the time, I’d mocked her for it.

Now I silently apologized.

Elena transmitted the call sign. Once. Twice.

Nothing.

On the third attempt, static answered, then a woman’s voice emerged, roughened by distance.

“Identify.”

I stepped closer to the radio. “Ruth, it’s Vincent Turner.”

A pause.

Then: “Vincent Turner is dead.”

Elena looked at me.

I leaned toward the microphone. “Not yet.”

Silence stretched.

“Prove it,” Ruth said.

I closed my eyes briefly. “At my father’s funeral, you told me grief was not an excuse to become worse than the man I’d lost. I told you to resign if you disliked my leadership. You said, ‘Gladly.’ Then you did.”

Another pause.

“Well,” Ruth said, “you were always better at remembering insults than advice.”

Relief moved through me so unexpectedly it was almost pain.

“I need help,” I said.

“I assumed. Dead men rarely call socially.”

“My brother tried to kill me. Derek Hale and Simon Price are involved. There’s evidence tied to an old fraud case involving emergency supply contracts. Elena Santos has copies.”

Ruth did not answer immediately.

When she did, her voice had changed. “Elena Santos is with you?”

Elena took the microphone. “I’m here.”

“Elena,” Ruth said quietly, “your mother used to call me every month.”

Elena went very still.

I looked at her. “You knew Ruth?”

Elena’s face had gone pale. “No.”

Ruth continued, unaware or pretending not to be. “She wanted to know if it was safe for you to come home.”

Elena’s hand tightened around the microphone. “My mother told me she stopped asking lawyers for help.”

“She stopped telling you.”

The room seemed to tilt in a different way now.

Elena swallowed. “What do you know?”

“I know Marcus Turner has been cleaning up old liabilities for years,” Ruth said. “I know your evidence was never the only copy. And I know Vincent’s father suspected something before he died.”

My breath caught.

“What?” I said.

Ruth’s voice lowered. “Your father didn’t die believing Marcus was innocent, Vincent. He died trying to protect you from what Marcus had already built around the company.”

A faint sound rose outside.

At first, I thought it was wind.

Then I saw light move across the trees below the ridge.

Flashlights.

Elena saw them too.

Ruth was still speaking through the radio. “Listen carefully. Do not go to Denver. Do not contact the board. Do not trust anyone using your family channels.”

“Ruth,” I said, watching the lights spread below us, “we have company.”

“Then leave the lookout. Now.”

Elena reached for the radio switch.

But before she could shut it off, another voice came through the speaker.

Calm. Familiar. Close enough to turn my blood cold.

“Hello, Vincent.”

Marcus.

Elena froze.

The flashlights below stopped moving.

My brother’s voice filled the lookout station with impossible ease.

“I was hoping you’d find the radio,” Marcus said. “Father always did love old-fashioned precautions.”

I stared at the speaker.

Ruth’s voice cut in, sharp with alarm. “Vincent, get out of there.”

Marcus laughed softly. “Ruth, still interfering. How nostalgic.”

Elena grabbed my arm. “We need to move.”

But I could not look away from the radio.

“How are you on this frequency?” I asked.

Marcus paused, and when he answered, I could hear the smile in his voice.

“Because, little brother,” he said, “Ruth Bell isn’t the only person Father trusted with secrets.”

A beam of light swept across the lookout window.

Then Marcus said the words that changed everything.

“Elena, ask Vincent what really happened to your father.”

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