Page 70 of Collateral Damage
My pulse doesn't spike. It narrows. He planned for force. He didn't plan for patience.
I ease the door back toward me—millimeter by millimeter—keeping the line slack. I feel every micro-shift in tension through fingers slick with blood. The door settles against the dirt floor, the line held loose.
I slide along the interior wall, keeping low, staying outside the kill arc. The cold hits my face as I clear the frame.
No blast. No light. Just the wind.
I don't breathe again until both boots are in the snow.
Ava
Every synapse in my brain fires at once and produces nothing—no sound, no action, just a total systemic shutdown, the kind I've only ever read about in trauma literature and never understood until this exact moment. My brain knows what it's looking at. My body has simply refused to accept the information.
He’s dressed in heavy, mud-streaked camouflage gear, stiff with frozen slush and pine needles. The scent of the wilderness—damp earth, resin, and the metallic tang of something darker—floods the cabin, overpowering the smell of the fire. Strapped across his chest is a bulky nylon harness, crisscrossed with straps and pouches that hold tools of a trade I don't want to name.
The smile he gives me is patient. Comfortable. The smile of a man who has never once doubted how this ends.
"See what happens when I’m not around," he says. “You get hurt.”
He moves before I can process it, hand closing around my arm, and the touch of him turns my stomach inside out. He steers me back toward the sofa, leaving rust-colored stains on my sweater. My stomach twists as my brain matches them to the dried smears in the creases of his knuckles.
I’ve seen enough of it to know what it is.
Blood.
My heart hammers against my ribs, a frantic, trapped bird. Find the thumb. Rotate. Break free. Silas’s voice echoes in the back of my skull, steady and professional.
I don't wait. I let my weight drop and whip my wrist toward the gap in his grip, snapping my arm over and down just like we practiced. For a split second, I feel the pressure give. I feel the ghost of a chance.
But he doesn't let go.
Instead of my arm slipping free, his hand shifts with a fluid, terrifying speed. He doesn't fight my movement; he follows it, sliding his grip higher up my forearm before I can pull away. He catches my momentum and twists, turning my own force into a lever that jerks me off balance.
Suddenly, my arm isn’t mine anymore. He wrenches it upward behind my back, forcing my shoulder into an angle it wasn't meant to hold. A white-hot spike of pain shoots through my chest, pinning me forward.
“Silas taught you that, didn’t he?” he whispers, his breath hot and smelling of winter air. His voice is conversational, almost disappointed. “The thumb-release. It’s a good move, Doc. Fundamental.”
He shoves me down toward the cushions, his weight following me, keeping my arm locked in that agonizing upward stretch. “But fundamentals only work on amateurs,” he murmurs, his face inches from mine.
I pull back as far as I can. "What did you do to Silas?"
It doesn't come out as a question. I don't have the breath for one.
He releases me and holds his hands up, squinting at them, then swings his gaze back to me, his eyes roaming over my face with an intrusive, sickening intimacy as he picks up the gun Silas gave me and tucks it away.
He taps his finger on his chin. “What did I do? I took him out of the picture.” He looks around the cabin. “It’s a good thing, too, Doc. You’re far too trusting.”
My eyes drift to the table where the satellite phone sits charging—a mindless, flickering hope that I can reach out to Caleb. My body shifts on its own, a small, involuntary movement toward the edge of the cushion.
He doesn't lunge. He doesn't even seem to exert himself. He just reaches out—an almost lazy, fluid extension—and the phone is gone. He bats it away, sending it skittering across the floorboards and into the shadows.
He waggles his finger at me. “Invitation only. And the guest list doesn’t include anyone I don’t approve of.”
Approve of.
Silas is dead.
The thought lands like a diagnosis I already knew was coming but couldn't say out loud until now. All that blood. My chest cavity feels like it's collapsing inward, like something structural has given way, and I know this feeling. I have felt it before in rooms with families who needed me to hold myself together.
