Page 72 of Collateral Damage
He sits back down, wraps both hands around his mug, and looks at the fire with the quiet contentment of a man with nowhere else to be.
"You're going to drink that."
Not a threat. An inevitability.
I pick up the mug. He settles deeper into the chair. Crosses his ankle over his knee. A man without a single urgent thing in the world.
"You're going to be angry for a while," he says. Reasonable. Measured. Like he's already mapped the stages. "That's fine. I expected that."
He takes a long sip from his mug and looks around the cabin like he's appraising it.
"Romantic," he says. “Hope you have candles?”
He drifts to the window with a grace that feels like an insult. He stands there, his silhouette blending into the glass, watching the dark as if he’s simply waiting for the rest of his kingdom to arrive.
"You know what I kept thinking, all those months?" He doesn't turn around. "I kept thinking, if I could just get her attention, she’d understand."
He turns. Looks at me across the room with something that in another life, on another face, might have looked like longing.
“And here we are, Doc."
He smiles. And it’s so utterly charming, it’s like watching Lucifer take on human form.
"I finally have all of your attention."
Sixteen
Silas
Two hundred and fifty meters.
I’ve covered worse, but usually without a hole in my arm and a target on my spine. The ground between the shed and the garage is a flat, open killing field. Snow falls in fat flakes that hiss against the frozen crust—heavy enough to blur the tree line, but not dense enough to hide a man. Anyone watching from the cabin windows would see a dark shape against the white.
The itch between my shoulder blades is the only thing I can’t account for.
I go low and steady. Not fast—fast is noise, the kind of mistake that only gets made once. My boots sink into the drift with a rhythmic crunch that sounds like the crush of gravel in a fresh grave. Eyes forward. Don’t look at the cabin windows glowing pale to the left. Looking makes me a target. Looking makes it real. Whatever’s happening on the other side of the glass gets filed in the dark place where I keep the things I’ll deal with later.
My arm is bleeding through the wrap. I feel the liquid heat—warm against the air, a steady leak. A countdown in the snow.
The garage wall emerges from the spindrift like a tombstone. I press my back to the rough wood and hold my breath until my lungs burn. I listen for anything that doesn’t belong—the click of a safety, the creak of a floorboard, the exhale of someone waiting.
Just the wind.
I slip inside and pull the door behind me. I stand still, letting my eyes adjust to the smell of grease and cold iron. Both phones are a no-go. No bars. No signal. No way to contact Caleb.
Plan B.
I move toward it carefully, one-handed, compensating. My dominant arm has stopped being useful and started being a liability. I reach the machine, a heavy shadow in the corner. I rest my good hand on the cold steel of the hood and close my eyes.
She’s in that cabin.
I don’t know what he wants, how long he’s been watching, planning, how far he’ll go. But I know the kind of man who sets a claymore behind a door. I know that kind of patience—the cold, predatory kind that doesn’t mind the wait.
I turn the key one position. The click is a hammer strike. I wait for the glow plug light. The machine ticks in the frost. My arm throbs in time with my pulse, reaching my jaw. I shift my weight, boots slicking in a small puddle forming at my feet. The door is still a gray rectangle of falling snow.
Nothing moving.
The light blinks ready. An amber eye in the dark.
