Page 75 of Collateral Damage
He crosses the room before I can speak. The smile doesn’t leave his face.
"Up."
It's soft. Almost polite.
His hand closes around my arm—not hard enough to bruise, just firm enough that resistance would be pointless—and he steers me to Silas’s bedroom.
He opens the bedroom door and looks inside like he's checking a hotel room for comfort.
"This'll do." He positions me in the center of the room and steps back and looks at me the way you look at something you've arranged to your satisfaction.
"I won't be long," he says.
"And Doc." He pauses in the doorway, one hand on the frame. "I'd hate for you to do something that changes the mood when I get back."
The door closes, and I hear something being dragged to block the door. I don't move until I’m sure I’ve heard the front door close again.
When I’m sure enough, I drag myself to the window using the bunk frame, one-handed, taking my weight through my arms, and I press my forehead against the cold glass, and I look out.
I wish I hadn't.
Through the snow, the sky to the east is the wrong color. Orange. Deep and rolling and alive in a way the snow can't quite swallow, no matter how hard it tries. A column of black smoke climbs above the tree line and just hangs there, enormous and patient, lit from underneath by something that is still burning.
If he was trying to go for help and hit a tree, or worse, There’s no way Silas could have survived an accident like that.
Panic closes my throat as I hobble to the bottom bunk and fold into myself, arms wrapped around my ribs.
Think, Ava. Think.
Silas Hightower doesn’t leave things to chance. He plans. He brought weapons with him, and this is a hunting cabin. And he didn’t just pick this room on a whim.
All of the times, of all the places, strangely, it’s not a still, quiet voice I hear penetrate my thoughts.
It’s Delilah’s.
Telling me to go full Sarah Connor.
Seventeen
Silas
The ground drops away—twenty yards, maybe thirty—a shallow depression, snow banked up along the windward side, and I angle left, off the straight line, away from the smoke already pulling northeast.
Everything hurts in a specific, informative way that means I'm still functional, still here, still able to be afraid of exactly the right things. Still too aware of how blood loss and fatigue are muddying my thoughts.
Lord, keep my legs under me, keep my hands steady, get me to those trees — and if this is the hour You've chosen, then let me meet it moving forward, not face-down in the snow. Amen.
My legs are giving me the bare minimum. The tree line swims in and out of the white. I’m close now—close enough to smell the pine—when I veer left, away from the trees, toward the slope. My body commits before my mind catches up.
I don’t climb high, just high enough for partial concealment through branches and a clean downward angle into the gully edge.
The pine bark chews into my spine, a cold reminder that I’m still upright. My left hand is a slick mess on the Glock’s grip; I pulse my fingers against the polymer, desperate for a dry patch that isn't there. My bicep is screaming—a heavy, rhythmic throb that turns my fingers into dead wood. I can feel the wool of my sleeve turning into an icy cast where the blood has saturated the fiber. It's stiff. It’s heavy. It’s failing.
Down the slope, the "funnel" of the crashed snowmobile is a graveyard of shifting shadows. I watch the oily black smoke from the gully drift between the trunks, but the gray shape I’m expecting never appears. The wreck burns, the orange glow mocking me, but the white static of the falling snow remains unbroken.
Empty.
A cold prickle that has nothing to do with the temperature crawls up my neck. I’ve staged the perfect kill box, but the woods have gone deathly silent. My ears ring with the roar of the burning fuel, but underneath it—closer—there’s a sound that shouldn't be there.
