Page 69 of Easy, Tiger

"So the boyfriend finally arrives." He circles left, keeping the blade between us. "Took you long enough to follow her breadcrumbs."

"Let her go. This is between you and me."

"Actually, it's between me and every freak hiding in these mountains." The knife weaves hypnotic patterns in the air. "But she makes excellent bait."

A quick feint to the right lets me drive left, grabbing for his wrist. He's terrifyingly fast, countering my brute force with calculated, lethal technique, slashing across my forearm before dancing backward. Blood wells through torn fabric, but the cut is shallow.

"Nolan!" Halsey struggles against her restraints, the chair rocking dangerously. "He's got backup weapons⁠—"

The hunter lunges, going for my throat. I catch his wrist, twisting hard until bones grind together. The knife tumbles free, but he drives his knee toward my ribs. Blocking with my elbow opens him up for a fist slammed into his solar plexus.

He doubles over, gasping. For a moment, I think I have him.

Then his hand finds a specialized canister clipped to his vest.

The metal hits the ground, but instead of just smoke, it releases a blinding flash and an agonizing, high-frequency sonic burst engineered specifically for a predator's sensitive hearing. It feels like ice picks driving into my eardrums. My equilibrium shatters, dropping me to my knees in blinding pain. Dense gray smoke, laced with acrid chemical irritants, billows out, searing my sinuses and completely neutralizing my sense of smell. My eyes stream, my throat burns, and tiger senses that should give me every advantage immediately become my worst vulnerability. This was meticulously planned. He came fully prepared for exactly this.

Lunging toward where Halsey was sitting, my hands search blindly through the haze, my lungs fighting the urge to cough.

"Halsey!"

"Here! I'm—" Her voice cuts off abruptly, a muffled sound following it that might be a hand clamped over her mouth.

Dropping low, I sweep my arms through smoke thick enough to taste, but my fingers find only the overturned chair and empty air. Every second I spend blind and choking is a second he's putting between us. By the time my eyes clear enough to see more than shapes, the tent's rear panel hangs open, slashed wide.

Bursting through it into the storm, I scan desperately through curtains of snow. My tiger senses are currently recovering, the scent trail scattered by wind and chemical residue alike, but I catch it, faint and fading fast toward the treeline. Two sets of tracks, one set dragging.

Our shooter has vanished into the storm with Halsey still captive, and he's bought himself a head start I never should have given him.

25

HALSEY

The snow falls harder than the weather app predicted when I checked it two days ago, but Nico moves through the whiteout with the eerie accuracy of a man who has memorized these mountains through years of obsessive stalking. Thick flakes cling to everything and muffle sound until the world becomes a white-wrapped tomb. Night has completely swallowed the mountain, plunging us into pitch-black numbing darkness. Nico forces me onto the snowmobile ahead of him, wrists zip-tied in front of me so I can clutch the middle of the handlebars, and the engine roars to life beneath us. The machine's single headlight cuts a desperate, bouncing beam through the swirling white as he steers us higher up the mountain, following switchbacks that grow steeper with each turn.

The zip ties bite into my wrists with every jolt of the machine over uneven ground, but I channel everything into memorizing landmarks instead of the discomfort. A lightning-struck pine twisted into a spiral. A boulder shaped like a sleeping bear. Reference points Nolan might recognize if he manages to follow us this far, assuming the snowmobile's tracks don't vanish under fresh drifts before he gets the chance.

"Hold still," Nico's words battle the wind and engine noise right against my ear, rifle strapped across his back, but his free hand fisted hard in the collar of my jacket. "Try anything and I put us both in a ditch."

"I'm not exactly in a position to try anything." Twisting enough to look back, the swirling snow obscures the trail sloping away behind us. No sign of pursuit yet. The smoke grenade bought him exactly the head start he needed, and the engine's only widening it with every passing minute.

We climb for another twenty minutes before Nico finally cuts the engine beside a cluster of granite outcroppings that provide minimal shelter from the wind. He hauls me off the snowmobile by the back of my jacket, then shrugs off his heavy canvas pack in one fluid motion, extracting a compact pop-up tent that snaps open instantly.

"Sit there and don't move." He flicks a hand toward a flat rock while anchoring the tent against the storm.

Settling onto the cold stone, I absorb the sight of him working. Everything about his gear screams professional preparation: waterproof stuff sacks, redundant equipment, military surplus built for extended operations in hostile terrain. This is a hardened professional who's spent serious money and time preparing to hunt us.

The tent snaps into its final shape, and Nico gestures for me to go inside with the rifle barrel. The space is cramped, and the wind cuts through the thin fabric walls, but at least it isn't screaming directly into my face anymore. Nico tosses a silver emergency blanket into my lap without comment, the crinkling material doing little against the cold but something against it, at least. He clips a battery-powered lantern to the ceiling, casting harsh shadows across our faces.

"Now we talk." He settles across from me, rifle across his knees but finger near the trigger. "I want to know everything about your boyfriend and his friends."

Realigning my feet, I try to work feeling back into my fingers. "Which boyfriend? I'm very popular in Red Pine. Lots of rugged mountain men competing for my attention."

"Don't be clever. It doesn't suit you." His calm demeanor burns with the intensity of someone accustomed to getting answers through patience rather than violence. "Nolan Maren. The woodworker who turns into something that shouldn't exist."

"You already know I know. We covered that already. So what exactly are you hoping I'll say? That I'll suddenly crack and confess something you haven't already spent years documenting yourself?"

"I'm hoping you'll be useful. You've spent weeks with them. Watched how they move, how they hunt, how they organize themselves. I've spent a decade spying from a distance. You have something I don't."