Frisco stepped beside her and took a few more pictures of the snowy paths. “I love the quiet cold days like this,” he said. “Everything is silent and sleeping. You have to cherish that feeling to live up here. This isn’t a life for people who need constant action. Our year-round residents know how to change with the seasons. Winter means settling in and being prepared to wait things out.”

“I don’t mind it for a few days,” answered Gianna.

Frisco nodded. “That’s why we get a few tourists during the winter. They crave the adventure of being snowed in, but once it’s continued for more than a few days they start climbing the walls.”

Gianna thought about Chris Jacobs. He seemed the sort who could last for weeks in the solitude.

“We were lucky Chris came along,” Gianna said. “We would still have been sitting in my Suburban when you arrived this morning.”

Dread shot through her at the thought of having spent that much more time without heat. Would we have survived? A dizziness rocked her as she imagined hour after hour of dropping temperatures. She bent over and rested her hands on her thighs, putting the image of Violet slowly freezing to death out of her head.

A spray of warm moisture and small fragments covered her face and shoulder. She twisted away reflexively as the sound of a gunshot filled the silent forest. A hole punched through the cabin siding beside her, and she lunged to the side after she heard the second shot, leaping off the low porch and landing on her belly in the snow, knocking the air out of her lungs.

She looked over her shoulder. Half of Frisco’s head was gone.

Brain matter and blood.

That’s what sprayed me.

His body slumped in a heap on the porch. Horror paralyzed her, and she fought to find a breath.

He’s dead.

I can’t help him.

I’m next.

Get away.

Her brain shifted into flight mode as she looked forward at the forest.

The shots came from the woods.

Did he shoot the man inside?

Run. Snowmobile. Now. For a brief second she considered dashing back inside the cabin. That will protect me for ten seconds. Leave now.

Gun. Keys.

Voices screamed in her head as she forced herself to scramble to her hands and knees and crawl back up on the porch, keeping her head low. Her hands shook as she flipped the snaps on the holster that held Frisco’s gun, and she yanked on the handle. It didn’t move. Push first. She pushed down on the butt of the gun and felt the holster’s safety release. She slid the weapon out of the holster and shoved it in the deep pocket of her coat. She mentally thanked the cop who’d shown her how the release worked when she’d teased him in the morgue, saying that she could snag his gun. Frisco’s tiny camera lay beside him. She grabbed it.

Keys. Still in the ignition.

Go. Now. She took a deep breath and sprinted to the snowmobile, dashing awkwardly in the snow, thrusting her boots into old footprints and nearly falling several times as her boot tip caught on the lip of the ice. Every second she anticipated a deathblow in the center of her spine, and her ears strained to hear the next shot over her gasping breaths.

She flung herself on the snowmobile, fumbled with the engine switch and choke, and turned the ignition. It purred.

He ran.

He hadn’t expected it to go down that way.

She was supposed to be dead. Instead she’d survived the fire and someone else had just died. He’d been unable to fire again as he realized the man who’d collapsed from his bullet wore a uniform.

Did I just shoot a cop?

More sweat ran down his sides under his coat as he pushed through the branches and deep snow. Pain shot through his lungs as they begged for oxygen. He wanted to throw the rifle aside, let it be buried in the falling snow, but he knew it could be traced to him. Instead he cursed it, blaming the gun for the man’s death and now his aching lungs.

I fucked up.

It was supposed to be over. All of it. But he’d made a mistake. He’d planned to tell his father that he’d found the cabin burned to the ground and the woman dead, and that he’d put the old man out of his misery with a gunshot to the head. But she was alive.

And it was his fault.

How am I going to fix this?

His father wasn’t going to be happy.

He’d keep his mouth shut about what’d just happened until he’d found a solution. Luckily he had a handy scapegoat.

And he’d follow Gianna Trask and finish the job.

“Do you mind if I make some more eggs?” Violet asked.

Her mom had taken off a few minutes ago with the ranger, and Violet was painfully aware that she’d been left in the confines of a remote cabin with a man she knew nothing about. Her hands were restless and she needed something to take her mind off her mother’s safety. Yes, she’d left with a forest ranger, but she was going back to that place. The place of flames, smoke, fear, and cold. Violet had woken up twice last night, terrified that Chris’s cabin was on fire, but everything had been silent. Now she couldn’t get the idea of a burned person out of her head, and she needed something to do to fill the awkward silence.

“Go ahead. I had to toss the ones I made earlier. I forgot about them once the ranger showed up.” Chris stood near the front window, watching the direction in which the two had vanished on the snowmobile.

“I can make a big batch of scrambled for both of us.”

Chris turned to look at her. “That’d be great.” He smiled, but it was one of those adult smiles intended to make kids and teens feel like everything is okay. Violet had known how to recognize them since she was four.