She started north.
The trail to the Stony River corridor was a two-mile hike through dense forest, the path buried under three feet of fresh snow that the afternoon system had laid down with the silent thoroughness of a painter applying gesso to canvas.Her snowshoes bit into the surface with each step, the familiar crunch-and-settle rhythm that had become the metronome of this case—every crime scene approached on snowshoes, every clearing entered one careful step at a time.
No one knew they were out here.That was the part that sat in her chest like a stone she’d chosen to swallow.The case had been reassigned; Walker and Harris from Minneapolis would arrive tomorrow with fresh eyes and clean hands and the confidence of agents who hadn’t spent three days standing in snowfields with the dead.Technically, Isla and Marshall had no business being in the backcountry tonight.Technically, they were off the case.Technically, what they were doing could end careers.
Captain Shaw knew.Isla had called him specifically, had laid out the plan with the careful precision of someone building an argument she might one day need to defend.He’d agreed to be in the air at first light.He’d also agreed, at Isla’s request, not to fly anywhere near the Stony River or Split Rock corridors tonight.No rotors.No searchlights.Nothing to spook the killer into flight the way the helicopter had spooked him at the Munger trail scene, sending him running through his own design with the desperate abandon of an artist watching his masterpiece burn.
Tonight the backcountry would be quiet.Tonight the killer would believe he was alone.
Isla moved through the forest with a steady pace, her headlamp dimmed to its lowest setting, just enough to keep the trail visible without broadcasting her position.The spruce pressed close on both sides, branches heavy with snow, creating a tunnel effect that concentrated the cold and the silence until both felt almost physical, things she was pushing through rather than simply enduring.
She thought about Sullivan.
Not deliberately—not the way she sometimes chose to, sitting beside his hospital bed with her hand on his and the monitors beeping their steady, insufficient assurance.This was the involuntary kind that arrived when the risk she was taking brought everything she still had to lose into sharp, unbearable focus.
James would be out here with her if he could.She knew this the way she knew the sun would rise over the lake in the morning—not because he would have agreed with the plan, because he probably wouldn’t have, but because James Sullivan’s concept of partnership did not include the option of letting your partner walk into danger alone.He would have argued.Would have stood in the bullpen with his arms crossed and his deep-set blue eyes carrying that blend of concern and stubbornness she’d come to rely on.And then he would have grabbed his pack and fallen into step beside her, because arguing and following were not mutually exclusive in James Sullivan’s world.
But James was in a hospital bed.The ventilator breathed for him.The monitors tracked vital signs that meant life without consciousness.And the note in Isla’s pocket—creased soft from handling, his handwriting pressed into the fibers—was the last thing he’d written before Brune’s attack, and some nights she unfolded it and felt the distance between the man who’d written those words and the still figure in the hospital close like a fist around something she couldn’t name.
She kept walking.The trail narrowed where a fallen birch had collapsed under its burden of snow, and she climbed over it with the careful efficiency of a woman who had been navigating these woods for long enough to read the obstacles before they reached her.The forest smelled of spruce resin and cold—the scent of the northern backcountry in winter, clean and sharp, like breathing through glass.
Channing would have her badge for this.Isla knew it with a clarity that was almost comforting in its certainty.Kate had reassigned the case and told them to go home, and instead Isla had recruited her temporary partner—a four-year agent, a man she was supposed to be mentoring, not leading into unauthorized backcountry operations—and driven into the wilderness to bait a serial killer.There was no framing that made it acceptable.If this went wrong, Kate wouldn’t just remove her from the case.Kate would remove her from the Bureau.
But the killer was out here.She felt it the way she’d felt it at the docks those long nights searching for Brune.Fresh snow.A clear night.The backcountry emptied by the advisory.And a man with an unfinished design burning in his mind like an open wound, a compulsion that would drive him into the cold because incompletion was the one thing he could not tolerate.
She couldn’t cover this much ground alone.That was the hard truth she’d swallowed when she’d asked Marshall to come.Two corridors, separated by dozens of miles, each containing multiple viable sites.She needed his eyes on Split Rock while hers were on the Stony River.Needed his radio check every thirty minutes telling her he was alive, the way she needed the sound of the monitors in James’s hospital room telling her the same insufficient thing.
The trail crested a ridge and descended into the valley.The forest thickened, the air grew stiller, the cold deepened, and the silence took on the quality of a held breath.The Stony River corridor.Shaw had described it from memory: bluffs on both sides, meadows in the valley floor, wind barely touching the snow.
Isla dimmed her headlamp further and unsnapped the retention strap on her holster.The Glock was where it always was, the grip cold through her glove.The radio on her chest was set to the frequency she and Marshall had agreed on—no dispatch, no base, just the two of them and the static between their voices.
She walked deeper into the valley, and the darkness held her the way it held everything—completely, without judgment, without mercy.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The forest was louder than Marshall expected.
Not loud in any human sense—no voices, no engines, no sounds that belonged to the world he'd left behind at the trailhead.But the wilderness made noises of its own, and alone in the dark, they were enormous.The creak of branches under snow-load, sudden and sharp, like something stepping on dry bone.The distant crack of ice adjusting in a creek bed.The wind moving through the canopy above with a low, sustained moan that rose and fell in patterns that sounded, if he let his exhausted mind wander, almost like breathing.
He was terrified.
The admission arrived without permission, surfacing through the layers of training and determination and the professional composure he’d spent four years learning to wear the way other people wore coats.In the daytime, standing in the fluorescent light of the bullpen with the map between them and Isla’s voice steady and certain, the plan had seemed sound.Dangerous, yes.Unauthorized, absolutely.But sound—the logic clean, the risk calculated, the objective clear.
In the daytime, he'd been confident.Eager, even—the word embarrassed him now, but it was accurate.He'd felt the pull of the operation the way he imagined soldiers felt the pull of a mission that mattered.He'd looked at Isla and saidI’m sure, and he’d meant it.
Now he was alone in the Split Rock backcountry at midnight with three feet of snow under his boots and a killer somewhere in the darkness, and the nearest backup thirty miles north, and the confidence that had felt so solid in the bullpen had dissolved like breath in cold air, leaving nothing but the fear.He thought of his parents in Roseville—his mother, who didn’t know he was out here, who thought he was safe in his apartment reviewing case files the way he’d told her when she’d called last Sunday.The lie sat in his stomach alongside the fear, and neither one was going anywhere.
Marshall kept walking.
That was the thing about fear, he was learning.It didn’t stop you from moving.It didn’t lock your legs or freeze your hands the way he’d always imagined.It just walked with you, a companion as present as the pack on his shoulders, matching his stride through the deep snow with the persistence of something that intended to stay.
The trail wound through a stand of birch, their white trunks ghostly in his headlamp, and then opened onto a gentle slope descending toward the first of the meadows Shaw had described.Marshall paused at the tree line and turned off his headlamp.
Darkness.Total, encompassing, the kind that made the eyes work harder, dilating, searching, finding nothing except the faint luminescence of snow under starlight.He stood still and let his vision adjust and listened to the silence with every nerve on fire.
The meadow was undisturbed.No tracks, no trenches, no patterns.Just snow, clean and unbroken, displaying the starlight like a mirror holds its image.
Not here.
