Cannon pulled his sled even with Rome’s. He shot a glance at his commanding officer and saw how he’d wiped his face clean of any emotion.
Which meant he was furious.
“Who sent the command?” Rome asked into the comms.
Cannon’s voice was flat. “Came down the chain from above.”
Rome glanced at him again and said the thing they were probably all thinking. “Someone wanted us off the mountain for two hours.”
Cannon didn’t respond—which was just as good as agreeing with him.
Silence hummed on the line as tension gripped the whole team.
Cannon pushed his machine harder, putting distance between him and the rest.
Rome stared at his back for only one second before he shot forward, intending to catch up with him.
He’d lived through enough bad times with Cannon to know the difference between a commander who was angry and one who was blaming himself.
This was the latter.
As he pulled even with him, Cannon gave a short shake of his head.
“Don’t even try to big-brother me, Rome.”
As if he was going to obey that command.
“You couldn’t have known no one was up there. The order was legit. You made the right call with the information you had.”
Cannon remained silent.
Seeing there was nothing left to say, Rome let it go. He spoke his peace—that was enough.
The drone of another machine came from behind, and Younger whipped by them, middle finger up in his own brand of a pep talk.
Cannon huffed. “Asshole.”
Younger’s chortle carried back on the wind as he buzzed twenty yards ahead, the headlight cutting through the dark.
Suddenly, his snowmobile locked up, the machine fishtailing sideways on the ice, forcing everyone behind him to swerve.
“What the hell?” someone barked out.
Snow sprayed up, clouding visibility.
Then Rome looked past Younger at the road ahead.
His blood iced over.
There was something in the snow at the edge of the tree line.
A shape that was the wrong size and wrong color to be part of nature—something his brain refused to process for a heartbeat before it processed it all at once.
“Rivers!” He leaped off his snowmobile before it fully stopped, weapon up, scanning for danger.
Rorke and Cannon reached the scene next.
Cannon hit the ground running. “Cover me!” he bellowed.
