Page 69 of Rescued By the Dog Trainer

Survival is never a balance sheet.

Love is never a debt to be repaid in sweat and silence—it's a gift requiring courage to receive, or a man dies alone in the cold.

Like Jesse.

The thought lands cold and heavy, cutting through the numbness in my limbs.

Jesse Marsh built this refuge with Wyatt. He dragged me out of a snowdrift behind the PickAxe, gave me a bunk, a job training working dogs, and handed me a reason to wake up in the morning. Jesse carried every wounded veteran, every broken dog, and every lost soul in Angel's Peak on his broad shoulders.

Last winter, Jesse died by suicide because pride refused to let anyone see him bleed.

He gave everything he possessed to this mountain, but when darkness closed in, asking for help proved impossible. Sitting across a table from Wyatt or me to say the words was impossible: I'm breaking. Hold the floor for me.

He died alone in the dark because he believed that needing someone was weakness.

The realization burns through my skull. The same fortress. The same suffocating silence.

Pushing Maren away in the tack room was cowardice. It was choosing Jesse's grave.

A violent crack snaps overhead. A heavy pine limb shears off thirty feet up, plunging into the drift ten yards away, spraying white powder over the truck hood.

Radar whimpers, burrowing deeper into my chest.

My feet are numb blocks of wood. Cold has crept past my knees, settling into the femoral graft like setting concrete. Frost coats my eyelids. If Search and Rescue wait until sunrise, two frozen bodies will be curled in the lee of the boulder.

I tighten my arms around Radar.

"Hold on." The whisper barely carries against the roar of the wind. "Just hold on."

Through the shrieking gale, a sound tears across the ridge.

Not the snapping of pine boughs. Not the groan of wind through the logging cut.

A ringing bark.

Radar's ears twitch beneath my chin. His head jerks up, black nostrils flaring toward the open logging trail.

A second bark echoes down the cut—deep and demanding.

Fifty yards down the slope, the whiteout tears open.

A dark shape launches over the four-foot drift with explosive power. Sixty pounds of sable muscle drives through powder, legs churning, an orange harness glowing bright against the snow.

Juno.

The Belgian Malinois hits the top of the drift, throws her head back into the forty-knot gale, and sounds off with a bark that shatters the storm.

Right behind her, stepping through the trough carved by Juno's chest, comes Maren Hale.

Her wool cap is pulled low, dark curls plastered to cheeks with frozen sleet. Her right leg is wrapped in a thick cylinder of black neoprene, the heavy steel hinge gleaming dull silver as it locks the joint rigid with every stride. She leans her weight into the tracking lead, boots driving into the powder.

Behind Maren, the storm erupts with life.

Barnaby breaks through the whiteout with a frantic roar, his massive frame plowing through drifts like a locomotive. Atlas, the old man, surges beside him. His gray muzzle lifts into the wind, nostrils reading the gale with the calm of a mountain veteran.

"Jason." Maren's voice cuts through the roar of the blizzard like a flare.

Barnaby reaches the truck first, slamming his broad head into my shoulder with a whining sob, his warm tongue rasping across my frozen cheek. Radar gives a joyful yelp from inside my coat, answering the pack with an eager whimper.