She told herself that meant she was safe.
She’d always been good at telling herself comfortable lies.
CHAPTER THREE
The storm peaked around midnight.
The wind shifted from its sustained howl to something more irregular, gusting and releasing in patterns that suggested the system was moving through. The snow still fell hard, but the whiteout had softened to something merely dangerous rather than lethal. The tree line, invisible at eleven, was a dark suggestion again by one AM.
Mack noted it, adjusted his threat assessment, and returned to watching the window.
The cabin was quiet. The only sounds were the occasional creak of the structure settling against the wind and the almost inaudible sound of his own breathing, and if he let himself listen for it, the silence of a bedroom door that hadn’t opened since she’d closed it two hours ago.
He told himself he wasn’t listening for it.
He rolled the quarters across the knuckles of his left hand, slow and deliberate. The cold had gotten into the scar tissue, a deep ache that started at the base of his thumb and radiated up toward his wrist. He’d learned years ago that the exercises helped more than anything. Keeping the tissue moving was the difference between functional and locked up by morning. He did them automatically now. Muscle memory working against muscle damage.
The engraving caught the low light as the quarter turned. He could still feel the letters if he pressed his thumb hard enough—he didn’t.
Sit rep, he told himself. Focus.
Weather: improving, still impassable. No vehicle movement would be possible on the backroads until at least noon. He and Alyssa were effectively sealed in, which meant whatever was coming couldn’t reach them. Yet.
Cartel response: hampered by the same blizzard. Their operatives in Missoula were grounded like everyone else. But they’d put a bounty on Lyss’s head. The $500,000 bounty would bring people eventually, but not tonight.
Blake: unknown location. Last confirmed at the party, where he’d contained the situation. Blake knew these mountains. Had spent summers here as a kid, the same as Alyssa. Would he brave the roads and come looking for her?
It was the problem with knowing your enemy too well. You started thinking in circles.
Blake won’t hurt her, and this, at least, he believed. In all the ways Blake Bennett had proven himself capable of betrayal—of his team, his country, his own moral code—he had never harmed his sister. Whatever twisted version of love Blake carried, it was genuine where she was concerned. The cartel might order her death. Blake would find another way.
That wasn’t the threat Mack was worried about.
The threat was the conversation they’d eventually have to have—Alyssa and Blake. Blake would explain himself with his charismatic certainty he’d always wielded like a weapon. Blake had been talking Alyssa into things her whole life, convincing her that her own perception was wrong, that her instincts were overreactions, that the truth she’d seen with her own eyes was somehow not the truth.
She’s different now.
He set the quarters flat on the table. He’d been sitting with the information from Claire’s call for hours, which was long enough that the distance he’d constructed around it was starting to erode at the edges.
He went through it again, leaning on his training. Facts first.
Cartel operatives had hit Alyssa’s apartment at approximately two AM. One fatality: Jenna Lopez, twenty-nine years old, elementary school teacher. Cause of death: gunshot wound, single round, before a fire was set. Accelerant had been used—deliberate, professional, intended to destroy evidence as much as eliminate the body. The medical examiner’s preliminary finding suggested she’d died quickly, if that was worth anything, which Mack had learned over years of delivering this kind of information that it rarely was.
It was a horrible case of mistaken identity. The two women shared a similar build and coloring and lived in the same apartment.
The cartel had realized its mistake almost immediately. It hadn’t changed anything.
A bounty was formally posted through Sinaloa channels. Mack hadn’t told her yet, wanting to give her one night without knowing the full scope of what her accidental bathroom run had landed her in. He’d question that call once she was up. Right now, it felt like the only merciful decision he’d made all evening.
FBI safe house: in progress. Forty-eight hours minimum. Claire had pushed for faster—he’d heard it in her voice even through the sat phone’s compression—but witness protection logistics didn’t bend for weather.
He’d filed all of it. Organized it the way he’d been trained, the way that let him absorb terrible information and still function.
Then he’d thought about Alyssa in the bathroom, voice deliberately quiet, leaving a message for someone already dead.
Lock the apartment door. Okay? Love you.
She’d called her roommate just a few hours before the attack, maybe less. Jenna had either been asleep or she’d gotten the message and not taken it seriously.