I should have grabbed a coat. Should have planned better. Should have?—
I should have never married Steffan Reynolds.
The blizzard howls around me as I push into the forest. Pine branches tear at my hair and whip across my face. My lungs burn, ribs screaming with each ragged breath. The cold sears my throat, each inhalation like swallowing broken glass.
Run. Willow. For God’s sake, run!
Behind me, somewhere beyond the white curtain, an engine dies. Doors slam. Voices carry on the wind. Harsh, clipped commands. Fragments of words, tactical coordination. They’re following on foot now.
I push harder, stumbling over roots and rocks hidden beneath the snow. My foot catches a root. The world tilts, gravity claims me. I hit the ground hard, pain detonating through my shoulder where Drake dislocated it last spring—a memory that lives in bone and sinew, awakening with fresh agony.
The flash drive flies from my grip, a small dark speck disappearing into the endless white.
No, no, no?—
Panic claws at my throat. I scramble through the snow, blind and frantic, my fingers already numb, searching. My chest heaves. The wind picks up, driving powder into my eyes, my nose, my mouth. I taste blood and snow and desperation.
The cold finds every weakness, burrowing under my sweater, freezing the sweat on my back. The blood from my lip has frozen to my chin. My hands ache with numbness, my fingers turning stiff.
I can’t breathe. I can’t see.
There.The small metal rectangle, cold as death against my palm. It documents three years of Steffan’s crimes. Three years of evidence, every wire transfer and illicit deal. Every bribe. Every threat. Every backroom meeting with arms dealers and human traffickers. Every time he bent justice to his will while bending me over his desk.
I risked my life to record threats and copy financial records. Three years of surviving hell to reach this moment.
I clutch it tight, pushing upright on trembling legs. The forest spins around me, white and dark bleeding together. The blizzard turns relentless—snow driving horizontally, stinging likehornets. Numbness creeps up my arms and legs, death claiming me inch by inch.
Just like Steffan promised. “One day you’ll push me too far, sweetheart. And when that day comes...”
Voices rise behind me. Close. Too close.
I keep moving. Because if I stop, I die. If I stop, they win.
Time stretches and compresses in the white-out. The forest becomes a fever dream of white and shadow, pain and cold. My legs move without feeling, stumbling over obstacles I can’t see. The taste of copper mingles with the metallic bite of snow.
Behind me, shouts carry on the wind. Coordinates being called out. The systematic closing of a net.
I angle toward a denser section of trees, but a light sweeps across my path. They’re everywhere—shadows moving through the white hell of the blizzard.
A root catches my foot. I go down hard, face-first into the snow. The impact drives the air from my lungs and sends fresh agony through my broken ribs. For a moment, I can’t move, can’t breathe, can only lie there as the storm tries to bury me alive.
Get up. Get up or they win.
I push myself to hands and knees, spitting snow and blood. The flash drive has somehow stayed clutched in my death grip; a small mercy in a night of disasters. Around me, the lights converge, voices growing louder.
The cold is winning. I feel it in my bones, in the growing numbness that starts at my extremities and creeps inward like death itself. My coordination fails—I trip over logs I can’t see, walk into branches that appear from nowhere in the white void.
The blizzard has become my enemy and my salvation. It hides me from Drake’s men, but it’s also killing me degree by degree, heartbeat by heartbeat.
Each inch forward feels like a mile, a war waged with my own broken body. My breath comes in shallow, panicked gasps,misting in the cold air, but I keep going. Because I have to. Because the only thing behind me is pain and the promise of death.
I don’t know how long I wander through the white maze. The forest closes around me like a frozen cathedral, pine boughs heavy with snow creating a canopy that muffles sound and dims what little light filters through the storm.
The cold has moved beyond pain into something deeper—a bone-deep ache that speaks of systems shutting down, of a body preparing to surrender.
Keep moving. Movement means warmth. Stillness means death.
And just when the last shred of hope starts to unravel, when the darkness feels endless and the cold has worked its way through my bones, a branch cracks somewhere in the white void ahead.
