near the woodpile. Rage flashed nakedly across his face.
‘You think a camera scares me?’ he asked.
‘No,’ Silas said. ‘Truth tends to do that better.’
For a long moment nobody moved. Then Wes pointed at Ruby with a hand she knew too well. ‘You come with me now, or I swear before God I’ll drag this place apart board by board.’
Jo, who had just come up the porch path from her Jeep with another folder in hand, stopped cold at the bottom step. ‘That threat was a gift, Wes,’ she said. ‘State police love clear language.’
He spun toward her, startled, then back to the screen. The calculation returned to his face. ‘This isn’t finished,’ he said.
He turned and strode down the steps. Denise hesitated only once before following him. The truck fishtailed out of the clearing.
Inside the cabin, silence crashed back too fast. Ruby’s knees weakened. She gripped the table and looked at the open folder in Jo’s hands to keep herself from shattering.
Jo made three calls from the porch. By the time she came back in, night had started knitting itself through the trees.
‘An emergency protective order is being pushed through,’ she said. ‘State police are on the road, but weather’s slowing them. I want to stay, but I’ve got an elderly patient on oxygen alone in Slatyfork. I can be back in under an hour if needed.’
Ruby almost said don’t go. The words died in pride. Jo seemed to hear them anyway.
She took Ruby’s face gently between both hands, looked at her bruises, then pressed the prepaid phone harder into her palm. ‘You call if a leaf falls wrong, understand?’
After she left, Silas showed Ruby an old flare gun kept beside the lantern and made her repeat the cabin address until she could say it without thinking. Then he sat down hard in the chair by the stove, coughed into his handkerchief, and for the first time admitted what Ruby had already guessed.
‘Pulmonary fibrosis,’ he said when the spasm passed. ‘Years of smoke and bad luck. So if this goes sideways tonight, you do not wait on me to be stronger than I am.’
Ruby stared at him. ‘You’re telling me to run?’
‘I’m telling you to choose living before pride.’
She nodded once. It was the first order she had ever taken from a man that sounded like care.
The window broke just after midnight.
Glass burst inward over the kitchen sink. Ruby was awake before the sound finished echoing, hand already closing around the phone under her pillow. She heard Silas’s chair scrape, a curse bitten short by a coughing fit, then the dull metallic clatter of somebody reaching through the broken pane for the latch.
Ruby stepped onto the porch with the phone pressed so hard to her ear it hurt and dialed 911. Signal flickered. Caught. Held.
‘Cabin on Mercer Ridge road,’ she whispered. ‘He broke in. He’s here. Please hurry.’
The dispatcher kept talking, but Ruby had already turned back toward the door.
Wes shoved it open from the kitchen side, eyes bright and wild in the lantern light. ‘Enough of this,’ he said. ‘You’re coming with me.’
He lunged for her arm.
Ruby moved on instinct and memory. Thumb under the
