Chapter 13: The Ex-Lover's Gambit
The mess hall at dawn was a symphony of clattering plates and low, sleepy conversation. Steam fogged the windows, thick with the smell of weak coffee, fried potatoes, and the underlying, never-quite-gone scent of damp wool and woodsmoke. Jess sat alone at the end of a long table, methodically working through a plate of cold pancakes. She was mapping the room without seeming to, her green eyes tracking exits, counting strangers, noting the group of hunters joking loudly by the stove. The snow from the night before had left a hush outside, but in here, life was stubbornly, clumsily loud.
She felt the bench shift a second before she heard the voice. “So. You’re the girl who thawed Ellie’s heart.”
The words were a purr, edged with something metallic. Jess didn’t jump. Her hand just stopped, fork hovering over her plate. She turned her head slowly.
The woman sliding in beside her was maybe a few years older, with sharp eyes and a smirk that seemed permanently tattooed on her face. Cat. Jess had seen her on the wall, a good shot, quick with a knife. Also quick with gossip, the kind that left bruises.
Cat’s fingers drummed a rapid, irritating rhythm on the chipped wood of the table. A low murmur rippled from the nearby tables; people weren’t staring, but they’d definitely stopped listening to their own conversations.
“Heard you two got snowed in together,” Cat continued, her eyes raking over Jess’s face, her short hair, her worn jacket. Assessing. “Must be a new record. Ellie doesn’t usually let strays get that close to the fire.”
Jess said nothing. She put her fork down. Her knuckles were white.
Cat leaned in, the scent of leather and cold clinging to her. She slid a small, dented flask across the table between them. It hit Jess’s plate with a dull thunk. “Little morning warmth? It’s the good stuff. Homebrew.”
“I’m good,” Jess said, her voice flat.
“Suit yourself.” Cat unscrewed the cap and took a swift swig herself, her Adam’s apple bobbing. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, her eyes never leaving Jess. “So, come on. Give a girl the details. Does she still make that little noise when she—”
“Stop.” The word cut through the steam-thick air, quieter than the kitchen noise, but absolute.
Cat blinked, her smirk widening. “Touchy. I’m just making conversation. We’re all friends here, right? Just wondering if our Ellie’s still… the same.”
Jess could feel every scar on her body like a lit fuse. The instinct was to tip the table, to put the flask through the window, to disappear into the silent white and never look back. The gas station anger, cold and final, shimmered at the edges of her vision. But then she saw the snow falling past Ellie’s window. Heard the practice. Felt the now-fact of the hot mug.
She didn’t move. But her gaze, when it locked onto Cat’s, was the same one she’d used on infected, on desperate scavengers, on the empty, hungry dark. It was a promise of violence, calm and precise.
“You don’t talk about her like that,” Jess said, each word a chip of ice. “Not to me.”
The drumming fingers stopped. The smirk didn’t vanish, but it stiffened, hardening into something less amused. The surrounding conversations had died completely now. A chair scraped as someone nearby decided to get a refill, giving them a wide berth.
Cat leaned back, putting a few inches of bench between them. She recapped the flask slowly, the metal clicking loud in the quiet. “Okay,” she said, drawing the word out. “Okay, I get it. Protective.” She stood up, looking down at Jess with a new, more calculating expression. “Just trying to welcome you to the family, kid. It’s a small town. Everyone knows everyone’s business. Especially Ellie’s.”
She turned to go, then paused, looking over her shoulder. “Word of advice? That heart you thawed? It’s been frozen solid for some pretty good reasons. Don’t get frostbite.”
Then she was gone, weaving through the tables toward the door, leaving the specter of her words hanging in the air beside the smell of grease and moonshine.
Jess looked down at her plate. The pancakes were a congealed, greasy mess. Her appetite was gone, replaced by a hollow, vibrating fury. It wasn’t just the intrusion. It was the casual ownership in Cat’s tone, the implication that Ellie was community property, a story to be dissected over bad liquor. It was the reminder that Jess wasn’t just navigating Ellie; she was navigating everyone who’d ever laid a claim to her.
She stood, leaving the full plate. She snagged her pack and walked out, ignoring the looks, the resumed murmurs. The cold outside hit her like a slap, cleansing. She pulled her collar up, her breath pluming in the gray dawn light. The snow was pristine, marred only by the paths to the latrines and the mess hall.
She needed to move. To work. The early patrol shift she’d volunteered for was a relief. She headed for the stables, the routine of saddling a horse, checking her gear, feeling like a liturgy she still understood. The familiar weight of her rifle on her back was a comfort. It was a simple problem: see a threat, eliminate it. No subtext, no history, no jealous whispers.
She was tightening the girth when she heard footsteps in the straw behind her.
“Hey. You bolted out of there fast.”
Ellie. Jess didn’t turn, focusing on the buckle, her hands steady. “Had patrol.”
“I know. I’m on it too. Dina’s got a cold.” Ellie moved up beside her, checking her own saddle. “Heard you had a chat with Cat.”
So it had already made the rounds. Of course it had. Jess finally glanced at her. Ellie’s expression was unreadable, a careful neutrality.
“Wasn’t much of a chat,” Jess said.
“Yeah, that’s what I heard.” Ellie swung up into her saddle with easy grace. “She’s an asshole. But she’s not usually that direct of an asshole.”
“What’s that mean?” Jess mounted her own horse, a steady gray mare.
Ellie nudged her horse forward, leading the way out of the stable doors and onto the packed snow of the main path toward the gate. The morning was blindingly bright, the sun glaring off endless white. “It means she’s threatened. You’re new. And you’re… here. With me. It shakes up the old ecosystem.”
Jess guided her horse alongside Ellie’s. “She talked about you like you were a story. For entertainment.”
Ellie was silent for a long moment, the only sound the crunch of hooves on snow and the creak of leather. “I am a story here, Jess,” she said finally, her voice low. “Parts of it are true. Parts of it are bullshit. Most people are smart enough not to say the bullshit parts to my face. Or to the face of whoever I’m with.”
They rode under the shadow of the main gate, nodding to the guards, and passed into the open silence of the valley. The world was reduced to white slopes, dark pines, and the piercing blue of the sky. It was a clean slate.
“What did you tell her?” Ellie asked. She wasn’t looking at Jess, her eyes scanning the tree line.
“Told her to stop.”
“And?”
Jess gripped the reins. “And I thought about breaking her nose with her own flask.”
A short, sharp laugh escaped Ellie, misting in the cold air. “That would’ve been a scene.” She looked over then, and her neutral mask was gone. There was a worried warmth there, and something else—gratitude. “You didn’t, though.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Jess met her gaze. The words from the night before were there, between them in the frozen air. Practice. “Because it’s a then way of doing things,” she said, the concept still foreign in her mouth. “I’m trying… now facts.”
Ellie’s smile was slow, real, and it felt like the sun finally reaching them. “Good,” she said, simply. She turned her eyes back to the wilderness. “For the record… the little noise she was talking about?”
“Ellie, you don’t have to—”
“It’s a snore. A really dumb, honking little snore. And if you ever tell anyone I admitted that, I’ll deny it and say you’re the one who snores like a busted chain saw.”
Jess stared at her profile, at the way her breath clouded around her smile. The hollow fury from the mess hall didn’t vanish, but it was slowly filled by something else, something warmer and more solid. The ecosystem had been shaken. Maybe that was okay.
They rode on, the horses breaking a fresh trail through the deep powder. The silence between them wasn’t charged with ghosts or gossip. It was just silence, shared, punctuated by the rhythm of their movement and the vast, quiet fact of the snow-covered world around them. A new line on the map.
The silence held for another mile, deep and insulating. It was broken not by threat, but by routine: the creak of a saddle, the crunch of snow, the distant, lonely cry of a crow. Jess found her shoulders relaxing incrementally, the knot between her blades loosening in the vast, empty quiet. The map in her head, usually cluttered with danger symbols and dead ends, was just topography here. Ridge line, creek bed, bluff.
“We’ll loop around the old trail marker,” Ellie said, her voice calm and carrying in the stillness. “Check if that drift’s covered the south path again.”
Jess just nodded, falling into the familiar, wordless coordination of a paired patrol. Her eyes kept moving, scanning the timber, but the vigilance felt professional now, not personal. It felt like purpose, not panic. The gray mare beneath her was steady, her breath puffing like a engine.
They dismounted where the snow grew too deep, tying the horses to a sturdy pine. The trail marker was just a rusted metal post, barely visible above a sweeping dune of wind-blown snow. Ellie started digging around its base with a small shovel from her pack, checking for signs of recent disturbance—tracks, weird scrapes, anything.
Jess provided overwatch, her back to Ellie, rifle held loosely but ready. She watched the tree line. The sun was higher now, melting ice on the branches, causing occasional clumps of snow to plummet to the forest floor with a soft whump. Each sound made her twitch, just a little, a reflex she couldn’t silence.
“All clear here,” Ellie called, brushing snow from her knees. “Just the usual winter burying everything.” She paused, looking at Jess’s stance. “You’re wired. It’s okay. It’s a quiet day.”
“Quiet days make me nervous,” Jess admitted, finally lowering the rifle. “Something always comes.”
“Not here,” Ellie said, but it wasn’t a naive promise. It was a statement of statistical fact. “Not always.”
The ride back was easier, the trail broken. The sun had some weak heat in it, and the world felt less like a frozen tomb and more like a place that was merely sleeping. As the wooden walls of Jackson came back into view, Jess felt a complicated pull—dread for the confined gossip, and a strange, reluctant pull toward the warmth behind the walls. Toward the person beside her.
They were walking the horses through the main gate, nodding to the same guards, when the voice cut across the yard.
“Back in one piece, I see. No tragic accidents out there.”
Cat. She was leaning against the side of the stables, arms crossed, looking like she’d been waiting. She’d changed out of her patrol gear and looked annoyingly fresh. A couple of her friends loitered nearby, pretending not to listen.
Ellie’s posture went rigid. “Got a problem, Cat?”
“No problem,” Cat said, pushing off the wall. Her eyes were on Jess, a mocking challenge in them. “Just making an observation. You two are getting pretty cozy. Makes a person wonder about the division of labor. Who’s really watching the tree line when you’re all… distracted?”
The implication was clear, ugly, and professional. It questioned their competence, their focus. It was a grenade lobbed over the breakfast table bullshit, aimed at the one thing Jess had left: her ability to survive, to do a job.
Ellie took a sharp step forward. “You need to walk away. Right now.”
“Or what?” Cat smiled, all teeth. “You’ll report me? For what? Friendly concern?” She turned her attention fully back to Jess, her voice dropping to a venomous, theatrical whisper the whole yard could still hear. “She’s a project for you, isn’t she? A little charity case to make you feel less broken. Bet you’re good at following orders, at least.”
Something in Jess snapped. Not the cold, calculating snap of the gas station. This was white-hot, immediate, and purely physical. The "now fact" was Cat's sneering mouth, the words that stripped Ellie down to a pity project and Jess to a obedient dog. The practice, the breathing, the snow—it all vaporized.
She didn’t shove the table. She didn't grab the flask.
Her right hand dropped the reins. It wasn’t a thought; it was a circuit closing. Her body pivoted, torque coming from the ground up, through her hips, her shoulder. Her fist, scarred and hard, traveled a short, efficient arc.
It connected with Cat’s mouth with a wet, crunching smack.
Cat’s head snapped back. She stumbled, a clumsy stagger in the snow, one hand flying to her face. A shocked, gargled noise escaped her. Bright red blood instantly welled between her fingers, dripping onto the pristine white ground.
The yard froze. The guards at the gate stopped talking. Cat’s friends stared, mouths agape. The only sound was Cat’s ragged, pained breathing and the dull stamp of a nervous horse.
Jess stood there, her fist still clenched. The knuckles throbbed, already starting to swell. She felt Ellie’s stunned silence beside her like a physical pressure. She looked at her own hand, then at the blood on the snow, vivid as a warning flare.
JESS PUNCHES CAT.