Chapter 8: The Dead Man's Secret
The adrenaline hadn't let go of Niko yet. I could see it in the way his shoulders climbed toward his ears, the way his breath came in short hitches that never quite reached the bottom. He stood over the unconscious killer with his fists still half-closed, blood dripping off his knuckles into the dirt, and his chest heaved like he'd sprinted the whole ridge twice.
"Is he breathing?" Maya asked from the porch.
"Once in a while." Ethan crouched, pressed two fingers to the man's throat, and waited. "Shallow. He'll live."
"Great," Niko said. His voice came out scraped raw. "My favorite outcome."
"Don't stand there admiring him. Grab his ankles." Ethan took the shoulders. "Inside. We tie him to the stove pipe before he wakes up with ideas."
They hauled him across the threshold, boots dragging twin furrows through the dust. The man was heavy, broad through the chest, and dead weight in the worst way. Maya held the door while they maneuvered him, and I watched the whole operation from three feet away with my knife still in my hand, my legs bare, cold air chewing on my skin.
The gasoline can had ended up on its side by the porch step, still half full. I crouched beside it to right it, and that's when I saw it. A fold of paper tucked under the handle, wedged there by the sloshing weight, with a crease worn soft like it had been opened and refilled a hundred times.
I pulled it out and unfolded it in the porch light spilling from the doorway.
A map. Hand-drawn, ballpoint on the back of a trail brochure, the ridgeline sketched from memory and the lake marked with a lopsided circle. And deeper in, past where the trails died, a clearing marked with an X. Two words beside it in blocky capitals.
SUPPLIES. RADIOS.
"Niko," I said.
He was watching Ethan loop rope around the killer's wrists. He turned, and I held the map up, and I saw the fight drain out of his face and something colder move in behind it.
"They've got a stash," I said. "Radios. Half a mile in, maybe less."
"That's how they knew the terrain." Ethan didn't look up from his knots. "That's how they've been ahead of us every step."
Maya took the map from my hand and studied the X, her thumb tracking the sketched contours. "If there are radios in that clearing, we get there first, we call out. Park service, county sheriff, anybody with a frequency."
"If it's not a trap."
"It's already a trap. Everything out here is a trap." She folded the map along its soft old creases and handed it back. "At least this trap has a prize."
I tucked it into my back pocket and turned to go inside, and that's when Niko moved.
He crossed the porch in two strides, caught my wrist, and swung me around so my back hit the wall beside the door. The impact knocked a soft grunt out of me. His palm came up flat against the planks next to my head, and he leaned in, and up close his eyes were still glassy with it, the fight, the punching, all of that animal chemistry still burning off him like heat off an engine.
"We're not done yet," he said. Low. Just for me.
"Niko, he's tied up three feet inside that door."
"Then you'd better be quiet." His bloodied hand slid up the outside of my thigh, over my hip, leaving a faint warm smear, and I felt my whole body answer before my brain got a vote. His mouth found the side of my throat and I tipped my head back against the wood and let him. "You watched me hit him. I felt you watching."
"I watched you win," I breathed.
"Yeah." His teeth grazed my earlobe. "And you liked it."
I did. God help me, I did, the coiled hot thing in my belly proving it again, and I grabbed a fistful of his shirt and pulled his mouth onto mine. He kissed me like the fight had never left his blood, all teeth and tongue, pressing the length of his body into me against the wall, and I felt him hard through his sweatpants against my stomach.
His hands went to work. He shoved my shirt up over my breasts, dragged the cups of my bra down rough, and bent his head to my nipple, sucking it into the heat of his mouth while the cold air tightened the other one. I gasped and clapped a hand over my own mouth. Through the doorway I could hear Ethan still talking, rope creaking, Maya saying something about knots. Nobody had looked out yet.
"Niko." I got my hand between us and pressed it against him through the fabric and he groaned against my breast. "Get your pants down."
"Bossy."
"You just beat a man unconscious. You can manage a drawstring."
He laughed once, breathless, and shoved the sweatpants down over his hips. His cock sprang free, hard and flushed, and he caught my leg behind the knee and hauled it up around his hip, spreading me against the wall. His fingers found the hem of my underwear, dragged them aside, and then he pushed two fingers into me and my eyes rolled back.
"Still wet," he whispered, wicked, against my jaw. "From watching me."
"Shut up and fuck me."
He didn't need telling twice. He hooked my underwear down to mid-thigh, gripped my ass with one blood-smeared hand, and drove into me in one thrust that shoved my shoulder blades up the wall. I bit down on the heel of my own hand, hard, because the sound that wanted out of me would have brought Ethan running.
He fucked me fast and deep, my back scraping the cedar, my thigh locked around him, his breath sawing against my neck. The wood creaked with every thrust and I prayed the rhythm would read as wind. His mouth was at my ear, panting, and every exhale was a small broken sound that I'd never heard from him before, like something in him had cracked open out there on the dirt and this was how he sealed it shut.
"You feel so fucking good," he ground out. "I could die right now and I'd die happy."
"Don't you dare." I grabbed his jaw and made him look at me. "You don't get to die. You're mine."
His answer was a harder thrust that made my knee buckle, and I held on, nails in his shoulder, and felt my orgasm coil tight and fast the way it had all night, fear and want braided into one hot rope. It broke over me in three shuddering waves and I buried my face in his throat and shook against him, biting down on the tendon, and he fucked me through it until his hips went ragged and he came inside me with a strangled groan he strangled even harder.
We stayed there, pinned to the wall, both of us dripping and gasping.
Inside the cabin, a floorboard creaked. Maya's voice, closer now, dry as tinder.
"You two know we can hear the walls shaking, right?"
I laughed. It came out wet and breathless and scraped raw, but it was a laugh, and Niko joined me a second later, his chest shaking against mine. He pulled his sweatpants up one handed, still breathless, and I shoved my underwear back into place and smoothed my shirt down.
"We could have timed that better," he said, voice low and sheepish.
"We could have done it somewhere else." Maya's voice came from just inside the doorway. "But you didn't. Ethan's trying not to look at me."
"It's a small cabin," Ethan called from somewhere deeper in. "I'm tying knots. I'm not looking."
We pulled apart, and the cold bit into the sweat on my skin. Niko ran a hand through his hair, leaving a red smear on his temple. His knuckles were a mess, split and swollen, dirt ground into the raw meat of them.
"Clean that up before it gets infected," I said.
"Yeah. In a second." He looked at the treeline, and the laugh faded from his face. "I'd rather we move first."
Maya stepped out onto the porch with the map folded in her hand. She'd found a jacket somewhere and had it zipped to her chin. "We've got maybe an hour of dark left. If we're going to find that stash, we move now."
We both looked at her. Clearly caught up on the mention of moving.
"When he wakes up," Ethan said, appearing behind her, "he's going to be pissed. We've got a window before that happens. I say we use it."
Niko nodded slowly. "We go for the radios. We call for help. We put this whole nightmare behind us."
"And if it's a trap?" Maya asked.
"Then we're prepared this time." I pulled the kitchen knife from my pocket. "We know what we're dealing with."
Ethan considered it for a second, then nodded once. "It's as good a plan as we've got. Two of us in the cabin, two going after the stash. When the one who comes for his partner shows up, we want people here."
"I want the killer's partner dealt with," Niko said. "Alive or not, I'm not fussy."
The words hung in the air, hard and final.
Ethan looked at me. "You and Niko know the terrain better. You head for the stash. Maya and I stay, hold the cabin, watch for the other one."
I looked at Niko. He was still trembling, just slightly, a low vibration like a held motor. But his eyes were clear.
"Let's get this done," he said.
We pulled our pants up properly, tucked in our shirts, and checked our gear quickly. Maya handed me a water bottle and a flashlight that flickered when I shook it. Ethan pressed his hunting knife into my hand, handle first, and I felt the weight of it settle.
"Be smart," he said. "If it feels wrong, come back."
I nodded, and then Niko was stepping off the porch, crunching into the dark treeline. I followed, the map burning in my back pocket, the raw night air filling my lungs.
Behind us, the cabin door shut with a solid thunk. The latch slid home.
Then there was only the forest, and the two of us, and the uncertain shape of what we were walking toward.