For the next week, I kept to the cabin, Orion healing slowly, the valley watching me the way a body watches a splinter, uncertain whether to push it out or let it fester. Trucks slowed when they passed my drive, voices dropped when I entered public spaces, and I became aware of how quickly rumor fills silence, how people invent danger when they don’t understand restraint. Someone said I was running from the law. Someone else said I was cartel. Another swore I’d killed a man in Arizona and disappeared north.
None of them were right.
And all of them were close enough to make me dangerous.
The second attack didn’t happen in public.
It happened at night, when the cabin lights were low and Orion slept near the hearth, his ears still tuned to the world in a way mine no longer were, and when the sound came, it wasn’t the crash of a door or a shout, it was the careful snap of wood being tested, followed by the almost polite pause of someone waiting to see if resistance would come.
I moved before thought caught up, years of training surfacing without permission, my body recognizing patterns my mind pretended it had forgotten, and by the time the back window shattered inward, I was already positioned, already counting breaths that weren’t mine.
There were three of them.
I knew that by the way they moved, by the uneven confidence, by the smell of alcohol layered under something sharper, more chemical, and when the first one stepped inside, laughing under his breath like this was a joke he couldn’t wait to tell later, I let him see me, let the light hit my face fully, because sometimes the most effective weapon is surprise sharpened by stillness.
He froze.
Not because I looked frightening, but because I didn’t look like anything at all, just a man standing where he hadn’t expected resistance, and hesitation is deadly when you don’t know who you’re facing.
