POV: Ava
I didn't run. I couldn't.
My lungs were screaming, each breath a serrated blade of ice cutting through my chest. The snow was a thick, suffocating blanket that pulled at my ankles, trying to drag me down into the permafrost. I moved toward the cabin door, the heavy stag-horn hunting knife clutched so tightly in my hand that my knuckles had gone white.
The cabin was a tomb behind me, and the forest was a predator in front of me. I had left Mark bleeding and broken on the floor, but the mountain was still full of eyes. Every snap of a frozen twig sounded like a bone breaking. Every moan of the wind sounded like Vitelli's silk-wrapped threats.
I was twenty feet from the porch when the shadows at the edge of the tree line shifted.
It wasn't the wind. It wasn't a deer.
