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The hum of the heater dies. The lights vanish.

My breath clouds in the cold.

No. No, no, no.

I spin around, heart pounding. My phone is on the coffee table. I sprint for it, grabbing it just as a crash shatters the back window.

I scream?—

But it’s too late.

Hands grab me.

A cloth presses to my face, and I kick, scream, claw, but the scent hits my nose—chemical, sharp, terrifyingly effective.

My limbs go heavy.

The world tilts.

Micah—

I try to call his name, but it dies on my tongue.

I’m dragged backward, out the broken window, into the cold, and the last thing I hear before everything goes black?—

Is my heart breaking.

14

Micah

The woods give me the answer I don’t want.

No tracks on the north ridge. No movement through the aspens. No second crack after the first—just the wind and the faint metallic tang of a silenced engine that’s already gone.

A bad feeling lifts the hair on my arms.

I turn and run.

Boots chew snow. Ranger paces beside me, ears up, a low, frustrated whine in his chest like he already knows what I’m about to find.

“Ellie?” I shoulder through the front door after opening it.

Cold air hits me in a rush. Glass litters the floor by the back window—spiderwebbed, caved inward. The power’s dead. The living room is wrong in small ways only I would notice: her mug knocked sideways, the quilt dropped in a heap, the lamp cord torn where someone tripped it.

“Ellie!” I roar, scanning corners, moving fast room to room. Bedroom—empty. Bathroom—empty. Closet—empty.

Silence. The kind that means absence.

My eyes cut to the back window. Broken latch. Boot scuffs on the sill. A smear where a shoulder or a hip slid through. Outside: two sets of prints dragging, not walking. A third set—heavier—covering their retreat. Tracks angle to the service road that sits behind the ridge like a private lane for people who don’t knock.

I hit the door again and burst onto the porch.

A black van is already fishtailing at the curve, snow rooster-tailing behind it. No plates. Tinted—mirror dark. It drops into the trees and vanishes, engine note fading to nothing.

I lift my weapon, know the shot is wasted at this range, and drop it again. Anger almost whites out my vision, then collapses into a cold knot in my gut.

They took her.