Page 66 of Screwed

I opened my mouth to guess again, but the words died in my throat. The casual front we were trying so hard to maintain shattered in an instant. Beneath the soles of my boots, the floorboards shifted. A low, sickening rumble resonated deep within the stone foundation, a groan that caused the water in our mugs to ripple in perfect, tiny circles.

Nate’s hand tightened on the back of my chair, his entire frame coiling like a spring. “Ethan,” he hissed, his voice dropping all traces of amusement.

“I hear it,” Ethan said, his smile vanishing as he stood up so fast his chair scraped violently against the floor.

The heavy drumming of the rain was suddenly drowned out by a terrifying, muffled roar coming from the ridge directly behind us. It sounded like a freight train tearing through the timber, growing louder with every second. The mountain was giving way.

The cabin shuddered, a concussive jolt that knocked me off balance and sent the candles sliding across the table. The trusses overhead groaned in protest, twisting under the sudden weight. There was a horrific, deafening screech of splintering wood as thousands of pounds of wet earth and jagged rock pulverized the back exterior wall, instantly followed by the explosion of the remaining kitchen glass.

A wall of freezing, muddy air blasted through the hallway, carrying a cloud of pulverized drywall dust, insulation, and the pungent, raw stench of torn roots and mountain soil. The darkness was absolute, chock-full of flying debris, as the mountain shoved its way inside, swallowing the entire back half of the cabin in a matter of seconds.

“Ava!” Nate roared. His massive frame moved before I could even process the sound. He lunged across the dining room, his large hands slamming onto my waist and launching me behind the table just as a cascade of mud, debris, and shattered log siding poured into the back hallway. The candle flames sputtered, snuffed out by the sudden, violent rush of air and dust.

And before the airborne dirt could even settle, the world outside exploded into blinding white light.

Massive spotlights broke through the cracks in our plywood barricades, slicing through the darkness. Engines whined in the distance. The synchronized rumble of sleek, high-end tactical SUVs cutting through the muck of the lower valley.

“Flashlights,” Ethan hissed, his voice dropping into a deadly, protective register as he lunged into the dark and pulled me up by my vest. He didn’t waste time with a comforting word; his grip was iron-tight, his eyes locked on the blind spots we’d mapped out hours ago. “They’ve found us.”

The corporate fixers didn’t bother knocking. A volley of suppressed automatic gunfire shattered the upper rows of unprotected glazing, raining sharp shards of glass down into the living room. The drywall we had spent weeks finishing collapsed under the sudden pepper of lead. They were launching a coordinated, multi-angled siege.

“Move, move, move,” Ethan muttered, his breath hot against my ear.

He took his turn keeping me close, ducking low and positioning his body between me and the splintering window-boards. I followed blindly as he dragged me down the dark central hallway toward the innermost fortified bunker space.

My heart hammered so hard against my ribs I could taste copper in my throat. This was the consequence of my choices. In the chaos, I had a single, panicked thought. I might’ve signed the death certificate of the men that I loved.

“Nate! Hold the stairs!” Ethan shouted over the din of the rain.

Using his intimate knowledge of the cabin’s floor plan, Nate stepped into the deepest shadows near the shattered side entryway. A fixer breached the doorframe, a sleek black tactical rifle raised, the red laser sight cutting through the dust.

But Nate came out of the dark like a specter of pure muscle. He used his sheer mass to seize the man, slamming him hard against the structural log header. The impact rang out with a sickening, hollow thud as the fixer’s helmet cracked against the timber, his body crumpling into the mud.

A side window broke, and a muddy, rain-soaked figure vaulted into the narrow hallway right ahead of us.

I gasped, shrinking back against Ethan’s chest, my hands flying up in defense. But instead of a weapon, a heavy, familiar hand wrapped around the back of my nape, pulling me hard into a broad chest that smelled intensely of gunpowder and wet canvas.

Deacon.

“I told you I’d be back,” he growled against my hair, his voice a ruthless, reassuring rumble that sent a sudden spike of warmth through my frozen limbs. He looked up past me to Ethan, tossing a heavy, waterproof nylon duffel bag onto the floorboard. Metal clinked loudly inside.

“I got the hardware. Semi-automatics and enough twelve-gauge ammunition to hold the front porch for a week,” he said.

“We found something better while you were gone,” Ethan yelled as another volley of gunfire chewed through the log siding behind us, sending splinters flying like shrapnel. “Logging equipment from the old extraction lines. We already prepped the charges. We just didn’t have a way to ignite them.”

Deacon’s eyes narrowed, a ruthless, brilliant grin cutting through the mud on his face. He reached right back into his heavy tactical vest, pulling out a coil of thick, green waterproof fuse and a small, padded tin of blasting caps he’d brought.

“An afterthought?” I questioned, raising my eyebrows.

Deacon laughed out loud. “My guy threw these in with the crates. I was going to use them to rig the driveway timber, but the ridge trail is a better bottleneck.”

“The basement hatch, right under the floorboards!” Nate roared, stepping out from the stairwell shadows to join us. “We’ve got the layout ready to choke out the main access trail before their heavy transport climbs the ridge.”

“Hold her,” Deacon ordered, shoving me back into Ethan’s arms without a second of hesitation. “Nate and I are going to drop the mountain on them. When you hear the blast, you lock this inner bunker down.”

I watched, frozen against Ethan’s chest, as Nate and Deacon moved with terrifying, synchronized speed. They didn’t head for the front door. Instead, Nate ripped back the wool rug in the center of the living room floor and yanked open the basement hatch. Deacon dropped into the dark opening first, his mud-slicked boots disappearing into the cellar where the wooden crates of old logging dynamite had been safely stored. Within seconds, he was passing the oil-sweating bundles up to Nate, who packed them into a canvas rucksack alongside the green waterproof fuse and the tin of blasting caps.

“They’re pushing past the first logging trail bottleneck now,” Ethan whispered, his iron-tight grip on my arm anchoring me to reality as he pulled me further back into the shadows of the central corridor. His eyes never left the front entryway, his thumb rubbing against my collarbone to keep me from spiraling. “Nate! You’ve got two minutes before they clear the treeline!”