Aurora’s Verdict

CHAPTER THREE: THE CABIN

December 25, 4:47 PM | Somewhere South of Hella

The cabin smelled of pine resin, woodsmoke, and old books. It was one room—a stone fireplace dominated the far wall, a worn leather sofa faced it, and a galley kitchen hugged the side. Above the mantel hung a single photograph: the Northern Lights over a glacier, green tendrils bleeding into violet.

Hunter Wei moved with economical violence. He kicked snow from his boots, shrugged off his parka to reveal a faded Canucks hoodie, and went straight to the fireplace. Within minutes, flames were licking dry birch logs.

“Take off the wet layers,” he said without turning. “Hypothermia makes terrible conversation.”

Stella stood just inside the door, melting snow pooling at her feet. Her legal mind was running damage assessments. Location: unknown. Asset: one hostile witness. Threat level: ambiguous. Exit strategy: none.

She unzipped her parka, hung it on a peg. Her cashmere sweater was damp at the collar.

“You said my father hired you.”

“Two weeks before he died.” Hunter stood, brushing bark from his hands. “Paid in cash. Asked me to take him to specific coordinates. Remote places. Not tourist spots.”

“Why you?”

His grey eyes met hers. “Because I know how to get lost. And how to find things people don’t want found.”

He walked to the kitchen, filled a kettle from a jug. “He was looking for something. Not geological. Not mythological. Something… personal.”

The fire popped, sending up a shower of sparks.

“What?” Stella’s voice was tighter than she intended.

Hunter set the kettle on the woodstove. “He never said. But he carried a locked metal case. Never opened it in front of me. The last day…” He paused, his back to her. “He was agitated. Said he’d made a mistake. That some truths should stay buried.”

Stella’s fingers found the key in her pocket. Cold brass. The deposit box.

“Did he mention a key?”

Hunter turned. His gaze dropped to her hand, still in her pocket. “No. But he did give me something. The night before the hospital.”

He crossed to a battered wooden desk, opened a drawer. Pulled out a sealed envelope, yellowed at the edges.

He held it out. Her name was on the front, in her father’s handwriting. But it wasn’t addressed. Just Stella.

“He said to give it to you if you ever came looking.” Hunter’s expression was unreadable. “I didn’t expect it to be like this.”

She took the envelope. It was heavier than paper should be. Something solid inside.

“Why didn’t you mail it?”

“He asked me not to. Said it had to be hand-to-hand. For accountability.” A faint, bitter smile touched his lips. “I think he knew I’d need to look you in the eye when you read it.”

The kettle whistled. Hunter poured two mugs of black tea, slid one across the counter toward her.

Stella didn’t open the envelope. Not yet. “The photograph. On the black sand beach. You saw it.”

“Yes.”

“Did you recognize the woman?”

He leaned against the counter, mug cradled in his scarred hands. “No. But your father… he looked at it like it was a holy relic and a curse all at once.” He took a sip. “He said the photographer saved his life once. And ruined it, too.”

Saved and ruined. The contradiction hung in the smoky air.

Stella’s phone, laid on the counter, lit up. A notification. Then another. Signal was back—weak, but present.

She picked it up. Two new emails.

The first, from the same random sender as before: PHOTOGRAPHER.

The second, from her mother’s personal account. Subject: Come Home.

Her thumb hovered over the screen.

“Don’t,” Hunter said quietly.

She looked up.

“If they could cut your brakes, they can track your phone.” He nodded at the device. “That’s a beacon.”

“My mother—”

“—sent you to Iceland with a key and a cryptic message about cello winds,” he finished, his voice flat. “How did she know you’d come here, Stella? How did anyone know?”

The question, spoken aloud, was chilling.

She opened her mother’s email.

Stella,

This foolishness has gone on long enough. Your father’s fantasies were just that—fantasies. There is nothing for you in Iceland but cold and regret. Come home. We will find you a position with the orchestra’s legal team. It is respectable. It is safe.

Do not make me intervene.

—Mother

The tone was classic Lin Yawen: imperious, dismissive, veiling a threat in concern.

“Intervene,” Stella read aloud.

Hunter had moved closer, reading over her shoulder. His proximity was suddenly, acutely tangible. Heat radiated from him. The scent of woodsmoke and cold skin.

“She knows you’re here,” he said.

“She knows I planned to be here. Not that I’m alive.”

“You think that email sounds like a woman wondering if her daughter is alive?” He shook his head. “She knows you survived the crash. Or she never expected it to kill you.”

Stella’s thumb moved to the other email. The PHOTOGRAPHER one.

“Don’t,” Hunter said again, but she’d already tapped it.

No text. Just an attachment. A high-resolution scan of a photograph.

Not the black sand beach.

This was a hospital room. A younger version of her father, maybe forty, in a hospital bed, face pale but smiling. Beside him, a woman sat in a chair, her hand on his. She was beautiful in a sharp, intelligent way—short dark hair, eyes that held the camera with unsettling directness.

And standing at the foot of the bed, holding the camera visible in a mirror’s reflection, was a teenage boy. Tall, awkward. Unmistakably a young Hunter Wei.

Stella’s breath caught.

The woman was the same one from the black sand photo.

The teenage Hunter had taken both pictures.

Her father’s words echoed: “When you discover who took this photograph, you will finally understand why I had to leave.”

And now she knew.

She looked up at the man beside her. Thirty-two, not fifteen. Hard where the boy had been soft. But the eyes were the same.

“It was you,” she whispered.

Hunter looked at the photo on her screen. His face went still, all expression draining away.

“That’s my aunt,” he said, his voice hollow. “Li Xia.”

“She’s the woman on the black sand.”

“Yes.”

“And you took the pictures.”

A long silence. The fire crackled.

“My father hired you because of her,” Stella said, the connections snapping into place. “Not despite who I am to you. Because of it.”

Hunter took the phone from her hand, stared at the image. “My aunt died in Iceland,” he said slowly, as if piecing it together himself. “Twenty-eight years ago. Childbirth. The baby died too. Or so we were told.”

He looked at her, the grey eyes sharp with dawning horror.

“Your father was here twenty-eight years ago. Doing fieldwork.”

The math hung between them, brutal and simple.

Stella’s hand went to the envelope from her father. She tore it open.

A letter. And a smaller, sealed envelope inside, addressed in the same hand: For Li Xia’s Daughter.

Her fingers trembled as she unfolded her father’s letter.

My dearest Stella,

If you are reading this, you have met Hunter. And you know now about the photographs. About Li Xia.

I loved her. It is that simple, and that complicated. She was my student, then my colleague, then the great, unmanageable truth of my life. Your mother knew. We had an arrangement—a cold, practical truce. Until Li Xia became pregnant.

We planned to leave. All of us. Li Xia, the baby, and I. Your mother… did not accept that.

What happened next, I have spent twenty-eight years trying to undo. I failed.

The locked case I carried in Iceland contains the proof. The truth about Li Xia’s death. About the baby who did not die.

The key I left you opens more than a bank box, Stella. It opens a grave. And some graves should never be opened.

Forgive me. For all of it.

—Your father

P.S. The photographer is not the key. He is the lock. Hunter holds the other half of this truth. Whether he knows it or not.

Stella lowered the letter. The smaller envelope felt like a live wire in her hand. For Li Xia’s Daughter.

Hunter was watching her, his face pale. “What does it say?”

She handed him her father’s letter.

He read it. His knuckles whitened around the paper. When he looked up, his eyes were shattered.

“The baby lived,” he said, the words raw.

Stella held up the smaller envelope. “This is addressed to her.”

Their eyes locked. In that moment, the past three years—the lawsuit, the hatred, the professional vitriol—dissolved into irrelevance. They were standing on the edge of a cliff their parents had built twenty-eight years ago.

A heavy thud shook the cabin door.

Then another. Not wind.

Someone was outside.

Hunter moved instantly. He grabbed Stella’s arm, pulled her away from the windows, toward the back wall.

“The case,” he hissed. “My aunt’s death. The baby. That’s what someone is trying to bury. And we just started digging.”

Another thud. Wood splintered around the door’s bolt.

Hunter shoved the letter and the envelope into her hands. “There’s a trapdoor. In the bedroom. Leads to a storage cellar. Go. Now.”

“What about you?”

His smile was all sharp edges. “I’ve been waiting for this fight for three years.”

The door burst open.

Snow and darkness swirled in. And a silhouette, backlit by a vehicle’s headlights, filled the frame.

Stella didn’t wait. She turned and ran for the back room, her father’s secrets clutched to her chest, Hunter’s final words chasing her into the dark:

“Find the case, Stella! It’s the only thing that can save us now!”