Aurora’s Verdict

CHAPTER TWO: BRAKE LINES

December 25, 3:18 PM | Route 1, South Iceland

The storm didn’t start. It arrived.

One moment, the landscape was a monochrome study in grey—ash-coloured sky, graphite road, pewter mountains. The next, the world dissolved into a furious, screaming white. Stella’s rented Dacia Duster, which had felt reassuringly sturdy at Keflavík Airport, now shuddered like a frightened animal as crosswinds hammered its flanks.

She’d landed six hours ago. The flight had been a sleepless limbo. Her mother’s key, cold and heavy, sat in the zippered pocket of her parka, pressing against her ribs with every heartbeat. The photographer’s identity was a ghost haunting her peripheral vision.

The GPS blinked cheerfully: 32 km to Hótel Rangá. Her father’s first circled location on the scanned manuscript page. A place he’d scribbled: “Here, the sagas say the world tree’s roots touch water. I say the hot springs melt permafrost in interesting ways.”

Stella tightened her grip on the wheel. Her father’s academic whimsy had always been a language she understood only in translation. Her mother’s cello, she understood—clear, structured, emotive within strict boundaries. Her own language had been law: precedent, evidence, conclusion. Now, all three felt like dead languages.

A sign flashed past, almost invisible in the swirling snow: ÖNDVERDARNES. The name tugged at a memory. Her father’s voice, crackling over a bad phone line three years ago: “The Öndverdarnes wreck, Stella. A fishing trawler lost in ’73. They found it weeks later, perfectly preserved in a glacier’s embrace. Sometimes, the ice doesn’t destroy. It keeps things… waiting.”

Why had he told her that? A warning? A clue?

Her phone, plugged into the car’s charger, buzzed. A new email. The sender was a string of random characters. The subject line: PHOTOGRAPHER.

Her pulse spiked. She glanced down, just for a second.

That second was enough.

The Duster hit a patch of black ice she never saw. The back wheels lost purchase. The steering wheel went liquid in her hands. The world spun—a dizzying carousel of white and grey and the terrifying dark shape of a ravine rushing toward the passenger side.

Instinct took over. Years of London traffic, of calculating risk in milliseconds. She steered into the skid, pumped the brakes—

Nothing.

The pedal sank to the floor with a sickening, spongy emptiness.

No. No no no—

She yanked the emergency brake. The car shuddered, slowed slightly, but momentum was a cruel god. The Duster slewed sideways, slammed into the guardrail with a shriek of tearing metal, rebounded, and came to rest half on the road, half in the deepening drift, nose pointed toward the abyss.

Silence.

The kind of silence that rings in your ears after a catastrophe.

Snow piled onto the windshield, blotting out the world. The engine had stalled. The only sound was the wind’s manic howl and the creak of cooling metal.

Stella sat perfectly still, assessing the damage like it was a legal brief. Physical state: intact. Shaking, but intact. Vehicle state: disabled. Environmental state: lethal. Probability of another vehicle: approaching zero.

She reached for her phone. No signal. Of course.

A laugh, sharp and brittle, escaped her. Three years at Cromwell & Vale, negotiating billion-dollar deals where a misplaced comma could trigger lawsuits across continents, and she was going to die because of a patch of Icelandic ice and a dead brake line.

Brake line.

The thought cut through the panic. She’d had the car inspected at the rental agency. The young man with the cheerful “Jól!” beanie had stamped the form himself. All systems optimal.

She unclipped her seatbelt, the click unnaturally loud. Pushed the driver’s door against the weight of the snow. It gave with a groan. Icy wind knifed through her parka, stealing her breath.

She needed to see.

Stumbling around the front of the car, she knelt at the driver’s side front wheel. The light was failing, but it was enough. She brushed snow from the brake hose.

There. Not a rupture, not wear and tear.

A clean, precise cut. A quarter of the way through the rubber and reinforcement mesh. Enough to hold under gentle pressure. Enough to fail catastrophically under hard braking.

Someone had wanted her to crash.

The realization was colder than the wind.

A shape materialized in the white chaos behind her—a deeper shadow, growing larger. Headlights, haloed by the blizzard.

Salvation.

She stood, waving her arms, the rational part of her brain already drafting the explanation to the police. Yes, officer, the brakes failed. No, I didn’t see anyone near the car. Yes, I have enemies. Professionally speaking.

The vehicle was a jacked-up Toyota Land Cruiser, painted a matte grey that swallowed the weak light. It pulled to a stop ten feet away, its engine a low growl.

The driver’s door opened.

A man climbed out. He moved with the unthinking ease of someone completely at home in the elements, his silhouette massive against the storm. He wore a heavy-duty arctic parka, its fur-trimmed hood pulled up, shadowing his face.

“You alright?” His voice was a low baritone, frayed at the edges by the wind. It carried an accent she couldn’t place—North American, but softened by something else.

“Brakes failed,” Stella called back, her legal training forcing calm into her tone. “I think there’s damage to the line.”

The man didn’t respond immediately. He walked toward her, his boots crunching in the snow. He stopped beside the front wheel, looked down at the cut brake line she’d just uncovered. He was taller than she’d realized—taller than anyone had a right to be. He knelt, gloved fingers tracing the incision with a mechanic’s familiarity.

He went very still.

Then he looked up.

The hood shadowed his eyes, but she saw the lower half of his face: a strong jaw dusted with dark stubble, a mouth set in a hard line. His head tilted slightly, a predator’s assessing motion.

“Stella Shen,” he said. Not a question.

Every hair on her neck stood up. “Do I know you?”

He stood slowly, the movement deliberate. He pulled back his hood.

The wind tore at his black hair. His face was all angles—the kind of face that belonged on a mountain summit or a wartime portrait. But it was his eyes she registered first. A pale, glacial grey. And in them, a recognition so deep it felt like an old, festering wound.

And his left hand. As he pulled off his glove to brush snow from his brow, she saw it. The scar. A raised, cross-shaped knot of tissue on the back of his hand.

Her mind, the relentless database, supplied the file instantly.

Wei, Hunter. Former defenseman, Vancouver Canucks. Suffered a career-altering skate laceration to left dorsal hand during training, 2015. Visible identifying mark…

The opposing client. The son whose inheritance she had systematically dismantled. The man whose mother had wept silently in the back of the courtroom for three days.

The man whose father had paid her firm to make sure he lost.

Time didn’t slow. It fractured.

Here, in the middle of an Icelandic blizzard, stood the living, breathing embodiment of her most profound professional shame. And he was looking at the cut brake line on her car.

His glacial eyes moved from the brake line to her face. There was no shock in his expression. No surprise. Only a terrible, weary certainty.

“You need to get in my truck,” he said, his voice devoid of all inflection. “Now.”

“I’ll wait for the police,” Stella said, the words automatic. A lifetime of procedure.

Hunter Wei let out a short, harsh sound that wasn’t a laugh. “The nearest police are in Selfoss. In this?” He gestured at the maelstrom. “They won’t be coming. And the person who did this?” He nodded at the brake line. “They might be.”

He took a step closer. She caught the scent of him—cold air, diesel, and something faintly smoky. “That cut is professional. It’s not vandalism. It’s an execution. And they won’t have just hoped the crash would kill you. They’ll have followed to make sure.”

The wind screamed its agreement.

Stella’s gaze darted past him, into the swirling white. Nothing. Everything. A perfect place for an ambush.

Every instinct screamed at her not to get into a vehicle with this man. He had more reason to hate her than almost anyone on the planet.

But he was also right.

The cut was too clean. The timing too perfect. The location too isolated.

And he had known her name.

“Why would you help me?” she asked, her voice barely above the wind’s roar.

Hunter Wei’s expression didn’t change, but something flickered in those grey eyes—a bleak, ironic light. “Let’s just say I have a vested interest in you staying alive long enough to answer a few questions.”

He turned and walked back to his Land Cruiser without looking back, as if certain she would follow.

Stella stood frozen, the key in her pocket a brand against her skin. Her father’s key. The photographer’s secret.

The person who did this might be following.

She looked at her crippled Duster. She looked at the vast, hungry whiteness.

Then she walked to the passenger door of the Land Cruiser and pulled it open.

The interior was warm, smelling of old coffee and warm electronics. Hunter was already behind the wheel, his large hands resting on the leather cover. He didn’t look at her as she climbed in.

He put the truck in gear. The powerful engine purred as they pulled away, leaving her rental car to be swallowed by the snow.

For several minutes, the only sound was the wipers fighting a losing battle and the hiss of tires on snow.

“Where are we going?” Stella finally asked, her voice stiff.

“Somewhere off-grid,” he said, his eyes fixed on the invisible road. “My cabin. It’s the only place I can be sure they won’t look immediately.”

“They. Who are they?”

He finally glanced at her. The dashboard lights painted his profile in cold blue and green.

“You tell me, lawyer.” The word was a deliberate jab. “Who have you pissed off enough that they’d send a professional to cut your brakes on Christmas Day in the middle of f*****g nowhere?”

Stella met his gaze. “You tell me, Mr. Wei. You seem to know an awful lot about professional brake-line cuts.”

A muscle twitched in his jaw. He looked back at the road.

“I know a lot of things,” he said quietly, almost to himself. “Like how your father died three years ago in Reykjavík. How you didn’t make it to his bedside.”

The words were a physical blow. “That’s none of your business.”

“It became my business,” he said, his voice hardening, “when he showed up at my door two weeks before he died. When he hired me to be his guide. When he spent his last days showing me photos of you and asking me… strange questions.”

The world tilted again. Her father. Hiring Hunter Wei.

“What questions?”

Hunter didn’t answer immediately. He turned off the main road onto an even narrower track, invisible under the snow, navigated by memory alone.

“He asked me about loyalty,” Hunter said finally, each word measured. “About what it costs to betray your own blood to satisfy someone else’s idea of success.” He paused. “He was holding a photograph. An old one. Of a woman on a black sand beach.”

Stella’s breath caught. Her photograph.

“Did he…” Her throat was dry. “Did he tell you who took it?”

Hunter Wei slowed the truck to a crawl, peering into the white-out. A dark shape loomed ahead—a low, sturdy cabin, barely visible.

“No,” he said, pulling to a stop. He cut the engine. The sudden silence was profound.

He turned to face her fully, his grey eyes trapping her in the dim light.

“But he did say one thing, right before I dropped him at the hospital for the last time.” Hunter’s voice dropped to a near-whisper, forcing her to lean in.

“He said, ‘If anything happens to me, find my daughter. Tell her the photographer is the key. And tell her… her mother already knows.’”

The words hung in the frozen air between them.

Her mother already knows.

The cabin’s porch light flicked on, a feeble yellow eye in the storm.

Hunter Wei opened his door, letting in a blast of arctic air.

“Welcome to the safe house, Stella Shen,” he said, his tone grim.

“Now get inside. We have approximately twelve hours before whoever cut your brakes realizes you didn’t die in that ravine. And I have a feeling your mother’s knowledge is the clock we’re ticking against.”