Fell For The Wrong Billionaire

Chapter 2: Footsteps In The Snow

I didn't sleep. I just couldn't.

I lay in the dark, eyes open, my whole body strung tight enough to ache. Every creak of the cabin settling snapped my heart against my ribs. Every gust against the glass sounded, for one half-second, like a hand.

Around four, I stopped pretending sleep was coming and got up instead.

You're being ridiculous. Pulling on my boots, I fumbled the laces twice before I got them right.

I grabbed the flashlight from the kitchen drawer. Then, after a pause that embarrassed me even alone in an empty room, Mara's old hunting knife from the cabinet by the door. I'd never used it for anything sharper than rope. I gripped it now like it might save me, and hated how much I needed to believe that.

The porch light didn't reach far enough. I stepped outside, into cold sharp enough to press the breath out of my lungs.

The footprints were still there.

I followed the flashlight beam down the steps, across the yard. Deep. Clean-edged. Not the wandering stumble of someone lost — it looked steadier. Suggesting someone had stood still a while before deciding to leave.

They stopped directly beneath my bedroom window. I stood over the mark, flashlight shaking in my grip, and thought about three feet of glass and how thin that actually was.

A hunter, I told myself again. The words felt thinner every time.

I followed the trail the other way, toward the tree line, my boots too loud in a silence that felt like it was listening back. The prints led straight into the trees and then — nothing. No path in. No sign of where he'd come from. Just snow, undisturbed, like he'd appeared at the edge of my yard and stood there long enough to leave a mark before dissolving back into the dark.

I didn't wait to find out if I was right about being watched.

I turned and walked — fast, not quite running, because running meant admitting something. Back inside, I locked the door. Then checked every window twice.

‘Just a hunter’, I whispered, climbing into a bed that no longer felt like mine.

I almost believed it by sunrise.

By midmorning the fear had folded down into something small enough to carry without it showing on my face. I'd had a lot of practice at that.

I made coffee. Worked in the shop, though my hands kept stalling on the same patch of wood, my eyes drifting to the window every few minutes.

I needed supplies — stain, sandpaper, groceries I'd been putting off. Good enough excuse. If some quiet part of me was grateful for a reason to put miles between myself and a set of footprints leading nowhere, I didn't look at that too closely.

The drive into town took forty minutes on a good day, the road curling through the pines in switchbacks steep enough to make strangers nervous. I knew this road. I didn't know what today was going to ask of me.

The sky had already gone that low, flat gray mountain people learn to read like a warning.

I was wrong about how much time I had.

By the time I left the store, the wind had turned vicious. Twenty minutes back up the mountain, the snow came down so hard my headlights carved three feet of visibility out of the white. I slowed to a crawl, both hands locked on the wheel.

I just wanted to get home.

That was when my headlights caught him.

A shape at the edge of the road, staggering, one arm clamped hard against his side. For half a second my mind tried to explain it away — a shadow thrown wrong. Then he lurched into the light. Dark stain, spreading down his side. Black against white. Too much of it.

I hit the brakes. The truck fishtailed, tires screaming, my body thrown against the belt hard enough to bruise.

He didn't move out of the way. I don't think he saw me at all.

He went down before I'd stopped, knees first, then folding sideways into the snow like something inside him had stopped holding him together.

I sat there, hands locked on the wheel, breath fogging the windshield in short bursts.

‘Drive away.’

The thought arrived cold and clear, in a voice that sounded uncomfortably like Mara's. ‘You don't know him. You don't know what he's done’.

I was already unbuckling my seatbelt.

I don't remember deciding to get out. Just the cold slamming into me, the wind screaming past my ears, my boots sinking into snow already ankle-deep as I ran.

He was face-down when I reached him, one arm curled beneath his body, snow already gathering in his hair. I dropped to my knees and rolled him over. My hands weren't steady enough to be gentle, though I tried.

He was breathing. Barely. Each pull of air ragged, like it cost him something to take it.

Dark hair plastered wet against his forehead. A jaw set hard even though he was unconscious. His coat had fallen open — the wound was high on his side, blood soaking black through his shirt, spreading with every heartbeat.

A gunshot. I'd never seen one in my life and some part of me still knew exactly what I was looking at.

"Hey." My voice cracked, swallowed by the wind. "Can you hear me?"

His eyes opened barely, a thin sliver of dark, searching for my face through the snow.

"I need to get you help." I reached for my phone. "I'm calling…"

His hand shot up and closed around my wrist.

The grip stunned me — strong, urgent, nothing like it should have belonged to a man who could barely keep his eyes open. His fingers dug in hard enough to leave marks.

"Don't." The word tore out of him, barely a whisper. "Don't call the police."

"You've been shot."

"Please."

Not just fear in his voice. Something closer to a man asking the last stranger left in the world for the one thing that might keep him alive.

His grip loosened. His hand fell back into the snow, eyes rolling shut.

For one second I thought that was it.

Then his chest rose again. Shallow. Uneven. But there.

My hands were still shaking, but I found myself patting down his coat anyway, searching for anything that would tell me who he was.

My fingers closed around something cold and heavy in his pocket. I pulled it free.

A watch. The kind of expensive that had no business existing on this road, in this storm, on a man bleeding out at my knees. Heavy gold, the leather band still faintly warm.

I turned it over.

Engraved along the back, small and precise, a single word.

‘Sinclair’

The wind, the snow, the blood soaking into my jeans — all of it narrowed down to that word sitting cold in my palm.

‘Never trust a Sinclair.’

Her voice. The woman whose face I'd never once been able to hold onto, cutting through twenty years of buried nightmares to land here, now, with a stranger's blood on my hands.

Except he wasn't dead yet. And I'd already decided he wasn't going to be.

"I've got you.” My voice came out shaking. “Stay with me."

Getting him into the truck was its own small war. He was tall, heavy with muscle even unconscious, dead weight sagging against my shoulder as I hauled him upright and half-dragged him the last few feet. My arms burned. My boots slid on packed snow. His head lolled against me, and something about the helplessness of it sat wrong in my chest.

I had him braced against the seat, one hand on the door frame to keep him from sliding back into the snow, when I heard it.

A sound tearing through the wind. Sharp. Unmistakable.

A gunshot.

Another.

Then a third, rolling off the mountainside from somewhere back in the trees. Not close yet.

My whole body went rigid.

I froze with my hand still on the door, staring back into the swirling white, straining to hear past my own pulse in my ears.

They weren't warning shots. They weren't hunters.

Someone was firing at something. Or someone.

Whoever they were looking for — I had a horrible, certain feeling I was staring right at him, slumped in my passenger seat, his hand still curled loosely around my wrist like he couldn't quite let go, even unconscious.

I slammed the door, ran for the driver's side, and threw myself behind the wheel.

Whoever was out there wasn't just searching anymore.

They were getting closer.