Chapter 126 - 125 Saving A Stranger
[EMILY]
The Blackridge Mountains do not welcome the living. They are a jagged, frozen fortress of ancient granite and unforgiving weather, entirely hostile to human existence.
Three years ago, I learned exactly how hostile they could be.
I was entirely alone, navigating the steep, treacherous incline of Blackwood Gorge in the absolute dead of night. My cheap canvas backpack cut painfully into my shoulders. The heavy industrial flashlight in my gloved hand was the only source of illumination in a world completely swallowed by darkness. According to the geological survey maps I had memorized, I was exactly half an hour away from the specific, lightless cliff crevices where the Crimson Bloodvine grew.
I was exhausted. The sub-zero temperature was relentlessly biting through the three layers of wool clothing I wore, turning the moisture in my breath into tiny, freezing crystals against my scarf.
Then, the mountain decided to escalate its cruelty.
Without any warning, the barometric pressure completely plummeted. The weather changed with terrifying, premature violence. The ambient wind, which had been a steady, howling nuisance, suddenly violently intensified into a shrieking gale. The light dusting of snow instantly transformed into a blinding, horizontal blizzard.
I lowered my head, shielding my eyes from the biting ice, and forced my frozen boots to keep moving forward. I swept the beam of my industrial flashlight back and forth across the deep snowdrifts, desperately searching for the edge of the tree line to use as a navigational marker.
The bright, white beam cut through the swirling storm. It illuminated the frosted trunk of a massive pine tree, swept across a cluster of jagged boulders, and then completely halted.
The beam caught something entirely unnatural on the forest floor.
It was not a rock. It was not a fallen branch. It was fabric.
I froze instantly. My heart executed a sudden, violent stutter against my ribs. I tightened my grip on the heavy flashlight, slowly inching the beam back to the left, illuminating the center of a small, trampled clearing.
Lying flat on his back in the deep snow was a man.
He was absolutely massive, with incredibly broad shoulders and a heavily muscled frame. But he was completely ruined. He was wearing a bespoke, charcoal wool suit jacket that had been shredded and torn. Surrounding his torso, rapidly melting the pristine white snow beneath him, was a massive, expanding pool of bright, steaming crimson blood.
My breath caught in my throat. My logical, analytical brain immediately shifted into hyper-drive, scanning the perimeter around his broken body.
Exactly three feet away from his right hand, resting starkly against the white snow, was a heavy, matte-black handgun. A few feet beyond the weapon, a large smartphone lay half-buried in the ice, its shattered glass screen emitting a faint, dying glow.
I took a slow, terrified step backward.
This was not a lost hiker. This was not a civilian who had suffered a tragic mountaineering accident. Ordinary people do not hike into Blackwood Gorge at midnight wearing tailored corporate suits, and they certainly do not carry heavy, tactical firearms.
This was the aftermath of a highly professional, highly violent execution.
My survival instincts screamed at me with deafening clarity. Turn around. Walk away. Take a wide detour around this clearing and disappear into the trees. In the city of Asuir, you do not involve yourself in the affairs of men who bleed out in the snow with guns by their sides. If the people who shot him were still nearby, if they saw the beam of my flashlight, I would be slaughtered without a second thought.
I pivoted on my heel. I aimed my flashlight toward the dense brush on the right, fully intending to vanish into the shadows and leave the dying man to the mountain.
Then, a sound completely shattered the howling wind.
It was a cry for help. But it was not a word. It was a raw, guttural, terrifying roar of absolute, unadulterated agony. It was the primal, desperate sound of a human soul violently tearing apart, begging the dark, empty universe for a single sliver of salvation.
The sound hit me like a physical blow to the spine.
I stopped. My boots locked into the freezing mud beneath the snow.
I am a woman forged in cold logic and ruthless ambition, but I am not a sociopath. I am fundamentally, deeply kind-hearted by nature. The agonizing, visceral desperation in that single, broken cry completely paralyzed my survival instincts. I thought of my grandmother, dying in a sterile hospital bed while the machines beeped in the background, completely helpless and entirely alone.
I could not leave him.
I turned back around. I swallowed the thick, suffocating knot of terror blocking my airway.
I stepped cautiously into the clearing, moving with agonizing slowness, my eyes darting frantically between the dark tree line and the bleeding man. I did not approach his body directly. My first priority was neutralizing the immediate threat matrix.
I knelt in the snow and reached out with a trembling, gloved hand. I grabbed the cold, heavy steel grip of the matte-black handgun. It was a Glock 19. The sheer weight of the weapon was shocking. I stood up, gripping the firearm tightly in my right hand, pointing my flashlight with my left. The weapon provided a fragile, entirely false sense of security, but it gave me the courage to close the final few feet.
I stepped directly over the massive pool of blood and shone the flashlight onto his face.
The man was terrifyingly handsome, his features carved with the sharp, aristocratic precision of old money. But his face was completely pale, drained of blood, and covered in a fine layer of freezing sweat.
I quickly scanned his torso. He had been shot. Multiple times. I could see the devastating entry wounds—one completely shattering his left collarbone, another piercing his ribcage, and a third destroying his right thigh.
"Can you hear me?" I whispered, my voice trembling violently in the cold. "Who did this to you?"
He did not turn his head toward the sound of my voice.
I leaned closer, shining the beam of light directly across his eyes. His pupils were massively dilated, swallowing the dark green irises almost entirely. They did not constrict in the bright light. He stared blankly, unseeingly, straight up at the falling snow.
He was completely blind.
He was also entirely paralyzed. His massive chest rose and fell in shallow, jagged gasps, but his limbs remained terrifyingly motionless. He could not speak. He could not answer my frantic questions. He was a prisoner locked inside his own dying body.
Suddenly, I noticed a microscopic, desperate movement.
The index finger of his right hand was weakly scraping against the frozen earth. He was dragging his nail through the dirt, attempting to form geometric shapes.
He was trying to write.
I immediately understood. I dropped the heavy handgun into the snow beside me. I unzipped the front pocket of my canvas backpack and frantically dug out my battered leather notebook and a cheap, plastic ballpoint pen.
I placed the notebook on the ground. I tried to press the pen into his palm, but his fingers were entirely dead. They lacked the muscular tension required to grip the plastic barrel. The pen slipped uselessly into the snow.
He let out a harsh, defeated exhale through his nose, a sound of absolute, crushing despair.
I did not hesitate. I pulled off my heavy winter gloves.
I reached down and wrapped my bare hands entirely around his massive, blood-stained knuckles. His skin was terrifyingly cold, like touching solid, frozen marble. I forcefully curled his stiff fingers around the pen, locking them into position. I pressed the ballpoint against the yellowed paper of my notebook.
He felt the resistance of the page. Using a monumental, agonizing exertion of willpower, he forced his arm to twitch.
I provided the physical strength, guiding his hand as he dictated the microscopic movements. It was a chaotic, desperate struggle against his failing nervous system.
Together, we dragged the pen across the paper. A one. A zero.
We slowly, painstakingly carved a string of ten crooked, jagged numbers into the bottom corner of the notebook. It was a direct, ten-digit SOS line.
The moment the final number was written, his arm went completely limp. I gently released his hand, letting it fall back into the snow.
I stared at the ten digits. I needed to make the call immediately. He was actively bleeding out, and the catastrophic drop in his core temperature was pushing him rapidly toward severe thermal shock.
I reached into my coat pocket, my fingers brushing against the cheap, prepaid cell phone I had brought for emergencies.
I stopped.
My analytical mind violently engaged. If I dialed a highly secure, private emergency line from my personal phone, the digital footprint would be permanent. Whoever answered that number would trace the call. They would find my location, my identity, and my connection to the Vance family. If the men who shot him intercepted the signal, they would hunt me down to eliminate a witness. I was an eighteen-year-old girl operating entirely in the shadows. To survive, I absolutely had to remain a ghost.
I looked down at the snow.
Resting a few feet away was the man’s smartphone. The glass screen was heavily spider-webbed with cracks from the fall, but the internal backlight was still glowing faintly in the dark.
I crawled forward and picked it up.
I pressed the power button. The shattered screen illuminated, displaying a stark, highly encrypted lock screen. It did not ask for a passcode. A small icon at the top indicated it required biometric facial recognition. Face ID.
I crawled back to his side.
I reached out with my bare hand, gently wiping a streak of freezing blood away from his sharp cheekbone. I held the shattered smartphone directly over his face, angling the front-facing camera to capture his features in the dim light of my flashlight.
The device scanned his face.
A small, green padlock icon flashed on the screen, followed by a soft, electronic click.
The phone unlocked.
I quickly pulled the device back, my thumbs flying rapidly across the cracked glass keypad. I manually punched in the ten crooked, jagged digits we had just written in my leather notebook.
I held my breath, the freezing wind howling violently around my shoulders, and pressed the green call icon.
I lifted the shattered phone to my ear.
The line did not ring multiple times. It connected almost instantaneously, completely bypassing standard cellular networks.
There was a split second of dead, absolute silence on the line.
Then, a man’s voice cut through the speaker. It was not a customer service operator. It was a voice forged in cold, lethal, paramilitary discipline. It was sharp, terrifying, and completely devoid of any warmth.
"Secure line activated," the voice stated sternly, echoing with a dark, unyielding authority. "State your identity and your operational status immediately."