Chapter 6 - Cracks in the Glass
The master bedroom of our home in Bozeman had always been my sanctuary.
It had vaulted cedar ceilings, a stone fireplace that burned aromatic pinon wood, and large windows that framed the snow-covered peaks of the Bridger Range.
At 0130 hours, it became an abattoir of the mind.
Dominic lay on the king-sized mattress, tangled in the high-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets. Next to him, Elena slept soundly, her rhythmic breathing soft and untroubled, her face half-buried in a down pillow.
The room was eighty degrees. Dominic had turned the thermostat up to the maximum setting before going to bed, trying to scrub the memory of the frozen mountain air from his skin.
A faint click echoed from the baseboards.
Slowly, deliberately, the high-efficiency heat pump reversed its cycle.
The motorized dampers in the attic vents slid open with a soft, lubricated hiss. The outdoor sub-zero air—twelve below zero tonight—began to pour directly into the master suite through the floor vents, driven by two commercial-grade blowers operating at maximum capacity.
Within twenty minutes, the temperature in the bedroom dropped forty degrees.
Dominic shivered violently in his sleep, pulling the duvet up around his chin.
Then came the sound.
It didn't come from the hallway. It came through the high-end ceiling speakers, disguised beneath the faint hiss of the heating vents: the rhythmic, mechanical crunch of boots walking through deep snow.
*Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.*
Dominic’s eyes snapped open.
He lay frozen in the dark, his breath pluming in front of his face in white, misty clouds.
"What the..." he whispered, his teeth chattering uncontrollably.
He looked around the room. The air was so cold his nostrils stuck together when he inhaled. The frost had gathered on the inside of the double-paned windows, feathering the glass in intricate, jagged patterns of ice.
"Elena," he hissed, shaking her shoulder. "Elena, wake up!"
Elena groaned, pulling the blanket over her head. "Dom, stop... it's freezing..."
"Why is it so cold in here?" Dominic kicked the blankets off and swung his legs out of bed. The hardwood floor felt like a sheet of lake ice against his bare feet. He gasped, pulling his feet back up onto the mattress. "The furnace must have died."
He reached for the remote control on the nightstand to check the smart home monitor.
His fingers touched cold metal.
It wasn't the remote.
Dominic pulled his hand back as if he had touched a live wire.
He reached over and clicked the bedside lamp on.
Sitting on the polished mahogany nightstand, resting precisely in the center of his leather-bound journal, was a pair of military dog tags.
They were standard-issue stainless steel, dull and scratched from three combat deployments, strung on a beaded steel chain.
Dominic’s eyes widened until the whites showed all the way around his irises.
He leaned forward, his hands shaking so violently he could barely pinch the metal between his fingers.
He read the stamped lettering:
**CROSS, MAYA A.**
**O-POS**
**US ARMY — SPECIAL FORCES**
"No," Dominic breathed, his voice cracking into a high, hysterical pitch. "No, no, no..."
He had personally taken those tags off my neck while I was half-asleep in the truck outside the cabin. He had watched them drop into the bottom of my technical pack before he tossed the bag into the river draw five miles out.
"Elena!" he screamed, grabbing her by the arm and dragging her upright. "Look at this! LOOK AT THIS!"
Elena blinked against the sudden lamp light, her face pale, shivering uncontrollably in the freezing air. "What is wrong with you? Why is it so cold in here?"
"The tags!" Dominic shrieked, shoving the stainless steel plates into her face. "Her tags! They were in her bag! I threw them in the river!"
Elena snatched the tags from his hand, inspecting them with cold, analytical eyes. Her initial panic faded, replaced by a sharp, venomous anger.
"Did you actually see them go into the water, Dominic?" she demanded, her voice sharp as broken glass.
"Yes! I threw the whole bag off the bridge!"
"Then somebody found them," Elena hissed, throwing the tags onto the floor. "Her sergeant. That massive brute who was here earlier. He’s messing with you. He’s trying to shake you down before the memorial to see if you crack!"
"In my bedroom?" Dominic was hyperventilating now, spinning around in circles in the freezing room, clutching his chest. "How did he get inside the house? The security system has three separate perimeter alarms! The gate didn't trigger!"
As if on cue, the lights in the master bedroom flickered twice and died.
Total darkness plunged over the suite.
Then, from the smart speakers embedded in the four corners of the room, a voice began to play.
It wasn't a recording of my voice.
It was the audio feed from the cabin window, captured through my smartwatch before Dominic threw it into the snow:
*"Dominic! What are you doing? Let me out!"*
The audio looped, the voice distorted by digital static, echoing through the master suite like a ghost trapped inside the walls.
*"Dominic! Let me out!"*
"SHUT IT OFF!" Dominic roared, lunging toward the wall unit, slamming his fists into the touchscreen interface. "SHUT IT OFF, ELENA! SHUT IT OFF!"
Elena leaped from the bed, her expensive silk pajamas offering zero protection against the bitter chill. She snatched her phone from the charging pad, frantically tapping the screen.
"The server isn't responding!" she screamed over the looped audio. "The gateway has been rerouted! Dominic, calm down! It's a digital hack! Someone is spoofing the IP address from the street!"
She ran to the bedroom window, scraping the frost away with her fingernails, staring down at the sweeping driveway below.
Parked two hundred yards down the lane, half-hidden beneath the heavy pine trees near the entrance gate, sat a blacked-out SUV.
Its headlights flicked on.
Two piercing beams of high-intensity white light cut through the falling snow, illuminating the master bedroom window with blinding, surgical brilliance.
Elena shielded her eyes, her heart pounding against her ribs.
Behind the wheel of the vehicle, illuminated by the dashboard glow, sat a silhouette.
A woman in a military combat jacket, wearing a black watch cap pulled low over her brow.
The woman raised her right hand to the brim of her cap.
A slow, deliberate, mocking salute.
Then the high beams clicked off, plunging the driveway back into impenetrable darkness.
Elena stepped back from the glass, her face completely drained of color, her fingers trembling as she gripped the windowsill.
"Dominic," she whispered, her voice barely audible over the screaming audio loop.
"What?" Dominic sobbed from the floor, his head between his knees, hands clamped over his ears. "What did you see?"
Elena turned to look at him, her eyes wide with the realization that the trap they had built had snapped shut around their own throats.
May you like
"She’s not on the mountain," Elena said.
***
