Sneaky peek of Chapter One.
Enjoy!
Hudson Kane spotted the tail outside Fairbanks.
A black SUV holding its distance. Three cars back on the highway, dropping to four when the road thinned. Never closer. Forty minutes confirmed it wasn’t a coincidence. His travel plans weren’t public, but someone knew he was heading to Aurora Cove anyway and had decided that was a problem worth resourcing.
Hudson filed that away and kept driving.
The junction for the Smithton access road came up on his right. The last decent intersection before the roads narrowed and options ran out.
Three hundred yards out, Hudson signaled left.
The SUV did the same.
At the last possible moment, Hudson yanked the wheel hard right. The rental protested, but in the rearview the SUV was already committed, momentum and surprise doing the work for him. Brake lights flared red in the gray afternoon as they realized what had happened.
By the time they corrected, he was already under the trees, the access road closing around the car like a hand.
Half a mile in, a narrow logging spur disappeared between the spruce. Two hundred yards of bumpy track and the access road ended at an abandoned weigh station. He turned and backed the rental into the logging spur until the trees concealed the car.
From the road, he’d be invisible but he could see everything. He killed the engine and waited, thumbs tapping against the steering wheel. Four minutes later, the SUV eased down the access road at a crawl, headlights probing the tree line. It rolled past the logging spur without slowing, taillights and dust dissolving into the gray.
He gave it ninety seconds.
Reverse lights flared white through the trees.
Hudson started the rental and pulled out of the spur without hurrying. He met them nose to nose, sixty yards out, and stopped dead in the center of the track. The SUV lurched to a stop, rocking on its springs.
For a second, nothing moved. Two vehicles facing each other in the dying light, engines idling, nobody blinking first.
Hudson was out of the car before the SUV’s engine died. The cold sliced through him like fresh steel. He didn’t run. Running was for people who hadn’t already decided how this ended. He walked hands loose at his sides, boots crunching over frozen stones as though he had all the time in the world.
His pursuers broke in opposite directions.
The one on the left had a head start and used it, crashing off the road into the spruce, branches whipping shut behind him. Hudson let him go. The other made it four steps.
Hudson caught him before he’d reached the trees.
A fistful of jacket. A sharp turn. The man’s own momentum did the rest. His back hit the nearest pine, driving the breath from his lungs. Wide-eyed, he stared at Hudson.
Hudson leaned in until they were almost eye to eye. “Let’s talk about who sent you.”
The man’s hand flew to his jacket and found nothing.
Hudson twirled the pistol once before dropping the magazine into his palm. “Looking for this?”
“—the fuck? You’re making a mistake.” The man’s words came too fast, tripping over each other. “You don’t know who you’re—”
“I know exactly who I’m dealing with.” Hudson tossed the unloaded pistol into the brush without looking. He leaned a fraction closer. “A guy who ditches his partner and drives into a dead end.”
Color came up the man’s neck, anger chasing out the fear. “Screw you. You think this is over? You think—”
“I think you’re going to tell me who sent you.” Hudson said it the way another man might mention the weather.
“Go to hell.”
Hudson waited. Experience had taught him most men couldn’t stand silence. They filled it themselves if you let it breathe. The man lasted eighteen seconds.
“I don’t know what—”
“Contact,” Hudson said. “A number, an app. A guy in a bar. However it came to you. Who paid you to sit on me all the way from Fairbanks?”
“I don’t—” The man recalculated. “It was a broker. Some guy online. We do repo work, skip tracing, whatever pays. Job comes in, we don’t ask who’s behind it.”
It had the ugly, unglamorous ring of truth. Cutouts. Layers, so a conversation like this one would dead-end exactly here.
“Description.”
The man shook his head.
“Payment method. Anything.”
“Crypto. Guy never showed his face, some blocked number texted coordinates and a photo of you.” He swallowed, sweat beading his forehead despite the cold. “That’s it. That’s everything, man, I swear to God.”
The pulse in the man’s neck never changed as he held Hudson’s gaze. Hudson believed him. It was the smart way to run an op. He straightened. Just another locked door, and Aurora Cove was still hours up the road.
Quickly, he searched the man. Wallet. Cash. A gym membership card. A driver’s license that was probably genuine—men this disposable rarely bothered with good fake IDs. Keys. A rental fob.
Nothing useful.
But inside a jacket pocket, the one the man’s hand had twitched toward earlier. A second phone.
Cheap. Prepaid. One you bought with cash at a gas station and threw in a lake when you were done with it. Hudson powered it on. No lock code—nobody protected a phone that was already meant to be disposable.
One conversation.
Confirm location by 1800.
No contact name or photo. Just a string of numbers that would be dead by morning. The message was unread, which meant whoever had sent it still thought Hudson Kane was somewhere out on the highway, blissfully unaware he was being followed.
The phone disappeared into his pocket. “Get up.”
The man didn’t move.
“Go find your partner.”
Slowly, the man climbed to his feet, and Hudson stepped aside. “Next time, send professionals.”
The man didn’t argue. He took off.
***
The sign for Aurora Cove appeared out of the treeline like an old scar. The road narrowed, hemmed in by spruce and bare birch beneath a pewter sky. Snow banked both sides. He could have driven this road blindfolded.
He and Wyatt had driven it a hundred times before either of them knew enough to be afraid. Dirt bikes. Frozen lakes. Wind in his face. Wyatt laughing somewhere behind him, damn near falling off his bike. Bad decisions that had somehow never caught up with them. It felt like someone else’s life.
The town emerged in familiar pieces—the gas station, the hardware store, Benji’s diner with a fresh coat of paint. Everything else looked exactly the same.
Hudson wasn’t sure whether that was comforting or cruel.
The folder lay untouched on the passenger seat. He knew every page by heart. Every photograph. Every reported sighting. Every dead end. Three years of chasing a ghost.
He’d pulled strings to get assigned to Aurora Cove. Nobody else would recognize what they were looking at. Or understand what it had cost. He wasn’t leaving Alaska without Cord. Whatever it took.
Wyatt would be pissed to find out later that he’d rolled into town without a text. He’d call him. Just not yet. Not until the case was further along and he had a reason for being here that didn’t require him to explain anything he wasn’t ready to explain.
He shut the second name down before it had a chance to surface.
Enough history.
***
He parked outside the first bar he came to and let the engine tick down before he moved. He smelled Aurora Cove before he was fully out of the car.
Snow. Cold air so clean it almost hurt. Resin beneath it. November in Alaska smelled like the church he’d attended every Sunday as a boy. Still. Ancient. Indifferent to whatever you brought into it.
He stood beside the rental and drew in a slow breath. His lungs tightened. He waited it out.
Fifteen seconds was long enough for the familiar resistance to ease. There had been a time he wouldn’t have noticed the air at all. Now he measured it, adjusted to it, and carried on.
Hudson picked up the folder, locked the car, and went to find a bar.
