“Boss,” he called out softly. “Tracks are fresh. Three, maybe four men. Heavy boots. Heading northeast.” Roman’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. “How fresh?” Dean knelt, touching the edge of a boot print in the soft earth. “Minutes. They could still be within half a mile.” The air in the clearing changed. All three men felt the shift from a rescue mission to something colder, sharper.
Roman looked at Maya. “Your mother, what’s her name?” “Ellen,” Maya whispered. “Ellen is going to be fine. My men will take care of her. But I need you to stay here with Victor while we…” — “No.” Maya’s grip on his jacket became desperate. “Don’t leave me, please. They’ll come back, they said they would.” — “They won’t,” Roman said again.
And this time, there was something in his voice that made the promise sound like a death sentence for someone else. “I’ll take care of it.” He gently pried Maya’s fingers from his jacket and guided her toward Victor, who had stripped off his own coat and draped it over Ellen’s unconscious form. “Stay with your mother,” Roman instructed. “Victor will keep you both safe. If anyone comes who isn’t us, he’ll handle it.”
Victor met Roman’s eyes and gave a single nod. His hand moved to rest on the sidearm hidden at his hip. Roman turned to Dean and Matt. No words were spoken; none were needed. The three men moved as one toward the northeast trail, leaving Victor crouched between Maya and her mother like a guardian angel in a tailored suit. Maya watched them vanish into the fog.
Her voice was a barely audible whisper. “Where is he going?” Victor checked Ellen’s pulse again. His expression was carefully neutral. “To send a message.” — “What kind of message?” Victor was silent for a long moment, listening to the woods. In the distance, through the heavy mist and ancient trees, he thought he heard voices, a shout, then nothing. “A permanent one,” he finally said.
Maya didn’t understand, not fully, but as she curled up next to her mother’s still form, feeling the faint rise and fall of Ellen’s chest, a part of her—the part that had run barefoot through a nightmare—understood enough. The forest swallowed Roman and his men as if they had never existed. But the forest would remember what happened next.
Victor worked in silence, his hands moving with practiced efficiency over Ellen’s cold body. He had seen worse, much worse, but something about finding a woman strung up like a warning sign in the middle of nowhere made his jaw set tighter than usual. Maya sat pressed against his side. Her pink dress was still damp with mud and morning dew.
Her eyes were fixed on her mother’s face. Ellen’s skin had taken on a grayish tint that made her look more like a ghost than a person. Her chest rose and fell in shallow, irregular rhythms that Victor didn’t like at all. “Will she wake up?” Maya’s voice was small, raw from screaming. Victor pulled a tactical blanket from the pack he always carried and spread it over Ellen, tucking it carefully around her shoulders.
“She’ll wake up, but not right now. Her body shut down to protect itself. She’s trying to recover.” — “From what?” Victor hesitated. How do you explain to a child what hanging from your wrists for hours does to the human body? The way circulation is cut off, the way muscles scream, the way the mind fractures under that kind of prolonged agony? “From being very scared for a very long time,” he finally said. Maya nodded slowly, accepting that answer because she understood fear deeply now.
She had lived inside it for hours that felt like years. “Why did they do it?” she whispered. “My mom didn’t hurt anyone. She just works at the diner, she takes me to school, she reads to me at night.” Her voice wavered. “Why would someone put her in a tree?” Victor didn’t have a good answer for that. In his experience, cruelty rarely needed a reason beyond the simple fact that some people liked having power over those who couldn’t fight back.
But he couldn’t say that to a child whose world had just shattered. “Some people are broken inside,” he said instead, “and broken people break things.” Maya thought about that, her small fingers picking at the fabric of his jacket that still covered her mother. “Is Roman broken?” Victor’s eyebrows rose slightly; it was a more perceptive question than he expected.
“Why do you ask?” — “Because he didn’t smile, not once. And his eyes…” Maya struggled for the words, “they looked empty, like nobody was home.” Victor checked Ellen’s pulse again—still weak, still there—and considered how to answer. Roman was many things: dangerous, powerful, absolutely ruthless when the situation demanded it. But broken? That was complicated.
“Roman isn’t empty,” Victor said carefully. “He’s careful. He’s seen a lot of bad things, and he’s done what he had to do to survive them. That changes a person.” — “Did it change you?” Victor met the little girl’s gaze and saw a sharpness there that survival had honed. She wasn’t asking to be polite; she genuinely wanted to understand the men who had materialized from the fog to save her mother. “Yes,” he admitted, “it did.”
“But you still helped us.” — “Yes.” — “So maybe Roman isn’t broken. Maybe he’s just…” Maya searched for the word. “Careful, like you said.” Victor almost smiled. Almost. “Maybe.” A sound cut through the woods. Distant, but distinct. A shout. Then another. The unmistakable crack of something that could have been a branch breaking, or something else entirely.
Maya tensed, her hand darting out to grab Victor’s arm. “What was that?” — “Roman,” Victor said simply. His hand moved to his weapon, though he didn’t draw it. Not yet. His eyes scanned the tree line, cataloging every shadow, every movement in the fog. “He’s okay.” — “How do you know?” — “Because if he wasn’t okay, we’d be hearing a lot more noise.”
Another sound drifted through the trees, this one unmistakable. A voice raised in pain or fear, cut off abruptly. Then the silence rushed back in like water filling a hole. Maya’s breathing quickened. “They’re hurting someone.” — “Yes.” — “The people who hurt my mom?” — “Yes.” Maya was silent for a long time, processing that. Victor expected tears, or fear, or perhaps moral confusion about violence meeting violence.
Instead, the little girl’s voice was cold and steady, making her sound much older than her years. “Good.” Victor glanced at her, surprised by the steel in that single word. Maya was staring into the fog where Roman and the others had vanished. Her jaw was set, her eyes hard. “They put my mom in a tree like she was trash,” Maya continued.
Her voice was shaking now, but not with fear—with fury. “They tied me up and made me watch. They laughed. One of them said…” She stopped, swallowing hard. “He said nobody would care. That people like us don’t matter.” Victor’s hand tightened. “What else did they say?” Maya shook her head. “I don’t remember everything. There were four of them. They wore masks, but I could see their eyes.”
“One of them had a tattoo on his arm—a snake eating its own tail. Another one smelled like cigarettes and something sweet, like cheap cologne.” Victor memorized those details automatically. Roman would need them later, if there was anything left to identify. “They said they’d be back tomorrow to check on things,” Maya whispered. “They said it like it was a joke. Like my mom hanging there was funny.”
“They won’t be back,” Victor said. And there was a finality in his voice that even a child could recognize as absolute truth. “Because of Roman?” — “Because of Roman.” Maya looked at her mother’s still figure, the faint rise and fall of her chest, the angry rope marks circling her wrists like brands. Then she looked at Victor with eyes that had aged ten years in a single morning.
“I’m glad I ran to him,” she said quietly. “I’m glad I didn’t keep running away.” — “Your mother is glad too,” Victor replied, “even if she doesn’t know it yet.” In the distance, the forest went completely silent. No birds, no wind, no voices. Just the heavy, expectant silence of a place where something irreversible had just happened. Victor checked his watch. Fifteen minutes since Roman had left.
The medical team would be here in five. Ellen would live. Maya would live. And somewhere in the fog, four men were learning the price of cruelty. The sound of an engine cut through the forest silence. Low, powerful, purposeful. Victor’s head snapped up, his weapon halfway out of its holster before he recognized the distinct rumble of Roman’s SUV picking its way through the narrow trail. “Stay down,” he instructed Maya, positioning himself between her and the approaching vehicle.
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