Stuart Redman survived the EMP. He survived the long cold dark of the first winter and the long road home of the third. Now, coming down out of the mountains after a trade run, wounded and alone in a killing storm, he sees the one thing no traveler can resist: a warm gold window burning in the middle of an open field.
He should know better than to trust it.
The cabin belongs to Shawna Hennefresy, a soft-spoken woman with hot soup, a kind smile, and a secret that has already killed forty-one people. Because Shawna's light is bait. And somewhere in the timber ringing the valley, her lover waits with a long rifle and a patient eye.
Tiberius Morton hunts travelers for sport. He is brilliant, empty, and utterly without mercy, a cold star of a man who kills the warm ones just to watch a light go out. And when Morton takes aim at the person Stuart loves most, the old survivor picks up a rifle older than the century and climbs into the killer's own mountains for a reckoning that only one of them will walk away from.
What follows is a brutal, breathless chase across the frozen high country. A duel of patience and nerve between two men who each know exactly how the other thinks. A wounded killer gone to ground. A broken woman forced to choose, at last, between the man she loves and the strangers who showed her mercy. And three armed men on the road behind them, carrying a dead warlord's price on Stuart's head.
But the real battle isn't fought with rifles. It's fought inside a man's own soul, in the cold place where rage and grief try to put out the one light that makes survival worth a single thing.
