My parents sold everything to rescue my golden-child brother from a massive debt. Then, during a Level 5 blizzard, they crashed a van into the gates of my remote mountain resort. “We’re your parents. We’re moving in,” Dad demanded. He thought my life’s work was his “collateral.” He threatened to ruin my business if I didn’t help pay off the ruthless men hunting my brother. When I secretly opened the manila folder they brought, I realized they had brought something far more dangerous to my door.

A dull, earth-shaking BOOM echoed from the high cliffs directly above the Obsidian Abbey.

It wasn't an explosion of fire or gunpowder. It was the sound of three hundred pounds of compressed nitrogen gas releasing simultaneously from the roof-mounted mortar cannon, blasting a massive charge of pressurized air straight into the six-foot snowpack resting on the upper ledge of Blackwood Peak.

For two seconds, there was silence.

Then, the mountain responded.

A sound like a freight train roaring down a narrow tunnel echoed through the stone walls. Thousands of tons of accumulated snow, ice, and mountain shale loosened from the cliff face, sliding down the forty-five-degree incline directly toward the rear glass facade of the Grand Hall.

Vance’s eyes widened in sudden, absolute terror. He looked up at the soaring glass windows behind the utility core.

"You crazy bitch," Vance whispered, dropping the thermite grenade onto the slate.

The avalanche hit the building.

The four-inch-thick thermal glass windows didn't just break; they erupted inward under the catastrophic pressure of five hundred tons of sliding snow.

A wall of white, frozen destruction smashed through the rear of the Grand Hall like a solid tidal wave. The massive force shattered the iron window frames, tore down the heavy velvet drapes, and roared into the room with unstoppable, brutal violence.

The freezing wall of snow collided directly with the thermite fire.

The intense, four-thousand-degree chemical blaze was instantly smothered under thirty feet of dense, ice-cold snowpack. A massive explosion of superheated steam erupted—a roaring white geyser that blasted across the room, knocking Vance completely off his feet and sending him sliding thirty feet across the ice-slick slate into the base of the stone fireplace.

I didn't stand there to watch. The second I pressed the red button, I threw myself behind the heavy, solid-oak reception desk, ducking into the reinforced footwell beneath the slate counter.

The shockwave of wind, snow, and shattered glass roared over my head. Heavy chunks of ice slammed against the oak desk, shaking the entire structure like an earthquake. The deafening roar of cascading snow filled the room for ten agonizing seconds, smothering every light, every flame, and every sound until the mountain finally came to a complete, violent rest.

Silence returned.

A deep, absolute, suffocating silence.

I lay in the dark beneath the desk for a long moment, coughing up dust and pulverized ice, my chest burning, every muscle in my body trembling with exhaustion and adrenaline.

Slowly, painfully, I pushed myself out from under the shattered oak desk.

The Grand Hall was transformed into a frozen cavern. Half of the massive room was completely filled with ten feet of packed, white avalanche snow that had poured through the destroyed rear windows. The freezing wind of the Level 5 blizzard was howling directly through the open mountain face, sweeping sheets of snow across the ruined interior.

The thermite fire was dead. Extinguished. Smothered under thousands of tons of mountain ice.

The Abbey had survived. Its thick stone walls and heavy timber beams had held against the avalanche, exactly as the eighteenth-century monks had designed them to do three hundred years ago.

I wiped blood and melted snow from my eyes and picked up a heavy iron fireplace poker lying in the debris near my feet.

I dragged my feet through the snow, walking toward the stone fireplace where Dominic Vance had been thrown by the blast.

He was pinned beneath a heavy fallen timber beam and three feet of packed snow. His tailored trench coat was shredded, his face bruised and bleeding, his right arm bent at an unnatural angle. The nickel-plated revolver was lying five feet away in the snow, completely out of his reach.

He was shivering violently, his lips turning a dark, dangerous shade of purple as the sub-zero wind blasted over his body.

He looked up as my boots crunched through the snow, stopping right above him.

He looked at me with his one unswollen eye—no longer the powerful, terrifying syndicate boss who commanded death squads and liquidated families, but a cold, dying man trapped under the weight of a mountain he didn't respect.

"Finish it..." Vance gasped, his breath coming out in weak, rattling white clouds. "Shoot me... or the mountain... will..."

I looked down at him. I raised the iron fireplace poker.

I didn't strike him.

Instead, I used the hooked end of the poker to reach into the snow, grab his nickel-plated revolver by the trigger guard, and pull it out of the snowbank. I checked the cylinder—five heavy .44 Magnum rounds remained.

I tucked the revolver into my waistband, turned my back on Dominic Vance, and looked out through the shattered rear wall at the roaring white storm.