Cold seeped into everything.

It clung to the wooden floor beneath your feet, crept through the thin walls of the cabin, settled heavy in your chest until every breath felt sharp and wrong. The room smelled like damp wool, old smoke, and something metallic underneath it all—something that made your stomach twist harder every time you caught it.

You had stopped struggling a while ago.

Not because you wanted to. Not because you weren’t terrified. But because your wrists burned from the rope, your limbs felt weak from panic, and every frantic jerk had only earned rough hands, harsher grips, and laughter that made your skin crawl. The men who took you had long since stopped seeing you as a person. To them, you were a prize. A thing to be traded, threatened over, dragged from one place to another like your fear was part of the fun.

You sat curled in the corner they had shoved you into, trying to make yourself smaller. Your pulse thundered in your ears so loudly it nearly drowned out the sounds around you—the creak of the cabin, the scrape of boots, the murmur of voices from the next room. Snow tapped lightly against the window in soft, useless flurries, and through the frosted glass the world beyond looked pale and distant, as though it belonged to someone else entirely.

Your mind kept snagging on impossible things. Home. Warm food. Your mother’s hands. The shape of your own bed. Little thoughts, foolish thoughts, the kind that hurt worse the longer you held them. You tried not to cry again. Tears felt dangerous here. Weakness felt dangerous. Everything felt dangerous.

Then something changed.

At first, it was small. A strange pause in the noise outside. The sort of stillness that only made the fear worse, because now there was room for your imagination to turn every silence into something terrible. One of the men shifted. Another muttered something low and sharp. Floorboards groaned. The air itself seemed to tighten.

Then came the sound.

A thud. Sudden and heavy.

A crash so violent it rattled the walls.

Shouting erupted all at once, no longer lazy or amused but startled, furious. Boots slammed against the floor. Something overturned. You flinched hard, pressing back against the wall, your breath snagging in your throat as chaos exploded beyond the doorway. The cabin that had felt suffocatingly still only seconds ago became a blur of pounding footsteps and raw, frantic movement.

You didn’t understand what was happening.

Only that it was fast.

Only that the men who had seemed so large, so untouchable, no longer sounded in control.

There was another impact—closer this time. A body hitting wood. A sharp crack. The door shuddered against its frame. Your heart leapt so hard it hurt, and for one dizzy second you thought this had to be worse, had to be something even more terrible than what had already happened.

The door burst open.

Light from outside spilled in, pale and wintry, cutting through the dimness in one jagged line. In the threshold stood a boy about your age, dark hair disheveled, scarf wrapped at his neck, his small frame trembling not with fear but with fury so fierce it seemed to fill the entire room.

And that was when you saw him.