Cole’s POV

The Brennan family farm sat at the very end of an unpaved dirt logging road three miles outside the Northridge town limits, swallowed whole by dense pine forest and blue-tinted snowdrifts that reached the window sills. It was a single-story gray house with a rusted tin roof that groaned constantly under the heavy northern wind, accompanied by a massive, detached wooden barn garage sitting thirty yards behind the main porch.

It was 4:50 in the morning. The sun wouldn't show its face over the eastern ridge for another two hours, leaving the farm drowned in a pitch-black, freezing silence broken only by the wind rattling the pine branches....