The seasons bled into years. The snow on the Appalachian peaks melted and froze again.
After the spying incident, rumors spread that Alton was a demon who controlled beasts with black magic. Even Agent Fletcher only watched the cabin through binoculars from the highway.
That was exactly what Alton wanted. Absolute isolation.
Eden grew up wild and brilliant. At two years old, she didn't use furniture to learn how to walk. She grabbed the tail of the massive cougar-now named Hunter-and pulled herself up on her chubby legs.
Alton built a brutal, military-grade obstacle course in the yard to burn off his own adrenaline. It became Eden's playground.
By age three, she could low-crawl under barbed wire with the flawless, fluid motion of a seasoned infantryman. The rattlesnake, Venom, became her personal alarm system. If a stranger got within a hundred yards, the snake rattled.
One night, a massive thunderstorm hit the valley.
The booming thunder sounded exactly like mortar fire. Alton's PTSD triggered violently. He huddled in the dark corner of the cabin, sweating, shaking, his finger resting on the trigger of a loaded shotgun. His eyes were wild, lost in the desert of his past.
Three-year-old Eden climbed out of her bed. She wasn't scared of the thunder, and she wasn't scared of the killer in the corner.
She walked up to Alton on bare feet. Her tiny hands reached out and pried his rigid, white-knuckled fingers off the shotgun barrel.
She pushed the gun away and pressed her warm, soft forehead against his freezing, sweating brow.
"Dada," she mumbled, her voice firm and clear.
The word hit Alton's brain like a defibrillator. The hallucination shattered. He dropped the gun, wrapped his massive arms around her tiny body, and buried his face in her neck, sobbing silently.
After that night, the phantom sounds of warfare still came, but they no longer owned him. The memory of Eden's small hand in his became an unbreakable anchor in the storm, a reason to fight his way back to shore. She couldn't cure the broken wiring in his brain, but she gave him a weapon to fight his own mind. Eden owned his soul.
To secure her future, Alton put his plan into motion. He bought a fleet of heavy dump trucks and started a cheap gravel transport business. It was a perfect front. Under the cover of hauling gravel, his crews dug deep into the toxic shale land, extracting high-grade rare-earth minerals.
He smuggled the ore across state lines to a shell corporation. Millions of untraceable dollars began flooding into his offshore accounts.
By age five, Eden was a terrifying prodigy.
Alton took her into the deep woods. He handed her a military combat knife. Without flinching, she expertly skinned a dead rabbit, her face splattered with blood, her eyes calm and focused.
But Alton knew she couldn't just be a savage. She had elite blood in her veins.
He used the dark web to order the entire curriculum of an Ivy League preparatory academy. The books filled half the cabin.
Every night, the man who could snap a neck with two fingers put on reading glasses. He stumbled through Shakespeare and basic calculus, teaching her everything.
Eden's memory was photographic. She would sit on the porch, absentmindedly petting the cougar, while flawlessly reciting sonnets.
When Eden was six, Cletus's fat, bullying son, Gus, stood near the fence and shot a bird with a slingshot.
Eden scaled the ten-foot wooden wall like a ghost. She dropped silently into the dirt right behind Gus.
She didn't punch him. She just stared at him with her father's dead, wolf-like eyes. In her right hand, she held a small, razor-sharp whittling knife, calmly and methodically shaving perfect ribbons of wood off a pine branch. Scrape. Scrape. The sheer, unnatural focus in her movements was far more terrifying than any verbal threat.
Gus took one look at her eyes, wet his pants, and ran screaming down the road.
Alton leaned against the porch pillar. He smiled proudly.
He tossed Eden a piece of imported dark chocolate. "Good job. You neutralized the threat without leaving physical evidence."
Eden caught it, peeled the foil, and shoved half into Alton's mouth. They smiled at each other.
But Alton looked at the road. He knew the fortress couldn't hold her forever. She needed to learn how to hunt in the human world.
