At Christmas, my mom opened our old photo albums for my fiancé, expecting laughter and memories. Instead, he froze, grabbed my hand, and whispered, “Don’t you see it?” When he showed me what was hidden in those pictures, I couldn’t unsee it. Five hours later, I called the police.

For over an hour, Gregory Miller dragged me through the blinding mountain blizzard, forcing me deeper into the treacherous high-altitude wilderness above the safehouse.

My legs were numb and shaking with exhaustion, my lungs burning as I gasped for thin, freezing air in the sub-zero mountain gale.

Every time I stumbled or slowed down in the deep snow drifts, he would jerk my arm brutally or press the cold steel shotgun barrel against my ribs.

“Keep moving! We’re almost home!” he growled, pushing through a dense thicket of snow-covered spruce trees that tore at my face and hands.

We emerged onto a rocky, wind-scoured ledge that overlooked a steep, dark ravine plummeting hundreds of feet into the forested valley below.

Carved directly into the granite face of the mountain, half-hidden behind a wall of fallen pine boulders and drifted snow, was a dark, rectangular opening.

It wasn't a rustic log cabin like he had boasted; it was the timber-reinforced entrance of an abandoned nineteenth-century silver mine.

Miller dragged me into the dark, damp opening of the mine shaft, out of the howling wind of the blizzard outside.

The air inside the tunnel was dead and freezing, smelling strongly of wet rock, old mineral dust, and rotting support timbers.

He reached into the pocket of his heavy white parka, pulled out a heavy industrial LED lantern, and clicked it on with a bright white beam.

The light illuminated a cavernous space about thirty feet inside the mine, where he had established a terrifying, permanent living camp.

There was a heavy military canvas sleeping bag laid over a bed of dry pine boughs, a small propane camping stove, and stacks of canned food.

Standing in the center of the camp, illuminated by the cold LED light, was a heavy wooden chair bolted firmly to the rocky floor with steel brackets.

Dangling from the arms of the chair were two heavy pairs of steel police handcuffs, waiting to receive my wrists.

“Welcome to our new home, little bird,” Miller said, wiping the freezing snow from his graying mustache with a gloved hand.

“We have enough food and propane down here to last until the spring thaw in May... long after the FBI stops digging through the snow for your body.”

He grabbed my shoulders and forced me down into the cold wooden chair, seizing my left wrist to clamp the steel cuff around my skin.

As the cold metal ratcheted tight around my bone, I realized with absolute clarity that if he locked my right wrist, I would never leave this mountain alive.

I looked down at the floor near the propane stove and saw a heavy, rusted iron geological mining hammer lying among some scattered rocks.

I didn't think about the shotgun; I didn't think about the freezing cold or the twenty years of terror this man had inflicted on my life.

As he leaned over to grab my right arm, I twisted my torso with all my remaining strength and kicked the heavy iron camping stove directly into his shins.

The metal stove slammed into his legs with a hollow crash, sending a pot of boiling snow water splashing across his thighs and boots.

Miller let out a roared oath of pain and fury, stumbling backward against the rocky mine wall and dropping his shotgun onto the dirt floor.