Dawn came slow, gray, and grudging—light filtered through frost so thick it turned the windows into blurred shapes instead of glass.I knew I’d been awake too long.My body kept reminding me.The tremor in my hands.The heaviness behind my eyes.The way the room blurred at the edges when I blinked too hard.Didn’t matter.I wasn’t going to sleep while she lay there on the cot, wrapped in every blanket we had, breathing shallow but steady.
She’d lived.I kept replaying that fact like I didn’t trust it.I’d treated hypothermia before—it was textbook.Warm slowly, remove wet clothes, replace with dry layers, monitor vitals, watch for cardiac arrhythmia.But none of that felt like procedure while I watched color crawl back into Mia’s face in uneven patches.None of it felt clinical when her fingers started to move again or when her breathing lost that thin, fragile quality that meant the body was fighting and failing.I’d done the same things for injured men in the middle of winter operations, men I couldn’t afford to lose because they were assets.Saving Mia hadn’t felt like that.
The ropes sat in a loose pile on the table—cut, useless, untouched since I’d thrown them there yesterday.I should have secured her again.The logic was simple: she would run if given the chance.She already had.I knew that and still didn’t move.I couldn’t put my hands on those ropes without seeing her wrists again—bandages stained with dried blood, skin rubbed raw, bruises climbing toward her elbows.Just thinking about tying her back down made something twist deep inside, something I didn’t want to name.
She shifted under the blankets and woke.I watched the confusion hit first, then memory—and her whole body locked tight.Her eyes snapped to me immediately.Reflex.She needed to know where I was in the room to calculate threat, escape, options.I stayed where I’d planted myself by the window—same vantage point on the door, the cot, and the whole cabin.
She pushed herself upright with slow caution, waiting for pain or dizziness or for me to stop her.When I didn’t move, she swung her legs to the floor and stood.Her legs held.Her eyes widened as if she couldn’t quite believe she was unrestrained.I let her take a few steps.She used them to study the room—calculating distance, obstacles, objects that could become weapons, places she might run.
Recognition hit me hard: this was how I assessed a room.Thorough.Tactical.Focused.She wasn’t flailing.She was learning.
My stomach picked that moment to betray me with a growl loud enough to carry across the cabin.Her head snapped toward me, and for half a second—just half—I saw something close to amusement soften her stare.It vanished before I could track it, but I’d seen it.
I turned toward the supply corner, partly because we needed food and partly because she needed the reminder that she wasn’t the only one who could observe.I pulled breakfast together—canned fruit, protein bars, instant coffee.As I reached for the coffee tin, something nestled between the rations caught my hand.
A glass ornament.Small.Gold-painted angels whose edges had faded with time.
Christmas.
I put it back before I could think further.
I set her food on the table and kept standing as I drank my own coffee.The burn down my throat helped keep me grounded—pain was easier to control than whatever was happening in my head.
Mia took the chair slowly, like the wood legs might explode when she sat.She studied the protein bar like she was making sure it wasn’t laced with arsenic before she bit into it anyway.Hunger didn’t respect pride.
Silence held until she finally spoke.
“Five-star accommodations,” she rasped, gesturing around the cabin with the corner of the protein bar.“Truly premium kidnapping experience.I’ll be sure to leave a glowing Yelp review—assuming hostage reviews are encouraged.”
My face moved before I could stop it.Not a smile, not really.A ghost of one.A twitch in muscles I hadn’t used in a long time.She saw it.I knew she saw it.She looked startled, then tried to bury it behind indifference.Too late.
For the rest of the day she tested me, not with physical escape attempts—she wasn’t in any shape for that—but with words.With sarcasm.With dry commentary delivered like she was poking a bruise repeatedly just to see when I’d react.I didn’t answer, but every now and then I felt that twitch again.I didn’t stop it fast enough.
She was learning me while she learned the cabin.Watching my responses the same way I watched hers.Taking inventory.Filing information.Adapting.
By late afternoon the fire needed more wood again.I stoked it methodically, fed it until the heat reached the corners of the room.She claimed the chair nearest the flames and pulled a blanket around herself like armor.I took my place by the window, the one that let me see everything.
She looked at me.I looked back.Something passed between us—nothing soft, nothing gentle.Just acknowledgment.Shared awareness that something was changing between us whether either of us wanted it to or not.
Four days in this cabin, buried under snow and choices neither of us wanted to make.She should have been bound to a chair.I should have been finishing the job Vincent gave me.Neither of those things was happening.
I didn’t understand where this was going.I didn’t know what happened when the storm ended.I only knew one thing with absolute clarity.
I didn’t regret keeping her alive.Not in the blizzard.Not when she woke.Not now.
And that truth sat heavy in my chest, dangerous and undeniable.Vincent would call it a weakness.A failure.
He wasn’t here.
Just me.Mia.The fire.And a storm we couldn’t escape—outside or inside.
I prepared the evening meal under lantern light.The glow didn’t soften the room.It just made the hard edges more obvious—rough-cut wood, shadows that reached too far, corners that looked sharp enough to cut.Canned stew warmed on the camping stove.Preserved meat, preserved vegetables.Functional fuel.Nothing more.
I registered Mia’s movements without turning.The soft shift of fabric against the chair when she leaned forward.The small inhale she made when the smell reached her.The fact that she tracked my position in the cabin the same way I tracked hers.Neither of us relaxed.Not fully.Maybe not ever again.
When the stew was ready, I set the bowls on the table.Muscle memory guided the motion.But then I did something that wasn’t muscle memory—I sat across from her.
The tension changed immediately.Sitting meant conversation was possible.Sitting meant we were on the same plane instead of opposite ends of the room.Nothing about it made sense strategically.But I was too tired to stand guard at the window another night.Too tired to pretend I hadn’t burned through the last of my adrenaline in the storm.
