His chest doesn’t move.
I tilt his head back with fingers that feel like blocks of wood, pinch his nose, seal my mouth over his blue lips, and breathe. His chest rises with my breath. Falls when I pull back. I push again, counting, trying to remember the rhythm from the MSF training, but my brain is sluggish and slow, and the cold is eating my thoughts.
“Breathe.” Push. “Fucking breathe.” Push. “I didn’t drag you out of that river to watch you die on the ice.” Push. “I didn’t survive you, survive this, survive everything just to lose you now.” Push.
Nothing.
The pulse point in his neck is still and silent under my frozen fingers.
“ROMAN.”
I hit his chest with my fist, not CPR anymore, just rage, just desperate, furious grief. I hit him again and again, and I’m screaming his name, and Luka is saying something behind me, but I can’t hear him over the sound of my own voice breaking—
Roman coughs.
Water pours out of his mouth in a rush, and I roll him onto his side with hands that won’t stop shaking. He’s choking, vomiting river water onto the ice, his whole body seizing with the effort of expelling what almost killed him. His hand grabs my wrist and squeezes hard, and I’ve never felt anything so beautiful in my entire life.
“Anya.” His voice is barely there, a rasp that sounds like death, but it’s his voice, and he’s alive, and he’s saying my name.
“I’m here.” I’m crying, hot tears freezing on my cheeks as soon as they fall. I can’t stop shaking, my whole body wracked with shivers. “I’m here, I’ve got you, you’re okay—”
“Told you.” He’s shaking as violently as I am, both of us freezing to death on this ice, but his eyes find mine and hold. “Told you to run.”
“And I told you I don’t fucking listen.”
Something moves across his face that might be a smile if he weren’t dying. His hand comes up, trembling, and touches my cheek with fingers that feel like ice against skin that’s already frozen.
“Solnyshko.”
“Don’t talk.” I try to pull his arm over my shoulder, try to get him upright, but my legs won’t cooperate, and I stumble sideways and nearly take us both down. “We need to move. Can you—”
“Can’t feel anything below my waist.” His voice is getting weaker. The gut wound is still bleeding, dark red soaking through his coat, and his shoulder is useless. “Can’t walk.”
“Then we carry you.” I look at Luka, who’s already moving. “Where’s the vehicle?”
“Two hundred meters north. Chernov!”
Chernov appears out of the darkness, tactical vest splattered with someone else’s blood, and he takes one look at Roman on the ice and goes pale.
“Grab his legs,” Luka orders. “I’ve got his shoulders. Move.”
They lift Roman between them and start running toward the treeline, and I try to follow, but my first step sends me sprawling face-first into the snow.
I get up. Fall again.
Get up.
My vision is tunneling around the edges, and I can’t feel my nose, and I’m running on a frozen engine that’s about to give out completely. But Roman is ahead of me, and I have to be there, I have to be there when we get to wherever we’re going because I’m the only one who can keep him alive.
I stumble through the snow, falling twice more before the SUV appears through the trees, and Chernov is yanking open the back door, and they’re shoving Roman inside.
I climb in after him on hands and knees because I can’t stand upright anymore.
“Drive,” Luka says, and we’re moving before the door is fully closed.
Then Luka is pulling off his tactical jacket, his sweater, and shoving them at me. “Change. Now. You stay in those wet clothes, you die of hypothermia before we get there.”
I’m shaking too hard to argue. My fingers won’t work on the buttons of Roman’s frozen shirt—the one I’ve been wearing since the bonfire—, so Luka reaches over and rips it open, and I’m too cold to care about nudity. I strip out of the ice-stiff fabric and pull his dry sweater over my head, and it’s warm. I’m crying again because I can feel something besides cold for the first time since the river.
