“People?” Von took a swig and squinted out at the lake, the mountains, birds soaring above as if everything were perfectly normal. “Not sure you and Leo count as regular old…people.” He shrugged. “Anything can happen if it’s meant to be.”
That sentiment shocked him, especially coming from a man who looked like emotion wasn’t in his wheelhouse at all.
“I, uh, could use your help.” Von cleared his throat, shifted, and leaned in. “Need you to tell me more about the virus. Exactly where it is. How we can get it.”
Elias nodded, took a breath, and let it out, eyes hard on Von’s. The man’s gaze didn’t waver.
“Turner destroyed every sample but one. That one, he hid in an old locked storage unit.” Saying the words was liberating and guilt inducing. “Labeled XR-54. It’s supposed to be cold viruses or something. Archived research and stuff. But that tube, the one he hid, is labeled as a variola sample.” He grimaced. “Hidden way back in a freezer.”
“That’s smallpox.”
“Yeah. Chronos isn’t supposed to have smallpox at their facility. It’s only housed in two places in the world. But there’ve been cases of it showing up randomly in labs. He said if they found this one, they’d treat it as a highly infectious pathogen.” Elias swallowed and forced the words out, which was hard after keeping them in for so long. “He refused to destroy it. Said it held too much potential—on the cancer front. Had to keep one sample. He planned to go back one day and…”
Von watched him closely, intensely, as if memorizing every word.
“That’s where I came in. He passed me the baton.” He shut his eyes, remembering. “Passed it to others, too, but they’re all dead. Every last one of them.”
“You survived.”
Elias opened his eyes and stared out, not seeing the water or the mountains or the lodge in the foreground. “Yeah. Yeah, I did.”
Someone shouted and both he and Von turned. “There.” Von lifted his chin to where Pam stood on the porch of Leo’s cabin, waving her arms, with a huge grin. “Looks like Leo’s awake.”
***
Again Leo tried to get out of bed, and again Pam stopped her with a firm hand and a firmer smile.
“Just wait,” the woman said. “He’s coming.”
A second later, the door flew open and a massive, handsome, bare-faced white man blew in. She looked past him for Elias.
When he didn’t show up, she shot the doc an accusatory glare. “What kind of—”
“Leo.”
She turned and stared. He was a massive monster of a man, the kind she’d definitely have looked at twice, with his sharply cut jaw—those squared-off indents bracketing his mouth—and freckles scattered over his nose.
She opened her mouth to ask him to clear the doorway for Elias when he said her name again and her heart stopped beating.
“Elias?” she croaked.
Her eyes took in the rest of him—a nose that looked carved from bedrock, hair with those sun-tinted curls that salons could never properly emulate. There was gray in there, too. Just enough to match those two sunburst sprays of creases around evergreen eyes.
There was love in those eyes right now. Tenderness. So much tenderness that she almost lost her shit right there and started crying.
“Yeah, Leo.” He was at her side, reaching for her hands and then backing up, as if afraid he’d hurt her.
“You’re fine,” Pam said, which didn’t make sense until Leo realized there were tubes hanging out of one of her arms. And her nose.
“Leo.” He knelt by the bed, brought her hand to his mouth, and warmed it with his breath. “Leo.”
It was apparently all he could say, which was fine, because every time was a new iteration, full of emotion, full of love.
“Yeah.” She turned her hand, cupped his naked chin, caressed his beautiful bare skin, and nudged him up. “Hi.”
“You weren’t waking up and…I thought…” He dropped his face into his hands, shoulders heaving. When he lifted it up again, there were honest-to-God tear tracks on his cheeks. “I can’t lose you.”
“You won’t lose me, Elias.” Full of tenderness for this man, she leaned in. “And I can’t lose you, either. I love you.” She breathed in the wood and smoke of his hair. “I wouldn’t trade those days with you for anything in the world.”
