“What? They catching up to us?” she asked, her body appearing as tense as his had suddenly gone.
“Not sure what I saw. Maybe nothing.” Warily, he handed her water. She drank, grimacing while he put his own canteen to his lips and took a long slug. It was achingly cold against his teeth.
His eyes scanned their surroundings, all the while investigating the forest for that extra presence.
It was hard to isolate a single movement with the flurries dancing around them. Though the storm seemed to be settling, motion was everywhere. “No, definitely something.”
“Where?” she whispered.
There.He zeroed in on it. “Your five.” He could have sworn something shifted.
Her nod was a slight dip of the chin, but she didn’t otherwise move. Just her eyeballs, swiveling right.
Beside him, Bo had frozen into one of her poised and ready positions, body vibrating with so much energy he was surprised it didn’t shake the snow from her fur.
The harder he stared, the more it just looked like another innocuous part of the forest—cloaked in night and snow and wind. “Just something off.” He let the words slide from the corner of his barely moving mouth. “Movement in the shadows.”
“You think they’re that close behind us?”
“Hope not.” He had no words to describe what it was that told him danger was near. No way of telling her it wasn’t just sight and sound that guided him, but something else. Something not quite real. She’d probably laugh.
“Should we keep moving?”
“Yep.” He picked up his pack and hefted it onto his back, sending one last uneasy look over his shoulder. “We’ll stick to the river for this last mile. Cover more ground.” Which would, unfortunately, make them easy targets. “Then comes the rough part.” For maybe half a second, he let a smile tug at his lips.
The guarded way she watched him, you’d think he was some wild creature that needed taming, instead of the man who’d pulled her from a plane crash.
But then he realized with the same jolt of self-awareness he felt when he met his own eyes in the mirror—maybe hewasthe wild creature. Maybe those hunting them were the civilized ones.
If that was civilization, he wanted nothing to do with it.
“Rough part?” One sleek, dark brow disappeared under the bandage’s stained, off-white edge, then lowered again. It was thick and smooth and perfectly arched. Which wasn’t something he’d ever noticed on a woman before.
Shit. Now he was thinking intimate thoughts about eyebrows.
“You’ll see,” he muttered, his good humor gone the way of any refinement he’d once had—crushed to smithereens beneath the boots of those who’d spent the last decade hunting him.
“I’ll see. Great. That bodes well.”
She didn’t shy away when he reached out and pulled her mask back over her face.
“Need more distance.” He gave the woods a final probing stare before turning toward the river again. “This’ll be hard. But it’s the only way.”
Yeah, it was the hard part. It was also the part that—if it worked, and that was a long shot—would buy them a little time.
***
Got you.
Ash eyed the cave with satisfaction. Two people had slept here recently. Or rested, at the very least. The ground had been scuffed to hide signs of passage, and there, someone had splashed water along the rock. To wash something, perhaps?
He drew close and sniffed.
Blood. It would take a lot more than a little water to mask the iron-rich scent.
He took his time, searching every possible passage out of the cave, noting a temporary latrine and clear footprints in the dust. Tufts of white hair clung to the corners. He’d bet his earnings that it belonged to a canine.
He followed the jumbled prints to a passage, ducked through it, stood, and went stock-still, his jaw hanging open.
