“You’re bleeding. What the he—”
“Not bleeding.” With an effort, he stood.
“That’s blood on your coat.” Leo’s tone brooked no bullshit.
His gaze followed the direction she was pointing. A stain darkened the right side of his coat. “Huh.” He met her eyes again. “Must be yours.”
She looked down pointedly, where one puddle was darker than the rest—the dirty reddish-brown of rust or winter moss. “You are bleeding,” she said.
He looked at her. “Okay. But we don’t have time.” He swung around, disoriented. “Need to move.”
“How can we move if you’re injured?”
“Remember which way we were headed?”
“DoIremember?” The wide-eyed, brows-raised look of disbelief she threw him actually made him smile. “Did you get shot? Elias, is that what happened?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes, it freaking matters! If you’re hurt, then our chances of getting out of here go way—”
A chunk of ice crashed nearby, startling all three of them.
“You can…” He focused hard on the horizon, finally getting his bearings. “Break my balls about getting shot when we make it to shore. How’s that sound?”
“At least you admit that you did get shot.”
They were hit by a gust of wind so hard it shifted the ice, slamming and crunching and overlapping the pieces like multicar pileups. What he wanted—what they needed in order to get away from their pursuers—was for the glacier along the lake’s eastern shore to calve into the lake. Its ripple effect would send waves out across the surface and dump those assholes into the frigid water before they knew what happened.
No, what theyneededwas to make it to shore before the lake chewed them up.
“Let’s go.” He reached for her hand.
She pulled away. “You won’t even tell me where you’ve been hit?”
“No, Leo.” In truth, he wasn’t sure. Adrenaline had masked the pain while they ran. If he stayed here much longer, he wasn’t sure he’d work up the energy to keep moving. “We don’t have time for this.”
“Fine.” She blew out an impatient sigh. “But trust me, Iwillbreak your balls about it later.” There was just enough snark in her response to put a grin on his face.
He started off, eyeing the crackling expanse between them and the western shore, now blurred by rain. They were lucky the ice in front of them was mostly whole. They were lucky the weather hadn’t cleared before this day ended. He turned and eyed the far side of the lake—lost in fog now—and caught sight of the widening gap in the ice. His guts tightened. Holy shit. The rift had to be twelve feet wide, the pieces they’d surfed minutes ago churning up the water like gigantic teeth. They were lucky they weren’t dead already.
“Give me your hand again.”
He turned to look at her and just kept himself from stumbling to a stop. She shook her hand, waiting for him to take it. A little exasperated maybe, but also solid. Bloodstained, battered, and soaking wet, Leoshouldlook like something the cat had dragged in. She didn’t.
Her dark eyes met his. She appeared exhausted and possibly feverish, a little angry, and above all, fierce.
A force of nature.
There wasn’t time for this now, thinking about how this person who’d been sent to him—who’d literally fallen from the sky—made him strong in a way he’d never felt. Together, he thought, letting his mind take an uncharacteristically fanciful spin, they were more than the sum of their parts.
Her presence, the solidity of her beside him, with her humor and her drive, sent something through him, so unfamiliar he couldn’t quite place it. But he knew one thing: for the first time in as long as he could remember, he wasn’t alone.
***
Surfing ice during breakup wasn’t nearly as fun as it sounded. In fact, it was more of arunning the gauntlettype of thing, which consisted of listening to the ice—that was Elias’s job—following a seemingly random, invisible maze, led just by sound; sprinting over flat, slippery surfaces; then jumping from one massive hunk to another, in a deadly game of leapfrog that was more exhausting than anything Leo had ever done. The final phase, of course, was the deadliest.
They’d made it far—or so she thought, though it was almost impossible to tell, the way they’d become enveloped in thick, soupy fog. She had no idea how he knew which way to go—or what time of day it was. How long had they been out on this ice? Three hours? Ten hours?
