That made me laugh again, a real sound. “That’s not a job.”
He leaned back, boots planted wide, and let out a breath that steamed in the air. “Back home, I was Sergeant at Arms. Means I kept the peace, but mostly I broke it. Fought for my people, the club.” He hesitated, then, “It was a kind of brotherhood.”
I chewed on that. “Like knights?”
He shrugged. “Less shiny, more blood.”
I pictured it, the tattooed arms, the rituals, the code. “Did you like it?” I said.
He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter.”
But it did, and we both knew it. I wanted to press, to ask what it felt like to belong to something so completely that you’d fight or die for it. Instead, I offered what little I had. “My world isn’t so different,” I said. “You find a place, or you’re cast out. It’s just the costumes that change.”
“It hasn’t changed,” he said. “It’s still that way.” He studied me, eyes hooded. “You ever kill anyone?” he asked, not unkindly.
The question landed like a stone in the gut. “No,” I said. “Not yet.”
He grinned, and this time it was real. “You will,” he said.
We ate the rest of the meal in silence. I passed him a handful of wild berries I’d found on the walk, and he took them without a word, fingers brushing mine. The hut was warm now, the air thick with smoke and animal. I let the comfort of it settle in my bones.
When the moon rose, slanting silver through the cracks in the wall, I was the first to move. I stretched out on the straw, cradling my head in my arms. He watched me, the fire painting his face in orange and black. The wolf tattoo on his arm glimmered, the ink alive in the shifting light.
“You tired?” he said.
I closed my eyes. “No. Just resting.”
He made a soft sound, then banked the fire, careful not to let the light die completely.
I listened to the rhythm of his breath, to the way the night pressed in around us. I thought of the world outside, of the men who might be searching even now, of the promise I’d made to myself never to go back.
In the dark, he moved closer, not touching, but close enough that I could feel the heat of him. I drifted off, and when I dreamed, I dreamed of running—not from, but toward.
***
I woke to the sound of bones settling, the slow pop and creak of flesh thawing after a night in the cold. The fire was a wound in the darkness, a single pulse of red that painted Moab’s face in sharp relief. He sat on his haunches by the hearth, forearmsbraced on his knees, the wolf tattoo luminous as burnished silver in the ember light. For a moment, I thought he was asleep, but then he looked up, eyes catching the red, and I saw that he was somewhere else entirely.
I watched him in the hush that followed, careful not to announce my waking. There was heaviness in his posture, the kind that comes after a confession or a beating. I had seen that look on men before, usually after a hunt, sometimes after a killing, never in the company of someone they trusted.
He didn’t move until the coals hissed under a drift of settling ash, the sound startling him back to the room. He rubbed his hands together, then reached into the coals with a stick, rearranging the logs with more care than the task required.
I cleared my throat, as softly as I could. “I’m awake,” I said, though it hardly mattered.
He grunted, then reached for the battered metal cup by the fire. He poured the last of the water, held it out for me.
“Thanks,” I said, wrapping both hands around the cup, more for the warmth than the contents.
He looked at my hands, then at my face. “You get cold easy.”
I smiled, embarrassed. “Always have.”
He shrugged, as if to say it was a fact of nature, like frost on a window or bruises after a fall. “I can get more water,” he said. “Or wood, if you want.”
I shook my head, sipping slowly. “No point. The cold just comes back.”
He snorted, not unkindly. “True enough.”
I watched the lines in his face as he sat back down. He was older than me, I realized, by more than a handful of years. Not old, exactly, but used to the world in a way that made it hard to imagine him ever being young.
