Alaska.I always wondered where we live.Now I know.
How far did the river take me from Hoss?Miles, if I had to guess, which equates to weeks this time of year.Too far to hike back.
Too far to be found by my brothers anytime soon.But theywillcome for me as long as I stay here, find shelter, and stay hydrated.
Should I tell the Almighty One about my stranded family?If he’s truly the Lord of All, wouldn’t he already know?
The breathing, pulsing, still very much alive instinct behind my ribs clenches.Not with hope.More like alarm.
He tapes and packs around the hole in my arm with sterile hands, iodine wipes, and folded gauze.Amid the pain, I focus on the wrongness in his practiced patience, on the carefulness that aims to own the moment.He’s too clean by miles.
If he’s God, couldn’t he just heal my wound with the touch of a shimmering, magical finger?
If he’s not God, what is he?A bush pilot?Off-grid trapper?Seasonal operator?
Except men who belong out here don’t have soft, manicured hands.They don’t wear knitted scarves and take pictures.And they sure as fuck don’t fold their gloves like clergy.
“Who are you?”
“Dr.Rhett Howell.And you, Wolfson Strakh, aremine.This will help with shock.”He moves a small vial into view.
I know the look on a man’s face when he wants to control a thing that refuses to be controlled.I see that look now as he plunges a syringe into the vial.
“Don’t.”I try to push him away, but the river stole my thunder.
“This is for you.”He leans close, breath warm and terribly calm.“To make you comfortable.To revive you fully.”
A wild, hungry thing snarls in my gut, and it’s far meaner than a doctor with a syringe.But before I can unsheathe its teeth and rip off his face, the needle enters my skin.
“Sleep now,” he purrs.
The cold curls into my chest and closes like a fist.I try to scream, but my voice is a bubble that pops.
My eyes slide closed on the quiet, awful certainty that I escaped one nightmare only to wake in a new one.
The night exhales a mournful hush that feels borrowed from a church.Pine leans into the wind as the little guest house breathes around us, a soft rib cage of wood and light.
The kitchen still smells like heat, lemon butter clinging to steam and the scent of dill floating in the air.The dinner Wolf made sits warm in my stomach, sending pulses of comfort through a body that clenches and shivers with arctic horrors.
He fed me before we started.Because he knew.That’s so him.Haunted, damaged, but so stubbornly protective that he would never let me follow him into hell on an empty stomach.
What he suffered is more unfathomable than anything I imagined.And this is only a glimpse.
He started his story on the edge of a cliff.He spread his arms, let go, and hit the river, taking me with him.Death should’ve been the end, but instead it delivered him into worse hands.
For ten months.
Ten months alone, in a cage, without the mercy of light.He wrote about his conversations with Regret, the visits from the doctor with a heart of frost, the scalpel, the blood, and the depth of pain that didn’t stop when the blade lifted.
My throat burns.I can’t scrub the images from my head.Wolf shackled, stripped, bleeding, but still spitting sarcasm through grinding teeth.A boy raised in hell, dragged back into hell, and still too stubborn to die.
I want to scream.I want to put my hands on the walls and rip the world apart for letting that happen to him.I want to do things that would shame the devil who hurt him.
Violence.That’s what his story inspires in me.I’m so angry for him.So fucking angry.
Instead, I look at him.Really look.The makeup-stained eyes, the pout, the theatrics, the necessary mask that prevents others from seeing what he carries under his skin.
But I see it now.There’s so much more.The steel braided into his bones.The fight that kept him alive when lesser men would’ve curled up and died.
