“It was their last meal. I’m glad you told me to jump into the hot water.”
“And I’m glad you came for me. You saw what… what he did.”
I pull her closer. “I saw you trying to get away. And you screamed so loud I could hear it even over the bloodwings.”
“I wanted tokillhim,” Riley says, with an intensity I’ve rarely heard from her. “If I could have reached my knife, I would have slit his throat. You know, he seemed so nice in the village. But there was somethingwrongabout him. I saw it the whole time.”
“I’m glad I came, and that we could let the bloodwings do it for us. He wasn’t worth making your blade bloody.”
She moves again, turning toward me fully, her body fitting against mine in the confined space. The furs shift with us, trapping the heat.
“I only wantyou,” she says softly, her voice rough with exhaustion and something deeper beneath it.
Her words sink into me like warm rain into the ground after a long draught. In the dark snow cave, the pale light filtering through the thick walls turns everything soft and red. The outside world, with the Gar hunters, the storm, the danger, is completely muffled. There is only the quiet sound of our breathing and the faint rustle of furs.
I pull her closer until she straddles my lap. My hands move slowly over her, loosening the outer layers of her heavy furs. She does the same to me, her small fingers working at the ties across my chest with gentle patience. One by one we peel the thick hides away, letting them fall open around us while keeping enough draped over our shoulders to hold in the warmth.
I cup her face and kiss her deeply, unhurried. Her lips are soft and yielding, warm despite the cold all around us. “You are everything I need,” I murmur against her mouth. “Here, it’s only us. Nothing else exists.”
Riley sighs into the next kiss, her body melting against mine. “I feel it too. Like the whole planet disappeared and left us here together.”
I slide my hands beneath the loosened inner furs to find her bare skin, tracing her waist and the curve of her back. She shivers, but not from cold. I kiss her again, slower this time, savoring the way she opens for me. My larger cock is already hardening against her, and the smaller one rests warmly against her mound, but I do not rush.
There is no frenzy here. Only this quiet, perfect closeness I have never known before, not even in the warm cave of the village, with its flickering firelight. The snow walls wrap us in silence and dim red light, making every touch feel sacred.
She rests her forehead against me. “Love me slowly, my love,” I whisper. “I want your heat inside me.”
I can only nod as her fingers thread through my hair and she pulls me back into another deep, tender kiss. The furs slip further down our bodies, and the world outside ceases to matter at all.
23
- Riley-
We decide to not build a fire the next day, so we spend the morning widening the hole in the ice. If we light a fire in that hole, it will melt that ice and the water will run down into the narrow hole, gathering there until we can scoop it up.
We go to the snow cave well before midday, then wait while the Gar tribe maybe comes, checks everything and then leaves again. Hopefully. If they even came today. But I worry that Nator’ax is right, and they will just search all the snow drifts for days until they find us. We can’t stay hidden that long, and we don’t have the food.
When I dare crawl slowly out and then stick my head out to see, there’s nobody there. So we walk carefully back to the glacier.
If the Gar tribe are as crafty as I think, they will realize that the smart thing to do is to hide and wait for us to come out. And sooner or later, we’dhaveto come out. They can wait longer than we can. For months, if they think it makes sense. So this isa risk that we simply have to take, gambling on them not beingthatsmart.
I start to hack at the ice while we discuss Nator’ax going on a hunting trip with the spear, and what I can do while he’s gone.
As I slam the spear back down for the ten thousandth time, it goes a little deeper than I expect, and the impact at the bottom is softer than usual.
I pull the spear back out, and the churned-up ice at the bottom of the hole drops all the way out.
“Nator’ax! We’re through to the hull.” We’ve hacked a narrow little hole all the way down to the saucer, so deep that only two feet of the spear are above the ice.
He turns around to see. “Ah. Well done. Now all that remains is to hack away the rest of it.”
He’s right, of course. One tiny hole going eight feet down isn’t going to help us much. But it’ssomething,a small success. “If that’s what we have to do, fine.”
He turns back and shields his eyes with one hand. “It may not take that long, if we use fire to-” He cuts himself off. “Take the spear out,” he says calmly. “They’re here.”
The heart drops in my chest when I see the fur-clad men coming from different angles. They’ve hid by the edges of the glacier, behind snow drifts, out of sight for us. Our gamble failed.
Running won’t do us much good. We may evade them for a day or two, but they’ll have packed food for a long trip and we have nothing. And from what I understand, this way ends in icy, desolate fields, much like the ones beyond the hot springs.
