He pulls me toward him. He doesn't say a word. He just presses his lips firmly, branding the back of my hand with a kiss that holds unspoken permanence.
He releases me, stands up, and shoulders the bag himself.
He kicks the bark panel open, letting the whiteout flood into the shelter. He steps out into the snow, carving the path forward, a silent, lethal shield against the world.
I follow the Shadow into the storm.
6
Santi
The wind hitslike a wall of solid ice the second I kick the bark barrier away. Snow blasts into the tiny cavern we built. The storm does not care what just happened between us. The mountain only wants us dead.
I step out into the waist-deep drift. It immediately bites through my layers, vicious and absolute. I do not care. The cold is irrelevant. Every function I have narrows to a single objective: keep the woman behind me breathing.
Reese crawls out of the shelter without complaint or hesitation, securing her jacket and pulling the collar up over her bruised mouth. Her hands shake. She hides it quickly, stuffing them into her pockets. She is bleeding, exhausted, and running on nothing but stubborn defiance.
She survives with me.
I turn my back to the gale. I plant my boots in the unbroken powder. I become the windbreak.
"Step exactly where I step," I command over the roaring wind.
She nods once. A sharp, jerky motion.
We begin the march. Every movement requires agonizing effort. The snow is wet and relentlessly deep. My thighs burn.The muscles in my back strain against the weight of the survival bag and the brutal resistance of the elements. I ignore the toll. My body is merely a tool required to transport her to safety.
A low, guttural howl cuts through the scream of the blizzard.
The wolves are tracking us. They are hungry.
My grip tightens on the Glock hidden in my coat pocket. Let them come. I will put them down one at a time. The violence in my head is not a tactical response. It is a deep, territorial rage. I have spent my adult life watching from a distance. That man died in the shelter. The man walking through this snow only cares about the curvy, infuriatingly competent pilot following in my wake.
We push through a dense thicket of frozen pine. The branches whip at my face. Ice slices my cheek. I do not flinch. I break the branches back, snapping thick wood to clear a path for her.
For two decades, I have simply existed.
I swallowed the grief whole that night. I have been the silent watcher ever since.
I stopped living that night. I became a function. I cataloged threats, ran operations, charted the enemy’s moves. A machine powered by vengeance and duty.
Then this extraction helicopter fell out of the sky.
Reese stumbles. Her boot catches on a hidden root beneath the snow. She pitches forward.
I spin. I catch her before her knees hit the ice. My hands grip her waist. The layers of our coats do nothing to mute the electric shock of her proximity. I pull her flush against my chest.
She pants, her forehead dropping against my chest for a fraction of a second. "I'm fine. Just tripped."
"You’re exhausted." My voice grates, rough.
"I'm walking." She pushes back. She does not want to be carried. She refuses to be weak.
I let her step back, but my hands stay on her hips for a brutal, lingering second. We’re locked in this frozen hell, tethered by the cold and by what happened in the shelter.
"Ten miles," she says, her voice rough but firm. "The map in my head says the station is ten miles north of the crash site. We drifted slightly east."
"We keep moving." I turn back to the unbroken snow.
