Jack’s own stride was long, the shoe prints large. The second set was smaller by several sizes, shorter between each footfall. Rick hadn’t said anything. He’d simply straightened and told Graham to go with him.
A loose endwas the word Todd had used.We can’t leave a loose end.
Rick had said nothing in response to that either, which was its own kind of answer.
Jack worked the twine. Todd paced left, stopped, and came back. He was a man who needed movement, neededsomething happening, and standing guard over a man on his knees wasn’t providing it. His attention kept pulling toward the tree line, toward whatever Rick and Graham were doing out there in the snow.
His face went hard as Rick and Graham walked farther away and out of sight. With narrowed eyes, Todd turned to Jack. “You’re more trouble than you’re worth.”
Jack stayed quiet and still, avoiding meeting Todd’s gaze for fear the man would take it as a challenge. Finally, Todd huffed and went back to his pacing.
The cold bit at Jack’s face. He tucked his chin and focused on his hands. He closed his eyes and thought back to the kiss in the crevice. He’d been holding it at a distance since they pulled him to his knees, not letting himself go there fully because going there made thinking harder.
It came back anyway. The way she’d turned her head in the dark. Her mitten against his jaw. Soft and careful and cold at first, and then not.
He could get used to that. He could get used to kissing Steph. To being with her. To more. He’d known it then, and he knew it now. The knowledge didn’t frighten him the way he might have expected.
That was the part he kept returning to. He’d been building defenses against exactly this kind of thing for years, for good reason, and the defenses had simply not shown up.
She’d told him things about the running club, and about her years of quiet work. About the money she’d been saving and not spending, which she hadn’t fully explained but which he suspected had a harder deadline than she was letting on. And about how his arrival in Basin County had looked from where she stood.
Jack didn’t blame her for any of it. He’d understood it before she finished saying it. The moment they got out of here, he was going to talk to Liam. Not about the Elkridge Endurance. About something different.
Something that had Steph’s name on the front of it and her hand on the decisions that mattered. Liam had money to put behind things, and what Steph had was everything else—the relationships, the history, the respect of people who’d watched her build something real over the years.
A race that combined both. A real race, with a real budget, the kind she’d been trying to put together on her own and couldn’t because the money never came together.
She might say no to anything connected to Liam. He understood that and had already accepted it as the likely outcome. But she might also look at the numbers and the possibilities and set aside the complications long enough to see what the thing actually was.
Jack was going to lay it out clearly and let her decide. She deserved to decide.
The thing he hadn’t been able to work out was the last chance.It’s probably my last try. She’d said it, and then the hill had interrupted and he’d let her redirect and it hadn’t come back up. Something in her tone, in the way she chose her words, tipped him off that this went beyond any adjustment to her racing schedule.
She’d started to explain and stopped, and the look on her face in the dark was the look of someone deciding how much to say to a person they weren’t yet sure of.
Was she sick? Something she hadn’t said out loud yet, something that was already changing every calculation she was making? The possibility sat heavy in his chest, and he pushed it aside because he didn’t have enough information,and building on guesswork wasn’t going to help either of them right now.
She didn’t seem sick, not with the way she climbed those hills, pulling the sled and barely increasing her breath.
Moving? A new position somewhere, a different life she’d decided to start where the running club and the races and the careful years she’d built weren’t part of the picture?
He didn’t know. He needed to find out.
But he needed to get off his knees first. The twine shifted. Not much. A fraction of give, barely there, but present. He went back to work, slower this time, more deliberate. Not chasing the progress. Building on it.
Todd had stopped pacing. He stood with his back mostly to Jack, his weight shifted forward, his head tilted to the right.
Jack kept his wrists moving. Todd took two steps toward the tree line and stopped. Something caught his attention and was holding it. Jack tracked him without moving his head, reading the angle of Todd’s body, the way his hand moved toward the rifle and then didn’t quite close on it. Todd moved again, walking toward the trees. Jack worked the twine harder.
The sound reached him before he could make sense of it. A sharp hiss, immediate and unmistakable, followed by Todd’s voice breaking apart into something raw and involuntary.
Not words. Just sound.
Todd lurched into view, hands clawing at his face. Steph came into view. She had a branch the length of her arm in both hands, and she swung it across Todd’s back before he could find his feet.
He stumbled forward. She hit him again, lower, and Todd went down hard into the snow. He made oneattempt to get up. She hit him a third time, a fourth and a fifth. The branch cracked loudly against his body. The rage she was unleashing on him was impressive and scary.
Todd stopped moving. Jack was on his feet. Steph gave another solid hit with the branch, muttering, “And stay down.”
