“I’m trying to— ”
“I know what you’re trying to do. And I don’t want to hear it right now.”
“Steph.”
“What you said to me...” She’d managed to keep the anger clean up to that point, functional, the kind that kept things moving. What came into her voice now was something underneath the anger, and she couldn’t stop it. “After what I just did, what I risked, you called me careless.”
“I know.”
“I’ve been out here all night, the same as you. I ran from the same people and hid from the same spotlight, and I did everything you asked me to do.” Her voice was controlled. She made sure of that. “And the moment I saved your life, you stood there and told me I was reckless.”
He looked at her and said nothing.
“I was right about you from the beginning. I told myself I was wrong. I let myself believe I was wrong.” She paused and took a deep breath. “I wasn’t wrong.”
“That’s not— ”
“I think you should know that whatever I thought was happening between us, whatever I thought the last severalhours meant, I was confused. The situation was intense, and I read it wrong.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re hurt, and you’re pulling back. I understand why, but that’s not fair.”
She snorted. “You want to talk to me about fair?”
“I want to talk to you about what’s actually happening.” His voice was still controlled, but the control had an edge to it now. “Yes, I said something wrong. I said it badly and from the wrong place, and you didn’t deserve it. All of that is true.”
He reached out again, this time touching her on the forearm. “But you telling me you misread our time together is not you being honest. That’s you deciding it’s safer to go back to the version of me that’s easier to be mad at.”
She opened her mouth.
“You just told me you weren’t reckless. That you made a careful, tactical decision. So did I. And mine got me captured. Yours got me free.” The edge in his voice was something she hadn’t heard from him before. Not anger, exactly. Something more complicated and less comfortable. “One of us was right today, and it wasn’t me.”
The acknowledgment landed somewhere she hadn’t braced for.
Steph kept walking but looked over at him to see him looking back. She’d been reckless, that much was true. When she’d looked at him in the dark of a rock crevice and decided to believe what she was starting to feel, that had been the actual recklessness. She’d known it going in and had done it anyway. And now she was trompingthrough the snow on the other side of it, trying to figure out what was left.
“Steph.” He touched her hand. “I need to tell you about Celeste.”
An engine turned over.
Her head snapped toward the sound.
“They found Todd,” Jack said.
Another engine started.
He reached for her hand. “We need to hide.”
Chapter 30
Jack
The rev of the engines was much too loud and much too close.
Jack tracked the sound as they pushed through the timber, calculating the angle, the speed, and the distance. This wasn’t the searching circles from last night when they thought someone was out there and were trying to learn the truth.
