He's quiet for a moment. "For a while," he says. "Yeah. It worked."
"Good." I press a kiss to his chest, right over the scar on his sternum. "Then we can call it a successful medical intervention. For your condition."
"I have a condition?"
"Oh, big time. Chronic Brooding. It's in the DSM. Dr. Levinson would back me up."
He chuckles. "Your therapist would have a field day with this whole week."
"My therapist would need her own therapist after this week. We'd be funding an entire pyramid of therapists. A therapy MLM." I yawn, enormous and unflattering, into his sweater."I'm going to charge you for tonight's session, by the way. My rates are very reasonable."
"What's the going rate?"
"Breakfast that isn't beans."
"Guess it's an IOU until we find a way off this mountain, then."
His chest bounces under my cheek. It takes me a moment to realize that he's laughing. Barely, and it's rusty, but it's a laugh. I feel a surge of pride.
I close my eyes. There's so much out in this world to fret about, and we have only these flimsy walls and a few strings of paracord with tin cans on them to keep us safe. But as long as Afon is here, it's enough. None of it can get to me. Not here. Not with his arm where it is.
I find his hand in the dark and lace my fingers through his, right over the bronze ring, and that's how I fall asleep: holding the hand of a man who staved off twenty years of ghosts for one night because I asked him to. Or was it because he asked me to? At this point, I honestly don't know who's saving who anymore.
I'm not sure it matters.
20
AFON
I wake before dawn.
For twenty years, the first thing my body did upon waking was take inventory of threats. Door. Window. Exits. Confirm whatever weapon was nearest.
This morning, the first thing my body registers is Caroline Oglethorpe's cheek pressed against my sternum and her hand still tangled with mine over the ring.
The threat inventory comes second.
For some reason, that doesn't bother me like I thought it would.
I lie there in the dark and listen to her breathe. She sleeps like someone who's never had to wake up fast in her life—loose-limbed, mouth slightly open, one foot hooked over my shin. Her hair smells like woodsmoke and faintly, stubbornly, like whatever floral product she put in it a week ago in another world.
The stove has burned down to nothing. The wind has not.
In fact, the wind has gotten worse.
I've been listening to this mountain breathe for six months. I know its moods the way I used to know which of Lukas's silences meant boredom and which meant somebody was about to disappear. The sound coming off the ridge right now is a warning of bad things to come. It's a deep, sustained howl out of the northwest.
I extract myself from under Caroline a centimeter at a time. She makes a small, wounded noise and rolls into the warm spot I leave behind. Wolf lifts his head from her feet to give me a questioning look.
"Stay," I mouth at him.
He puts his head back down, but his ears prick up as he assumes guard duty.
I dress in the dark, take the Remington off its pegs, and slip outside.
Gone is the dry cold of the week. This morning, I'm greeted by a heavy dampness. It wriggles under my clothes and stays there. The sky in the east should be lightening up by now, but it isn't. It's a nasty kind of dark, and the snow coming out of it isn't falling so much as traveling sideways.
Two inches of fresh powder already over yesterday's crust.
