I'm the man who already had his year and used it up.
I look at Caroline through the window one more time, just to steady myself, the way you'd check your footing before a hard step.
And that's when I see she's not alone anymore.
A man has slid into the booth across from her. He's got his back to me. He's broad, wearing a heavy canvas coat going dark with melt at the shoulders, a wool cap pushed back off his forehead. Not the trapper-hat man; that one's still at the counter, working on his pie.
This is someone new. He must have snuck in while I was on the phone. I didn't hear the bell. Not sure how I missed it.
Caroline's posture has changed. She's sitting up straight now, both hands flat on the table, smiling politely. And—fuck me, is shelaughing?
I'm in motion at once. Wolf is up and at my heel without a sound. I pound across the lot through the snow, my hand drifting toward the small of my back where the Makarov rides warm against my spine.
I don't know who this motherfucker is. He could be nobody. A trucker, a local, a lonely man in a storm who saw a pretty woman alone and decided to try his luck.
But I haven't lived this long by assuming the best.
I put my hand on the door, and the bell jingles, and the man in the canvas coat turns his head toward the sound.
24
CAROLINE
The man slides into the booth across from me. "This seat taken?"
It is, actually. It's taken by a glowering Russian and a complicated emotional situation.
But the glowering Russian is currently outside in the snow making mysterious phone calls and the emotional situation is a real damn clusterfuck, and that's all pretty hard to communicate in a few words.
So I just blink at the newcomer and say, "Um."
"Saw you sitting here all by your lonesome," he says, settling in like he's been invited. He's big—not Afon big, but big in a soft, gym-membership-he-doesn't-quite-use way—with a canvas coat dark at the shoulders and a wool cap pushed back off a broad, pleasant face. Late thirties, I'd guess. The kind of face that probably gets calledboyishby women who have not yet learned better. "Couldn't let a thing like that stand. Not on a night like this."
"That's very civic of you," I say.
He grins. He has good teeth, and I get the feeling he knows it. "Name's Drake."
"Caroline."
"Caroline! What a pleasure to meet you, Caroline," he purrs. "Pretty name for a pretty girl."
Oh,Drake.
I have spent the last week being kidnapped, concussed, shot at, frozen, and starved. I have watched a man chop a deer into pieces. I have hauled a bleeding former assassin fourteen miles through a blizzard while losing feeling in my own extremities.
And now, here is Drake, with his good teeth and his expensive coat, deployingpretty girllike it's a brand-new invention he just patented.
I am too tired to be annoyed. Honestly, there's something almost soothing about it. Drake is the most normal thing that has happened to me in seven days. Drake is a man who has clearly never had to think about kerosene rationing. I could weep with the ordinariness of him.
So when he asks what brings me to Pike Hollow, I find myself smiling and saying, "Oh, you know. A wellness retreat."
He laughs like it's the funniest thing he's ever heard. "A wellness retreat! In Pike Hollow!" He shakes his head. "You're a riot, you know that?"
I am not a riot. I am a sleep-deprived woman with frostbite-adjacent toes. There's a mean part of me—probably at least related to the part that's still smarting from Afon snarlingWe're not togetherlike that is the worst thing that anyone could ever accuse him of—that is leaning into this.
Look,it says.Somebody thinks I'm a riot. He slid into a booth just to be near me. And I bet dollars to donuts that he isn't keeping a secret phone in his pocket.
It's pathetic, but then again, pathetic is exactly how I feel right now.
