“Watch me.”
It surprises a laugh out of her, small, half a breath, but real, and it cracks the fear right down the middle of her face for just a second. That sound. I would walk into a whiteout for that sound and not think twice about the cost. Her eyes come up to mine and stay there, and the room goes very still around the two of us, nothing moving but the low light off the fire.
I should stand up. Put the trap back together. Keep this simple, because in a few days men with federal paperwork are going to climb this mountain and take her somewhere I cannot follow, and every hour I let this thing between us keep growing is an hour I am going to pay for later, alone, in a cabin that used to feel like enough before she filled it up with the sound of her pencil and her laugh.
I do not stand up.
I slide my hand along her jaw, into the softness of her hair, and she is already leaning in before I even finish the motion, like some part of her has been waiting on this since last night and does not intend to wait a second longer than she has to. This kiss is not careful like the first one in the dark. This one has an argument built into it, mine, against the Marshals, against the Pertrosyans, against every version of the future where she isnot here in this cabin with me. She answers it fully, her fingers curling into my collar and pulling instead of holding, and by the time we finally break apart her breath has gone unsteady, and so, for the record, has mine.
“That felt like a decision,” she whispers, her forehead still close enough to mine that I can feel the words as much as hear them.
“It was.” I rest my forehead against hers, both of us breathing the same small pocket of air. “I do not know exactly what it changes yet. But it changed something. I can feel that much.”
Outside, the wind leans hard on the cabin and the cabin does not give an inch. I stay crouched there in front of her chair with her hands folded inside mine and her forehead against mine while the last of the light dies out of the window, and somewhere down the mountain, buried under all that snow, a man named Levon Pertrosyan is out there somewhere looking for the woman I am holding right now.
Let him look. He hunts people in cities, in alleys, on paved ground that belongs to him.
Up here, the ground is mine.
11
Nora
I wake up disoriented, sunlight pouring through the window instead of the gray storm light I have grown so used to over the last three days that its absence feels almost wrong. For a second I think I am still dreaming. Then I feel the warmth at my back, Colt's arm heavy across my waist, his breath slow and even against the nape of my neck, and I do not move. I just lie there for a long minute, cataloguing the strange, improbable, entirely wonderful reality of being tangled up with this man in his bed, in his cabin, on the same mountain that nearly killed me three days ago and gave me this instead.
The storm broke sometime in the night. I can tell by the quiet before I even open my eyes properly. No more wind howling at the corners of the cabin. No more snow hammering the window glass like something trying to get in. Just soft, ordinary morning light and the low crackle of a fire somebody must have fed before dawn without waking me.
Colt stirs behind me, his arm tightening instinctively around my waist before he is even fully awake, some deep animal part ofhim checking that I am still there before the rest of him catches up. “Morning,” he murmurs against my hair, his voice thick and rough with sleep in a way that does something warm and low in my chest.
“Morning yourself.” I turn carefully in his arms, mindful of my healing ribs, until I am facing him properly. His eyes are still soft from sleep, none of the usual sharp alertness there yet, none of the watchfulness he seems to carry every waking hour like it is simply part of his anatomy. I like him like this. Unguarded. It feels like being handed something most people never get to see.
He studies my face for a long moment, quiet, like he is memorizing it, and then he leans in and kisses me, slow and unhurried, nothing like the desperate, argument shaped hunger of last night. This kiss is a question and an answer both, patient in a way that makes my chest ache pleasantly. I melt into it, my hand coming up to rest against his jaw, feeling the scrape of morning stubble rough under my palm.
When we finally break apart, he pulls back just enough to look at me properly, his gaze moving over my face like he is checking for damage the way he does every morning. “Storm's over.”
“I noticed.” My stomach does an uncomfortable flip, the good feeling from a second ago curdling fast into something colder. The storm was our excuse, our reason to exist in this bubble outside of time and consequence, and without it, reality comes crashing back in all at once. Levon. WITSEC. Everything Mason told us yesterday, all of it waiting patiently on the other side of that door for the weather to finally get out of its way.
Colt reads it on my face, because of course he does. He always seems to know exactly what I am thinking a beat before I manage to say it out loud, which should probably unsettle memore than it does. “Hey. We have got time still. Storm clearing does not mean the roads are passable yet. Could be another day, maybe two, before anybody makes it up here.”
“And then what?”
He does not answer right away, his jaw working like he is chewing on something he does not particularly want to say out loud yet. “Then Mason and the team probably show up. We figure out next steps together.”
I nod, even though the thought of strangers, of Marshals I have never met, sitting in some office somewhere deciding my fate on my behalf, makes my chest go tight with a very specific kind of anxiety I have never had to practice managing before this week. I push it down for now, the way I have gotten surprisingly good at pushing things down since the crash. We have time. A day, maybe two. I refuse to waste it drowning in fear about what comes after, not when what is happening right here, right now, in this bed, is the first genuinely good thing to happen to me since I heard that gunshot on the trail.
“I need coffee,” I announce, mostly to change the subject before my own thoughts can drag me somewhere darker. “And maybe actual food. Something that is not eggs. I love eggs in theory, Colt, but we have had a very intense relationship with eggs the last two days and I think we both need some distance.”
Colt laughs, the sound rough and real and entirely too rare, which makes me want to earn it again immediately. “I have got venison stew I can heat up. Made it myself last month.”
“You made stew? From an actual deer you actually hunted?”
“That is generally how venison works, yeah.”
I swat his chest lightly, more for the excuse to touch him than out of any real annoyance. “I know that, smartass. I just, you are very good at all this. Surviving. Cooking. Being a whole capable human being who does not need modern conveniences to function. Meanwhile my most impressive survival skill is knowing exactly which coffee shop has the best outlet access for my laptop charger.”
Something flickers in his eyes, pride maybe, or amusement, or both tangled up together. “You get good at things when you spend enough time alone in the woods.”
“Is that lonely? Living out here by yourself?”
