Page 136 of Shatter

Desmond turns it over in his fingers, then sets it on the desk without looking at it.

"I'd like to see her." My voice doesn't sound like mine. "Now. Before we do anything else."

Desmond looks at me for a long moment.

Then he smiles wider.

"Of course." He buttons his jacket. "I think she'd like to see you, too."

He walks past me into the hall.

Laurent's gun presses into my spine, and I follow him down the hall, past a frosted window where men are loading boxes into the back of a reefer truck.

To a steel door at the very end, thick as a man's arm, with a heavy chrome latch and a small square of frosted glass set in it at eye level.

Frost has crawled across the glass from the edges in.

Desmond stops in front of it.

He puts his hand on the latch.

He looks back at me over his shoulder, and his eyes are shining.

I look at the glass.

Behind the frost, in the blue dark on the other side, a small, pale hand presses flat against the window.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Anni

The frost on the glass is thick as sugar.

I can't feel my feet anymore.

I stopped feeling them a long time ago, somewhere between the fourth time I tried the door and the hour I spent curled against the wall with my hands shoved up under my hoodie, pressed against my stomach, the only warm place left.

My teeth stopped chattering a while ago, too.

It scares me more than the chattering did.

Voices in the hall.

I lift my head, and it takes forever, like lifting something through syrup.

Footsteps, three sets, coming closer.

A voice I know better than my own, low and flat and so calm it makes my eyes sting.

I crawl.

My knees scrape across the frozen concrete, and I don't feel it.

I get one hand on the rack beside the door and drag myself up onto my knees, and I press my palm flat against the little square of frosted glass.

Through the frost, blurred blue and white, a figure.

Broad shoulders and dark hair, and a face I'd know through a hundred layers of ice.