The path slopes gently downward, winding between stands of aspen stripped bare by winter and evergreens heavy with fresh powder. Every footfall sends a soft puff of snow into the air, glittering for a heartbeat before it settles again. My lungs burn with the cold, clean bite of it, and I welcome the sting. It reminds me I am alive. That we both are.
Stryker glances over his shoulder, dark eyes scanning my face the way he does a dozen times a day, checking temperature, mood, the set of my shoulders. Satisfied, he slows until I catch up, then slips his gloved hand around mine.
His fingers lace through mine without asking, the heat of his palm bleeding through two layers of wool and leather to reach my skin. I squeeze back, hard, because his touch is a language I trust.
We walk in silence for a long while, boots crunching, breath fogging, hearts keeping time. The river appears suddenly, a wide silver ribbon frozen solid between banks piled high with snow.
The ice is thick enough to bear the weight of a truck, Stryker told me yesterday, but today it looks fragile, like one wrong step and the whole world could crack open beneath us.
He stops at the edge, boots planted wide, and pulls me in front of him so my back rests against his chest. His arms come around me, solid and warm, chin settling on the top of my head. I feel the steady thud of his heart against my spine, the way his body shields mine from the wind whipping down the valley. For a minute we simply stand there, watching sunlight fracture across the ice in a thousand sharp pieces.
My throat tightens without warning.
Remy.
The name rises like a stone in my chest, heavy and cold and impossible to swallow around.
Stryker feels the shift in me instantly. He always does. His arms tighten a fraction. “Talk to me.”
I stare at the frozen river and try to find the beginning of the sentence. “I don’t even know his last name.”
The confession comes out small, scraped raw.
Stryker says nothing, just waits, patient as the mountains around us.
“Remy’s,” I clarify. “After. When everything went quiet. There was no obituary. No article. No record of a body. Nothing. It’s like he never existed at all.” My breath shakes out of me, visible in the air. “But he came every time my father snapped his fingers. He crossed borders with no questions. He put himself between my dad and bullets without hesitation. And when I called him, terrified and alone, he came. He always came.”
The words tear loose now, rough and ragged.
My eyes burn. I blink hard, but the tears come anyway, freezing on my lashes. “And I don’t even know what to mourn. Just… A shadow that showed up when I was most afraid. A man who gave me his life and asked for nothing.”
Stryker’s arms loosen.
Gently, with his hands on my shoulders, he turns me until I face him.
His eyes are steady, dark and fierce and soft all at once. He brushes the frozen tears from my cheeks with his thumbs, then takes my gloved hand and leads me off the path, deeper into the trees where the snow is untouched and the silence feels sacred.
He stops beneath a massive pine, its branches drooping under the weight of winter. Snow pillows the ground in a perfect, unbroken sheet.
I know what I need to do before I fully admit it to myself.
I sink to my knees.
The cold bites through my jeans instantly, sharp and grounding. My fingers tremble as I pull off my gloves.
Snow packs under my nails as I sweep a clear space in front of me, the powder fine and dry and impossibly white.
With one bare finger I write his name.
R E M Y
The letters are crooked, awkward, but they are there. Real. In the world.
I stare at them until my hand goes numb.
“I see you,” I whisper to the wind, to the trees, to whatever part of him might still be listening. “I remember. You will never be nothing. Not to me.”
A shadow falls across the snow as Stryker kneels beside me. His presence is quiet, immense, steady. He doesn’t touch me yet. He simply exists in the space beside my grief, letting me feel it fully without rushing me through it.
