Jen pushed herself up from the snow.
Her face was dark and bloody. Snow clung to her hair. Blood streaked bright against it.
She looked straight at him.
Not with fear.
Decision.
44
The snow wascold enough to burn.
She lay where Akilov had thrown her, face down, the cold burrowing under her skin. Her cheek throbbed where it met the ground. Her left eye had swollen to a slit, the world narrowed to silver and black. Her hands were raw, the torn nail radiating violent pulses up her finger with every heartbeat.
She couldn’t feel her arms properly. Shock? Damage? She had no idea. Snow seeped through her shirt and into her bones. Her body was starting to believe stillness was the answer.
Just stop.
Her breath came in shallow clouds against the snow. A small, hypnotic cycle.
She could close her eyes. The ground was holding her, the cold was becoming something almost gentle, wrapping around the places that hurt the most and numbing them into silence.
Someone else would stay down.
Let someone else decide how this ended.
She almost did.
For one long, trembling breath she stopped fighting gravity.
Click.
A small mechanical sound, almost swallowed by the wind. But she knew what it meant because Wyatt had taught her, and the sound of a slide locking back on empty was burned into her, part of the vocabulary of this new life she hadn’t asked for.
Empty.
She turned her head.
Wyatt was fifteen feet away, standing in the snow, weapon extended. He wasn’t retreating. He wasn’t running. He was reaching behind for a spare magazine.
Drop the empty. New magazine. Rack the slide. Two seconds. Maybe three.
Wyatt was fast. The reload still needed time he didn’t have.
Akilov’s muzzle was coming up.
She knew when margins ran out.
In the space between one heartbeat and the next, she saw what she stood to lose.
Not the rush or survival.
Him.
This was the man she wanted years with. Not just moments.
She planted her hands in the snow and drove herself up.
