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“Rinaldo asked me to do it,” he said simply.
“You always do what he asks?”
“Pretty much,” Arden confirmed.
“Why you?”
“I killed the guy who would have otherwise done it,” Arden replied as he stared up into the sky.
“You killed one of your boss’s men?”
He moved his eyes slowly to mine. He didn’t need to respond verbally.
“You got balls,” I muttered.
“He was an asshole,” Arden said.
“There are plenty of those around. You can’t kill them all.”
“Maybe.” He kept looking at me, and his cold eyes reminded me a bit of Landon’s. They were the wrong color—much too dark. In fact, they were pretty close to the shade of blue in my eyes. “So why are you here?”
I ignored him. The last thing I wanted to do was have him thinking that I had someone out there to make me vulnerable. Not that it mattered at this point—only one of us was going to get out of this alive.
If even that.
Closing my eyes, I tried to find my focus again. Getting free was paramount, but my body was exhausted and half frozen. I licked my lips, and it felt like the cold was freezing the saliva to my mouth. I needed more focus to stop myself from giving in to the temptation to just give up and lie back in the snow.
Incentive.
Struggling a little due to my mitten-covered hands, I reached under my parka and into my breast pocket to pull out the drawing Alex had made. I unfolded it carefully and stared at the figures in the picture. I traced the bottom of the picture where Alex had drawn his feet in blue tennis shoes and long, crazy laces and then brushed the edge of Raine’s face with my thumb.
When I glanced back over my shoulder, Arden was still looking at me. From his vantage point, he would have seen the picture clearly. For a moment, I felt a touch of panic because every one of the people watching over the closed circuit had just seen it, too.
But Arden’s head was free of his goggles as well. We had both lost the cameras used to broadcast back to Resolute. There was no beacon being transmitted from our location at all. They didn’t know where we were or what we were doing. Their last images would have been the avalanche taking us both down the side of the mountain.
We were fucked—completely and totally. It didn’t matter what he knew now.
“They got my girl,” I said quietly.
As the words came out of my mouth, something inside me flipped. It was over. There was no way I was going to be able to get out of this without help, and as much as I didn’t want to admit it, I was done. I couldn’t move. My leg was broken. This was going to be an all losers tournament.
Arden didn’t respond, and I looked over to him. He was staring blankly into the snow in front of his face with his jaw tight.
“You’re never going to see her again,” he said, “not the kid, either.”
My muscles tightened at his words. As much as I wanted to deny it, I knew he was right. I’d come to the exact same conclusion. I wasn’t about to admit it out loud, though.
“Fuck you,” I growled. “I’m getting out of this, fucking you over, and going home to them.”
“No, you aren’t,” Arden said. “You know it, too. You just figured it out.”
“How do you know that?” I snapped back at him.
He shrugged with his one free arm.
“Your posture just changed,” he said. “You slumped down, and your eyes dropped. There’s no way to dig yourself out, and we aren’t going to help each other, so there will be no winner for this tournament. You were looking at that crayon drawing when you realized you’d never see her or your kid again.”
I couldn’t hide the shock I felt.
