His arm takes my full weight without buckling. The tendons stand out in his forearm like cable, and I hear him exhale through his teeth, but he doesn’t let go.
He pulls. I climb. My boots scrape stone, my free hand finds a root, and between his arm and my scrambling, I clear the chute and hit solid ground.
I’m on my hands and knees on the trail. Breathing hard. My palms are torn. My hip is screaming where it hit the ledge. Belowus, the rock shelf I was standing on breaks free and tumbles into the crevice with a sound like something heavy being swallowed.
He’s beside me. On his knees. His hand is still on my wrist.
“You’re okay,” he says. Breathing hard, too, but his voice is steady. “You’re okay. You’re on solid ground.”
I look up at him. His face is close enough to feel his breath. His eyes are blue and clear and completely present…the man, not the wolf. His hand on my wrist is the same hand that grabbed me that day I bathed him, the same grip, the same position. But everything about it is different. That grip was reflex. This was choice.
I throw my arms around him.
The contact is graceless…my torn palms flat against his back, my face against his shoulder, my body shaking with adrenaline and the memory of the ground dropping away. He goes rigid for half a second, and then his arms come around me. Carefully. His hands settling on my back, his chin against my hair.
He holds me the way he held me when he took me from the transport—like something he won’t let fall. But this time, nobody is screaming. Nobody is running. He’s just holding me on a mountainside because I’m shaking and he’s there.
“You saved me,” I say against his shoulder. My voice is unsteady. I don’t care.
He’s quiet for a moment. His hand moves on my back, a slow, deliberate stroke between my shoulder blades.
“No,” he says. “You saved me.”
I pull back and look at him.
His face is open in a way I haven’t seen before, stripped of the rawness of surfacing from the wolf and the blankness the drugs left behind. He means what he said. He may not have the words to explain it yet, but I believe him.
The hand still around my wrist is the same one that caught me in the sickroom. Same grip. Same bones under my fingers when I cover them with my own.
Everything else has changed.
Then the helicopter sound returns, distant and south of us.
“We need to move,” I say.
He nods, gets to his feet, and offers me his hand.
I take it.
His palm is scraped. Mine is torn. Our fingers fit together badly at first, blood and grit and shaking muscles, but neither of us lets go as we climb.
The afternoon wears on. The helicopter makes two more passes, each one closer, the grid tightening. We stay in the shadow of the rock face, using the granite to mask our heat signatures, and every time the rotors fade, we push higher.
Rafael’s speech doesn’t go back. Whatever the rescue cracked open stays open. He talks as we walk; not constantly, but naturally. Pointing out changes in the air pressure. Noting where the rock transitions.
“How do you know all of this?” I ask, eventually.
He turns to look at me. “I don’t know. I just do.”
I leave it at that, certain that the person he was will unfold in its own good time. But I like what I’m seeing so far.
The weather turns late in the afternoon. The temperature drops so fast I can feel it in my chest with each breath. The clouds that were high and gray all day settle down around us, thick and wet. The first flakes of snow hit my face like cold needles.
“There,” Rafael says. He’s stopped, his hand on a rock face, his head tilted. “Behind this. The air is moving. There’s space.”
I look where he’s pointing. A gap in the rock, barely visible, a dark line where two granite faces overlap. Not an obviousentrance. A fold in the mountain you’d walk past a hundred times without noticing.
“How big?” I ask.
