Her terrible singing allows me to reach her with surgical precision, my hands breaking through to where her body is entombed in the snow. It could have been behind the thickest stone of the mountain and still it would not have stopped me. I would have clawed the earth bloody until it yielded to me.
She is limp in my grasp, her limbs too light, her breath too faint. She is smaller, frailer under all of her mountain gear than I could even have imagined. Her bones feel like a bird’s beneath my great hands. I gentle my grip, afraid to leave a mark on her delicate flesh.
I pull her free and watch her lie there in the snow. The flakes swirl over her face, falling down around her ears. I watch one dance in her panting breaths until it finally loops and arcs to land softly on her lips.
Oh, how I want to land there, too. To be the snowflake that dares kiss her lips. But it does not melt. The cold is stealing her from me.
Her eyes flutter open and words fall from her mouth, but I cannot even comprehend them in the enormity of this moment—she and I are finally together.
She sees me. And she should be afraid or even surprised but the only thing I see reflecting back at me in the violet-blue eyes of my Winter Star is like recognizing like. Soul meeting soul.
This may be the first time she is truly seeing me, but she has felt me all along. Despite the storm raging around us, her warmth floods my veins like the summer sun.
Her small pink tongue peeks out, sweeping the lucky snowflake into her mouth as her teeth begin to chatter and she pales even further.
Without thought, I sweep her up and into my body, cloaking her in my thick fur against the raging elements and she thanks me.
Me. She thanksme. Not with fear. Not with hesitation. With gratitude.
Her voice, barely more than a whisper against my flesh, reaches through the storm, curling around something deep inside me.
She is not afraid. She only knows that I have saved her.
Something inside me tightens. Something ancient. Something I never thought to have again but has declared itself, established a foothold deep in the mountain of my soul.
I shift her against my chest, cradling her carefully, pressing her into the warmth of my body. Her skin is like ice, but she is soft. So soft. Beneath this ridiculous puffy coat and the jeans that have no place in this snow, I feel her curl around me as if she were carved from my own flesh.
But I should not want this. I should not crave this. My hands are made for shaping the land, for protecting, for killing if I must. Not for holding something so delicate. Not for keeping. I’ve proved it before, but my heart does not listen.
It screams,mine.
The word slides through my mind, unbidden. I crush it down. She is dying. She does not belong to me.
Not yet,my heart says.
I will it with every fiber of my being, and although I am hers, just as I have vowed, she will need to choose me. I honor her far too much for any other way.
The wind howls, wrapping around us like a living thing, but it no longer matters. She is no longer lost.
And neither am I.
I tighten my hold, fitting my body around hers, sheltering her from the storm. And then I turn toward the mountains. Toward safety. Toward the only place she will be truly protected. The storm swallows us whole.
And I carry her home.
Chapter Fourteen
Dahlia
Idrift in and out of consciousness, pulled between waking and dreaming by the rhythmic sway of movement. I don’t know how long I’ve been here, wrapped in this cocoon of heat and fur, my body cradled against something impossibly warm.
The storm is gone. The wind still howls in the distance, but it no longer pursues us relentlessly. A sure and steady heartbeat pounds beneath my cheek, slow despite the perpetual movement and the strain of carrying me.
My fingers twitch, flexing instinctively, brushing against the thick fur wrapped around me. It’s softer than I expected, smooth where it meets skin beneath the dense coat. A fresh wave of heat unfurls in my chest, seeping down, warming places that shouldn’t need warming after nearly freezing to death.
I shouldn’t feel this safe. I shouldn’t feel thisgood.A low sound rumbles through the body beneath me—deep, resonant,male.My breath catches, eyes fluttering open as awareness crashes into me. The creature. The Migoi.
He saved me.
