She went quiet, and he killed the impulse to look at her. The silence lasted for almost a full minute. He should have known it wouldn’t hold.
“You’ve done this before?” she asked. “Getting people out?”
Yes.
And not all of them came home.
Sometimes the mission didn’t give you two people to save.
The familiar ache found him anyway, even out here in the dark.
Now he looked.
She was watching him with those dark eyes that noted everything and forgave nothing, her face pale in the moonlight, his jacket swallowing her frame, his hat pulled low over her ears. Blood on her lip had dried. Her cheeks were raw from the cold. She looked exhausted enough to collapse and stubborn enough to keep walking anyway.
Snow had melted against the heat of her skin and frozen again along the edge of her lashes.
Fuck.
He didnotneed to be noticing her eyelashes.
Trees creaked in the breeze. Snow shifted and fell from a branch in a soft cascade. He turned away from her as it hit the ground, grateful for the distraction.
“Dawn soon,” he said. “We need to be across the river before daylight.”
He felt her gaze on the side of his face for a long time after that.
They walked in silence for another twenty minutes, the gradient steepening, the trees thickening as the terrain dropped toward the valley floor. His ribs had subsided into a steady, grinding protest that he’d stopped registering as pain and reclassified as background noise. The moon was low, the light thinning, the sky ahead showing the first bruised suggestion of predawn gray.
The river met them with a low, constant rush beneath the wind—water flowing fast over rock, the sound carrying up through the trees. They trudged out of the trees and the valley opened.
Below, the river cut through the base of the slope, maybe twenty feet across. Snowmelt-fed and swollen. Dark as ink in the center, but ice crusted the edges. Moonlight caught the surface and fractured across it in cold, shifting patterns. The air smelled clean—mossy and mineral, and the sharp bite of glacial runoff.
Every minute they stood still, the dogs were a closer reality.
He scanned upstream and downstream, picking the crossing point—the widest stretch, which meant the shallowest. Rocks broke the surface in an uneven line, slick and dark, but they gave him a route.
Cold radiated off the water in waves as he approached the bank, cutting through his clothes, settling into the sweat on his skin.
Harper halted beside him. She didn’t speak. Her jaw was set, her breathing shallow, and her arms were locked rigid at her sides.
Dogs would pick up the trail eventually. The river was the only thing that would buy time. It wouldn’t beat good dogs forever, but fast water shredded scent trails better than snow.
The cache was less than two kilometers beyond the far bank. Dry layers. Heat packs. Calories. Without that, he wouldn’t risk putting her into snowmelt. And with dogs coming, he didn’t have another choice. Snowmelt would hurt like hell, but dogs would hurt worse.
“How deep?” Her face was ashen.
“We’ll find out.”
“Is that supposed to be an answer?”
“Wait here.” He tightened the retention strap on his handgun, then cinched the rifle sling high across his back. Close enough to reach. Secure enough not to drag him sideways if the river took his feet.
Pav stepped off the bank. The water hit his boots and climbed his shins, and the cold was immediate and absolute—an agonizing grip locking every muscle from the knee down, fierce enough to steal the breath from his lungs. The rocks underfoot were slick as glass, and he tested each step before committing his weight, finding the edges, the lips, the places where his boots could grip.
The water reached his thighs at the center, and the cold went from painful to something beyond, a deep numbness that ate inward toward the bone. The current was stronger here, shouldering against him as he leaned into it and found his balance.
He turned back to where Harper waited on the bank, her arms folded across her stomach in a protective hug.
