A second passed. “Probably not.”
“At least you’re honest about being dishonest.”
His gaze shifted over her shoulder. “We should move.”
21
Every step cost him.
His head wound throbbed in time with his pulse. His shoulder sat hot and swollen in the makeshift sling, every movement sending a grinding ache through the joint. The shrapnel laceration across his chest pulled with each breath, butterfly strips straining against skin that wanted to bleed.
He noted the damage. Functional. Slower. Push it, and it bleeds.
Harper walked beside him. Not behind—she hadn’t walked behind him since the river. She’d taken his good arm across her shoulders without asking, and he’d let her. That was new.
Her hand was firm against his waist, careful of his wound without making a production of it. Her pace was strong. She’d become a different woman in the last twelve hours—the one who’d screamed at him by the burning helicopter was gone.
In her place was someone who stitched scalp wounds and reset dislocated shoulders, and breathed air into him when his own body forgot how, then picked up the patient and kept walking. He didn’t have a place for that. There was a growing list of things about Harper Fox he didn’t know what to do with.
They’d been walking thirty minutes when the sound reached him.
Distant, carried on the wind from the east. The rhythmic, pulsing bay of tracking dogs working a scent line.
He stopped, drafting the sound against his mental map—distance, direction, wind speed, the way sound traveled through cold, dense air in the mountains.
Less than two miles and closing fast.
The drone had given them a position fix. The handlers had the coordinates, and they’d deployed the dogs. Now the dogs were doing what dogs did—running the scent with an efficiency that no amount of evasion training could fully counter.
The river had bought them time. Time had run out.
Harper read him. “What is it?”
“Dogs.”
Her face changed. “How far?”
“Close enough.” He disengaged from her shoulder. Stood on his own. The pain was irrelevant now—his system flooding with adrenaline, the body’s chemical override for damaged hardware. It would cost him later. It always did. But later was a problem for a man who was still alive.
“We need to move. Fast.”
He took point. Injured or not, he was the one who read the terrain. She was smart and brave—but she didn’t know how to move through hostile wilderness the way he did. He pushed the pace to the edge of what his body could sustain. His breathing was controlled despite the chest wound. Breathing was a discipline he’d mastered in BUD/S when they held you underwater until your vision grayed and then held you longer.
Pain was data. He ignored it.
He selected the route by instinct and training—hard ground where possible to minimize tracks, exposed rock, frozen stream beds. He broke their line of march twice, doubling back along arock shelf before changing direction. Standard counter-tracking procedures that wouldn’t fool the dogs for long but would cost the handlers time interpreting the trail.
Harper kept up. She didn’t complain about the pace or her blistered feet or the fact that he’d just gone from barely standing to moving through the forest at a speed that pushed her to her physical limit.
The dogs were drawing closer. Individual voices were audible—the deep baying of the lead dog, the higher notes of the flankers. The sound flattened as it closed—no longer distant or scattered. Direction resolving. Distance collapsing. A well-trained pack. Four, maybe five animals. Handlers behind them. Two, based on the whistle patterns.
He ran the calculation. Their pace against the dogs’. The terrain, the altitude, the diminishing returns of his adrenaline against a body that was running on stitches and willpower.
Their odds were collapsing.
Musk rose on the wind—dense, animal, unmistakable. Something predatory and territorial that raised the hair on the back of his neck through pure evolutionary reflex.
He caught Harper by the elbow. She stopped immediately. The trees ahead were old growth—massive pines with low, spreading branches that created a cathedral of shadow. The ground between them was rocky, broken, the snow thinner where the canopy blocked the fall.
