It didn’t hold.
A package didn’t kiss you under northern lights. Or throw your own words back at you with a sharpness that made you want to smile for the first time in years.
He pressed the heel of his good hand against his eyes until he saw static. His head wound throbbed, deep and persistent, keeping time with the thoughts he was trying to outrun.
Focus. The border was almost sixty miles southwest—he pulled the terrain from memory, the contours and elevations and choke points mapping themselves behind his closed eyelids. Two hard days on foot if the weather held and his body cooperated. And that was if the men hunting them had been sufficiently discouraged by the wolf pack’s territorial dispute with their tracking dogs.
Fox and Zak would be at the rendezvous. Handoff. Extraction complete. Mission done. And then what?
Nothing was waiting for him.
Nothing he hadn’t chosen.
The thought surfaced and refused to drown.
He could still feel her mouth on his. The softness, tentative at first, giving him room to retreat, and then the moment the gentleness had burned away, replaced by something he hadn’t felt in so long that he’d forgotten the shape of it. The sound she’d made against his lips—soft, involuntary. It had reached past every wall he’d built and found the man behind them.
And when he closed his eyes, the future wasn’t the border and the next job. It was something else.
Waking with her beside him.
Soft with sleep. Her hand on his wrist for no reason at all.
He opened his eyes and glared at the door.
He couldn’t do this. Not here. Not with miles of hostile terrain between them and safety and armed men behind hunting them.
Even if some part of him had already started.
He checked the rifle across his knees. Magazine. Chamber. Safety. The ritual steadied him.
She was the mission and the mission was all that mattered. Keep her alive. Get her to the border. Don’t let whatever happened under the northern lights compromise the objective.
He watched the door, not Harper.
Twenty minutes passed. She hadn’t moved, her breathing steady and slow. Deep sleep. The kind that wouldn’t break easily.
He stood, checked his weapon one last time, and slipped outside.
The cold hit him like absolution. Clean, sharp, stripping away the warmth of the station and the smell of her hair and the memory of her mouth. His lungs filled with air that tasted of resin and ice and nothing human, and for a moment the familiar machinery clicked back into place, and he was just a man doing a perimeter check in hostile territory and everything else was noise.
He moved through the assessment on autopilot. Entry points—one door, one window, both covered. Sightlines—clear to the treeline on three sides, the fourth blocked by a snow-covered equipment shed. Approach routes—south through the forest, east along the ridge, both visible from the door.
Snow had continued to fall, a persistent accumulation filling their tracks with white silence. No sounds of pursuit. No movement in the trees. The sky was vast and black overhead, scattered with stars so dense they looked like frost on dark glass.
The northern lights had faded to a faint green shimmer. The ghost of what they’d been. The ghost of what he’d allowed.
The wound on his chest prickled under the dressing. He scratched it through his shirt without breaking stride. Irritation, sweat. Perfectly normal.
He filed it and de-prioritized it.
He completed the perimeter. Everything was secure and quiet. He should go back inside. He stood in the snow instead, head tilted up to the sky. The last traces of the aurora thinning to nothing, green bleeding into dark, the stars reclaiming the night one degree at a time.
Three seconds.
He let it in.
All of it.
