The kiss. The taste of her. The sound she made against his mouth. His walls coming down, not brick by brick but all at once, the way a structure fails when the load exceeds the design—total, catastrophic, irreversible. The feeling of standing in open ground with no cover and nothing between him and the thing he’d avoided since his brother died.
The possibility of caring about someone enough to lose them.
Three seconds. It moved through him—hot, enormous, ungovernable. Something that lived beneath the training and the discipline and everything he’d built on top of the man he’d been before. Before the SEALs. Before he’d learned that the safest way to survive was to never let anything matter enough to hurt.
A shape moved between the trees, detaching itself from the deeper darkness of the forest. The wolf stood at the edge of the clearing.
Alone—not the alpha from the pack earlier, but smaller, leaner, its winter coat thick and silver-tipped in the starlight. Yellow eyes caught the faint glow of the dying aurora, fixed on him with an attention that carried no aggression.
It studied him but didn’t approach. Two creatures built for the cold and the dark, standing at the edge of something neither of them trusted.
The wolf turned, disappeared into the trees without a sound, gone between one blink and the next. Pav scratched his chest, then checked the treeline one final time before he went back inside.
The fire had burned to a low, steady glow, the embers casting the room in shades of amber and shadow. The air was thick with woodsmoke and warmth and the quiet sound of Harper breathing.
He crossed to where she lay and lowered himself onto the tarp behind her, easing down on his good side, his injured arm secure against his chest in the makeshift sling. Between her and the door. The position he’d taken the night before—his body placed between a threat and the person it was his job to shield.
Except after the kiss, it wasn’t just that anymore.
And he didn’t have a better explanation.
He pulled the edge of the blanket over himself. Her warmth hit him immediately, soaking through his shirt into the bruised and battered bones of his ribs.
She shifted in her sleep, a small unconscious movement, her back pressing into him as if her body had decided about him while her mind was elsewhere.
His breath hitched.
His brow came to rest against her hair.
It wasn’t an embrace. Not even close. Just the angle his body had settled into. The only position that didn’t pull at his shoulder or grind his ribs.
Her hair carried hints of smoke and river water.
He breathed in. Then again.
Sharing was the most efficient use of the blanket. It had nothing to do with wanting her closer.
Nothing.
Yeah. Whatever, Morozov.
He closed his eyes.
The list of things he wasn’t thinking about had grown longer than the list of things he was.
He shut it all down.
But it didn’t hold. Not where she was concerned.
24
Wanmorning light leaked through the grubby windows, turning the concrete room the color of old bone, but Harper was warm.
For a second, she didn’t understand it.
Warmth meant something had slipped, that danger had moved while she slept.
Her pulse kicked.
