Then she felt him.
His chest pressed to her back, rising and falling in a slow, steady rhythm her nervous system recognized before her mind did. Heat soaked into her spine, her ribs, the backs of her thighs—every place he touched.
She didn’t move.
Instead, she let herself have it. One breath. Two.
His breath ghosted against her neck, gentle against skin that had known nothing but cold for days. She’d curved into him in her sleep, as if her body had simply gone where it wanted to go.
Toward him. Always toward him.
Her brain caught up.
The kiss. The northern lights burning overhead. His hand in her hair. The moment he’d given in—just long enough for her tofeel it—before he’d shut it down and rebuilt his defenses in real time.
We should get inside.
His voice stripped clean of everything that had been in his eyes seconds before.
She lay motionless and tried to reconcile the two versions of him. The man who’d kissed her like restraint was a losing battle. And the one who’d walked away from it like it meant nothing.
He’d wanted it. She hadn’t imagined that. She’d felt it in every line of his body, every shift of muscle, the way control had snapped and something deeper had taken over.
And then he’d buried it.
She understood why.
They were being hunted. Survival came first.
He was right. God, she hated that he was right.
She shifted. His body tensed for a fraction, then loosened as he woke. They separated with the careful precision of two people pretending the proximity was accidental.
“Morning,” she said. Because silence felt worse. She ran her fingers through her hair, trying to tug it into some semblance of tidiness.
“Morning.” He was already moving—rolling the tarp, feeding their small fire, out the door for a perimeter sweep without a glance back.
Always the goddamn perimeter.
The man who’d swayed with her to scratchy radio music and murmured Russian words for blue was packed away with everything else.
His body operated like a machine tuned to exact tolerances.
Except—
A beat too slow when he turned toward the door. A faint sheen of sweat along his hairline. Something was offthis morning. Not just physical. Controlled—but thinner. Like something underneath was costing him.
She noted it but said nothing. He’d tell her he was fine, and it wasn’t relevant.
Her stomach cramped but there was no food left. The energy bar was gone. The condensed milk a memory.
Pav melted snow in the tin mug and handed it to her. His fingers brushed hers. Too brief to matter. Too deliberate to ignore.
She drank her water, and then it was time to move.
Pav led.
The forest pressed in around them, dense and muffled, branches heavy with snow bending low enough to choke the sky. Sound didn’t carry here—just the steady crunch of her boots, the soft exhale of her breath turning to fog, the occasional crack of a branch giving way under weight.
