It landed on her face. In her hair. She pressed her lips together and breathed through her nose and tried not to cough.
Pav’s hand found hers in the dark. His fingers closed around hers and squeezed.
Quiet. I’m here.
She squeezed back.
Above them, voices. Russian. Two men, maybe three. The tone was aggressive—demanding, entitled. The scrape of furniture being moved. A door slamming open.
Then Katya’s voice cut through the noise like a blade. Every word traveled through the floorboards, her Russian rapid and sharp with the authority of a woman who’d stopped being impressed with men approximately thirty years ago.
“In my guesthouse. Take your boots off or get out.”
A male voice—dismissive, amused. Something about looking for fugitives. A foreign woman and a man. Possibly injured.
“Do I look like I have time for fugitives?” Katya’s voice dripped with contempt. “I’m baking bread. What part of that suggests I’m hiding anyone?”
“We know what you do here,” the man said. “People come through. People disappear.”
“I hide nothing.” Katya said. “I run a guesthouse that nobody visits in a town that nobody cares about.”
More voices. The sound of doors being opened. They were searching the rooms.
Harper’s grip tightened on Pav’s hand. His calm was contagious. Or maybe it was the hand. Either way, her heart rate dropped from catastrophic to merely terrifying.
Footsteps directly above them. A boot flexing the board, the wood bowing down toward her face.
She stopped breathing.
If he looked down, they were done.
The man moved away.
Above, Katya was still going. “You want to search? Search. You’ll find cat hair and a television with three channels. Very dangerous, yes?”
A man’s voice—harder now, threatening. Something about consequences for people who hide things.
“I hide nothing.” Katya’s voice didn’t waver. “If your fugitives were here I would hand them to you myself because the inconvenience of armed men in my kitchen is worse than whatever these people have done.”
The reply came slower this time. A quiet rumble. The tone of a man reassessing whether this fight was worth finishing.
“Do your job properly,” Katya said. “Or stop pretending you have one.”
Magnificent. Harper pressed her forehead against Pav’s shoulder to keep from laughing. Or crying. She wasn’t sure which.
His hand moved from hers to the back of her head and stopped there. His fingers threaded through her hair, and her scalp tingled under his touch.
Minutes passed. The search continued—boots, doors, furniture scraping. Katya’s voice rising and falling—an indignant woman whose afternoon had been ruined by idiots.
The antibiotics had done their work. Pav’s skin was cooler and he was no longer burning up beneath her fingers. Fordays she’d touched him only as a doctor—checking pulse, temperature, wounds.
This was different.
The width of his shoulder against hers. The steady rise and fall of his chest. The solid reality of him in a space too small to pretend there was a distance between them.
She could smell him. Not the fever sweat of the last day. Pav. Underneath the grime, antiseptic and dust. His hand was still in her hair. His fingers moved—barely. The unconscious motion of a hand that had found where it wanted to be.
Her breath caught low in her throat.
