He drained the tub and stood, catching the edge as his legs protested. The room tilted, then steadied.
He toweled off with one of Katya’s threadbare blue towels.
She’d left clothes folded on the chair by the door. A shirt, a dark wool sweater, and trousers that were an inch too short in the leg—left behind by a previous guest, probably.
Hand-knitted socks with wonky stripes.
He pulled them on, knowing Katya had chosen them on purpose. He finished dressing and wiped the fog from the mirror with his palm.
The face that looked back was one he barely recognized. Clean jaw. Damp hair pushed back from his forehead. Without the blood and grime, he looked like someone else.
Someone who’d died years ago. Someone who didn’t need to be dangerous.
For the first time in years.
He opened the bathroom door. Voices from the kitchen reached him—Harper and Katya, layered over each other in the easy rhythm of women who’d found a working frequency.
Harper’s voice was lighter, stripped of the tight control she’d carried since the compound.
Then she laughed.
A genuine laugh—surprised out of her, the sound of it bright and warm in the corridor. It hit him clean through the ribs, harder than anything had for days.
The kitchen opened at the end of the corridor.
He stopped in the doorway. Heat rolled toward him from the range, a massive cast-iron beast that radiated warmth in waves that sank into his bones and stayed there. Katya’s scrawny cat lay stretched out on the warm tiles at the range’s base.
There was rye bread on the counter. Steam rising from a pot. A table set.
A life.
Harper stood at the counter with her back to him.
The breath left his body.
She wore a dress sprinkled with tiny blue forget-me-nots. She’d washed her hair, and it fell in loose waves down her back, darker where it was still damp. Her feet were bare on the kitchen tiles, her sleeves pushed to her elbows as she stirred something with the same focus she gave everything.
She looked?—
Unmarked.
As if the forest and the blood and the running had happened to somebody else. He knew better. Which only made it harder to look away.
This was Harper.
Dangerous in a way he wasn’t trained for.
Katya saw him first.
Her eyes flicked to the doorway, and something crossed her face—amusement, or recognition of the expression he wasn’t hiding. “Sit,” she said. “Before you fall over.”
Harper turned.
Her eyes found him, taking in his clean hair, the borrowed clothes, the absence of blood.
Something shifted in her expression. Gone almost before it arrived. He held her gaze, didn’t reach for cover or look away.
Normally he’d find something operational to focus on—the window, perimeter, the threat assessment that ran like breathing. This time he didn’t. He stood in the doorway of Katya’s kitchen in borrowed clothes and let Harper see him without his armor on.
