“I heard the door. I thought?—”
“You don’t think. You listen.”
I advance on her. I don’t drop the gun. I stalk down the hallway, dripping snow and rage.
“When I give an order, you follow it. If that had been a kill team, you’d be dead right now, bleeding out on this rug while I searched outside for a ghost. Is that what you want? You want to die here?”
“I couldn’t leave you.” Her voice drops to a frantic whisper. The defiance hides under the fear. “I couldn’t just hide while you…”
“You think your presence helps me?”
I halt inches from her. I loom over her, weaponizing my size, weaponizing the threat. I want her to see the monster. I want her to run from it.
“You’re a target. When you’re out here, you’re something I have to bleed to protect. A variable I have to manage.”
It’s cruel. I want it to be. I need her to be afraid. I need her to understand we aren’t playing house. We’re being hunted.
The cruelty is a wall I build on purpose: a frightened woman obeys, and a woman who obeys is a woman who lives.
“Is it them?”
She ignores the insult. She ignores the gun. She looks at me, at the snow melting on my skin, watching the droplets track down through my hair.
“No. Deer.”
My voice scrapes like gravel.
She lets out a sigh, a shuddering exhale that racks her entire frame. She takes a step toward me and looks at me like I’m a ghost walking back from the grave.
“You’re freezing. You’re…”
She reaches for me.
That’s the mistake. Or maybe it’s the salvation.
She touches my arm. Her hand rests warm, soft, alive.
It severs the last thread of my control.
The contrast feels violent. Her heat against my frozen skin. It scalds. It resurrects every nerve ending the wind just deadened. It welds the predator to the man.
The fear, the adrenaline, the self-loathing: all of it transmutes into something else. Something ancient. Something necessary.
I drop the gun on the bench. It clatters loudly.
I grab her.
No questions. No warnings.
I haul her against me. I press my cold skin against her heat. The shock of it makes her gasp.
“Boyd—”
I crush my mouth to hers.
This isn’t the kiss from before. That was hunger. This is starvation. A man who just looked death in the face and needs to prove, violently, his own survival. An exorcism of the fear.
She meets me. She doesn’t pull back.
