“How long do you stay up here? When you’re not working.”
“Long as I want.”
“Weeks?”
“Sometimes.”
“Months?”
“Once or twice.”
“Alone the whole time?”
“Yes.”
I wait for more. It doesn’t come. He’s answered every question I’ve asked, and I know nothing I didn’t know before. It takes me until now—chest-deep in freezing water, watching the back of his head—to work out why.
He’s not hiding anything. There’s just no more.
I’ve spent so long around people who talk to cover something. Everyone who came out of places like I did carries things they can’t say, so they say everything else. I thought his quiet was the same thing. It isn’t. Ask him a question, he answers it, and then he stops, because he’s finished.
So what do you do with a man like that?
I climb out and pull my shirt on over wet skin. The cold has gone all the way into my bones, and it should be the only thing I focus on.
It isn’t.
There’s a warmth low in my chest, and it connects to him. The water should have killed it. If anything, the cold made it sharper. He’s the most dangerous thing on this mountain, and my body wants to cross the chamber and get closer to him anyway.
It’s just because you’re cold, idiot.
He didn’t look when I stripped, and he isn’t looking now. It isn’t manners, either. He just doesn’t care. Probably because whatever this pull is, it’s mine alone. I’m carrying it by myself, and that’s the part I hate most.
I do up my jeans and wring my hair out over the gravel.
“You don’t fill silences,” I say.
He picks up the lantern. “No.”
“Most people can’t stand them.”
“I know.”
“It’s not a trick, is it? You’re not waiting me out.”
“No.”
He stands. As far as he’s concerned, that’s the whole conversation. I take one last look around the chamber—the pool, the water sliding down the back wall, solid rock everywhere else—and follow him out.
Back in the main cave, the hours crawl, and I can’t afford a single one of them.
The men in that road failed. By now someone’s reported it—that I’m alive and loose, that something big and angry carried me off before they could finish the job. I keep turning over what that means for Serenity, and I can’t make it come out safe. I’m a loose thread. Maybe it makes her a loose end too.
I can’t think that and stay standing.
So I do the only thing I can do from inside a mountain. I work on him.
“You’re not here with Viktor’s blessing, are you?” I chew on the thought. “You brought me here, when you should have taken me back there.”
