“You can’t know I was going to.”
His mouth moves. A soft smile. “I know you.”
Three words, and they land deeper than anything else he’s said today. I stay where I am and let the cave be quiet around us.
Finally, he eases back, his arms loosening as he steps away. He takes the phone Viktor gave him off the ledge and turns it once in his hand.
“The call,” I say.
“Won’t take long.”
There it is again. The thing under his steadiness. It was there the night after we first slept together, when I lay against his chest and knew he was awake and carrying something.
He’s three steps from the entrance. I could ask him right now.
I don’t. My eyes are still swollen, and the quiet between us is too new, and some part of me isn’t ready for whatever answer costs him this much silence.
The stone rolls back, and he steps out into the dark.
The boulder seals, and I sit in his den with the tea going cold in my hands and the question I didn’t ask sitting exactly where he left it.
Chapter 28
Decker
“Nothing’s changed,” Viktor says. “Whoever gave us the tip has gone silent. The council wants a verdict posted, and I’m running out of ways to delay.”
“And the search?”
“The number gave Vanya towers. It moved twice.” A pause I don’t like. “Both times along the corridor Faine marked.”
The valley below is one black line against another. I keep my voice level. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure of the towers. Nothing else yet.” Papers turn on his end. “It’s a direction, Decker. It’s not a certainty. But it points where we thought, and it means we have to be more careful than ever. Nothing travels with her name on it. Nobody moves fast.”
Because fast gets a girl bled out instead of found. He doesn’t say it again. He doesn’t need to. It’s been gnawing at me since his office, and tonight it’s got a blood corridor that makes it real.
“Two days,” he says, and the line goes dead.
I pocket the phone and climb. The bear stops fighting me the moment I turn uphill; this direction he approves of. By the time I reach the entrance, he’s crowding me so hard my hands aren’t fully mine.
The main chamber is empty. Lantern low, cot empty, her boots by the ledge.
Then I hear water moving, and I’m already walking.
She’s coming up out of the pool when I reach the gap.
Water sheets off her as she climbs the shelf of rock—thighs, calves, into the gravel. Bare skin. Her hair is dark and slicked to her skull, and a wet line of it runs down her spine to the center of her back. She’s so damn small. It lands every time I see all of her at once, how little of her there is and how much of my world she takes up.
She turns her head and finds me. She doesn’t cover herself. Her chin comes up.
“The call,” she says.
“Later.”
Three steps in, the bear tells me what’s wrong.
She’s washed me off her. The scent that’s been on her skin for days—the one he’s been living inside—stripped away by cold water. To him that isn’t clean. That’s wrong, and it pulls at me hard and low in the gut.
