She leans in over the map, her shoulder brushing mine as she studies the contour lines and the little penciled notes only I would ever be able to read. Her finger hovers, moves, hovers again, tracing the ridge trail above the fishing access beforefinally settling on a spot near a switchback I know better than my own name. “Here, I think. There was a big dead pine leaning over the trail, split down the middle like lightning got it. I remember thinking it looked like a comic panel. Danger foreshadowed.”
I mark the spot with a stub of pencil, the X small and precise. “That is not far from where I found you. Maybe three quarters of a mile, cutting straight down the fall line.”
“That is not far at all.” Something like fear flickers back into her voice.
“No,” I agree. “It is not.” I do not tell her that three quarters of a mile is nothing to a man who knows this mountain, that whoever did this could have been standing at my own tree line without either of us ever knowing it. She does not need that weight added to the one she is already carrying for a dead man she never met until the worst moment of his life happened to also be the worst moment of hers.
Instead I fold the map back along its worn creases and set it aside, and I reach across the table and cover her hand with mine, my rough palm swallowing her smaller one whole. Her fingers curl against mine, just slightly, an answer she probably does not even realize she is giving.
“You did good,” I tell her. “Remembering all this. We are one step ahead now because of you.”
She does not pull away. The fire pops loud enough to send a small burst of sparks up the chimney, and the wind keeps working at the window in its frame, but in here it is just the two of us and the slow burn that has been building since the moment I pulled her out of that wreck and has not once let up since. I willkeep her safe. I will find whoever did this to Richard Rogers and make sure they answer for it. And when the time is right, when she is not carrying quite so much fear and grief all at once, I will show her exactly how much I want to keep her.
For now I just hold her hand across the table, my thumb moving slow over her knuckles, and let the storm rage on outside where it belongs.
She is here. That is enough.
9
Nora
I wake up gasping, the dream still gripping me — the men from the snow bursting through the door, faces twisted, guns raised. My heart slams against my bruised ribs hard enough to hurt. The cabin is dark except for the fire's last orange coals, and for one long, terrible second I don't know where I am. The bed's too big. The dark's too thick. Nothing about this explains a rifle strap hanging on the wall three feet from my head.
“Easy, darlin'. I've got you.”
Colt's voice cuts through it before I can spiral, low and rough with sleep. His hand finds my shoulder in the dark, steady even half-awake. The cabin resolves around me piece by piece — the dying fire, the traps hanging by the door, him. I sink back against the pillow, my breath coming loose in shaky pieces.
“They were coming through the door,” I whisper. “Right through it.”
“Not tonight. Not ever, while I've got a say in it.” He doesn't let go. His hand on my shoulder is the only fixed point in the room,and I hold onto that fact the way I used to hold onto a pencil when a deadline felt too big.
I look up at him in the last of the firelight — beard, eyes, that unreadable steadiness — and something in my chest gives way that has nothing to do with fear anymore. I kiss him. It surprises both of us, I think, the way it starts soft and doesn't stay soft, his mouth answering mine like he's been waiting for permission he'd never have let himself ask for. My ribs ache when I shift closer. I don't care.
“Sleep now,” he says against my hair when we finally break apart, his voice wrecked in a good way. “I'm not going anywhere.”
I believe him. That's the problem, maybe — how easily I believe him. I let his heartbeat pull me back under, counting it instead of counting exits, and for once it actually works.
When I wake again, gray light is coming through the window and the spot beside me is cold. Not fresh-cold. Cold like he's been gone a while.
The old fear tries to stand up in me fast and familiar — ‘something's wrong’ — but this time I make myself lie still a second and actually look instead of just react. That's new. Or maybe it isn't new. Maybe it's just the first time I've been steady enough to do it.
His coat's gone from the hook. His boots too. The satellite phone isn't on the mantel where he always sets it, which means he took it, which means he's being careful, which means this is an ordinary thing he does and not an emergency. I catalogue all of it without quite deciding to — the exact angle of the door, closed but not barred; the tarp over the snowmobile out pastthe window, humped with fresh snow; how completely quiet the cabin is, how easily a person could come and go from it and leave no more trace than he apparently has.
‘I could do that,’ some small, treacherous part of my brain says, and I don't know yet what it means by it, only that the thought slides in fast and cold, like the draft under the door, and doesn't quite leave again.
I hate that I noticed all of it. I hate more that some part of me filed it away like it might be useful.
I get up anyway, my bare feet cold on the boards, and call his name into the empty room like that'll fix the tight feeling in my chest. No answer. I press my hands flat against the window glass, but the snow's too thick to see anything but white, and the panic that's been circling finally lands — what if something got to him out there, what if the storm isn't the only thing hunting on this mountain?—
The door bangs open on a gust of cold and snow and Colt, arms full of split wood, boots stamping on the threshold. He takes one look at my face and drops the wood without ceremony, crossing the cabin in three strides.
“Easy, darlin'. Right here.” His hands land on my shoulders, solid and real, smelling like snow and pine and cold air. I press my face into his chest and let him ground me the way he keeps doing, over and over, like it costs him nothing.
“I woke up and you were gone,” I say into his shirt. “I thought—” I don't finish it. He already knows what I thought.
“Checking the perimeter. Getting wood. That's all it ever is.” His chin settles on top of my head. “I'm not going anywhere.”
I nod against him and let the fear drain out the way it always does when he says that. But underneath it, quiet, filed away where I don't have to look at it yet, is the other thing. The one I don't say out loud.
