Page 25 of Challenged By the Mountain Man

Nothing.

I knock again, harder.

Still nothing.

"Hannah?" I call out, keeping my voice loud enough to carry but not so loud I'm yelling. "You awake?"

Silence.

Bear whines softly beside me, picking up on my tension.

"Hannah, if you don't answer in the next ten seconds, I'm coming in."

I wait. Count to ten. Nothing.

"Fuck it."

The lock is old and simple, the kind that came standard on cabins like this forty years ago. I pull out my knife, work the blade into the gap between the door and the frame, and pop it in about five seconds. I'll fix it later. Right now, I need to know she's not dying in there.

I push the door open and step inside, Bear at my heels.

The cabin is freezing. Colder than outside, somehow, like the walls have been holding onto the night's chill and refusing to let go. The wood stove is dark: completely out, not even embers left. And there, in the bed against the far wall, is a Hannah-shaped lump under about four quilts.

I cross the cabin in three strides and crouch beside the bed. "Hannah."

She doesn't move.

I reach out and shake her shoulder, gentle at first, then more insistent. "Hannah, wake up."

She makes a noise that might be a groan and burrows deeper under the quilts.

"Come on. You need to get up."

"Go away," she mumbles, voice muffled by blankets.

She's alive. She's conscious. She's just being stubborn.

"Your fire's out," I say. "The cabin's freezing. You need to get up."

"'I’m fine."

"You're not fine. You're going to get hypothermia if you stay in here like this."

"Got blankets."

"Hannah…"

"Griffin." She finally pulls the blankets down just enough that I can see her face. Her hair is a mess, tangled and sticking up in about six different directions. Her eyes are bleary and irritated. "It's not even six in the morning. What are you doing here?"

"Making sure you didn't freeze to death."

"I'm clearly not frozen."

"Yet."

She stares at me for a long moment, and I can see her trying to process the fact that I'm in her cabin, uninvited, before dawn. "Did you break into my cabin?"

"The lock was shit anyway. I'll fix it."