Page 13 of Locked & Loaded

“Chris.” Mads’s voice changes, the anger dropping out of it all at once. “Hey, are you okay?”

I try to nod, but I’m not sure my body follows. “I’m fine,” I force out, strangled and useless.

“Jesus,” Mads says, crossing the compartment in one stride and crouching in front of me. His hands find my shoulders, and the contact is so sudden, so warm against my bare skin, that I flinch. “You don’t look okay. Are you passing out?”

My vision tunnels. The overhead light narrows to a single bright point, and everything else goes gray at the edges.

Mads’s hands leave my shoulders. He cups my face and taps my cheek, not hard, but enough to make my eyes focus on him for a second. “Chris. Talk to me.”

I can’t. My jaw is locked, my throat closed, and all I can do is keep gasping against the wall while the room tilts around me.

Then he lets go.

I hear his footsteps cross the compartment. A hard thud follows, distant through the blood rushing in my ears. Then another. I turn my head just enough to see him by the window, one boot in his hand, slamming the heel against the tiny vent at the top of the pane.

“Stop—” I manage, but the word comes out barely above a whisper.

He hits it again, harder. The frame groans, then cracks so loudly it cuts through the whole compartment. The small rectangle of glass—barely bigger than both my hands—breaks loose, mostly in one piece, and drops out into the night.

For one second, nothing happens.

Then the cold hits.

It comes through the gap like a physical force, Norwegian winter air pouring into the overheated compartment so fast my skin prickles. It sweeps over my face, my chest, my legs, and it feels so fucking good I could cry.

I drag in a breath. Deep. Cold all the way down. For the first time since this started, my lungs actually fill.

I gasp, then suck in another breath, and another, feeling the panic loosen with each one. The buzzing in my skull pulls back. My vision clears. The walls stop pressing in.

I blink, and the compartment comes back into focus.

Mads stands by the window, boot still in his hand, but he’s not looking at the hole he just put in the train.

He’s looking at me.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

Cold air gusts through the empty frame, lifting the damp hair off Mads’s forehead, and the overhead light catches the worry on his face.

“Jesus,” I say, my voice rough. “What did you do?”

He looks at the broken vent, then back at me. “You couldn’t breathe.”

The words hang between us, suddenly too big for this tiny space. Mads Holm, who has spent three months looking at me like I’m something he stepped in, just broke a train window because he thought I was dying.

“I was having a panic attack,” I say.

His expression doesn’t change, but something shifts behind his eyes. He sets the boot down, reaches into his duffel, and pulls out a bottle of water. Then he hands it to me without a word.

I take it, suddenly aware of how dry my mouth is.

The cold air swirls around us, already turning the compartment from a torture chamber into something almost bearable.

Mads sits on his bunk across from me. “Are you going to be okay?” he asks. His voice is quiet now. Serious.

I drink half the bottle before I answer. “Yeah. I think so.”

I hand it back to him and take another breath. The cold air fills my lungs, and for the first time since this started, my head feels clear enough to understand how insane this is. I’m sitting half-naked on a train bunk, shaking from a panic attack, across from a shirtless Mads Holm, who just smashed a window because I forgot how to breathe.