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“I’m not getting out,” Maksim says, working his knuckles into a fist.

“One more word from either of you,” I say through my teeth, “and I turn this car around and send you both home.”

The car goes completely silent, and for one blessed mile I enjoy the bliss of peace and stillness.

“You are scarier than Uncle Lev now, like literally a killer boss,” Milo whispers to me from the back.

“Thank you,” I say.

“That was not a compliment,” Milo says, his forehead creasing. “It is just true. Even Yuri stood up straight when you yelled.”

We drive out to a valley of earthy loam and pine with a gentle rafting route that the guides advertise as suitable for families. I already know that Lev checked the route twice over, along with its safety record, the weather forecast, and every marked rescue path, because he fed me the intel himself without any prompting.

He has also efficiently packed a medical kit more thorough than anything a working ambulance carries, and he cannot stop himself from preparing for accidents that will almost certainly never happen. A month ago, that would have felt like a cage closing, and the blood in my veins would have turned to ice. I’m only now starting to see the difference between a man who wants to control me and a man who is simply terrified of losing the people he loves, already feeling the sorrow of mourning someone before they are gone.

At the cable car station, the mountain breeze comes down cool off the peaks, carrying the suggestion of snow in the cold air, and when I start shivering, Lev drapes his own jacket over my shoulders without a word.

His thumb brushes slowly over the bone of my wrist, his skin rough and calloused, and every inch of me reacts, and my breathing tightens without my permission. I pull my hand back, and he laughs low, the sound following me anyway.

Maksim tries to infiltrate the cable car and commandeer the seat beside me, and Milo grabs his arm at the last second. “I’m scared of heights,” Milo announces. “I can only ride with Maksim.”

Maksim looks like he swallowed a whole lemon, waiting for me to expose the obvious lie, watching me like a hawk. I don’t.

“You would really abandon a scared little kid?” Milo presses, laying a hand over his heart. “And make Delaney angry at you on top of it? After everything?”

Maksim shoots me a look that begs me to call the bluff, and when I only shake my head and raise an eyebrow, he reluctantly climbs into the car with the little con artist.

The instant the doors close, Milo drops the terrified act completely and moves to the far window with easy confidence.

“You owe me for this,” Maksim says through the glass, his eyes thinning to slits.

“I will help you chase down your next girlfriend as payment,” I joke. “Consider it a partnership in crime.”

Lev lets me pick my seat first, and only after I have settled does he lower himself onto the bench across from me, and even so, the space between us feels ridiculously small. The cable car lifts off the platform with a juddering lurch and begins its slow climb above the valley.

In the car ahead of ours, Milo gestures wildly at something, jabbering away, while Maksim glares at me through the glass, and I cannot help laughing at the pair of them.

“He did that on purpose,” Lev says, his face unreadable. “There is no such thing as a coincidence with that boy. I’m surprised you didn’t stop him.”

“Why would I stop him?” I ask.

The cable car sways in a gust, and I grab for the handrail. Lev’s arm comes up on reflex, and then he stops it in midair before he reaches me.

“Do you need me?” he asks quietly, his hand hovering between us, palm turned up and open. The old Lev would have already hauled me against his chest and decided the matter for me.

My hand twitches, and then I place it in his open palm. “Yes,” I say.

His fingers close firmly around mine as the car keeps rising, and my hand goes hot inside his grip. He gives off heat the way other men give off cologne.

I think about all the years and the hard, unrelenting marks that shaped him into the man who checks rescue paths twice and packs an ambulance into a backpack. The distance between us was never only about his age. It is about two different ways two frightened people learned surviving, his by holding everything in an iron grip, mine by making myself small, keeping my emotions at bay, and asking for nothing.

“Tell me what I should do,” he says, and coming from him, the man who never once asks anyone anything, the words are careful and enormous. “You are young,” he goes on. “You have so many first times still ahead of you. I only ever see the risks in every one of them. I don’t know how to turn that off.”

“Do you think I’m immature?” I ask, and I sit up straight.

“No,” he says at once. “I think you have choices. That is different.” His fingers tighten around mine, and my heart trips painfully.

“You could choose someone easier than me,” he says, and the words send a stab of fear through me. “Someone like my brother. Someone with no enemies and no phone that rings at midnight with news that someone has been offed.”